The challenge, which goes by the moniker of the “homeless” or “rags-to-riches” challenge, sees players dress their Sims characters so that they appear homeless and then set out to acquire 5,000 Simoleons—enough in-game currency to build a modest multiroom house—without any shelter or a job, according to the challenge’s community page.

Technology companies are required by US law to report any CSAM they find online to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US nonprofit child-safety organization, but Apple has historically lagged behind its competitors.

While I appreciate the ability to shield my teenager from unseemly content, I also understand the importance of having meaningful conversations about why certain words and actions can harm others.It’s not difficult to imagine nefarious actors injecting extremist or toxic content into metaverse experiences directly.

We like it so much that we've spent a couple of months trying to get one to give away to a lucky reader.Read the official rules , accept the terms and conditions, and fill out the form below to enter.

In one sense, this design feature gives social media companies and their apologists a convenient defense against critique: If certain stuff is going big on a platform, that’s because it’s what users like.

The proposed changes would have been catastrophic for sex workers, who comprise the majority of the creators on the platform, and although the reversal is something of a relief, the about-face left some worried about their long-term futures on the site.

He founded Locast, which provides broadcast television over the internet for a monthly donation, because he wanted to “preserve the social contract in the streaming age.” Goodfriend isn’t alone.The cable companies, content providers, and broadcasters aren’t making it easy.

“Contrary to blocking, where access to the content is blocked, throttling aims to degrade the quality of service, making it nearly impossible for users to distinguish imposed/intentional throttling from nuanced reasons such as high server load or a network congestion,” researchers with Censored Planet, a censorship measurement platform that collects data in more than 200 countries, wrote in a report.

An early draft of the report, seen by WIRED, says that increased usage of end-to-end encryption would protect adults’ privacy at the expense of children’s safety, and that any strategy adopted by technology companies to mitigate the effect of end-to-end encryption will “almost certainly be less effective than the current ability to scan for harmful content.”.

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.

The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia's content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too).Conversations between the foundation’s newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia’s thousands of volunteers.

“From our research experience we know that storytelling is key for communicating the climate crisis in a way that can lead to taking action.” According to Schinko, TikTok has incredible potential as an arts-based activist platform.

That can include anything from 11-year-olds going live playing Minecraft—exposing them to potential predators —to now-banned gaming celebrity Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm streaming from a public bathroom at E3.In its new transparency report Twitch acknowledges this difficulty and for the first time offers specific details about how well it moderates its platform.

By the end of last year, there were few better symbols of bad-faith politics than Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that gives online platforms legal immunity for user-generated content.

In a statement Thursday, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for content policy, said the company would follow the board’s decisions to restore four items, including the Instagram post from Brazil.

Click Add Profile to do just that—you'll be prompted to provide a name for the profile first of all, and then you can set an avatar image and various user preferences (like episode autoplay).During the profile creation process, you'll be asked if you want to configure it as a child profile, which means you can put restrictions on it in terms of maturity ratings and which kinds of content can be viewed.

Whether you've been thinking about starting a podcast or sharing your epic Mario speed runs with the world, here's the gear you'll need to share your story.We recommend a lot of gear below, but before buy anything, think hard about what it is you want to record or livestream.

According to the report, released last night, the terrorist regularly watched extremist content online and donated to organizations like the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist site, and Stefan Molyneux’s far-right Freedomain Radio.

It seems Trump really believes his own garbled propaganda about Section 230—namely, that the law unfairly allows platforms like Twitter to get away with labeling or suppressing his posts spreading lies about the election, among other offenses.

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.

While there’s little evidence to support that Facebook is biased against conservative users, University of Virginia professors Brent Kitchens and Steven Johnson found that, by maximizing for engagement and attention, Facebook’s algorithms actively push conservatives toward more radical content than liberal users.

On Wednesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey will appear remotely at a hearing titled “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” The law, part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, gives interactive computer services broad legal immunity for content posted by users.

We applaud these changes, and believe that if Twitter is serious about its stated goal of “protecting the integrity of the election conversation,” there's another thing the platform should consider: putting a time delay on the tweets of Donald Trump and other political elites.

Cyberbullying is hard to define and even harder to measure; even Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, can’t estimate how prevalent the behavior is on its platform, or whether it’s worsened as Instagram replaces school cafeterias and shopping malls as the main place where teenagers interact.

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.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects “interactive computer services” like Facebook and Google from legal liability for the posts of their users.We could start by limiting Section 230 and making the platforms responsible, like any other publisher, for content they decide to promote and amplify.

Facebook gave me a statement saying, “We believe strongly in press freedom and the rights of journalists to work without fear for their personal safety or other repercussions.Facebook’s explanation is that it doesn’t normally single out free-speech heroes and that it did meet privately with Ressa after her conviction.

TikTok may very well be the future of the image.Sign up for our Longreads newsletter for the best features, ideas, and investigations from WIRED.And they're built, by design, on a kind of appropriation—the original lip-syncing app required users to mime existing audio.

Yesterday, YouTuber Calvin “LeafyIsHere” Vail posted a video attempting to eviscerate celebrity Twitch streamer Imane “Pokimane” Anys.On her Twitch channel, followed by 5.3 million people, Anys streams first-person shooter Valorant, reacts to ridiculous YouTube videos, pets her cat, and mouths over the lyrics of pop songs.

If Citizen has to grow before it can make money, then it has to entice people to use the app in the first place.But to show what the app is really capable of, it needs the participation and content provided by its users.To grow, Citizen needs videos.