In March 2021, a Turkish court ordered the news site Diken to remove a critical story about an ally of the country’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan. Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish…
Tag: Twitter
Why It’s So Hard to Count Twitter Bots
Automated accounts have become more sophisticated and complex in recent years. Many fake accounts are partly operated by humans, as well as machines, or just amplify messages written by real…
Can Social Media Be Redeemed?
“I read that Jack Dorsey, a cofounder of Twitter, claims to regret his role in creating the centralized internet. Given what we know about the divisiveness, violence, and misinformation that…
Apple, Google, and Microsoft Team Up to Vanquish the Password
We’ve been promised the end of password-based logins on the internet for a very long time, but now it seems that promise may finally be fulfilled. The FIDO Alliance, an…
Kara Swisher’s Take on Twitter
Lauren Goode: Your brain is starting too much info. OK. But do you want to know what the actual best episode we did was? Kara Swisher: What? Lauren Goode: Walt’s…
Europe’s New Law Will Force Secretive TikTok to Open Up
Social networks grow up faster these days. It took Facebook eight years to reach 1 billion users, but TikTok got there in just five. The fast-growing short-video app also got…
The Infinite Deaths of Social Media
In 2012, when a species of Karner blue butterfly in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore park suddenly perished during a summer of intensifying climate catastrophe, Gregor W. Schuurman, who at…
Twitter Isn’t a Town Square—It’s a Whole City
The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. Several years ago, in response to a…
Twitter Insiders Fear Elon Musk Heralds a Troll Takeover
Jon Bell, a designer who previously worked on Twitter’s anti-abuse team, says weakening Twitter’s moderation would be a mistake. Outsiders—including Bell before he joined the company—often don’t realize how much…
Right-Wing Trolls Are Trying to Break Back Into Twitter
Within two hours of Twitter’s announcement that it had accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy the company and take it private, the first concerning signs flashed across Joe…