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"An army of fake social media accounts on Twitter and the blogging site Medium have been promoting and defending the controversial hosting of a UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates. The president of the Cop28 climate talks is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the state oil giant Adnoc, which has major net zero-busting expansion plans."

""Bots view, 'like,' subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists," the analysis said. In some cases, Fabrika targets users with disinformation directly after gleaning their emails and phone numbers from databases. The campaign's goals include demoralising Ukrainians and exploiting divisions among western states, the document added. Experts have downplayed the 1% claim. Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said the figure sounded implausible and that sock puppet accounts - a term for accounts with fake identities - need their content to be reposted by plausible accounts such as those operated by influencers."

"The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the platforms."

"Caroline, the 28-year-old behind a popular TikTok account where she posts satirical skits, found herself dropping the comedic tone when the child of a family vlogger sent her a letter and asked Caroline to share it with her 2.3 million followers. "To any parents that are considering starting a family vlog or monetizing your children's lives on the public internet, here is my advice: you shouldn't do it," the letter read. "Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering… your child will never be normal… I never consented to being online.""

"Pornbots create fake accounts that are designed to mimic real people. They steal photos from public social media accounts, and follow the real profile's friends. They tack on suggestive captions and post links to external paid adult sites. The fake accounts choose @usernames that are deceptively similar to those they impersonate. And for good measure, the fake accounts block the person they're copying, making it difficult for the victim to see or interact with them."

"ne YouTuber, Dan Duffy, joined the search just to post a video of himself joining it, and was fined on a public order offence, which he also filmed. One TikTok account, Curtis Cool Stuff, posted a video of a man digging up woodland, and another of him roaming around a derelict house opposite the bank where Bulley was last seen. Another group of men had to be dispersed from the house, having travelled there from Liverpool."

"Such bans are possible because school policies allow for the blocking of traffic to certain websites on campus wifi networks, measures that are typically reserved for harmful content and pornography. But those policies can also extend to specific apps, which has been done in the past with platforms like anonymous social media account Yik Yak."

"Yet despite much of the content appearing to break TikTok's rules, which explicitly ban misogyny and copycat accounts, the platform appears to have done little to limit Tate's spread or ban the accounts responsible. Instead, it has propelled him into the mainstream - allowing clips of him to proliferate, and actively promoting them to young users."

"Twitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations. Chinese bot accounts - not operated by humans - are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script."

"You're nailing the problem: the tech sales people and the politicians are all on the same drug, which is "This tech is perfect", because it's cheaper than more police. There's a lawsuit in the US because a black man was wrongly arrested based on facial recognition. Tech companies need to be held to account. One company we focused on, Clearview AI, scraped social networks - collected images of people's faces and data from publicly available information - to create its software. Facial recognition relies on artificial intelligence. It needs to study faces. And only the government - the DVLA etc - and social networking companies have access to a lot of faces."

"TikTok's algorithm is famously effective, yet hard to study. As part of the Guardian's special series on the platform's explosive rise, we tested how the algorithm treats different users. We wondered what would happen if three people - with varying ages, backgrounds, and familiarity with the platform - created new accounts and recorded what they saw."

"The combination of the infinite scroll and lack of live links has led to a very specific kind of information economy on the app. Creators whose brand involves discussing news or popular culture (and there are a lot of them) opt to screenshot headlines, summarize articles, and offer their takes. But it's impossible to know whether the creator even read the article or if they're just offering a summary of the online discourse. Even worse are the accounts that spread false headlines, whether they know it or not. Without live links, all these possible situations are presented to you in the exact same way: with a familiar face on your FYP speaking authoritatively."

"The platformization of labor affects workers of all kinds, across platforms. On "click farm" platforms in Brazil, workers perform countless fragmented data tasks. They spend hours every day clicking, following, and commenting on social media accounts - and earning less than a penny for each task."

""With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable," says Finlay Shakespeare. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. With streaming, he says: "If I didn't gel with an album or an artist's work at first, I tended not to go back to it." But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. "Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music." Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention."

"That algorithm can make the app powerfully addictive and fun, but like other social media platforms, it may also be cutting out whole swaths of content that you'll never get to see. I ran an experiment by creating two fresh accounts on TikTok. With these accounts, the only bias they start with is knowing my location - Toronto - which brings up content made near me."

"Cyber conflicts are fought in the shadows, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is a group that calls itself Anonymous that has made the most public declaration of war. Late on Thursday the hacker collective tweeted from an account linked to Anonymous, @YourAnonOne, that it had Vladimir Putin's regime in its sights."

"or its latest update, which it released Wednesday, the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub combined nine different mathematical models from different research groups to get an outlook for the pandemic for the next six months. "Any of us who have been following this closely, given what happened with delta, are going to be really cautious about too much optimism," says Justin Lessler at the University of North Carolina, who helps run the hub. "But I do think that the trajectory is towards improvement for most of the country," he says. The modelers developed four potential scenarios, taking into account whether or not childhood vaccinations take off and whether a more infectious new variant should emerge. "

""Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,""

"The Bank of Thailand has allowed six commercial banks to offer facial recognition for electronic Know Your Customer (e-KYC) technology to verify the identity of new customers under the regulatory sandbox when opening online deposit accounts."