The Washington Post
Facebook whistleblower sheds light on social media’s harmful effects
Oct 6th · Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen warned lawmakers of the challenges with Facebook are unique because policymakers don’t have visibility into how the company works.
AppleInsider
Mark Zuckerberg may have lied to Congress about who can see WhatsApp messages
2 min read · Sep 7th · The Facebook-owned WhatsApp regularly boasts of using end-to-end encryption and keeping communications between users private, but a report alleges that some monitoring of messages does take place, and…
The New York Times
Text Memes Are Taking Over Instagram
6 min read · Aug 9th · Fueled by Gen Z, text-heavy meme posts, often paired with nonsensically unrelated pictures, are turning the photo and video app into a destination for written expression.
MIT Technology Review
She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story.
~12 min read · Jul 29th · Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it.
Real Life
Why Can’t We Be Friends — Real Life
~11 min read · Jul 1st · Podcasts and other forms of “parasocial” media reframe friendship as monetized self-care
The New York Times
The ‘Ugly Truth’ About Facebook
5 min read · Jul 9th · A new, deeply reported book by the Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang recounts the full story of the social media company’s foibles.
TechCrunch
TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’
5 min read · Jun 3rd · A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content.…
The New York Times
We Worked Together on the Internet. Last Week, He Stormed the Capitol.
7 min read · Jan 11th · At BuzzFeed, we followed the signals of social media. A young employee followed them all the way to Charlottesville and Capitol Hill.
The New Republic
Making Sense of the Facebook Menace
~18 min read · 2020-12-31 · Can the largest media platform in the world ever be made safe for democracy?
The Atlantic
Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine
~16 min read · 2020-12-15 · The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.
Fast Company
The ‘Coded Bias’ documentary is ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for Big Tech algorithms
2 min read · 2020-11-12 · Director Shalini Kantayya’s documentary ‘Coded Bias’ unravels how inherent gender and racial biases get embedded in the algorithms that run our lives.
Aeon+Psyche
How smartphones silence what the urban landscape tries to say
10 min read · From 2019 · When you stare at your phone or use Uber to navigate your neighbourhood, you flatten the rich texture of urban life
Guardian Books
Give up Google, don't hit 'accept all': how to fight for your privacy
7 min read · 2020-09-28 · In Privacy Is Power, professor Carissa Véliz has made a shocking survey of how much intimate data we are surrendering. But she has a plan to fight back
POLITICO
Why the right-wing has a massive advantage on Facebook
6 min read · 2020-09-26 · A company executive responds to claims of bias.
The New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg Is the Most Powerful Unelected Man in America
5 min read · 2020-09-03 · Facebook is too big for democracy.
Fast Company
Facebook is quietly pressuring its independent fact-checkers to change their rulings
~13 min read · 2020-08-20 · As Facebook struggles with waves of misinformation, the company’s political and business concerns are influencing its fact-checking policies.
