Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University's School of Business, argues in the Atlantic that social-media platforms "trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting." But that was just the beginning.

He now believes this ultimately fueled a viral dynamic leading to "the continual chipping-away of trust" in a democracy which "depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions." The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens' trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).... Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth — with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
In the last 10 years, the article argues, the general public — at least in America — became "uniquely stupid." And he's not just speaking about the political right and left, but within both factions, "as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families." The article quotes former CIA analyst Martin Gurri's comment in 2019 that the digital revolution has highly fragmented the public into hostile shards that are "mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another."

The article concludes that by now U.S. politics has entered a phase where truth "cannot achieve widespread adherence" and thus "nothing really means anything anymore--at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree." It even contemplates the idea of "highly believable" disinformation generated by AI, possibly by geopolitical adversaries, ultimately evolving into what the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory has described as "an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality."

But then the article also suggests possible reforms: The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the "Share" function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this...don't stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. Banks and other industries have "know your customer" rules so that they can't do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same.... This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms.... Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.

In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

The members of Gen Z--those born in and after 1997--bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.... Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it. More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision...
The article closes with its own note of hope — and a call to action: In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.

Earlier this week the Voice of America news service shared a story that begins with exclusive photos from a nuclear lab "from which a Ukrainian official says Russian troops stole radioactive material that could be harmful if mishandled...." It is housed in a building run by a state agency managing the exclusion zone around Chernobyl's nearby decommissioned nuclear power plant, where a 1986 explosion caused the world's worst nuclear accident. The director of the agency, Evgen Kramarenko, provided the laboratory photos to VOA, saying he took them on an April 5 visit, five days after Russian troops withdrew from Chernobyl....

"We have a laboratory that had a big quantity of radioactive instruments that are used to calibrate our radiation dosimeters," Kramarenko told VOA. A dosimeter is a safety device, typically worn by individuals as a badge, that measures exposure to ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation. The agency's dosimeters are calibrated using small metallic containers of radioactive material made by Ukrainian state enterprise USIE Izotop, which displays a photo of them on its website.

"Most of those calibration instruments were stolen. They look like coins. If the Russian soldiers carry them around, it's very dangerous for them," Kramarenko said....

In a Saturday Facebook post, Kramarenko's agency said occupying Russian troops stole samples of fuel-containing materials from the lab in addition to the radioactive calibration instruments. The agency said it was possible that the Russians threw away the items elsewhere in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, but that a likelier scenario is that they kept items as "souvenirs."

Apple's controversial App Tracking Transparency feature available in iOS 14.5 is expected to have a significant impact on Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and YouTube in 2022. According to a report by Lotame, big tech platforms' revenue could drop by almost $16 billion. 9to5Mac reports: For those who don't remember, ATT requires that applications ask permission from users before tracking them across other apps and websites. For example, when you open the Facebook app, you'll see a prompt that says the app would like to track you across other apps and services. There will be two options from which to choose: "Ask App not to Track" or "Allow."

Talking about Facebook, Lotame's report shows that Zuckerberg's company will take the biggest hit as the privacy changes will cost it $12.8 billion in revenue: "The effects of these changes on these companies are hard to isolate because all four players are still growing extremely strongly, still taking share from the last bastions of traditional media and gaining share in digital media as privacy regulations make it harder and harder for independent publishers and technologies to execute,' said Mike Woosley, Chief Operating Officer at Lotame. 'To add to the complexity, the pandemic has introduced volatile and unpredictable gyrations in the pacing of media spend.'"

In a Twitter thread earlier today, Meta CTO Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth teased a web version of Horizon Worlds, the company's virtual reality platform that's an integral part of their plan for creating a "metaverse." Boz was responding to criticism from MacRumors' Sami Fathi, who pointed out the hypocrisy of Meta taking an almost 50% commission on "metaverse" purchases after complaining about the 15-30% cut Apple takes from developers in the App Store.

"We're taking a different approach with our margin (heh) on Quest devices to make them available to more people," said Boz. "We're committed to help build a different ecosystem. Developers are already seeing success on the Quest Store alone -- over 120 titles are generating over $1M." He added: "We're making good on our goal to ensure that developers have a path to real financial success on our platform. It's early days, there is still a lot of work to be done and we continue to partner closely with our creators and developers to enable them to earn meaningful revenue." Boz went on to say that the Horizon World's platform fee "will only be 25%" when the web version launches -- "a much lower rate compared to other similar world-building platforms."

Meta is throwing billions of dollars into building out the metaverse as the future of social networking but in the near term, the tech giant is looking toward the power of messaging to connect users in a more personal way. From a report: On that front, the company today introduced its plans for a significant update to its WhatsApp messaging app that will allow users to now not only connect privately with friends and family, as before, but also participate in larger discussion groups, called Communities. These groups aim to serve as a more feature-rich replacement for people's larger group chats with added support for tools like file-sharing of up to 2GB, 32-person group calls, emoji reactions, as well as admin tools and moderation controls, among other things.

The feature has been under development for some time as the next big iteration for the WhatsApp platform, meant to capitalize on the app's existing end-to-end encryption as well as users' growing desire to join private communities outside of larger social platforms, like Facebook. In particular, Communities could present a challenge to other messaging apps like Telegram -- which has recently become a prominent player in communications related to the Russia-Ukraine war -- in addition to other private messaging platforms, like iMessage or Signal, as well as apps like GroupMe, Band, Remind and others used to communicate with groups.

Apple has responded to Meta's plan to take a nearly 50% commission for digital asset purchases made inside the metaverse after complaining about fees in the App Store, calling the decision hypocritical. From a report: Yesterday, it was revealed that Meta, more commonly known as Facebook, plans to take a steep 47.5% commission for digital asset purchases made inside the so-called "metaverse." The 47.5% cut includes a 30% hardware fee on top of a 17.5% platform fee. Responding to the plan, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz told MarketWatch that Facebook is simply being hypocritical and that while it complains about Apple's own platform fees, it wants to charge creators even more. "Meta has repeatedly taken aim at Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases in the App Store -- and have used small businesses and creators as a scapegoat at every turn," Apple spokesman Fred Sainz stated in an email to MarketWatch. "Now -- Meta seeks to charge those same creators significantly more than any other platform. [Meta's] announcement lays bare Meta's hypocrisy. It goes to show that while they seek to use Apple's platform for free, they happily take from the creators and small businesses that use their own."

Mark Zuckerberg has a grandiose vision for the metaverse, and he hopes that you'll one day see the same thing, too -- quite literally, through a pair of augmented reality glasses. The Verge reports: Still, Zuckerberg has ambitious goals for when his high-tech glasses will be a reality. Employees are racing to deliver the first generation by 2024 and are already working on a lighter, more advanced design for 2026, followed by a third version in 2028.ââ The details, which together give the first comprehensive look at Meta's AR hardware ambitions, were shared with The Verge by people familiar with the roadmap who weren't authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment for this story.

If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. "Zuck's ego is intertwined with [the glasses]," a former employee who worked on the project tells me. "He wants it to be an iPhone moment." Meta's CEO also sees the AR glasses, dubbed Project Nazare, as a way to get out from under the thumb of Apple and Google, which together dictate the terms that apps like Facebook have to abide by on mobile phones. The first version of Nazare is designed to work independently from a mobile phone with the assistance of a wireless, phone-shaped device that offloads parts of the computing required for the glasses to operate. A marquee feature will be the ability to communicate and interact with holograms of other people through the glasses, which Zuckerberg believes will, over time, provide people with a more immersive, compelling experience than the video calling that exists today.

After announcing earlier this week that creators can sell digital items in Horizon Worlds for real money, Meta has offered details about how many fees creators will have to pay on earnings made through the platform. According to Road to VR, "Meta explained that anything sold in Horizon Worlds would be subject to the same 30% fee the company charges developers selling apps through its VR platform and then an additional 25% fee on top of the remaining amount." From the report: The company provided the following example: "...if a creator sells an item for $1.00, then the Meta Quest Store fee would be $0.30 and the Horizon Platform fee would be $0.17, leaving $0.53 for the Creator before any applicable taxes." That's an effective rate of 47.5% of anything sold on Horizon Worlds to Meta, leaving 52.5% to the creator.

That's a pretty hefty take, but not entirely out of line with contemporaries. Roblox, for instance, takes between 30% and 70% of the revenue generated by creators depending upon whether the creator sold the item directly to customers or if the item was sold on the Roblox marketplace or by another party. These are big fees, no doubt, but creators are getting something in return. Horizon Worlds, for instance, offers up its self-contained collaborative building tools, access to an audience, and handles all hosting and networking costs associated with the things creators build. Whether that's worth 47.5% of what someone manages to sell on the platform is going to be up to the creator.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The current tide of antitrust scrutiny and regulations focused on big technology companies has conspicuously omitted one company: Microsoft, the software and cloud-computing behemoth that was the notorious target of a landmark U.S. government lawsuit in the 1990s. Microsoft, the thinking goes, was already humbled by years of intense government oversight, and since it largely caters to other companies, instead of consumers, it doesn't belong in the same category as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. But now some Microsoft customers, and some of its fiercest rivals, are making a bold claim: The software giant is again using its sway over one market to thwart competition in another.

Microsoft three years ago overhauled the way it licenses some of its most ubiquitous software programs, including Windows and Office, in ways that increase the cost of running those programs on rival cloud-computing systems like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. In some cases, the revamped agreements outright forbid using some products on competing cloud services. AWS and Google say they have complained to Microsoft on behalf of multiple customers. French cloud provider OVH, along with other unidentified companies, filed a complaint last year with European regulators about the practice, saying it's also being hurt by Microsoft's policies. Major business software customers, some of which are only now starting to see the impact as they renew deals or replace aging programs, are also incensed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook today reported an increase in attacks on accounts run by Ukraine military personnel. In some cases, attackers took over accounts and posted "videos calling on the Army to surrender," but Facebook said it blocked sharing of the videos. Specifically, Facebook owner Meta's Q1 2022 Adversarial Threat Report said it has "seen a further spike in compromise attempts aimed at members of the Ukrainian military by Ghostwriter," a hacking campaign that "typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the Internet." Ghostwriter has been linked to the Belarusian government.

"Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel," Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in "a handful of cases" in which "they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared." In its February 27 update, Meta said it detected Ghostwriter's "attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender." Meta said it had "taken steps to secure accounts that we believe were targeted by this threat actor" and "blocked phishing domains these hackers used to try to trick people in Ukraine into compromising their online accounts." But Ghostwriter continued its operations and hacked into accounts of Ukrainian military personnel, as previously mentioned.

Separately, Facebook recently removed a network of Russian accounts that were trying to silence Ukrainians by reporting "fictitious policy violations." "Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Russia for abusing our reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them," Meta said today. Providing more detail in its quarterly report, Meta said the removed network included 200 accounts operated from Russia. "The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying, and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook. The majority of these fictitious reports focused on people in Ukraine and Russia, but the network also reported users in Israel, the United States, and Poland," the report said.

Meta may have given up on its Diem cryptocurrency, but the company is still exploring finance products, according to a new Financial Times report. The Verge: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram reportedly has a few irons in the fire, including virtual currency employees have apparently taken to calling "Zuck Bucks." Zuck Bucks, seemingly named for Meta founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are "unlikely" to be a cryptocurrency. "Instead, Meta is leaning towards introducing in-app tokens that would be centrally controlled by the company, similar to those used in gaming apps such as the Robux currency in popular children's game Roblox," according to the FT. Roblox has built a huge business selling Robux, and Meta could try to emulate some of that success on its own platforms. Meta hasn't totally distanced itself from blockchain products, as the company is also looking into posting and sharing NFTs on Facebook. The FT says the company plans to launch a pilot for doing just that in mid-May, according to a memo, and soon after, Meta will test allowing "membership of Facebook groups based on NFT ownership and another for minting" NFTs. The FT previously reported on some of Meta's NFT plans for Facebook and Instagram in January, and Zuckerberg announced in March that NFTs would be coming to Instagram.

The federal Liberal government introduced legislation Tuesday to force digital giants to compensate news publishers for the use of their content. CBC News reports: The new regulatory regime would require companies like Google and the Meta Platforms-owned Facebook -- and other major online platforms that reproduce or facilitate access to news content -- to either pay up or go through a binding arbitration process led by an arms-length regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The compensation extracted from these digital giants must be used, in large part, to fund the creation of news content to protect the "sustainability of the Canadian news ecosystem," according to a government backgrounder distributed to reporters. The government is pitching the arrangement as a way to prop up an industry that has seen a steady decline since the emergence of the internet.

To preserve access to Canadian news, the federal government has adopted much of the so-called "Australian model," named after the country that first forced digital companies to pay for the use of news content. According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, more than $190 million has been paid already to Australian media companies since the model was enacted last year. The big winners have been legacy media and larger media outlets.

The new Canadian scheme would require that Facebook, Google and other digital platforms that have "a bargaining imbalance with news businesses" make "fair commercial deals" with newspapers, news magazines, online news businesses, private and public broadcasters and certain non-Canadian news media that meet specific criteria. The goal is to have these digital platforms negotiate deals with publishers without the need for government intervention. [T]he amount of money each news business gets from these digital giants will be decided by those negotiations -- there's no preset formula. In the absence of some sort of voluntary arrangement, news businesses can initiate a mandatory bargaining process and go to a CRTC arbitration panel for a binding decision.

Donald Trump's Truth Social has "been a disaster," says Joshua Tucker, director of NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics. According to the BBC, "The app launched on Presidents' Day, 21 February, but six weeks later is beset by problems. A waiting list of nearly 1.5 million are unable to use it." From the report: Truth Social might look like Twitter, but it isn't available on Android phones, web browsers or, apparently, to most people outside the US. And a Republican ally of Mr Trump's, who did not wish to be identified, said: "Nobody seems to know what's going on." On 21 February, Truth Social was one of the App Store's most downloaded apps -- but many who downloaded it were unable to use it. There was an assumption this problem would soon be resolved and Mr Trump would start posting his "truths" in the coming days -- but neither of those things happened. My attempt to register, this week, was placed at number 1,419,631 on the waiting list.

While YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are among the 10 most downloaded apps, according to Similar Web, Truth Social is outside the top 100. Users who find their way in can find the app a little empty, as many big voices on the American right have so far stayed away. Another study found downloads have fallen by as much as 95%. And many are feeling frustrated. "Signed up for Truth Social a couple weeks ago and still on a waiting list," one Twitter user said, on Tuesday. "By the time I'm off the waiting list and on to Truth Social for real, Trump will be President again," joked another. The report says Mr Trump "has not posted a 'truth' for well over a month."

"Maybe they're holding him back," Mr Tucker said. "That's his last chance to launch it - when suddenly Trump comes in and starts being really active on it, that will get a buzz."

What happened after Russia blocked 80 million users of Instagram? Reuters reports: A black and white, melancholy alternative to Instagram that asks users to post sad pictures of themselves may launch in Russia this week, its creators said, to express sadness at the loss of popular services such as the U.S. photo sharing platform....

Although people can still sometimes access [Instagram] using a Virtual Private Network, domestic alternatives have started appearing, the latest being 'Grustnogram', or 'Sadgram' in English. "Post sad pictures of yourself, show this to your sad friends, be sad together," a message on the platform's website read.... "We are very sad that many high quality and popular services are stopping their work in Russia for various reasons," Afisha Daily quoted Alexander Tokarev, one of the service's founders as saying. "We created Grustnogram to grieve about this together and support each other."
Insider looks at the larger landscape now for Russia's social media apps: Rossgram joins a slate of Russian versions of major platforms that seek to mimic larger and more popular social media companies, resulting in a landscape of Russian knockoffs that often struggle to attract users while raising questions about how much access the Kremlin has to users' data.... Russia has been trying to coax internet users to turn to its own versions of popular sites, such as YouTube knockoff RuTube, for years. Authorities this year offered online creators the equivalent of $1,700 a month to move their content to RuTube, according to Coda Story, attempting to make up for its minuscule audience.

A 2021 report by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, found that YouTube is used by 37% of Russians, Instagram by 34%, and TikTok by 16%. But some native platforms hold influence too. Out of Russia's 70 million active social media users, according to research by Linkfluence, a market research platform, 83% use a social media platform similar to Facebook called VKontakte, and 55% use another called OdnoKlassniki. According to Alyssa Demus, an associate international and defense researcher at Rand corporation, Russia has long been building up an ecosystem of alternative social media platforms. But people tend to be more skeptical and cautious when using them out of fear that the government is involved in their operations and users' information isn't secure.

"Either Russia has a hand in the building of the platform from this start, or they strong arm or co-opt whatever is popular later," Demus told Insider. "I know there's significant use of platforms like WhatsApp or others that are believed to be encrypted for that very reason — so that there can be open communication without the fear of reprisal." Russia has also enacted laws to exert influence on non-Russian social media platforms, including passing legislation stating companies need to place their servers for Russian accounts on Russian territory. "Presumably so they can then sort of meddle and do whatever kind of surveillance they need to," Demus said.
Demus adds at one point that "anything Russia touches has the potential to land you in jail."

But the article also notes that younger tech-savvy Russians are using VPNs to access sites blocked by the government — ultimately resulting in a kind of "generation gap" where they're less aligned with pro-government rhetoric from state-controlled media.

The BBC reported Friday that "Facebook users around the world have been waking up to find themselves locked out of their accounts for no apparent reason." The message many received reads: "Your Facebook account was disabled because it did not follow our Community Standards. This decision can't be reversed." [It appeared in a popup window with the title, "We Cannot Review the Decision to Disable Your Account."]

One user told the BBC there was no warning or explanation given.
While the message appeared on April 1st (April Fool's Day), the lockouts were real, confirmed on Twitter by Facebook's policy communications director Andy Stone. Later Friday he tweeted that "Earlier today, a technical issue caused a small number of people to have trouble accessing Facebook. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

Numerous Twitter users then replied, complaining that their own accounts had been — and remained — disabled. "This happened to my father a couple of weeks ago and we are desperate to get his account back," one Twitter user told the Facebook communications official — while trying to explain the glitch's impact. "He has stage 4 cancer and uses the account to update his friends on his progress."

"I don't know if you know a lot about what is actually happening right now in Ukraine...."

CNN reports: There's silence on the other end of the line. "The real truth is that it is a terrible invasion..."

This is one of dozens of cold calls that Marija Stonyte and her husband make every day to people in Russia from their home in Lithuania as part of a volunteer initiative aimed at penetrating Russia's so-called digital iron curtain.... [M]any Russians know little about what is unfolding....

Desperate to break through, people around the world are trying creative ways to connect with Russians. Online activists Anonymous claim to have hacked Russian TV channels to broadcast footage from Ukraine. Others, like Stonyte, are trying a more individual approach. They're cold calling or messaging strangers in Russia, hoping their personal pleas will disrupt the Kremlin's propaganda — and potentially even help put an end to the deadly war.... The couple began calling businesses, museums and restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg, hoping to tell them about what was happening. Days later they stumbled across CallRussia.org, an initiative launched March 8 with the tagline: "Make the most important call of your life."

Co-founded by Lithuania-based creative agency director Paulius Senuta, the initiative aims to cold call 40 million phone numbers across Russia. The team gathered publicly available phone numbers in Russia and created a platform that randomly generates a phone number from the list. A user can opt to call over the phone, Telegram, or WhatsApp, and at the end of the call, a site pop-up asks the user whether they got through, and if so, if the call went well. The idea is based on Senuta's belief that Russian people have the power to end the war if they have access to free information and understand the human suffering in Ukraine.... With the help of psychologists, Senuta's team of about 30 people put together a script to guide the calls. They didn't want to get into a confontation — instead the goal is to "convey the human tragedy and the fact that they don't know about it."

In just one week after the CallRussia launch, thousands of volunteers made 84,000 phone calls, he said....

Henkka, a Finnish man based in Estonia, who asked to only be identified by his first name, set his location on dating app Tinder to St. Petersburg, got tipsy, and went on a mission to tell Russians about the war in Ukraine. Although Instagram and Facebook have been blocked, dating apps are still accessible. "How To" guides have sprung up on social media platform Reddit, advising people how to use Tinder's passport feature — which allows users to connect with people in other countries — to share information about Ukraine with Russians. Users share tips on how to create a credible fake account and match with as many people as possible without getting banned by the Tinder algorithm — Tinder says it may delete accounts using the app to promote messages.
CNN actually has a two-minute audio recording of one of Stonyte's phone calls. "I know that it is not safe in Russia to speak about these things. So I will just tell you, and I really hope that you can spread this message in private or to the circles of people you know...." (Stonyte's voice seems to quaver.) "The thing is that, I know that there is a lot of propaganda that is happening..."

"I agree with you," responds the person on the other end of the line.

Stonyte eventually says "So just — as much as you feel safe, and as much as you feel comfortable, please just silently, but, spread this message, so that people know..."

CNN reports that "Stonyte says few people hang up. Instead, most fall into one of two categories — those who argue back, and those who listen, she said. Stonyte believes many people may not want to respond out of fear the call could be monitored and they could face punishment...."

The Verge reports: A group of Facebook engineers identified a "massive ranking failure" that exposed as much as half of all News Feed views to potential "integrity risks" over the past six months, according to an internal report on the incident obtained by The Verge.

The engineers first noticed the issue last October, when a sudden surge of misinformation began flowing through the News Feed, notes the report, which was shared inside the company last week. Instead of suppressing posts from repeat misinformation offenders that were reviewed by the company's network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30 percent globally. Unable to find the root cause, the engineers watched the surge subside a few weeks later and then flare up repeatedly until the ranking issue was fixed on March 11th.

In addition to posts flagged by fact-checkers, the internal investigation found that, during the bug period, Facebook's systems failed to properly demote probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine. The issue was internally designated a level-one SEV, or site event — a label reserved for high-priority technical crises, like Russia's ongoing block of Facebook and Instagram.

A controversial facial recognition company that's built a massive photographic dossier of the world's people for use by police, national governments and -- most recently -- the Ukrainian military is now planning to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses. The Washington Post reports: Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That disclosed the plans Friday to The Associated Press in order to clarify a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale. "We don't have any plans to sell the company," he said. Instead, he said the New York startup is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in verifying people's identity using facial recognition.

The new "consent-based" product would use Clearview's algorithms to verify a person's face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the "least controversial use case" of facial recognition, he said. That's in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On a winter night in early 2016, Jeremy Kitson gathered in his buddy's large shed with some neighbors to plan their fight against a proposed wind farm in rural Van Wert County, Ohio. The project would be about a mile from his home. From the beginning, Kitson -- who teaches physics and chemistry at the local high school -- knew he didn't want the turbines anywhere near him. He had heard from folks who lived near another wind project about 10 miles away that the turbines were noisy and that they couldn't sleep. "There were so many people saying that it's horrible, you do not want to live under these things,'" Kitson says. He and his neighbors went on the offensive. "I was just like, there's got to be a way to beat 'em," he says of the developer, Apex Clean Energy. "You got to outsmart them. You got to figure out the science. You got to figure out the economic arguments. You got to figure out what they're going to say and figure out how to counter it."

At the shed, according to Kitson, they agreed that part of their outreach would involve posting information on a Facebook community page called "Citizens for Clear Skies," which ultimately grew to more than 770 followers. In between posts selling anti-wind yard signs and posts about public meetings opposing local wind projects, there were posts that spread false, misleading and questionable information about wind energy. Links to stories about wind turbine noise causing birth defects in Portuguese horses. Posts about the health effects of low frequency infrasound, also called wind turbine syndrome. Posts about wind energy not actually reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Photos of wind turbines breaking, burning and falling -- some in nearby counties and states, but some in Germany and New Zealand.

According to 2014 data from the Department of Energy, the most recent available, out of the then-40,000 turbines in the U.S., there had been fewer than 40 incidents. Kitson, the administrator of the Facebook page, says he knows that these accidents aren't typical. "Those events are not likely. We know that," Kitson says. But Kitson has seen a broken piece of a fallen turbine blade himself, which got him worrying about how the fiberglass might affect the integrity of the soil and the crops. So he posts the photos and articles, many of which he receives from an anti-wind email list. "I do that just to try to show people what's possible." Kitson's group is one of dozens in the United States and abroad that oppose utility-scale wind and solar projects. Researchers say that in many groups, misinformation is raising doubts about renewable energy and slowing or derailing projects.

Blocking access to internet resources requires lots of hardware but due to sanctions, there are fears in Russia that a breakdown in systems operations may be just months away. Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak: Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than a month. It isn't going to plan. In parallel with the terrible images being shared around the world, Russia is using its infamous site-blocking systems to deny access to websites that dare to challenge the Kremlin's narrative of Putin's 'Special Operation.' Telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor is working harder than ever to maintain its blockades against everything from Google News, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, to the thousands of pirate sites and other resources on the country's blacklists. But, like the invasion itself, things aren't going to plan here either.

A little over a week ago, local telecoms operators supplying internet access to Russian citizens were ordered to carry out "urgent checks" on their ability to continue blocking sites deemed illegal by the state. ISPs were required to carry out an audit and liaise with telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor. Today is the reporting deadline but according to several sources, problems are apparent in the system. With accurate and critical reporting being all but strangled by the state, it is not absolutely clear who or what ordered the review but the consensus is that prescribed blocking standards aren't being met. As previously reported, local torrent site RuTracker suddenly found itself unblocked earlier this month, reportedly due to issues at an ISP. Problems are also reported with the Roscomnadzor-controlled 'TSPU' Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) system embedded into the networks of around 80 local ISPs and recently used to restrict Tor, VPNs and Twitter traffic.