Social Media

Fox News reports: Facebook removed a video of an interview with former President Trump conducted by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, saying any content “in the voice of Donald Trump” would be scrubbed from the social media platform. Facebook permanently banned the former president from their platform in January after the Capitol riot. On Tuesday, Lara Trump, a Fox News contributor, …

Salon reports: Pro-Trump pundit, conservative media tycoon and self-proclaimed Parler investor Dan Bongino was apparently tricked into being promised shares of Parler by investor and conservative mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, according to former Parler CEO John Matze. This allegation is within a new lawsuit claiming that Bongino and Mercer used bullying and intimidation to take away Matze’s shares in Parler when …

“This is going to be launched in the next three to four months, and it’s going to be an interactive communication tool, whereby the president will be able to post things to it, and people will be able to repost and communicate directly with him.  “The platform that the president is building is not going to rely on Amazon, or …

As I reported earlier this week, Parler has sent a letter to Congress claiming that they alerted the FBI to over 50 posts inciting violence ahead of the Capitol riot. They did this in response to a inquiry into their financing. Parler has now posted to the letter to their official account and it’s not being received well. Mashable reports: …

Axios reports: Donald Trump has been in talks with no-name app vendors as he contemplates partnering with an existing platform to create his own social media network, according to sources familiar with the private discussions. Driving the news: Among the social networking apps the former president and his digital adviser Dan Scavino have homed in on is a relatively unknown …

Axios reports: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told New York Times podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” Tuesday he doesn’t feel “particularly comfortable” with Twitter permanently banning former President Trump from the platform. In the interview, Sanders was asked about criticisms from some conservatives that liberals had become “too censorious.” Sanders responded by saying Trump “is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, …

The Daily Beast reports: A team of cybersecurity researchers who analyzed TikTok’s code found no evidence of “overtly malicious behavior”—and determined the app collects about as much user data as Facebook.  Citizen Lab cautioned that there may still be security issues that didn’t crop up during the analysis, but they remain unaware of any “immediate security issues with TikTok.”  The …

Posted today to Facebook’s corporate blog: Let’s start with fake accounts. We take a hard line against this activity and block millions of fake accounts each day, most of them at the time of creation. Between October and December of 2020, we disabled more than 1.3 billion of them. We also investigate and take down covert foreign and domestic influence …

Buzzfeed News reports: Executives at Instagram are planning to build a version of the popular photo-sharing app that can be used by children under the age of 13, according to an internal company post obtained by BuzzFeed News. Current Instagram policy forbids children under the age of 13 from using the service. According to the post, the work would be …

The Washington Post reports: A Florida teenager who was involved in the high-profile and massive hack of Twitter last year has reached a plea deal with prosecutors and will serve three years in a juvenile facility, followed by three years of probation. Graham Ivan Clark, now 18, was the “mastermind” of the so-called “Bit-Con” hack, authorities said, and one of …

Politico reports: As former President Donald Trump’s supporters have flocked to alternative social media networks, many are turning to SafeChat, a fast-growing platform known for its tolerance of high-octane MAGA content. In the nine weeks since the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, SafeChat’s app has been downloaded more times than in all of 2020, quickly becoming a hotbed of conspiracy …

ABC News reports: Facebook will start labeling all posts that discuss COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to combat misinformation, the company said Monday. Facebook will initially add labels with information from the World Health Organization to posts that discuss the safety of vaccines, Facebook said in a blog post. The labels will state that vaccines go through testing for safety …

ABC News reports: Parler, the controversial conservative social media app, was denied re-entry to Apple Inc.’s App Store recently after it was kicked off the platform in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, documents show. On Wednesday, Parler LLC cut its three remaining iOS developers, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company eliminated seven workers …

Reuters reports: Russia said on Wednesday it was slowing down the speed of Twitter in retaliation for its alleged failure to remove banned content, and threatened a total block if the U.S. platform did not comply with its deletion demands. The move, which escalates a growing stand-off between Moscow and U.S. social media firms, comes weeks after Russian authorities accused …

Politico reports: Twitter on Monday filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeking to stop the state’s investigation into its content moderation practices. The social media giant said in its filing that the investigation requested by Paxton was an abuse of his power and a retaliatory action over Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Donald …

Mediaite reports: “I just got suspended by Twitter, so I’m part of the censored group because I did a tweet saying that having illegal immigrants come in without any controls is a public health issue in the time of Covid,” said Gingrich. “So I just want to report, I’m part of the same effort by Twitter to censor the country …

The Texas Tribune reports: Decrying “a dangerous movement” to “silence conservative ideas [and] religious beliefs,” Gov. Greg Abbott touted a bill Friday that aims to crack down on the perceived censorship of conservative voices by social media companies. “They are controlling the flow of information — and sometimes denying the flow of information,” the Republican governor said at a press …

Reuters reports: Twitter Inc is testing an “undo send” function that would give users a short time to withdraw a tweet before it is posted, the company confirmed on Friday. App researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who discovers unannounced social media features by looking at the sites’ code, tweeted an animation showing a tweet with a spelling error where an ‘undo’ …

Dallas’s NBC News affiliate reports: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and State Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) are set to discuss a bill that aims to “help prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans based on the viewpoints they express,” the governor’s office says. According to the Texas Legislature, Senate Bill 12 would give Texans a way to get back online if …

From Right Side Broadcasting: RSBN has been suspended from YouTube for two weeks, with live streaming and the ability to upload new videos revoked.  According to YouTube, this is due to our video of President Trump’s speech at CPAC, which violated their policies on election misinformation. YouTube has also removed the video from their platform, which at last check was …