Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The media bet its future on Facebook. Did it learn from that mistake? Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images BuzzFeed, the archetypal new media company of the 2010s, announced last week that it was shutting down its news division. In 2012, the small “web buzz” start-up started hiring reporters. The newsroom…
Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains. Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. April 18, 2023 Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw…
from the make-it-so dept Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of interesting developments regarding protocol-based, decentralized social media, and each time I plot out an article about it, something else pops up to add to the story, including Thursday evening as I finally started writing this and news broke that…
Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key security and…
Given the company’s character and scale and long ethical rap sheet, it is reasonable to construe every message issued by the company formerly known as Facebook as a threat. The company surely doesn’t intend this, but the story of the company’s growth and success has by now been overtaken by the sum of the many,…
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…
Chrissy Teigen, the former queen of Twitter, has gotten into a lot of trouble lately on the very platform she once ruled. Teigen is famous because she’s a model, TV host, and bestselling cookbook author who is married to John Legend. (Disclosure: Legend sits on the board of Vox Media.) But her real claim to…
TikTok quietly updated its earlier this week in a way that allows the company to automatically collect extensive data on users in the United States —including data about their faces and their voice . The policy change, first spotted by , specifically states that TikTok “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…