Tag: Social Media
William Saponaro Jr., a 52-year-old man from New Jersey, is suing Grindr after he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old boy he met through the hook-up app for gay men. Saponaro states that he “reasonably believed [the minor] was 18 years or older.” While no information is available on the quality of Saponaro’s eyesight, he apparently can read the small text in […]
A new survey from Pew Research Center and Rutger’s University shows that social media use makes people less likely to voice opinions they think are different than those held by their friends. This uneasiness even extends to the offline world, where participants who used social media consistently were less likely to voice dissenting views, if […]
Facebook is currently fighting against disclosing user data — like photos, friend lists and private messages — to the authorities. Such warrants are being issued at an unprecedented rate, with nearly 400 in New York. The fight has been joined by four NY-based social media platforms — Tumblr, Kickstarter, Foursquare and Meetup, AP reports. The NYCLU and […]
Internet creepers, take note: a new study from Cyberpsychology suggests that stalking acquaintances online before meeting them IRL won’t lead to a better interaction. Researcher Sharon Rauch at Arizona’s Benedictine University tested the “arousal” of subjects in four different conditions. Medical Daily described the set up: The first group simply saw a person’s Facebook page, and the second […]
Gilad Lotan of I-Data has published an enlightening and thorough analysis of how social media channels and online publications spread coverage of the conflict in Gaza. It illustrates the pathways through which we’re served biased material, based on our user preferences and whichever social media bubble we already occupy. The article features massive infographics like […]
After the mass media kerfuffle over Facebook’s Emotional Contagion Experiment wherein the company manipulated 600,000 users’ feeds to study their emotional responses, dating megasite OKCupid made the unlikely choice of transparency regarding its own user testing. In a casual blog post, OKCupid announced the findings of three specific studies. The New York Times described the experiments: In one test, [OKCupid] […]
Yesterday, we noted how excited some police commanders are about their new Twitter accounts sanctioned by the NYPD. It seems this might have been a little hasty on their part: the same day, Captain Thomas C. Harnisch of the 25th precinct, who was one of the first five police captains to be granted official social […]
Facebook has has a pretty shitty week in the media. Last week, we found out that they’d conducted an “emotional contagion” study in 2012 on almost 700,000 users without their knowledge. Advocates of privacy and informed consent raged, but defenders pointed out that Facebook’s User Agreement contains a sentence that warns users they can use your information […]
Reid Weissman (@astro_reid) is an astronaut currently aboard the International Space Station with a penchant for documenting his voyage on Twitter. Weissman has recently made history by posting the first Vine ever taken in space — a compressed clip of one full orbit around the earth. In the Vine, the sun never sets, instead, it […]
In the best news since the last cool thing the government did, the Secret Service has acquired software that can supposedly detect “false positives” on the internet, including sarcasm. The software can also do all kinds of great stuff like “sentiment analysis” and “influencer identification” and is compatible with already vulnerable web browser Internet Explorer […]
