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"As Zuckerberg surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won't make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more. This, of course, will produce more data for Facebook to mine to its own financial advantage."

"A time is coming in which you may see more memorial accounts on Facebook than active users, with academics estimating that accounts belonging to the deceased will outnumber the living within 50 years."

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

"The "battle for Telegram" pits one of Russia's most popular messaging apps - with more than 13 million users - against the internet censor Roskomnadzor, in a public cat-and-mouse game to block traffic that has put the agency's reputation on the line. Telegram is widely used by the Russian political establishment, and prominent politicians and officials have openly flouted or criticised the ban. Data from the app showed several Kremlin officials had continued to sign in on Tuesday evening, four days after a court ordered the service to be blocked over alleged terrorism concerns."

"Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian's four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter"

"The chatbots - BabyQ and the Microsoft-created XiaoBing - were yanked from Chinese messaging app QQ, according to the Financial Times, after they started providing answers that weren't satisfactory to the glorious party.  According to FT, BabyQ would answer the question, "Do you love the Communist Party?" with "No." XiaoBing's transgressions were a bit more direct, declaring for some users "My China dream is to go to America" and answering other patriotic questions with "I'm having my period, wanna take a rest.""

"The new policy is a major shift in Twitter's efforts to balance its ideological commitment to free expression with user demands for improved enforcement of rules against harassment, hate speech and other toxic behavior."

"Many studies like these describe heavy users as addicted to smartphones. But the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official guidebook for psychiatric diagnoses released in 2013, does not view smartphones as addictive. The manual separates behavioral and substance-use problems for the first time, but online gambling is the only behavioral addiction recognized by the DSM-5, as it's called."

"Mozilla has announced it will make the tool, called DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, the default for all users in the US."

"the weWALK cane consists of an electronic handle with a regular 'analog' white cane that is inserted into the bottom. it uses an ultrasonic sensor to detect any obstacles above chest level and warns the user via a vibrating handle."

"The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina."

""Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk's rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: 'I'm only five years old myself, please don't kill me.'""

"These systems weren't set up to be biased; it's likely that they were simply trained on a subset of the diversity of accents and usages present in the United States. But, as we become ever more reliant on these systems, making them less frustrating for all their users should be a priority."

"In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6bn of the 2.4bn presidential campaign ads shown to US Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads - more than all his opponents combined."

""Closer investigation by our team confirmed that hackers were carrying out a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords. These attempts specifically were trying to gain access to our emails. "

"Gmail users are under attack in a gigantic phishing operation that's spreading like wildfire across the internet right now. People took to Twitter to report receiving an email that looks like an invitation to join a Google Doc from someone they know. But when you click on the link to open the file, you are directed to grant access to an app that looks like Google Docs but is actually a program that sends spam emails to everyone you've emailed, according to a detailed outline of the attack on Reddit. "

"Two decades on, the institute has decided to terminate the licensing programme for some MP3-related patents which effectively halts industry support. Although users can still listen to their MP3 files, inventors of new technologies will probably not include the file format in their blueprints as they turn to more advanced alternatives."

"Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said: "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.""

"Facebook users are permitted to praise mass murderers and "violent non-state actors" in certain situations, according to internal guidelines that underline how the tech corporation is striving to operate in repressive regimes."

"But it wasn't just one day of high engagement. A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement. It wasn't a small edge, either. "It's almost twice as much engagement per follower among the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation," Edelson said. "So, clearly, that portion of the news ecosystem is behaving very differently.""