Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Facebook, a social network originally founded as an Ivy League version of Hot or Not, has billions of users and the power to sway elections. In the U.S., where nearly 70 percent of adults are Facebook users, its recent choices make it clear where the company stands: with the party of Donald Trump. 

On the day that the company rolled out one of its biggest new products, the Facebook News tab, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided the place he wanted to be on launch day was a media event co-hosted by News Corp.

There, Zuckerberg and News Corp. chief executive Robert Thomson spent an hour yucking it up and reminiscing about old times spent with Thomson’s boss, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News. Read more…

More about Facebook, Donald Trump, Social Media, Republican, and Conservative

Facebook has done it again. 

As the company fights growing backlash against its political advertising policies and new pressure from lawmakers, Facebook is proving once again that seemingly no scandal is big enough to affect its bottom line — at least for now.

The company delivered its results for the third-quarter of 2019, revealing that it had taken in $17.7 billion while growing its daily active users to 1.62 billion — both comfortably ahead of analysts’ expectations for the beleaguered social media giant. 

Facebook’s latest financial results came just after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would no longer accept political ad dollars from candidates or outside organizations. Though Dorsey didn’t call out Facebook or Zuckerberg by name, he made clear that he believes Facebook’s own explanation for its political ad policies is “not credible.”  Read more…

More about Tech, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Media Companies, and Tech

Twitter will cease running paid political ads. 

The announcement, made Wednesday afternoon by Jack Dorsey, is in stark contrast to Facebook’s controversial decision to allow politicians to pay to spread lies. It’s a smart move, and, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s protestations, Dorsey makes clear that it has nothing to do with free speech. 

As the Twitter CEO rightly points out, the policy will not prevent politicians from tweeting, but rather will prevent them and their teams from using his company’s advanced micro-targeting service to gain paid exposure. 

“This isn’t about free expression,” tweeted Dorsey. “This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.” Read more…

More about Facebook, Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Tech

This is not a drill: two health-tech companies are building the world’s first database for images of poop and they need your poop pics.

The campaign is called “#GiveAShit For Science” and asks people to upload photos of their bowel movements by using a smartphone browser to visit seed.com/poop (yes, that’s the whole URL).

The companies behind the initiative are Seed, a “microbial sciences” company that conducts microbiome research (and sells a probiotic), and Auggi, an AI company developing technology to treat gut disorders. 

One of the objectives of the campaign is about awareness, getting people to pay more attention to their gut health via their poops. Read more…

More about Poop, Microbiome, Probiotics, Tech, and Artificial Intelligence

TikTok users are calling for more visibility for creators of color on the platform.

The app’s For You Page, a never ending queue of trending content, displays videos based on content the user has already engaged with. Nobody outside of TikTok itself knows how the algorithm works, and TikTok declined to comment on it for Mashable, but some users claim that the app’s most popular faces are overwhelmingly white. Tired of not seeing people who look like them while scrolling through the app, the users are raising awareness for better representation. 

Larry Hudson III, a 20-year-old TikTok user, created an audio clip calling for better representation in the app’s trending page. Through the in-app editing feature, users can use audio uploaded by other users to make their own videos.  Read more…

More about Diversity, Representation, Tiktok, Culture, and Web Culture

According to Pornhub, the yeehaw agenda remains strong heading into Halloween.

The adult video platform released its Halloween insights on Wednesday, and overall Harley Quinn ranked as the top character in Pornhub searches. The Joker came in second place. “Succubus” — the female demons of medieval lore who seduce men while they sleep and suck the life force right out of them — came in fifth in this years Halloween-themed searches. Classic “sexy costumes” like nurse, kitty/cat, and maid also rounded out the top ten.

Female Pornhub users were 76 percent more likely to search for “cowboy,” compared to men. Women were 68 percent were more likely to search for “Michael Myers” — yikes — and 53 percent were more likely to be seeking “Harry Potter” videos.  Read more…

More about Halloween, Data, Pornhub, Culture, and Web Culture

Horse owners fled with their animals Wednesday morning as a new blaze erupted on Southern California’s parched terrain. 

The wind-whipped Easy Fire, born near Easy Street in the city of Simi Valley north of Los Angeles, made a vigorous run at Ronald Reagan’s hillside presidential library, but the blaze, promptly attacked by firefighters, has so far been stopped near the edges of the landmark. Yet flames have spread over some 1,300 acres while threatening more than 7,000 homes, according to the Ventura County Fire Department (as of 11 a.m. PST). 

“We were able to protect the library,” said Ventura County Fire Chief Chad Cook at a press conference. But Cook noted the entire region is still under threat.  Read more…

More about Science, Fires, California Fires, Science, and Climate Environment

HBO announced on Tuesday that their streaming service HBO Max will launch in May 2020 for $14.99 a month (existing HBO customers and HBO Now direct subscribers will get it bundled for free), as well as a feature it calls “human-powered discovery.” 

“Talent & influencers will be the humans behind our Recommended by Humans feature, sharing the content they love and why it’s worth watching,” it announced in a tweet.

The service will also offer “co-viewing”, a joint profile that gives recommendations based upon joint views without interfering with personal profiles.

In addition, the company announced a Game of Thrones prequel as the crown jewel in their upcoming slate for HBO. Co-created by George R.R. Martin and Ryan Condal, the Targaryen prequel House of the Dragon will also be written by Condal, and both he and Miguel Sapochnik will act as showrunners. Read more…

More about Hbo Max, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

In Los Angeles, a battle’s been slowly brewing between scooter-shares and the transportation department. Now, privacy organizations are taking sides.

Scooter companies like the Uber-owned Jump are not having it with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) data-gathering policies required for operating a scooter company in the city. Back in March, LADOT gave year-long permits to Bird, Lyft, Lime, Bolt, Sherpa, Spin, and Wheels to offer app-based rides on two-wheeled electric vehicles. Uber’s Jump was given a temporary permit.

Uber (and to its credit, Lyft) balked at parts of the permit about data policies. LADOT wanted real-time data as part of its Mobility Data Specification (MDS) system to collect data from the companies, as it was mandated that they “provide real-time information about how many of their vehicles are in use at any given time.” Uber was down to give data about its scooters like it does in other cities like Oakland and Seattle, just not the way LADOT was demanding it. Read more…

More about Uber, E Scooters, Tech, Cybersecurity, and Transportation

Facebook is going to court.

The social media giant, which owns the messaging service WhatsApp, has filed a complaint against the Israeli tech company NSO Group for allegedly developing and deploying spyware on approximately 1,400 users’ smartphones via the messaging app. And here’s the scary thing: According to Facebook, the victims didn’t even have to click on anything for the spyware to take over their devices. 

We first learned of this troubling attack in May of this year, with reports that all a bad actor had to do was call a person via WhatsApp to compromise their phone. Once installed, the software could read decrypted messages on a person’s device.  Read more…

More about Facebook, Encryption, Whatsapp, Nso Group, and Tech