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The US share of global GDP is nearly 15%. If our economy can't stabilize and then recover from the coronavirus pandemic, it will be harder for the world to do so

it's imperative that Congress write fair, generous legislation to get us through the economic shutdown required to fight the virus

But that isn't what's happening. Republicans accuse Democrats of not moving fast enough. Democrats accuse Republicans of short-changing American workers and favoring big corporations.

For years, people who use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have chased Likes as a status symbol. More Likes on a social media post meant it was popular, engaging and worthwhile.

Now Facebook is moving to limit the importance of Likes and other metrics.

On Thursday, the social network said it was starting a test in Australia, where people’s Likes, video view counts and other measurements of posts would become private to other users. It is the first time the company has announced plans to hide the numbers on its platform.

Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources.

The study compared Twitter’s “Home” timeline – the default way its 200 million users are served tweets, in which an algorithm tailors what users see – with the traditional chronological timeline where the most recent tweets are ranked first.

The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.

Here are three of the most prominent rumors that have spread on online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit.

Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.

he conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.

The commonly recommended age for a first cellphone is 13 years old. Most kids that age are in the eighth grade, getting ready to learn algebra. The desperate phone calls to 911 coming from inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., where 21 people were killed last month, were placed by children younger than that.

In the aftermath of another school shooting, concerned parents are weighing whether phones are a distraction or a potential lifeline for their children.

Phone ownership already is widespread among younger children, with 43 percent of 8-to-12-year-olds owning their own smartphone

Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.

the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation.

With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-ri

Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could they have warned the authorities? Answers to these questions remain unclear

But if nothing else, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seems highly likely to focus additional attention on how social platforms monitor what users are saying to and showing each other.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy”.

The bedlam of Twitter, fused with the brevity of its form, offers an interpretation of the virtual town square as a bustling, modernist city.

It’s easy to get stuck in a feedback loop: That which appears on Twitter is current (if not always true), and what’s current is meaningful, and what’s meaningful demands contending with. And so, matters that matter little or not at all gain traction by virtue of the fact that they found enough initial friction to start moving.

The platform is optimized to make the nonevent of its own exaggerated demise seem significant.

“Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”

a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat).

Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public.

A social media account recommended by Elon Musk for its coverage of the Israeli war with Hamas with a long history of antisemitic posts is connected to a southwest London teenager, according to research and a text exchange with the account.

Both accounts were among seven cited a week ago by researchers at the University of Washington as the “new elites” of influence on X, with more than 1.6 billion combined views in the first three days of the war.

“Most of the accounts also use video and images frequently, framed in emotional ways,” researchers wrote. “Strikingly, many of these accounts have received prior promotion from X owner Elon Musk, either through direct recommendation or through Musk’s account replying to their content, which may explain some of their dominance of 'news Twitter.’”

Over the course of two dozen interviews spanning six countries, I’ve discovered a thriving warren of companies employing a similar business model, using ghostwriters on OnlyFans to provide digital intimacy at scale. These agencies operate, out of necessity, a little below the radar. They collectively represent hundreds of models, and some claim to bring in profits that can range into the seven figures annually.

OnlyFans started in 2016, and has since emerged as the top platform worldwide for creators to sell monthly subscriptions for self-produced erotic content. The platform has become synonymous with this sort of business, though some use it for other purposes.

The real product is relationships. Money from subscriptions can be trivial compared with the profits earned by selling custom videos, sexting sessions and other forms of fan interaction that require more concerted engagement than simply posting to a feed.

Microsoft said that the search engine is still a work in progress, describing the past week as a learning experience that is helping it test and improve the new Bing

The company said in a blog post late Wednesday that the Bing upgrade is “not a replacement or substitute for the search engine, rather a tool to better understand and make sense of the world.”

The new Bing is going to “completely change what people can expect from search,” Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, told The Wall Street Journal ahead of the launch

Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.

As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”

unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.

There’s little indication that Biden’s remarks on this occasion—which were lucid, thoughtful, and, as Yglesias noted, cogent—or that any of the countless hours of footage from this past year alone of Biden being oratorically and rhetorically compelling, have meaningfully factored into the media’s appraisal of Biden’s cognitive state

Instead, the media has run headlong toward a narrative constructed by the very people politically incentivized to paint Biden in as unflattering a light as possible. When news organizations uncritically accept, rather than journalistically evaluate, the assumption that Biden is severely cognitively compromised in the first place, they effectively grant the right-wing influencers who spend their days curating Biden gaffe supercuts the opportunity to set the terms of the debate

Why does the media take at face value that the viral posts showcasing Biden’s gaffes and slip-ups are truly representative of his current state? 

In 2001 the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a group exhibition called “Freestyle,” the first in what would be a series intended to introduce freshly minted African-American talent.

She referred to the group of artists she’d chosen, most of them then in their 20s, as “post-black.”

For her it meant artists who were adamant about not being confined to the category of “black,” though, as she wrote, “their work was deeply interested in redefining complex notions of blackness. Post-black,” she added with a wry twist, “was the new black.”

Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe. Safety, here, doesn't mean inaccessible. Competent and determined data hunters armed with the right tools can always find a way to get it. Less committed folks, however, experience great effort as a deterrent.

Online, obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too

What obscurity draws our attention to, is that while the records were accessible to any member of the public prior to the rise of big data, more effort was required to obtain, aggregate, and publish them. In that prior context, technological constraints implicitly protected privacy interests.

Psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz published their work in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. They sampled 623 Internet users (all white, 70 percent students), asking them to indicate the frequency of their Facebook usage. The group then read one of three versions of a Facebook Notes page they were told was written by a 26-year-old named Jack Brown. "Jack" was white and male. The first version of Jack's message contained what the researchers call a "superiority message": It "contrasted the behaviors of black and white individuals, only to find consistent superiority of the whites."

The researchers then asked participants, for each version of the post, to rate factors like "how much they agreed with the message," "how accurate they found it," "how much they liked the writer," and, significantly, how likely they were to share the post with others

Their findings? "Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages." The group of more-frequent Facebook users didn't differ from others in their reaction to the egalitarian message. But those users "were more positive toward the messages with racist content -- particularly the superiority message." 

Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.

The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.

Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful

Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his ope

nness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.