Is Twitter real life? This has become one of the perennial questions of social media. Indeed, it often seems as if prominent Twitter users enjoy nothing more than reminding the people they spend their lives, both professional and personal,...
Yahoo Answers is shutting down. Once upon a time, it was a juggernaut that pulled 31 million visitors a month and easily swatted away competition from the likes of Google and Amazon, both of which launched (and later scrapped) their own Q&A...
In 2018, Buzzfeed released a video of Barack Obama (or at least it looked like Barack Obama) calling President Trump a “total and complete dipshit.” The video was what’s known as a deepfake: the product of an advanced form of algorithmic video...
Legend has it that when the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was nearing his final moments in November of 1831, he purportedly uttered the following words: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.” This...
On February 24, 2021, Lisa Nandy and Yvette Cooper – both senior MPs in the U.K. Labour party – used their Twitter accounts to share a thread by Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist specializing in nutrition.
I downloaded Nextdoor in March 2020. Nextdoor is an app and a website that aims to “connect neighbors to each other.” It offers a hyperlocal social network through which residents can share posts with people living within a mile or so from them. Its...
On 12 May 2020, 62 days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Facebook updated its COVID-19 policy. In this update, they included a particularly tedious sentence written in corporate legalese — a soul-crushingly...
On February 11, India’s Information and Technology Minister Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad made a speech about the Indian Government’s recent stand-off with Twitter. He stated that while social media platforms were respected for the revenue they bring...
Recently, there has been a lot of excitement surrounding the development of Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. An NFT is like a bitcoin, except that it represents something unique. While the cryptographic information associated with a bitcoin only...