Twitter

Twitter announced that searching for COVID-19 will take you to a page featuring recent stories from public health organizations and credible mainstream news sources. The search takes common misspellings into account. The company also said it would take a zero-tolerance approach to platform

Bahrain has warned its citizens and residents could face legal action simply for following social media accounts it deems anti-government, which raises concerns about the ability of Bahraini citizens and residents to exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms. In May 2019, a state terrorism law

In 2019, after five years of acquisitions and billions of dollars in investment in advertising software and real-time tracking of web users, Oracle, facing questions about the practices of Data Cloud, its advertising software division, began laying off staff. The reason may have been partly

A November 2018 report from Data & Society discusses "data craft", the methods manipulators use to create disinformation with falsified metadata, specifically platform activity signals, which can be read by machine learning algorithms, platforms, and humans. Manipulators use platform features in

In January 2019 Twitter revealed that it had discovered a security flaw in that meant that Android users who updated the email address linked to their account between November 2014 and January 2019 had inadvertently turned off the "protected" setting on their accounts so that their tweets could have

In February 2019, Twitter announced it would expand the political campaigning policy it launched in the US in May 2018 to all EU member states, Australia, and India, commencing March 11. Once the policy is live, only certified advertisers would be allowed to run political campaign ads on the service

In the run-up to the May 2019 European Parliament elections, Google announced it would launch a new set of transparency tools to combat voter manipulation. Before being allowed to buy advertising on Google platforms, campaigns will be required to verify their identity, and approved ads will be

A 2018 study found that Twitter bots played a disproportionate role in spreading the false claim, made by US President Donald Trump shortly after winning the election but losing the popular vote in November 2016, that 3 million illegal immigrants had voted for Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton

"Buzzer teams" - teams employed to amplify messages and create a buzz on social media - were used by all candidates in the 2017 Indonesian general elections. Coordinated via WhatsApp groups, many of the teams opened fake accounts to spread both positive and negative messages, as well as hate speech

A little over a month before the US 2018 midterm elections, Twitter updated its rules to reduce manipulation of its platform. Among the changes, the company outlined the factors it would use to determine whether an account is fake and should be removed, provided an update on its automated detection

By July 2018, ten-year-old Twitter had become such a frequent data resource for social scientists that estimates were that anyone who tweeted publicly on the service was part of a dataset somewhere. The ease and low cost of using Twitter have enabled studies such as analysing bot behaviour during

The internet provides employers with the opportunity to learn an unprecedented amount about prospective employees by searching social media feeds and other postings. By 2018, DeepSense was taking this a step further by analysing individual's Twitter feeds to predict their personality and employment

A data breach at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm at the centre of Russia's interference in the 2016 US presidential election, reveals that one way the IRA operated was to use identities stolen from Americans. Using these accounts and other fake ones, the troll farm interacted

Princeton University's WebTap - Web Transparency and Accountability - project conducts a monthly automated census of 1 million websites to measure tracking and privacy. The census detects and measures many or most of the known privacy violations researchers have found in the past: circumvention of

In 2017, Facebook introduced two mechanisms intended to give users greater transparency about its data practices: the "why am I seeing this?" button users can click to get an explanation of why they're being shown a particular ad, and an Ad Preferences page that shows users a list of attributes the

In 2014, the UK suicide prevention group The Samaritans launched Radar, a Twitter-based service intended to leverage the social graph to identify people showing signs of suicidal intent on social media and alert their friends to reach out to offer them help. The app was quickly taken offline after