The numberless catfish who now course through social media , the ones who devastate lives with sophisticated online masquerades, exist to beguile and disturb.In this way, she is akin to Nev's catfish, Angela, who turned him from a defeated dropout to a man with a purpose.

On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai testified before Congress for a hearing titled “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role In Promoting Extremism And Misinformation.” By this point, it was far from their first rodeo.

To do the experiments, the researchers gathered a set of headlines and lead sentences from news stories that had been shared on social media.People were more likely to rate headlines that agreed with their politics, but the difference here was only 10 percentage points.

There’s even a new Twitter feed devoted to this: @YearCovid, which is dedicated to “livetweeting the covid pandemic as it happened on this date in 2020.” Following the account means getting semi-frequent reminders of what the news stories and social media reactions were on any given day in 2020.

In recent months, the audio-based social media app Clubhouse has emerged as Silicon Valley's latest disruptive darling .The app strongly encourages all users to share their address book data so Clubhouse can help you make connections with people you know who are already on the platform.

Fans looked up to Cara, and by extension Carano, but the actor’s comments on social media left one of those things harder to do.

"When it feels like everyone in your feed is using social media as a funnel for emotions that don't have anywhere else to go—which is happening a lot right now—that's when you close your laptop or close the app.".

The QAnon conspiracy theory, spread in large part through social media, was recently supported by a majority of Republican voters.Research into similar groups tells us that, if QAnon followers are to leave the world of conspiracy theories, they need a dignity-preserving path forward.

In September, a small group of friends convinced me to join them in my first few rounds of Among Us. Developer Innersloth’s game had been virtually inescapable at that point, clogging up every newsfeed on all of my social media apps with fan art, memes, and jokes about the cute little space beans.

But his debut film, Fake Famous (on HBO, starting February 2), brings slightly more apprehension—specifically to Instagram, the photo darling of social media.

Speaking as part of a conference convened for International Data Privacy Day, Cook excoriated the social media business model, which is based on monitoring people’s behavior in order to target ads to them.“The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been,” he said.

To combat review fraud, Yelp and other platforms flag reviews they deem spammy or objectionable and remove them from the main listings of the page.Platform-wide estimates show even higher rates of content removal, some 25 to 30 percent of all reviews aren't shown on businesses’ main review pages.

What Americans saw on Wednesday was different from Inauguration Day four years ago in other ways.They saw musical performances by Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks—a lineup that would look strange on concert poster but felt unifying on the first day of a new presidency.

The rioters present had talked extensively on publicly accessible social media about their plans to storm the Capitol and commit violence, and private citizens and law enforcement agencies had raised concerns with Capitol and DC police.Fortunately, social media still holds plenty of information about plans for more violence, and this time we can be more prepared.

By Monday, rumors were circulating on Reddit and across social media that the mass disemboweling of Parler's data had been carried out by exploiting a security vulnerability in the site's two-factor authentication that allowed hackers to create "millions of accounts" with administrator privileges.

Other livestreams from participants have been removed by the platforms themselves, part of a scrambling effort by social media giants to scrub their feeds of footage like Evans’ stream.

Marshall was one of Clubhouse’s first 100 users, and she quickly got hooked on the app, which works like an audio chatroom.Now, the emergence of audio social networks makes it even easier for anyone to broadcast their conversations to the wider world.

Submissions and any other materials, including your name or social media handle, may be published, illustrated, edited, or otherwise used in any medium.Illustration: VIOLET REEDYOUR GENES ARE MY GENES NOW.A Story Set in a World Without Paper.

On social media, #squadgoals—a hashtag describing glamorous friend groups, once culturally appropriated and popularized by Taylor Swift’s glamorous posse—was born and then died, but the notion that friendly hangouts make for marketable, sexy Instagram Stories remained, yielding engineered influencer friendships and branded collaborations.

Substack CEO Chris Best tells me that while he’s not out to kill what’s left of big media, the ad-free newsletter model has advantages over what traditional journalism has become—a chase for clicks where “most people’s media diets get determined by social media,” he says.

Right-wing luminaries who still have profiles on “lamestream” social media have made posts encouraging their followers to get off Facebook and Twitter and join them on Parler instead.

But it turns out that when Trump got into stuff that really violated policy—like Covid or election misinformation, or what might be interpreted as calls to violence—Facebook and Twitter began to place warning labels on his posts.

Our most significant, and surprising, finding was that only 15 percent of users who post with the #depressed hashtag do so with what we call “real name” accounts (through which users share their name, pictures of themselves, and other identifying details).Most people using #depressed—76 percent of the accounts in our data set—do so pseudonymously to share humorous memes and inspirational content about mental health.

Foucault Welles, an associate professor at Northeastern, says that network science “lets us distill vast, chaotic online communication data down to its essence” and “pull out important themes, people, and events for close reading.” This intersection with big data is critical: that it can extract patterns from terabytes of social media interactions strengthens the reach of its conclusions—the findings aren’t about how a small set of users behave, but about aggregate behavior.

Platforms could either collect such information through the mainstream press or set up a hotline allowing users to report election problems to the social media companies themselves, which would then verify the authenticity of tips before alerting users.

Senator Josh Hawley, who wants to strip Section 230 protections from platforms if they moderate misinformation in political speech, cited Thomas’ memo and asked Barrett her views about it.Pai gave us a hint of his thinking: “Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” he wrote.

“When I saw the split screen,” O’Donnell said later in a video on her website, “I knew it was over.”.While reaction videos cleave an artwork into its substance and its effects, the split screen is also being used on social media for the purposes of political activism.

Mitchell says law enforcement agencies routinely use tools that trawl social media for posts on particular topics, and that they have been used, for example, against people protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.“If you live in the United States and you’re exercising your rights to free speech and assembly to march and demonstrate, you might not realize that the entire time there’s a lot of data being vacuumed up and used against you,” Mitchell said.

With more Americans than ever working, going to school, and gathering online, social media platforms have an urgent responsibility to step up in order to ensure the integrity of this election.

Three and a half years ago, as the country came to understand the outsize role of social media manipulation in electing Donald Trump, you might have imagined that by the next time around the major platforms would have profoundly changed the way politics is conducted online and come to grips with essential design flaws.