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Last Wednesday, a British firm released emails exchanged between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook staff which reflect potentially damaging privacy practices. The emails were uncovered as a part of the ongoing US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into Facebook’s potential breach of privacy laws during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This new development comes amidst the US Federal authorities laying the groundwork for ensuring regulations against the market threat posed by technology giants Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google. Earlier this month, the US House

A deal between Facebook and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could see the social media giant put under the government agency’s supervision for the next 20 years. Facebook is looking to close the deal with FTC within the next month which would include new privacy-focused changes in its governance. The platform could potentially also be asked to shell out nearly $5 billion for privacy violations—a penalty record by the FTC against a technology company. This record breaking penalty if imposed, will not only dwarf Google’s $22.5 million fine paid to the FTC, it indicates a new, tougher shift

In the last two decades, few technology giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have come to dominate the online market. With Facebook’s earnings being roughly the size of the GDP (gross domestic product) of the bottom 65 countries the harm goes beyond economics—it harms democracy itself. Such an empire like monopoly of technology giants strips people of power. Social networking is just like any other industry and Facebook dominates it. In turn, it has made the market devoid of healthy competition with Facebook either buying its rivals or making the market unsustainable for competitors

Four phases of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections are over, but the slew of measures taken by WhatsApp to curb fake news—particularly during the polls—seem to have come a cropper. The fake news ecosystem is alive and kicking, and disinformation is still spreading like wildfire. If news reports are anything to go by, the dissemination of fake news and doctored videos on the world’s most popular messaging app has not ebbed in spite of the corrective and prohibitive steps that have been taken by WhatsApp since January this year. Among fake news that have gone viral in the recent past include a clipped

As Facebook celebrates 15 years of virtual friendship, social science has compiled an expansive body of research that documents the public’s love-hate relationship with its best frenemy. What many once viewed as a confidant has devolved into a messy codependence, mired by ambiguity and mistrust. It’s a relationship that’s both taken for granted, yet extremely high-maintenance, leaving users to wonder whether they should just move on with healthier friends. But it wasn’t always like this. Friendly beginnings At its launch, Facebook was one of the most authentic social networking partners

In less than a month, France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) have gone from being a celebrated example of Facebook’s ability to power a spontaneous revolution to a cautionary tale of how social networks can be manipulated by outsiders to provoke outrage and sow dissent. But in both of these extreme scenarios, the central actors lie outside France, whether it’s the platforms based in Silicon Valley or the suspected propagandists in Russia. Because the gilets jaunes phenomenon couldn’t be connected to one particular trade union, political party or any other national organization, many looked to

The centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, came victorious in Sunday's general election. The party captured 29 per cent of the vote, winning 123 seats in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies. But the Socialists, till even the last minute, had seemed to be facing in uphill task, particularly in the wake of virulent disinformation campaigns waged by the far right Vox pary, which eventually the country's parliament for the first time since dictator General Franco's rule came to an end in 1975. Just days before the country went to the polls

There was a time when our internet resembled the American economy of the historic Western frontier: unregulated, vast in opportunities and untouched by large firms. The world wide web was new and cyberspace was, for the most part, overloaded with useless information. “Chances are if you search for an item even with a very good search engine, most of the results you get will be irrelevant,” said Kate Delhagen, a research analyst at Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1997. Like the early oil industry that grew throughout the 1800s, the industry players populating the early

In recent weeks, the amount of online fake news that circulated during the final months of the presidential race is coming to light, a disturbing revelation that threatens to undermine the country’s democratic process. We’re already seeing some real-world consequences. After fake news stories implicated a Washington, D.C. pizza shop as the site of a Clinton-coordinated child sex ring, a man wielding an AR-15 assault rifle entered the store on Dec. 4 to “investigate” and fired shots. Much of the analysis, however, has focused on the people who create these false articles – whether it’s

Last February, Cadbury Chocolate fell victim to a hoax. The image below went viral in an Indonesian WhatsApp group called “Viral Media Johor”, and later in a Nigerian group. Obviously, the post was fake news. The man in the image is Aminu Ogwuche, who was arrested on suspicion of involvement with the bombing of a Nigerian bus station back in 2014. He has never worked for Mondelez, the company that makes Cadbury chocolate, and their products are not infected with HIV. Indeed, it’s not even possible to contract HIV from eating food contaminated with HIV-positive blood. But the problem that this