Social Media

Using fake social media profiles is a common technique among hackers in order to gain the confidence of targets and direct them to credential stealing sites.

For security and penetration testing teams to replicate this is time consuming as often people have profiles across multiple sites. Ethical hacking specialist Trustwave is using a new tool called Social Mapper that can correlate profiles across multiple sites and make analyzing a person's online presence easier.

Alex Jones and Infowars are being banned, suspended and removed from the internet left, right and center. But while YouTube, Facebook, Apple and others have come down hard on the right-wing conspiracy theorist for peddling hate speech, Twitter is standing by him.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has defended his company's decision not to follow the lead of its Silicon Valley counterparts, saying that Alex Jones "hasn't violated our rules". In a series of tweets, Dorsey explains that Twitter enforces its rules "impartially, regardless of political viewpoints".

Facebook has rushed to deny allegations that it is in talks with banks with a view to gathering information about users' card transitions and other financial information.

The allegations came in a story in the Wall Street Journal which claimed the social networking giant had asked US banks to share information about their customers. Facebook is said to have told banks that information about customers could be used to offer further services to users, but at least one bank had been scared off by the privacy implications.

Think of dating apps, and the likes of Tinder, Grindr and Match.com spring to mind, and now Facebook is looking to take itself a slice of the action. We first heard about Facebook Dating at the social network's F8 conference back in May, and now more details are coming out.

Currently undergoing internal testing with employees, Facebook Dating is looking to be a feature of Facebook rather than a standalone app. Leaked images now give us an idea of what to expect from it -- but there'll be no swiping right.

Twitter users can no longer automatically cross-post to Facebook. The restriction has come about after Facebook made changes to the way third parties are able to make use of its APIs.

It means that Twitter users who have connected their Facebook account to make it easier to post the same content on both services via Facebook Login can't have their tweets automatically posted to Facebook. The -- rather unsatisfactory -- solution from Twitter is simply copy the URL of a tweet, and this can then be manually posted to Facebook.

It might seem counter-intuitive -- or it might seem like a case of just saying what it thinks people want to hear -- but Facebook doesn't want you to use it as much as you do. That's not to say it wants you to disappear entirely, rather it just hopes that the time you spend on the social network is more "intentional, positive and inspiring" -- so you don't feel compelled to stay away and miss out on all those ads!

Today, the company launches a new activity dashboard for both Facebook and Instagram that lets you see how long you've on the social networks, set time limits, and restrict notifications. Facebook says that the new tools have been created in conjunction with mental health organizations and they come amid growing concerns about the problem of social networking addiction.

LinkedIn is supposed to be about connecting with people and communicating with them, and a new option is on the way -- voice messaging.

As anyone who has signed up for LinkedIn will know, it's very common to be hit with a barrage of connection requests and messages from people you don't know. Now there's yet another way to get frustrated with needless communication which will almost certainly go one of three ways: getting ignored completely, being referred to email like most modern communication, or just having a phone call for efficiency.

As part of its continuing attempts to clean up its platform, Twitter has announced that it is going to apply its rules more strictly on Periscope. Starting in mid-August users who repeatedly post abusive comments or harass others run the risk of being banned.

Twitter will enforce its guidelines more aggressively during live broadcasts. The company says that it will "review and suspend accounts for repeatedly sending chats that violate" its rules.

Following on from a strike for violating YouTube policies, Infowars founder Alex Jones has been hit with sanctions by Facebook for contravening its community standards.

The social network -- which just dropped in value -- removed four of Jones' videos for violating its policies and banned the right-wing conspiracy theorist from using his account for 30 days. In the event of further policy breaches by Jones or his admins, his page could be permanently banned.

Out of the blue today, Donald Trump took to his favorite medium of Twitter to complain that the company was "shadow banning" prominent Republicans -- and it wasn't long before Donald Trump Jr sided with his father.

The allegations stem from a Vice article that suggested Twitter was limiting the visibility of searches for key Republican figures -- something Twitter denies. The company says that a bug is to blame and it is actively working on addressing it.

Facebook shares and the personal fortune of Mark Zuckerberg took massive hits as the social network felt the impact of a growth slowdown and the fallout of recent privacy scandals.

The company issued a warning to investors about a deceleration of growth in its userbase, leading to a stock drop of around 20 percent. A drop in share price lowered the value of Facebook by a massive $118 billion -- a record-breaking one-day drop in the value of a company.

As part of its continuing efforts to clean up the platform, Twitter has removed 143,000 apps in the last three months for policy violations. To help reduce the need for such measures in the future, the company has also introduced a new registration system that means developers must now request access to Twitter's APIs.

The change is a significant one, and with it Twitter will be hoping to prevent the appearance of malicious apps in the first place -- making its job easier and improving the overall experience for users.

Snapchat confirmed that it is closing down Snapcash next month. The peer-to-peer money transfer service is due to shut up shop on 30 August.

The closure was not officially announced by Snapchat initially, but references to "Snapcash deprecation" were spotted in the code of the Android app. The company has now confirmed that Snapcash is coming to an end after four years.

Facebook has severed ties with data analytics company Crimson Hexagon because of concerns about its links to the US government, Russia and Turkey.

In a move that has echoes of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has suspended the company and blocked it from accessing user data because of fears about how that data is used. Crimson Hexagon claims to have gathered more than one trillion pieces of data about social media users, and there are concerns that this data could be used for surveillance purposes.

Twitter: you either love it or hate it. Even if you're a Twitter lover, there's probably plenty you dislike about it! People have complained about tweets being too short, and Twitter fixed this. People complained about not being verified, and Twitter (temporarily, at least) opened up verification to everyone. People have complained about not being about to edit tweets -- and Twitter has done nothing about it.

But that's not to say someone hasn't been working on a solution. Using a new Chrome extension, you can effectively gain the ability to edit your tweets and save yourself the embarrassment of a typo in your timeline.