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"It is time now for two things: for people to wake up and realise how much our lives are dominated by such a small number of Silicon Valley bros, one hand in their jean pocket announcing their next move, and for tech companies to acknowledge their power and influence and become truly accountable."

"The Observer has obtained a series of Conservative party attack ads sent to voters last week in the key marginal constituency of Delyn, north Wales. Activists captured the ads using dummy Facebook accounts after finding that their own ad - encouraging young people to register to vote - were being "drowned out" by the Tory ads"

"In October, American teachers prevailed in a lawsuit with their school district over a computer program that assessed their performance. The system rated teachers in Houston by comparing their students' test scores against state averages. Those with high ratings won praise and even bonuses. Those who fared poorly faced the sack. The program did not please everyone. Some teachers felt that the system marked them down without good reason. But they had no way of checking if the program was fair or faulty: the company that built the software, the SAS Institute, regards its algorithm a trade secret and would not disclose its workings."

"Maybe so, but guess what? You're next. When automation starts displacing lawyers, accountants and bankers, then we might see some push-back about the social costs of technology. So long as it's only truckers and factory workers getting sacked, well, there's always Walmart, McDonald's, or food stamps."

"Twitter is expanding its use of warning labels on tweets that contain misleading details about coronavirus vaccines. The move, announced in a blogpost on Monday, is designed to strengthen the social network's existing Covid-19 guidance, which has led to the removal of more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5m accounts worldwide."

"What might happen next? First the investigators would find out the culprits' names, telephone numbers, and where they lived. Then the authorities would be alerted. Shortly afterwards, accounts would be closed down. And, in the worst cases, the police would prosecute. Finally, as people began to realise that actions online had actual consequences, many would start modifying their behaviour. The tsunami of online hate might eventually become a sea swell."

"As such, there are certainly some sinister ways technology like this could be used-and the faces don't need to be attractive, they just need to look real. Any circumstances where it would be useful to have fake people-like profile photos for dummy social media accounts used to manipulate online discourse-are a ready target for technological treachery."

"In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented misinformation glut, Google has decided to hide some Australian news sites from its search results. It is "experimenting" with the lone supply of fact-checked, accountable information Australians can access right now."

"By then, calls over social media for crowds to gather in areas of Cairo, and converge in public spaces had built an unstoppable momentum. "Social media was the most important tool in the revolution," said Abdelkarim. "People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship." Mubarak's police state was over run by dissenters with smartphones and Facebook accounts."

"This type of extreme racist post was frequently met with pushback from the community. Common responses included; "people should be treated as individuals not as part of a group" and "the Democrats are the ones who want to divide us up by race". Implicit or explicit gestures of antisemitism were strongly protested by evangelical Christians. Red-pill posts would rarely stay up long. In most cases, they were only intended to appear in one's Instagram feed and to vanish shortly after. The account would then resume posting popular content, wait another week and try it again. This process would continue for months, maybe a year. By posting mainstream conservative content most of the time, these extreme-right groups were able to build up an audience numbering in the range of 30,000 to 40,000, which they could then incrementally expose to radical content."

"Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies. The social media company said the group, dubbed "Tortoiseshell" by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust - sometimes over the course of several months - and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware."

"The paradox here is that Facebook is more accountable to US lawmakers and reporters than it is to any other country's. It is incumbent on American politicians and the American press to keep this in mind - and push Facebook to answer questions about how its policies will apply to the vast majority of its users."

""If everything that people are seeing is via social media - who is accountable? There is very little human intelligence or decision-making behind it, no attempt to give a balanced view. That seems to leave all responsibility on the reader.""

"With millions of people following an account and Donald's 'fans' being quite fanatical, it could be a clever move by Twitter to ensure that any potential negative and hate-fuelled tweets are neutralised before the new president-elect takes up his position"

"Twitter's decision to permanently suspend Donald Trump's account in the wake of the storming of Capitol Hill on Wednesday continues to stoke fierce debate, supporters and critics split on partisan lines as they contest what the suspension means for a cherished American tradition: freedom of speech."

"A woman who held jobs at a supermarket and a halfway house took down credit card information of customers at NTUC FairPrice, created an EZ-Link mobile account with details from a halfway house resident and combined the two to make S$41,330 worth of unauthorised EZ-Link top-ups."

"Zoom is not encrypting calls for free accounts with end to end encryption so they can provide law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with content from those calls. As protesters demonstrate in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, law enforcement has deployed a wide range of surveillance tools to monitor and track protesters－including facial recognition software and contact tracing technology. They are working to get information from every source possible to disrupt and even arrest people involved with the protests."

"Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs. It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours. While much of the information has been "scraped" from open-source material, some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles."

"Dubbed typosquatting, the idea is simple (if devious): A hacker registers a domain that is close enough to a real site, like yourbanknarne.com, and puts up a clone of yourbankname.com. The unsuspecting victim goes to the wrong site by mistake, and enters their personal banking information. In doing so, they have inadvertently handed the digital keys to their account to a hacker. "

"Researchers call these design and wording decisions "dark patterns," a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to "please turn on notifications," and doesn't present an option to decline? That's a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to "log out" when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That's a dark pattern too."