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The Federal Trade Commission just fired the opening salvo in the war to break up Facebook. The FTC lawsuit, announced Wednesday, accuses Facebook of "illegally maintaining" its monopoly through, in part, buying up would-be competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp. The complaint has the backing of 46 states' attorneys general, along with those of the District of Columbia and Guam, and pulls no punches in its characterization of Facebook's supposedly illegal […]

We finally know who watches the (exam) watchers. On Thursday, six Democratic senators sent an open letter to the CEO of the online test-administering company ExamSoft. At issue are claims online proctoring and remote-testing software is biased against people of color and people with disabilities, and that it invades students' privacy. "We write to request information on the steps that your company has taken to protect the civil rights of […]

On Facebook, each single serving of truth comes with a heaping side of bullshit. Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Anthony Fauci talked all things coronavirus Monday afternoon, but if you tuned in to the Facebook livestream you'd be forgiven for missing the finer points of the discussion. That's because the often deranged user comments, running alongside the conversation and overflowing with COVID-19 misinformation, had a tendency to distract. As the coronavirus […]

Twitter finally struck a blow against doomscrolling. Everyone's favorite time suck went down Thursday afternoon (or night if you're in Southeast Asia), preventing — at least at the time of this writing — its users both from tweeting and from reading about how the world is crumbling around them. According to Downdetector, which is owned by Mashable parent company Ziff Davis, reports of problems began trickling in around 2:12 PST. […]

Another day, another bunch of pro-Trump Facebook accounts revealed to be fake. Stop me if you've heard this one before. On Thursday, the social media giant announced it had removed 200 Facebook accounts, 55 Pages and 76 Instagram accounts over the past week for "coordinated inauthentic behavior." At least some of those accounts and pages were spotted pushing messaging in favor of Donald Trump. Of course, at least according to […]

Hot damn, we can all rest easy. In a bold and daring display of courage, Facebook announced Wednesday that it will stop running political ads — for an undefined amount of time — after polls close in the U.S. on Nov. 3. That's right, when it comes to election-related misinformation on the largest social media platform in the world, Facebook isn't waiting to act. Or, rather, it is waiting... until […]

Donald Trump is spreading dangerous misinformation — again — about the coronavirus on both Facebook and Twitter. Late Wednesday afternoon the president posted a rambling video to both social media platforms in which he claims, falsely, that there is "a cure" for COVID-19. To be clear, according to the World Health Organization, "there are no medicines that have been shown to prevent or cure the disease." Don't tell that to […]