Facebook confirmed it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign believed to be working ahead of November's midterm elections. The social media company announced it had detected and removed 32 fake accounts and pages from both Facebook and Instagram after identifying "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
Twitter is teaming up with academic researchers on ways to cut down on abusive content and harassment on its platform. The company said that it is partnering with two groups of academic researchers that will help measure the "health" of conversations on the platform.
In a policy paper obtained by Axios, Sen. Mark Warner's office laid out 20 different paths to address problems posed by Big Tech platforms -- ranging from putting a price on individual users' data to funding media literacy programs. The paper -- prepared by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner’s staff and circulated in tech policy circles in recent weeks -- is a window to the options available to U.S. policymakers concerned about disinformation and privacy.
A U.S. jury awarded International Business Machines Corp. $82.5 million after finding that Groupon Inc. infringed four of its e-commerce patents. The verdict is a boon to IBM’s intellectual-property licensing business, which last year brought in $1.19 billion for the company, holder of more than 45,000 patents.
Amid a plummeting share price, Facebook Inc. wants panicked investors to believe Europe’s strict General Data Protection Regulation is to blame for fewer people using the social network in the region. EU lawmakers disagree. The new law came into force on May 25 and forced companies that hold data on EU citizens to obtain “unambiguous” consent to collect personal information.
The Trump administration is crafting a proposal to protect Web users’ privacy, aiming to blunt global criticism that the absence of strict federal rules in the United States has enabled data mishaps at Facebook and others in Silicon Valley.Over the past month, the Commerce Department has been huddling with representatives of tech giants such as Facebook and Google, Internet providers including AT&T and Comcast, and consumer advocates, according to four people familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record.
State-sponsored Russian hackers appear far more interested this year in demonstrating that they can disrupt the American electric utility grid than the midterm elections, according to United States intelligence officials and technology company executives. Despite attempts to infiltrate the online accounts of two Senate Democrats up for re-election, intelligence officials said they have seen little activity by Russian military hackers aimed at either major American political figures or state voter registration systems.
Alex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist who runs the InfoWars website, has been suspended from Facebook for bullying and hate speech. The suspension will last for 30 days, and affects only Jones’s personal account on the social network, not the main InfoWars account.
Google is updating its financial services-related ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice, Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, told CNBC. That means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won't be allowed to serve ads through any of Google's ad products, which place advertising on its own sites as well as third-party websites.
President Donald Trump waded into the controversy over reports that Twitter Inc. is limiting the visibility of some Republicans on its platform -- a practice known as shadow banning -- sending shares down. "Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints," Trump, who prefers to use the site to communicate and is its most influential user, tweeted.
A facial recognition tool that Amazon.com Inc. sells to web developers wrongly identified 28 members of Congress as police suspects, in a test conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the organization said. Amazon, in a response, said it took issue with the settings of its face ID tool during the test.
Toerisme Vlaanderen, a Belgian tourist board based in Flanders, wrote an open letter to Facebook complaining that its posts featuring paintings by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens had been taken down. Rubens was one of the most influential painters of the 17th century, known for his paintings of nude adults and cherubs.
Facebook Inc. reported slower user growth, revenue that fell short of analysts’ expectations and increased spending to safeguard data, which cut into its profit margin in the second quarter and sent shares down 7 percent after hours. The company had cautioned investors to expect a big jump in costs because of efforts to address concerns about poor handling of users’ privacy and to better monitor what users post.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ YouTube channel received a strike for violating the site’s community guidelines, The Verge has learned. YouTube removed four videos from Jones’ channel, which has 2.4 million subscribers, that contained instances of hate speech and child endangerment, sources familiar with the matter said.
Facebook will be legally required to end its practice of allowing businesses to block certain groups like blacks, gays and immigrants from viewing ads under an agreement reached with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. The Attorney General’s Office said it had launched an investigation into the social media giant and successfully bought 20 fake Facebook ads that excluded various ethnic minorities in late 2016.
A retired Georgia Institute of Technology engineering professor described as a “pioneer” in developing the idea of ride sharing sued Lyft Inc, claiming it infringed his patent for technology underlying the core of its business model. According to a complaint filed on Monday evening, Lyft has failed to pay Stephen Dickerson for using his system integrating cellphones, global positioning system (GPS) technology and automated billing, despite earning as much as $1 billion of annual revenue.
Asustek Computer Inc. and Royal Philips NV were among four companies fined a total of 111 million euros ($130 million) by European Union antitrust regulators for preventing online retailers from setting prices that undercut traditional stores. Asus received the largest fine, about 63.5 million euros, while Philips owes nearly 30 million euros, the European Commission said in a press release.
Hackers working for Russia claimed “hundreds of victims” last year in a giant and long-running campaign that put them inside the control rooms of U.S. electric utilities where they could have caused blackouts, federal officials said. The Russian hackers, who worked for a shadowy state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into supposedly secure, “air-gapped” or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies, said officials at the Department of Homeland Security.
The operator of a shuttered bitcoin-denominated exchange pleaded guilty to federal charges that he defrauded investors and lied to U.S. securities regulators investigating the theft by hackers of virtual currency now worth about $46 million. Jon Montroll, 37, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and obstruction of justice before U.S. Magistrate Judge James Cott in Manhattan, federal prosecutors said in a statement.
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity. A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.
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