Paid-for blue checks on social media network X deceive users and are abused by malicious actors, the European Union said today, threatening the Elon Musk-owned platform with millions of dollars in fines unless the company makes changes. Enabling any account to pay for a verification breaches the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), European Commission officials … Read more
Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn’t be able to scale. “They said, let’s just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest is online history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions … Read more
When European Union vice president Věra Jourová met with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan in California last week, they fell to talking about the long-running conspiracy theory that the moon landings were fake. YouTube has faced calls from some users and advocacy groups to remove videos that question the historic missions. Like other videos denying accepted … Read more
Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019, frustrated at feeling a lack of support from executives. “The work that teams like the … Read more
