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""Face recognition … might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things." Excuse me? What kind of benefits could possibly balance the risk of making life extremely easy for stalkers and creeps? Well, Bosworth later said on Twitter, it could help people with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition where you can't recognize people's faces. More generally, Bosworth said, it would be super handy when you run into someone at a party and can't remember their name. Ah yes, I can totally see how avoiding a little social awkwardness balances out the whole stalker thing!"

"How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a lightbulb? QAnon won't let me tell you. I can, however, reveal that it takes only a dozen anti-vaxxers to spread dangerous misinformation to millions of people. According to a report from the NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), up to 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter can be traced back to just 12 people. Although Facebook has disputed the report's methodology, the 12 have been nicknamed the "disinformation dozen", and include Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of John F Kennedy. A few of the 12 have been removed from at least one social media platform, but are still free to post on others."

"A "massive anti-vaccination campaign" has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation. Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked."

"What if this isn't just a one-off case of a popular professor dying. With so many classes online, why wouldn't universities just lay off any professor with a body of recorded lectures? We already know that tenure is harder to achieve every year, and schools are relying more and more on adjunct professors who teach a couple of classes on yearly contracts with no benefits. This scheme could save schools even more money! Of course, tuition will remain the same. One prof in the Twitter thread saw this possibility already."

"A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of "ballot burning" shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals. The misleading video shows a man filming himself on Virginia Beach, allegedly burning votes cast for Donald Trump. The ballots were actually samples. The clip went viral after Trump's son Eric posted it a day later on his official Twitter page, where it got more than 1.2m views."

"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"

"The greatest propaganda machine in history. Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others - they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged - stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It's why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history - the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, "Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.""

"It's a useful and insightful perspective, particularly for a time when Facebook is cowering under the pressure of conservative conspiracy theorists, while Twitter took the approach and ended up empowering oil companies by throttling climate activists."

"Telegram, a messaging app created by the reclusive Russian exile Pavel Durov, is suited to running protests for a number of reasons. It allows huge encrypted chat groups, making it easier to organise people, like a slicker version of WhatsApp. And its "channels" allow moderators to disseminate information quickly to large numbers of followers in a way that other messaging services do not; they combine the reach and immediacy of a Twitter feed, and the focus of an email newsletter. The combination of usability and privacy has made the app popular with protestors (it has been adopted by Extinction Rebellion) as well as people standing against authoritarian regimes (in Hong Kong and Iran, as well as Belarus); it is also used by terrorists and criminals. In the past five years, Telegram has grown at a remarkable speed, hitting 60 million users in 2015 and 400 million in April this year. "

""Social media giants like Twitter receive an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, not an editor with a viewpoint," he said during an Oval Office signing ceremony for an executive order designed to rein in big technology companies."

"Just like the Twitter experiment, and to nobody's surprise -- a Facebook account that copies and re-posts President Donald Trump's posts word-for-word is immediately flagged for inciting violence."

"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."

"Instagram turned our phones into adult pacifiers. At first, this was a tranquillising reel of pretty pictures, pumped in a steady stream with each thumb-swipe. Like a warm milky drink, but of sunsets and puppies and toes in the sand. Later, and more insidiously, the dopamine hit shifted to refreshing your feed to see how many likes your own pictures had. Either way, we had got ourselves in a feedback loop of attention-seeking in which our emotions were channelled from our brains to our phones and back again. Twitter is about your tribe, Facebook is about home and family, but Instagram is a romance between just you and your phone."

"THE GLARING FALLACY that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one's own views. The most cursory review of history, and the most minimal understanding of how these tech giants function, instantly reveals the folly of that pipe dream."

"This is the dark, flamboyant humour beloved of the "stan" culture of pop superfans, and in this case, quite funny. But another attack on Jillian Mapes, Pitchfork's reviewer, was very serious: "Contact info both old and current was leaked, down to a photo of my home," she wrote on Twitter. "I've gotten too many emails saying some version of, 'you are an ugly fat bitch who is clearly jealous of Taylor, plz die' … It sucks to be scared of every person milling about outside or feel like you can't answer the phone." Her overwhelmingly positive review nevertheless tarnished the numerical perfection conferred by Metacritic, hence the attack."

"The answer is simple: nobody, including opinion pollsters, knew about the Trump campaign's astonishing mastery of social media, especially Facebook. Trump may not have known much about that at the time - he really only understood Twitter - but Brad Parscale and his team sure knew how to make use of Facebook's micro-targeting machine. And they did."

"The role of so-called social media "bots" - automated accounts capable of posting content or interacting with other users with no direct human involvement - has been the subject of much scrutiny and attention in recent years. "

"If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s - because so few people had direct experience of computers - there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations. "

"In some respects, singling out Twitter is unfair: it was a collective failure of social media. People were able to name Edwards as the BBC presenter with impunity in social media comment sections. TikTok suggested Edwards and other BBC presenters' names as "hot" search terms, appending the fire emoji to their names. Google showed news stories and videos about the then-unnamed BBC presenter to people who searched for Huw Edwards' name, connecting him to the scandal."