social networking

Large online platforms have largely given up on the news business. Meta finally removed its dedicated tools for news publishers. Google is experimenting with removing the news tab from search results. AI chatbots are eating the last remaining ways that publishers can drive traffic to their sites. And Elon Musk, the owner of X, the site formerly known as Twitter, spends most of his days railing against the mainstream media. All of this has led to some pretty serious soul-searching among America’s journalists. Is the future…

As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to touch our lives in every aspect, who owns the digital content we generate on a daily basis? The answer is complex. Today's consumers find themselves in a world where their personal data is constantly being collected, analyzed, and utilized to boost the services we use. In fact, now it's also being used to create further content? Who truly owns all this digital content?According to a report by Chiratae Ventures, the consumer tech industry will touch US$300 billion by 2027, and…

In January, the CEOs of X, TikTok, Meta, Snap, and Discord testified in front of a congressional committee about child exploitation on their platforms. “Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands,” Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time.Despite confrontational questioning from Graham and others about how many underage users were on their platforms, and what safeguards protected them, Zuckerberg and other executives weren’t questioned about the…

Our goal is to combine both approaches—to run a moderation service that tries to provide a baseline and to also have an open ecosystem where anyone who wants to innovate can come in and start building. I think this is particularly useful around cases where information is really fast moving and there's specialized knowledge. There are organizations out there already in the business of fact-checking, or figuring out if a verified account is actually a politician or not. They can start annotating and putting that information…

Days after Meta launched its new app, Threads, this month, a software engineer at the company named Ben Savage introduced himself to a developer group at the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards body. The group, which maintains a protocol for connecting social networks called ActivityPub, had been preparing for this moment for months, ever since rumors first emerged that Meta planned to join the standard. Now, that moment had arrived. “I'm really interested to see how this interoperable future plays out!” he…

After all the press for Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk potentially taking it to each other in the octagon, the only analog we’re likely to see is Twitter versus Meta’s new darling–Threads. The platform has picked up 70 million sign-ups in the first couple of days, and it shows no sign of slowing down. The only trouble is that, right now, it’s mobile only. You can view individual posts in a browser, but you can’t post or read your whole feed.Personally, my relationship with the blue bird has been in sharp decline over the…

Threads, the new "Twitter Killer" app from Meta that was launched on Thursday, now has 50 million users — just over 24 hours since the app was rolled out. The text-based microblogging service is closely tied to Meta's popular photo and video sharing service, Instagram. While the brisk rise of Threads is impressive, it is worth noting that Meta is using its user base of over 2.35 billion active users on Instagram to get users to sign up for Threads. Meanwhile, rival Twitter has already begun to feel the heat, with the…

After months of chaos at Twitter, many people are looking for something different—but most have yet to commit to a single platform, which is good news for Threads. “They’ve definitely got a fighting chance if all of their protections for communities and individuals are firmly in place,” says Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Australia. “If Threads can displace Twitter’s current toxicity, it may well steal Musk’s crown.”That also matters to brands, and by extension advertisers, who…

About once a fortnight, David Ermes gets an email from a journalist or fact checker along the lines of “Boys have to dress up as girls in queer week at school, is it true?”“Of course I can say it’s not true—it isn’t even lawful, since we don’t have school uniforms,” says Ermes, who is head of communications at the ministry of education in Schlewig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state. Over the past year or so he has had to deal with a steady flow of misinformation spread on social media that misrepresents conversations…

If you're looking to get hired, giving your LinkedIn profile some love should be on your to-do list. It's likely that potential recruiters are going to find it and form impressions of you based on what it looks like, and what's listed.LinkedIn profiles with huge gaps or out-of-date information—or pages that look like they've been gathering virtual dust for years—aren't going to show you in your best light. On the other hand, a profile that's well maintained and has had some care and attention means you're ticking some of…