Social Networking

Apple plans to launch a subscription news service at an event next month. The service has been described as "Netflix for news," because it would let customers access an unlimited amount of content from publishers for a single monthly fee. It will be based on a reworked version of Texture, the media ...

Musing about Facebook's first 15 years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg positioned it as a David confronting a Goliath composed of hierarchical institutions. Facebook gives the masses a voice, he wrote. It brings communities together and provides businesses with low-cost outreach. Progress has been made in addr...

Apple has blocked a Facebook app that paid users for total access to all network data passing through their mobile phones. Facebook had been paying users $20 a month for root network access to their phones. Facebook was on-boarding users of its Research program, which included teenagers, through App...

The social media model has come under increased scrutiny following revelations of data misuse and news of executives reneging on some security commitments. People expecting to change the situation will need to address how social media works. This means changing not just the business model, which des...

Facebook has begun rolling out a new feature that's bound to charm the political activists among its users. Called "Community Actions," it lets Facebook members create an action page where they can describe what they'd like done, and set up a button that like-minded members can click to show their s...

Women are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds, and minority women are harassed more often, according to Amnesty International. Volunteers for Troll Patrol, a crowdsourcing project set up by Amnesty International to process large-scale data about online abuse, sorted through 288,000 tweets sent to 778...

Firework this week released a collection of shows consisting of 12 episodes that will run just 15 seconds each. The first, "Fireside Chat featuring Molly Tarlov," debuted Tuesday. Three more followed on Wednesday, and another is scheduled for release on Dec. 28. Users can download the episodes via t...

The personal data of some 100 million people who have used Quora, a popular question-and-answer website, has been compromised, the company disclosed. "We recently discovered that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to one of our systems by a malicious third party," wrot...

Facebook at one time considered charging companies for access to its user data, according to a report based on three pages of unredacted material from a document showing portions of some internal Facebook emails, mainly from 2012 to 2014. The documents are linked to a lawsuit, Six4Three LLC v. Faceb...

In response to reports that Russian actors had used Facebook to disrupt the 2016 election, I wrote a few pieces about fixing the problem. I am not sure I have solutions for everything, but what motivates me is the sagging feeling that settles in whenever society throws up its hands and punts. We can...

Do you take your online privacy seriously? Most people don't. They have an ideal scenario of just how private their online activities should be, but they rarely do anything to actually achieve it. The problem is that bad actors know and rely on this fact, and that's why there's been a steady rise in...

Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions, is one of the most influential experts on cybersecurity and IT strategy in the United States. She is an authority on Internet security, data breaches and fraud mitigation. She served as the first female chief information officer at the White House, oversee...

The European Union has been stretching its wings. In the shadow of Brexit, it apparently has decided it has the real enemy of the people in its sights: social media companies and Google. France is even more aggressive than the EU overall, suggesting that the region's "right to be forgotten" law sho...

Defending against foreign interference in American elections is one of the priorities Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he has been focusing on this year. The issue is highly sensitive, and it is one that has garnered a great deal of discussion in media reports and on the Web. Special counsel Robert...