Articles about Social Media

If 2020 was a Trump- and Covid-inspired year of social media excess, 2021 can’t help but see some reversion. But it’s more than that, with big Internet companies coming under greater regulatory scrutiny worldwide, especially Facebook and Google. This year is going to be a tough one for Mark Zuckerberg, especially. And while I don’t expect Zuckerberg to abandon his CEO job this year, he eventually will, simply because it isn’t as much fun as it used to be and there will come a point (maybe in 2022) when leaving the top job will help Facebook’s stock.

At this moment there’s reportedly a bot operating on Telegram selling for $20 or less the personal info including phone numbers of 500 million individual Facebook users. What’s the logical corporate response to a gambit like that? Nobody knows because nobody has been in Facebook’s particular position before.

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The fallout from Donald Trump's ban from Twitter and suspension from Facebook, and Amazon's de-platforming of Parler continues as large numbers of users have been signing up to alternative social networks.

Many of these like Gab and Mastodon are decentralized in that they run on their own servers rather than relying on the public cloud so they are not at the mercy of larger businesses.

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In the run-up to Inauguration Day, and in the wake of violent events at the Capitol last week, tensions are running high in the US. With numerous social media platforms having banned outgoing president Trump from using their services, Facebook has now announced that it is banning a phrase that has become strongly associated with right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud.

Having already removed a group called Stop the Steal a couple of months ago, Facebook is now going to be removing all content that uses these words. The phrase "stop the steal" is effectively banned on both Facebook and Instagram, and the company says that it will be working around the clock to enforce its policies until after president-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated.

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The blue tick of verification is something a huge number of Twitter users crave. Sadly for those who are desperate for validation, the company placed a paused of verifying accounts quite some time ago. But this is about to change.

2020 has been a terrible year for many people for numerous reasons, but for those seeking Twitter verification, things could be about to improve. The company has announced that its verification program is about to start up again. So... how do you get verified on Twitter?

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Right now, we are still waiting for the winner of the 2020 US presidential election to be determined, with vote counting still continuing in several states. But the fact that counting is not yet complete has not stopped Trump declaring victory.

The current president has also used his favorite medium, tweeting, to make numerous false claims about the election. Twitter responded accordingly, attaching warnings to tweets in which Trump claimed the Democrats were trying to "STEAL the Election", made baseless accusations about "surprise ballot dumps" causing him to lose his lead in some states, as well as claiming victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan.

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Ahead of the 2020 United States presidential election, Mozilla is calling Twitter and Facebook to "unfck the internet".

The Firefox-maker is seeking "an honest internet for the US elections". It's something of an ad campaign for its own web browser, but it touches on legitimate worries many people have about the use and abuse of social media. Specifically, there are concerns about how social media platforms are used to spread misinformation.

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Overnight, Twitter suffered a massive attack by hackers who tried to use the verified accounts of celebrities and high-profile users to execute a Bitcoin scam. The likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Kanye West had their accounts hijacked and message were posted promising that if people sent money to a Bitcoin wallet, they would get double the amount back.

Needless to say, it was a crypto scam, and Twitter took the extraordinary steps of preventing all users with a blue tick from tweeting. Twitter now has control of the situation and says that the attack came after staff fell victim to social engineering, enabling hackers to gain access to internal tools which were then used to take over key accounts.

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Facebook has sneakily used a blog post purportedly about "protecting people's data" to reveal that it has failed to do precisely that. In a post in its almost ironically titled Privacy Matters series, Facebook admits that it shared private user data with thousands of app developers when it should not have. Two years ago, Facebook implemented a privacy policy that stopped apps that had not been used for 90 days from sharing data with developers, but it turns out that data was in fact still shared.

The social media giant shamelessly tries to save face in saying that while the way in which this user data was shared ran counter to its own privacy policy, the "issues" didn't result in the sharing of personal information which people had not previously given permission to be shared. This is either deliberately missing the point, or treating users with a callous off-handedness, sharing little in the way of meaningful information about the incident.

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Twitter has emailed an unknown number of users to warn them of a security incident that took place some time prior to May 20 this year.

The company says that personal and billing information of people who used the Ads or Analytics pages on the Twitter site may have been affected. Twitter says that the vulnerability has now been addressed, but has emailed users to explain the circumstances of the incident.

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The Trump administration has been dealt a double blow on social media after Twitter flagged a tweet from the president as "manipulated media" and Facebook remove election ads that featured a Nazi symbol and called for Antifa to be declared a terrorist organization.

On Twitter, Trump retweeted a video labelled as depicting a "racist baby" and made to look like a CNN news clip. In the case of Facebook, an ad that violated the company's policies against organized hate was taken down.

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The coveted blue tick of verification is the goal of many Twitter users, and for a very long time the social media company has closed off the request system that existed.

Having used a secretive system to determine whether an account is deemed worthy of being verified or not, Twitter is now going to bring a "Request verification" option into its apps. The feature is currently undergoing development, but Twitter confirms that there is a new system in the works.

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While Twitter is used for sharing live news, real-time reactions and the like, it's also used for promotion -- and promotion means planning. There are numerous apps and services that you can turn to if you would like to be able to send a tweet at a date or time in the future, but now you can do it direct from the Twitter website.

The ability to tweet when you're not at your computer can be extremely useful, so here's what you need to know about scheduling tweets.

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There have long been complaints from the right that online platforms censor conservative opinions because of a liberal bias. Now after being fact-checked by Twitter, Donald Trump has threatened to close down social media platforms.

In the last 24 hours, Twitter added a "Get the facts" link to a false claim made in a tweet by the president about mail-in votes. Clearly incensed, Trump tweeted that "we will strongly regulate, or close them down".

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Donald Trump has lashed out at Twitter, accusing the site of not only interfering in the 2020 presidential elections, but also of standing in the way of free speech.

The accusations came after the site added a fact-checking link to a tweet Trump posted suggesting that mail-in ballots in California would be "substantially fraudulent". Twitter added a "Get the facts about mail-in ballots" to a pair of his tweets, causing the president to react angrily. The site, did not, however, censor or delete the tweets.

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Facebook has acquired GIPHY, the GIF-making and sharing service. Although full details have not been officially revealed, the deal is estimated to have cost the social networking giant in the region of $400 million.

The main plan for Facebook is to integrate GIPHY into Instagram, but there will also be further integration into other Facebook services such as WhatsApp and Messenger.

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