Social Media

The Associated Press reports: Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers. The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they …

Vice News reports: Scammers are abusing Instagram’s protections against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation to purposefully target and ban Instagram accounts at will, with some people even advertising professionalized ban-as-a-service offerings so anyone can harass or censor others. It appears that in some cases, the same scammers who offer ban-as-a-service also offer or are at least connected to services to restore …

The New York Times reports: Fewer than half of all Americans age 18 to 39 are fully vaccinated, compared with more than two-thirds of those over 50, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And about 58 percent of those age 12 through 17 have yet to receive a shot at all. To reach these young people, the …

Politico reports: Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform. The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic …

Buzzfeed News reports: Twitter has permanently suspended eight accounts that spread former president Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and pushed for partisan “audits” to find evidence to support those falsehoods, the platform’s latest suspensions directed at the audits. Among those suspended was the official Twitter account for the ongoing, Republican-led audit in Arizona, which is being overseen by …

The Verge reports: Facebook content moderators in Europe and the US are calling on the company to put an end to overly restrictive nondisclosure agreements that discourage people from speaking out about working conditions. In a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the CEOs of Covalen and Accenture, moderators say these NDAs aren’t limited to user data and …

The Verge reports: Twitter is working on new upvote and downvote reactions for tweets to accompany the usual options to retweet and reply. Twitter confirmed it was testing the feature for a small group of users on iOS, and it’s already been spotted according to multiple tweets from users that are part of the test group. Twitter writes that iOS …

The Christian Post reports: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York City, has agreed to rehear the case of Pastor James Domen v. Vimeo en banc. The lawsuit comes after the streaming service Vimeo suspended the account of Jim Domen, a pastor who leads the California-based nonprofit organization Church United, for posting videos highlighting the stories of …

NPR reports: In 2021, Ben Shapiro rules Facebook. The conservative podcast host and author’s personal Facebook page has more followers than The Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the world’s biggest social networking site. An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro …

The Washington Post reports: “They’re killing people,” Biden said Friday on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One on his way to Camp David for the weekend. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.” Biden was asked to clarify those comments Monday after giving a speech about increasing support …

The New York Times reports: Facebook and the Biden administration engaged in an increasingly rancorous back and forth over the weekend after the administration denounced the social media giant for spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines. On Sunday, the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, reiterated warnings that false stories about the vaccines had become a dangerous health hazard. “These platforms have …

Axios reports: Facebook fired back on Friday evening after President Biden earlier said that social media platforms are “killing people” by allowing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on their sites.  “We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts,” a spokesperson for the tech giant said in a statement Friday. The Facebook response followed Biden’s commentary on the …

The Verge reports: Facebook plans to pay out $1 billion to creators over the next year and a half as part of an effort to court content makers to its many services. The money will be awarded to creators who use Facebook products in different ways: on Facebook, creators can get a cash bonus for running ads on their videos …

Axios reports: “Oh f—, how did we miss this?” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked, looking around at the somber faces of his top executives, the N.Y. Times’ Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write in their book, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination,” out Tuesday. In an excerpt provided first to Axios, the authors write that the executives met …

Politico reports: Violent videos and misinformation are amplified by YouTube’s algorithm, despite the company’s rules meant to limit their spread, according to a Mozilla Foundation report published July 7. The foundation — a nonprofit that advocates on privacy issues — found 71 percent of all videos that volunteers reported as disturbing were recommended by the video-sharing platform’s algorithm. They included …

Here’s what started it all: Some eye catching billboards urging businesses to consider a move to Ohio are garnering attention across New York City. There are three print billboard placements and 13 programmatic in Manhattan along with four print and seven programmatic in Brooklyn, and the marketing campaign is the brainchild of private nonprofit economic development corporation JobsOhio. One board …

The Insider reports: GETTR, the new social media platform set up by allies of former President Donald Trump, was been hacked on the day of its July 4 launch. The platform’s most popular verified users, mostly former Trump aides, had their accounts compromised. GETTR’s official support page was also targeted. Jason Miller, who founded the platform and was formerly a …

CNN reports: There’s a new TikTok star, and his name is Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Tell all of your TikTok buddies to get vaccinated,” Fauci said this week in a video posted on TikTok by Nia Sioux, the social media and former “Dance Moms” star. “I will, I’ll tell all my besties,” Sioux replied. In the latest push from the White …

CNN Business reports: Some Facebook (FB) users in the United States are being served a prompt that asks if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist. Others are being notified that they may have been exposed to extremist content. It is all part of a test the social media company is running that stems from …

Mother Jones reports: “Welcome to GETTR and start a new journey!” So reads an introductory message on the home page of Gettr, a right-wing social media app recently launched by a team led by Jason Miller, an ex-spokesperson of former president Donald Trump. That “new journey,” thanks to spam comments left en masse below the message, involves encountering things like …