The surprising reason some college professors are telling students to use Wikipedia for class

Here are the latest reports from The Washington Posts ‘The Intersect’.

The surprising reason some college professors are telling students to use Wikipedia for class

Most college freshmen learn on Day 1 that they shouldn’t use Wikipedia. It’s framed as a crime on par with cheating: a mortal sin against the gods of academia. In hundreds of classrooms across the country, though, some professors have begun taking a very different tack. Not only are their students encouraged to see Wikipedia […]

Trump’s meme brigade took over Reddit. Now Reddit is trying to stop them.

A bunch of meme-slinging Donald Trump supporters are having a party on Reddit. A loud, fun party. You probably weren’t invited. And now, someone just called the cops. Reddit announced this week that it would tweak the algorithm on r/all, a feed of popular posts across all the site’s subreddits, to stop certain communities from promoting large numbers […]

The truth behind your Orlando shooting hoaxes, theories and conspiracies

The Internet always floods with rumors and theories after a tragedy, and the aftermath of the Orlando shooting has predictably been no different. In the immediate absence of a clear and coherent narrative, people are all too willing to invent their own versions. On Facebook, certain skeptics have circulated memes that allege three shooters attacked […]

6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says

On June 4, the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.” Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy. Now, […]

You don’t need to find the news anymore. It will always find you.

Gone are the days when you had to find the news to stay informed. The news, tragic or otherwise, will always find you. On Sunday, as news organizations reported a horrific shooting in an Orlando nightclub, phones lit up across time zones — on nightstands, under pillows, in pockets and in hands — glowing with texts, notifications […]

The self-retweet has officially arrived

Now you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself with just a few taps. Pick an old favorite and give it a try! 🔄 https://t.co/bUj4ezQNOJ — Twitter (@twitter) June 14, 2016 This is how to retweet yourself on Twitter, as of today: Go to one of your own tweets, click the little loopy “retweet” button, […]

Here are Mark Zuckerberg’s full remarks about how much he’d like to (literally!) read your thoughts

Mark Zuckerberg has already persuaded you to share your status updates, photos and videos with the world. But you’re still being stingy, Zuckerberg insists. You ought to share your unfiltered thoughts with everyone  as well. During an on-site Q&A today, Zuckerberg traced the evolution of online communications from text to photo to video to live […]

For the first time, an alleged terrorist has broadcast a confession in real time on Facebook Live

Larossi Abballa, a 25-year-old suspected terrorist accused of killing a French police captain and his partner in their home Monday night, appears to have broadcast the aftermath of the attacks, in real time, on Facebook Live. The 13-minute live stream may be the first terrorist incident broadcast on the site. “I just killed a police […]

How GoFundMe is making sure all of those Orlando victim fundraisers are legit

A GoFundMe campaign for victims of this weekend’s Orlando shooting has raised more than $3 million from 75,000 donors in fewer than two days. Altthough that campaign is legitimate, other GoFundMe sites have attracted the attention of the Florida attorney general’s office. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday that her office was investigating some of the more than […]

Texting is the way we say goodbye during tragedy now

In the moments when they feared they were about to die, they reached for their phones. “ACTIVE SHOOTER,” a Marine typed to his girlfriend from a recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tenn. “Love you guys. Was shot,” a health inspector wrote from a conference room in San Bernardino, Calif. “Mommy I love you,” a 30-year-old accountant […]

#TwoMenKissing: The Internet’s powerful response to the Orlando shooter’s anger
Dear, Lt. Gov. Patrick..yup, I kissed him..and u BEST believe I love him! Now, how about you have a seat and watch how love works.. #TwoMenKissing #equality #love #loveislove #orlando #instagay #gay #instamood A photo posted by Marc Prince (@marckent1980) on Jun 13, 2016 at 9:32am PDT Forty-nine people, many of them young gay men, died […]

Want to help Orlando shooting victims? This crowdfunding campaign has collected $1.4 million.

A crowdfunding campaign to raise money for victims of this weekend’s horrific Orlando nightclub shooting has raised almost $1.4 million in 22 hours, becoming the fastest campaign to clear the $1 million mark in GoFundMe’s six-year history. The campaign was launched by Equality Florida, the state’s largest LGBT rights group, which is aiming to collect […]

Redditors checked r/news for updates on the Orlando shooting. Instead, they found a war.

Redditors descended on r/news, the center of Reddit’s crowdsourced news-gathering, looking for vital updates on the mass shooting in Orlando on Sunday. But instead of news, visitors this weekend found something very different: thousands of deleted posts, furious Redditors accusing individual moderators of censorship, and a subreddit that appeared to be bleeding subscribers. In other words, the subreddit […]

Facebook activates ‘safety check’ in Orlando

Facebook users in Orlando are being prompted to check in and let their friends know that they are safe, after 50 people were killed and another 53 were injured overnight at a popular gay nightclub in the Florida city. Facebook’s “Safety Check” feature activates during major disasters and, increasingly, during terrorist attacks and conflict situations around the world. […]

FYI, Hillary Clinton did not actually tweet that ‘sick’ Donald Trump burn

Far be it for us to rain on the joyous Twitter parade that’s followed @hillaryclinton since it tweeted that “sick” “burn” to Donald Trump on Thursday. Whatever your politics, it IS kind of nice to see someone return Trump’s Twitter bombastry. Delete your account. https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 9, 2016 That said, a quick fact-check […]

This site does exactly what it says it will do, but people are clicking on it anyway

The title of the link currently sitting at the top of a popular Reddit community is pretty straightforward: “Ruin My Search History – Ruin your Google search history with a single click.” Click it, and the link will do exactly what it says: it will run a series of Google searches, roughly escalating in potential […]

‘World of Warcraft’ can be a battleground for newbies. Meet the players who want to help.

You start irradiated, underground in Gnomeregan, fighting your way out of the once-great city of Gnomes. Or in the grim town of Deathknell, only recently reanimated from the dead as a member of the Forsaken. Soon, your character begins to explore the expansive universe of “World of Warcraft.” When you do something wrong — and you will […]

The Internet is warring over a photo of garlic bread. You will not guess why.

A war is brewing in memedom, and it could not possibly be more absurd: In the various online fan groups devoted to garlic bread, fierce arguments have broken out over … gender. The drama first kicked off over the weekend, when the wildly popular Facebook page Garlic Bread Memes posted an image macro that many […]

Tinder is banning (most of) the teens next week

The dating app Tinder will ban all users under 18 starting next week. That’s a big change from its earlier policy, which allowed anyone over 13 to use the app — albeit only with other users who were also under 18. Tinder Vice President of Communications Rosette Pambakian told Techcrunch that the company started reconsidering its age […]

Creepy startup will help landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine intimate data from your Facebook page

There’s a scene in the dystopian scifi novel “Ready Player One” in which the protagonist glimpses the dossier of personal information a major tech company has gathered on him. It includes his height and weight, his browser history, his address — even several years of his school transcripts. We’re still several years away from that […]

What the world needs now is a dinosaur emoji

The Unicode Consortium will soon release 72 new emoji into the world. None of them is a dinosaur. Dominik Schwarz, a self-described “Internet rando” with a deep and abiding love of dinosaurs, is trying to change that. Schwarz is one of at least two people to submit proposals for a dinosaur emoji to the Unicode […]

Dudes tried to take credit for a woman’s viral Hillary Clinton meme, because of course they did

In the midst of Hillary Clinton’s victory speech Tuesday night, the writer and Democratic strategist Laura Olin tweeted a brilliant piece of “tiny emoji art” to celebrate the historic nature of Clinton’s presumptive nomination. made some tiny emoji art to mark this moment pic.twitter.com/Flk5ZT3Xp4 — laura olin (@lauraolin) June 8, 2016 It was retweeted and […]

Why Twitter gave a woman’s home address to her cyberstalkers

This story begins with a woman named Renee, but we aren’t using Renee’s last name at her request. That’s because Renee is the victim of cyberstalkers — and, thanks to Twitter, they now have her address. Since early last summer, when Renee began advocating publicly for childhood vaccination, a dedicated clique of Twitter trolls has hounded […]

Kimbo Slice, one of the very first YouTube celebrities, has died at 42

Kimbo Slice, a mixed martial arts fighter who died Monday evening at age 42, may be best remembered for the bouts he fought with Bellator and UFC. But before he was a pro fighter, Slice had another — perhaps more important — claim to fame: He was one of the world’s first YouTube celebrities. This […]

Axl Rose wants an unflattering ‘fat’ picture removed from the Internet

In 2010, a Winnipeg Free Press photographer covered a Guns N’ Roses concert, snapping photos of Axl Rose. The images ran with the paper’s favorable review of the show. The photos caught the attention of Gauntlet, a heavy metal news site that republished the photos under a very different headline: “OMFG Axl Rose is fat.” This was the beginning of […]

Why you are only now seeing the Stanford sex offender’s mugshot

The media paid attention when a California judge sentenced a convicted sex offender to just six months of jail time last week after prosecutors asked for years in state prison. But the Internet had a question for the media: where is the mugshot of former Stanford student Brock Turner? Instead of a booking photo, stories about […]

No, Facebook doesn’t eavesdrop on your phone. But it does spy on you.

Kelli Burns may go down in history — or at least in Google search — as the professor who claimed, definitively, that Facebook “eavesdrops” on its mobile users. Her comments, reported in a Tampa TV news segment two weeks ago, have sparked a global panic about corporate surveillance and personal privacy. The claim that Facebook […]

Study confirms what you always knew: People who subtweet are terrible

Subtweeting has become such an ingrained part of online culture that you don’t even need Twitter to do it. Just throw a vague, personal jab on Facebook, Tumblr or Snapchat: Ta-da! You — such as luminaries Khloe Kardashian, Mitt Romney, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett and the Redskins — have just successfully subtweeted™. But just because it’s […]

It’s 2016, and Tribune didn’t secure the Twitter accounts for ‘Tronc,’ its new corporate name

In case you haven’t heard, Tribune Publishing is now “tronc”  with the lowercase “t” and all, because it’s supposed to be more cool and Internet-y. Tronc (which we’re going to capitalize from here on out) stands for “tribune online content.” The company said in a press release that its new mission is to be “a content curation […]

The mesmerizing lost art of the 10-hour YouTube loop, 2011’s weirdest video trend

This is part of an occasional series looking at defining Internet trends in specific years.  Fall deep enough into any YouTube rabbit hole, and you might find the following: a version of a popular video that some helpful user has looped over and over so that it lasts for 10 hours. I am partial to loops […]

Anti-Semitic Trump supporters made a giant list of people to target with a racist meme

The alt-right Internet community has started to sneak into the fringes of the mainstream Internet recently, undoubtedly helped along by unofficial alt-right idol Donald Trump’s rise to prominence in the presidential race. And this means more people are getting introduced to the racist memes popular in this corner of the online universe. This week, Mic wrote about (((echoes))), an […]

What happened when an A.I. hive mind answered Reddit’s burning politics questions

The Hive Mind has spoken: Jet fuel can melt steel beams. An artificial “hive mind” called UNU visited Reddit on Wednesday to answer questions about U.S. politics (and weigh in on a couple of memes, I guess). Why? The idea is, its creators argue, that a swarm of lots of minds working together is better at […]

The best social network you’ve never used is finally stepping out of Reddit’s shadow

Since the day in 2009 when a bored college senior coded it, Imgur has lived in the long shadows cast by the much better-known Reddit. The site was built to help Redditors host their GIFs and photos; it became one of the world’s 50 largest websites thanks entirely to the traffic that Reddit referred over. […]

Pope Francis met with a bunch of YouTube vloggers. Here’s what he told them.

Taking a selfie with Pope Francis #PopewithYTcreators #scholas pic.twitter.com/rVxjLbxuG6 — Jamie and Nikki (@JamieAndNiks) May 30, 2016 The Internet loves Pope Francis — even if the 79-year-old leader of the Catholic church has admitted to being a technology “dinosaur.” For the most part, the pope has praised the Internet’s potential for good from afar, not quite […]

These are the words most associated with men and women, according to Facebook status updates

Researchers examining more than 10 million Facebook statuses across 65,000 users who opted in to having their posts analyzed found that women were more inclined to use “warmer” words expressing positive emotions and referencing social relationships, while men were linked to words related to politics, objects, and anger. The international, interdisciplinary team of researchers behind the […]

The (very) dark side of live streaming that no one seems able to stop

In an interview last month about Facebook’s recent push into live-streaming video, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeats the word “raw” as if it’s some kind of sacred totem. Facebook Live is “raw and visceral,” he says. It’s this “new, raw” way to communicate. Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to realize that, when it comes to online video, […]

Every 10 seconds, someone on Twitter calls a woman a ‘slut’ or ‘whore’

Here is a bit of news that should surprise no one: Despite myriad incremental efforts to make the Internet more woman-friendly, misogyny is still a scourge on social media. That finding comes to us courtesy of the think tank Davos, which published some updated figures on Twitter abuse today as part of a British anti-harassment campaign. […]

Twitter says goodbye to all ‘.@’

Twitter announced a plan to make itself simpler Tuesday by, among other things, removing the need for a popular, improvised equivalent of a stage whisper.  The changes are the latest iteration of the microblogging site’s attempts to make itself more appealing to new users. For instance, a few months ago, it changed its “favorite” button — a way […]

The shockingly simple way the nude photos of ‘Celebgate’ were stolen

Note: We have updated and republished this post, originally published on March 16, in light of the news that Ryan Collins pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on Tuesday.  After a ton of speculation about how “celebgate,” one of the biggest celebrity hacks in recent memory happened, it appears that […]

Facebook’s ‘sweeping’ reforms to trending topics won’t actually change much

The “sweeping changes” that Facebook just announced to its trending topics module are, in fact, a whole lot less dramatic than the headlines would suggest. In a nutshell, Facebook has heard your concerns, reviewed Trending … and nixed the least important, least impactful steps in the process. A letter from Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch […]

The definitive analysis of a truth-seeker’s $1.5 million plan to ‘re-create’ 9/11

It was almost midnight in Thailand, and Paul Salo said he had not slept in days — too busy telling reporters about a contentious and costly new venture to reconstruct the 9/11 terrorist attacks and put people’s questions to rest. “There’s a serious doubting crowd out there,” he said in a weak and raspy voice. “In this […]

What we really see when Facebook Trending picks stories for us

Only rarely has Facebook, the media monolith that commands the eyeballs of some 1.65 billion people, faced the level and volume of scrutiny that it’s facing right now. Following a pair of Gizmodo reports that raised questions about Facebook employees’ control over the site’s influential “trending” news stories, everyone from pundit S.E. Cupp to the chairman […]

What happens when a deceased person’s Twitter account starts posting spam?

For about an hour on Thursday morning, the verified Twitter account of the late New York Times media columnist David Carr belonged to an apparent spambot. The account’s name changed to “Miranda Davis,” and “Miranda” tweeted, “I love role-playing games and sex.” The tweet shocked many of Carr’s hundreds of thousands of followers: Carr died […]

The one thing Reddit’s CEO regrets about the company’s anti-harassment crackdown

When Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman returned to become the company’s CEO last summer, he knew one big change he wanted to make: Introduce really clear, really specific content rules for the site, which was in the middle of a massive upheaval at the time over how it moderated objectionable content. Turns out, Huffman said during a […]

Inside the rabbit hole of YouTube’s destruction videos
What do a Mormon father and son, a Finnish power-lifter and a small-town Nebraska family all have in common? They destroy things for fun and science — and put the results on YouTube. This particular YouTube community is a bit “Mythbusters” and a bit Bill Nye. Its personalities are usually self-taught, the production values variable […]

‘I’m coming for you’: A mother’s social media quest to find her daughter’s accused killers

When Belinda Lane buried her 24-year-old daughter a decade ago, she vowed to find those responsible for the gang-related firefight that stole her daughter’s life. “I told her, ‘Baby girl, I promise you if it takes my last breath, I will get them; I promise you, you will have justice,’” Lane recalled in a recent interview with KABC. […]

You probably haven’t even noticed Google’s sketchy quest to control the world’s knowledge

Google’s “knowledge panels” materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God: Betty White is 94 years old. The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car. Taipei is the capital of — ahem — the “small island nation” of Taiwan. If you’ve ever Googled a person, place or thing — which, survey […]

A Facebook ‘trend’ isn’t always what you think it is

Here’s the thing about Facebook’s bar of “trending” topics: It’s basically news aggregation, representing itself as a data point. It looks like a neutral platform — and, to some extent, allows its users to interpret it as one — but humans play a role in what you see and don’t see. That disconnect was crystallized this week […]

The hottest trend in web design is intentionally ugly, unusable sites

There’s an interesting trend in web design these days: Making websites that look, well … bad. Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites — some decades old, some built recently — and hundreds more like them, eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces that has long been […]

For some, Facebook’s automatic Mother’s Day reminders bring grief

When Scarlett Scalzo, a 23-year-old student in Austin, woke up on Wednesday, she picked up her phone and opened Facebook. Right at the very top, the app displayed a message, adorned with flowers, reminding her that Mother’s Day is this Sunday. Scalzo didn’t need the reminder: Her mother had died suddenly in February. “Don’t worry Facebook, I know Mother’s Day is […]

Inside Democrat Facebook’s vicious civil war

Members of Bernie Sanders’ Facebook army have learned to be cautious. Spies hide around every corner; infiltrators lurk behind even the friendliest friend requests. According to popular theory, which has been repeated so often in copy-paste memes that it’s widely treated as truth, the Clinton campaign has armed hundreds of professional Internet trolls with the goal of […]

The pre-Twitter history of Twitter’s favorite insult

An “egg” on Twitter is someone who hasn’t yet changed their avatar to something other than the provided default: an unhatched egg, against a brightly colored background. Not all “eggs” are bad eggs. But to point out that someone is an “egg” on Twitter is an insult, an essential part of the social networking site’s local […]

Radiohead tried (and failed) to erase itself from the Internet

In the course of a single afternoon, Radiohead did what many of us have fantasized about for ages: evanesced from the Internet, leaving nothing but confused fans and empty pages. Fans began noticing around 11 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday that the band’s website, Radiohead.com, was gradually fading to transparent. By 1:30, the site was completely […]

Is @ProfJeffJarvis Twitter’s best parody or its least repentant troll? Possibly a bit of both.

For more than four years, the much-beloved Twitter account @ProfJeffJarvis has skewered and satirized the “thinkfluencers” of the Web. But in a the next few days, the handle will disappear. Its creator is finally changing it. Rurik Bradbury, the man behind @ProfJeffJarvis, hopes the name change will settle his raging four-year fight with the real Professor Jarvis. Jarvis, a pundit […]

How Prince revolutionized the Internet — according to the webmaster who helped him do it

Sam Jennings is an artist and designer who worked as Prince’s webmaster and creative director from 1998 to 2007. Unfortunately, the big headline everyone remembers about Prince and the Internet is when he said it was “over” in 2010. Many people with short memories used him as the poster boy for the old guard of musicians […]

The most popular authors you’ve never heard of are finally getting their own book

Imagine that you’re an 18-year-old Army wife with no working car and no furniture. Imagine that you just moved from Ohio to Texas, where you have neither friends nor plans for the future. Imagine that you’re scrolling through Instagram one day when you chance upon a series of funny One Direction memes. Imagine that you begin […]

This real-time video of a sinking Titanic was made to honor the victims. Does it?

In the final two minutes of a 2 hour and 40 minute simulation of the Titanic sinking, its creators decided to introduce the sounds of screams. The viral, real-time video that has racked up more than 6 million views in the past week is almost otherwise devoid of voices. And you never see a human for its entirety. The simulation […]

Dante Alighieri explains Snapchat’s exciting new face swap feature!

If, reader, you are slow now to believe what I shall tell, that is no cause for wonder, for I who saw it can hardly accept it. – Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXV “Snapchat now lets you face swap with pictures from your camera roll” – Headline, the Verge Big news, Snapchat fans! The popular social […]

Prince had a complicated relationship with the Internet
People tend to look at a couple of things when considering what relationship Prince, who died Thursday, had with the Internet: His 2010 declaration that the “Internet’s completely over,” maybe, or the fact that it’s nearly impossible to listen to his music on Spotify. Or his aggressive use of takedown notices and lawsuits to keep bootlegs of his performances off the Internet. […]

How a dating app for burrito-lovers exposed one of online dating’s biggest myths

The only conceivably good thing about branded April Fools’ pranks is that they’re confined to a 24-hour period. The press releases go out; the “jokes” get mocked and aggregated; and within a day it’s all disappeared from our minds and homepages. But this year, one prank remains stubbornly present, almost four weeks after the day […]

It’s not just Snapchat’s Bob Marley lens: Every face-swap app has a ‘blackface’ option

Today, Snapchat launched an arguably racist Bob Marley filter that’s making lots of people on the Internet mad. In a nutshell, the feature lets you wear Marley’s face like some kind of weird Rastafarian mask. The incredible thing isn’t that such a filter exists — virtually every face-swap app has one. It’s that users are […]

As Treasury rethinks the $10 bill, an online victory could turn into defeat

The viral campaign to put a woman’s portrait on the $20 bill caught on last year in part because of its simplicity: putting a woman on the $20, in 2020, to celebrate the centennial of women’s suffrage. It wasn’t an original idea, but this online campaign seemed to come at exactly the right time, and […]

How bots will change the Web, according to a bot we built to answer that question

Chatbots are the new darlings of Silicon Valley — the officially anointed Next Big Thing. They’re on Slack, taking your lunch order. They’re on email, scheduling your meetings. On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that chatbots would soon join Facebook en masse, suggesting that, one day, users may get everything from groceries to Google within […]

Microsoft’s Caption Bot is the latest bot we’re mocking on the Internet

A couple of weeks after the Internet made Tay, a sophisticated chat bot, into a Hitler-loving, genocidal repository of 4chan memes, people have discovered another new-ish bot from Microsoft. This one is called captionbot, and it exists to try and describe to you the content of an image. Upload any image to Captionbot, and you’ll get […]

Is it ‘Internet’ or ‘internet?’ The Internet can’t agree.

In the summer, the “Internet” will become the “internet,” at least according to the Associated Press’s widely-followed stylebook. The change was announced over the weekend at the American Copy Editors Society’s annual meeting, immediately setting off a round of arguments about whether “internet” with a lowercase “i” is a good or a bad thing. For some, […]

Is Rule 34 actually true?: An investigation into the Internet’s most risqué law

Here’s a fun parlor game to play with your (inebriated, adult) friends: Pull out a smartphone with “safe search” disabled, and try disproving the 34th rule of the Internet. Rule 34, according to long-standing legend, goes something like this: If it exists, or can be imagined, there is Internet porn of it. Tetris blocks? Yep, […]

What happens when a convicted murderer edits Wikipedia

Charles Watson, convicted of seven first-degree murders in 1971, does not dispute that he stabbed, shot and mutilated several people to death. Nor does he deny being “the right-hand man” of the cult leader and killer Charles Manson. But Watson, still serving a life term in Ione, Calif., does reportedly want to set the record […]

The counterintuitive reason why Chinese body-shaming memes conquered the Web

話題らしいのでやってみた。A4の紙にウエストがおさまるかどうかってやつ。 #a4waist #a4waistchallenge #a4challenge #ギリギリ #厳しめで見ればアウト A photo posted by @nozomipics on Apr 4, 2016 at 7:01am PDT Internet memes can start anywhere and spread everywhere: That’s exactly what makes them so wonderful. But there has been a wave of disturbing body-shaming memes recently, and they all originate in the same place: Chinese social networks, such as […]

Redditors accuse Axe of lifting their content to sell shower products

A “shower thought,” as defined by the widely read subreddit that popularized the term, is the sort of semi-philosophical breakthrough that comes to your brain during your most quotidian moments. Your morning shower might be, for instance, when you realize that the human knee is really just a giant knuckle or that if there is a […]

Facebook is trying to get its users to share more about their personal lives

Facebook, like an old “friend” from high school who wants to get coffee and catch up some time, wishes it knew more about your personal life. At least, that’s according to a couple of reports this week outlining a sharp decline in “original,” personal posts from its users, and what Facebook is trying to do […]

How Facebook is slowly eating the rest of the Internet

You can now stream live to Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know it’s a big deal. But Facebook’s latest feature is more than just the ability to post live video for your friends to see. There’s a map where you can explore streams from across the world. There are filters to use when broadcasting, […]

This horrifying and newly trendy online-harassment tactic is ruining careers

There are literal textbooks for online harassment, the original dating back to 1999. These “ruin-life” guides include tactics from doxing and SWATing to placing endangering or annoying ads in online classifieds. As popular as those techniques remain, however, online harassers have learned that they can cause far more damage with a slightly less flashy and […]

What happened when a game suddenly turned some of its players into women

Some games let you spend hours tweaking the look of your character before you even start to play the actual game. Not Rust. Rust is an online survival game where each player starts naked and alone, with no say in how they look at all. But until recently, there was one thing that players could […]

How do you stop online harassment? Try banning the men.

The Slack channel began out of practical necessity, a place to source hair ties and Excedrin. But it wasn’t long before The Washington Post’s all-female chat room began to diversify into other subjects. Tampon taxes. Yoga classes. The stubborn gender wage gap that plagues our industry. Get a bunch of ladies in a private listserv […]

How do you stop online harassment? Try banning the men.

The Slack channel began out of practical necessity, a place to source hair ties and Excedrin. But it wasn’t long before The Washington Post’s all-female chat room began to diversify into other subjects. Tampon taxes. Yoga classes. The stubborn gender wage gap that plagues our industry. Get a bunch of ladies in a private listserv […]