Congratulations to all the horrible people on Twitter (and there are so, so many of you): A judge has just ruled that posting thousands of creepy, insane, obsessive rambling messages at someone is a constitutional right.
Consider Jean Quan's Facebook successfully occupied. The Oakland mayor has officially given up her would-be "fan page" after it was overwhelmed with critics of her handling of Occupy Oakland protests.
Now that Facebook, Google and Twitter have all published their year-in-review lists, we can definitively answer the question of, Who was dumber in the year 2011: Facebook, Google or Twitter users? Hard to tell ('cause they were all pretty dumb.)
The Obama White House can be terrible at leading the nation. It's been incredibly soft on Wall Street and often horrible on basic human rights. But it can stand proud on its family Facebook policy! At a time when American parents help sneak their legally underaged kids onto Facebook, Sasha and Malia Obama are quite sensibly told to stay away from the social network.
Internet trolls! Everyone hates them. But are they actually good for something? A new academic paper argues the worst sort of trolling illuminates harsh truths about social networking, the internet, and the mainstream media.
A well-placed mole has forwarded us the Silicon Valley equivalent of hard-core pornography: an explicit look at Facebook's finances. They're even more staggering than we expected. A gusher of profits has left the social network with a cash hoard to rival established companies like 3M, eBay and Yahoo.
ZOMG, Justin Bieber is trending! How can we short the Jonas Brothers?? That, apparently, is the sort of conversation that's becoming more and more plausible on Wall Street; hedge funds are increasingly turning to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube trends to place social media driven bets in the "tens of billions of dollars," according to a company that sells them data.
Facebook is offering a way to report a friend's suicidal posting, and get him or her help via instant message. It's not the most direct or energetic way to get help for a terminally depressed pal, but at least it's something.
Last week, national experts traveled to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to convey hotly anticipated knowledge to the social network's engineers. The computer programmers "listened intently," according to a reporter who was present, to explanations of compassion, tact, sensitivity, and the psychological differences between children and adults. So it was that, nearly eight years after the world's biggest social network began, Facebook learned some basic social skills.
Facebook is trying to shut down IsAnyoneUp.com, a sleazy porn site built around posting the Facebook profiles of its often-unwilling subjects. But the site's owner says he's not going anywhere.
Priscilla Chan has always taken her relationship with Mark Zuckerberg seriously; she famously sealed a contract of dating rules before moving to be near him in California. But the medical school student just got more serious than ever before, listing Zuckerberg as her "partner" on Facebook - and adopting Zuck's mother as her own.
When Facebook isn't intentionally destroying your privacy, it's doing so unintentionally. That even goes for Mark Zuckerberg: Two years ago, the Facebook CEO's once-private pictures were exposed to the world after the social network changed its privacy defaults. Now his once-private photos are again exposed to the world, this time thanks to a security flaw.
If you were responsible for the world's largest trove of sensitive personal information, what would you name your headquarters address? "4 Trust Lane?" "2 Careful Way?" "1 Gentle Drive?" Those would all be very reasonable branding choices! Instead, the world's most powerful social network, Facebook, went with "1 Hacker Way." Really?
Early last September, before Occupy Wall Street was even a glint of pepper spray in an obstinate protester's eye, the NYPD were mobilizing against another crowd menace: the West Indian American Day Parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Sure, some officers were spotted getting into the spirit by grinding against paradegoers' behinds, but a far greater number were bracing for the mayhem that frequently accompanies the debauched annual event. This year's parade was particularly violent — there were multiple shootings, resulting in one civilian fatality and an officer wounded in his arm. In the days that followed, New York cops had had enough, and they created a Facebook group to vent their anger. It was extremely racist.
Everyone meet Jane Addams High School principal Sharron Smalls—seen here getting down with, and chocolate-sauced by, a topless man who looks less-than-excited to be there. Yesterday students at Addams (it's in NYC) covered their school with copies of the photo in honor of Smalls and her achievements—particularly her use of said pic on her Facebook profile.
