Social media accounts linked to the Russian government attempted to intensify racial tensions during the US elections in 2016, CNN reported late Thursday. The accounts, which used the moniker “Blacktivist,” regularly shared content intended to fuel the outrage of their audiences, including videos of police violence against African Americans. “Black people should wake up as …
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Paul Horner, a leading peddler of fake news and internet hoaxes during the 2016 election, has died at the age of 38. Horner was discovered dead in his bed on Sept. 18, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Mark Casey said in a statement Wednesday. Casey said evidence found at the scene southwest of Phoenix suggested Horner died of an accidental …
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Instagram now lets you whitelist groups of commenters on your posts to filter out the trolls — a much more efficient system for some people than the current blocking capabilities. In a blog post Tuesday, the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing site delivered this flip-side to the push it began a year ago with blocking controls such as automatic filtering, blocking individual …
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Then-President Barack Obama warned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the impact of fake news on the 2016 US presidential election nine days after the chief executive dismissed the idea as “crazy,” the Washington Post reported Sunday. The two met in private on November 19 at a world leaders forum in Lima, Peru, according to people briefed on the exchange. Obama told Zuckerberg …
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Chinese authorities have apparently squelched another service — Facebook‘s WhatsApp text-messaging service. The popular app — more than a billion people use WhatsApp, at least until the China ban — opens up an encrypted communication channel between two people. That encryption protects your privacy but also makes life hard for law enforcement, spies, and other forms of government snooping. China started …
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Looking to get top dollar for your old iPhone to splurge on the new $1,000 iPhone X? Your best bet is to sell your device instead of trading it in. But private sales of expensive and easy-to-steal items like iPhones can be risky. We’ve all heard stories of someone who became a victim of a robbery when a prospective buyer …
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The Snapchat-ification of Instagram rolls on. On Thursday, the Facebook-owned photo site said it’s bringing face filters, which superimpose digital graphics like sunglasses or a dog nose on your face, to its live video feature. The filters were already available for photos and Instagram Stories, which lets people post strings of videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours. Both …
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Over the past couple of episodes, we’ve talked about how photos affect our lives and issues around publishing them to the web. But the biggest problem I keep hearing about is where to safely store all these memories we create. Do we keep them on our computers? Do we back them up to the cloud? Should we pay someone to …
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Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives. My plan is to spend the evening finding interesting apps on the App Store. Apple/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET Please lie here on my chaise-longue and we’ll play word association. When I say “App Store,” what word first comes into your mind? “Whatever,” perhaps. Or …
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Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives. Offering wall-lovers reassurance? John Moore / Getty Images In recent days, it’s been unclear whether the much Trump-eted wall between Mexico and the US will be built. Perhaps, though, it’s already being built, after a fashion. After all, the president himself tweeted just last week: …
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