For months before and after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi—a widely critically acclaimed movie and box office titan—what appeared to have been a small number of fans made it known they were rabid haters of the movie’s twist on the franchise’s formula. They were mad about everything, from plot holes and…
The anti-vaccination movement might be getting a boost from Twitter bots and Russian trolls, suggests a new study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. It found that certain kinds of bot accounts were more likely to send antivax tweets than were accounts belonging to actual people, while alleged…
Facebook wants to prove to lawmakers and the public that it’s working diligently to combat political disinformation and foreign election meddling, and on Tuesday, the company revealed it recently shut down a network that appears to be mirroring the kind of activity Russia is accused of orchestrating in the run-up to…
In what appears to be new ranking behavior, Gizmodo has identified several prominent far-right accounts now buried by Twitter’s search feature.
Apparently sick of being criticized by everyone from US Congress to Seth Rogan for not doing enough to purge its platform of bots, trolls, and malicious foreign actors, Twitter has started liberally dropping the ban hammer on suspicious accounts, suspending more than 70 million users over the course of May and June.
For grassroots pro-choice organizations, visibility is a double-edged sword. This was especially clear during the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon cyberattack two years ago. For the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), which led the event, more visibility meant the potential to raise more money to help those…
Twitter has had no idea what the flying fuck its “Verified Account” badge is supposed to mean for years, even as it was handing out verifications to rambling conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and anyone willing to pay for it, according to internal emails obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would finally be changing its moderation policies in what was popularly received as an acknowledgement how badly hordes of trolls, white supremacists and swastika-toting Pepes have overrun the site for years. The new guidelines (which Twitter has touted as simply a…
In recent years, Reddit has banned a bevy of far-right troll havens, including its board for the white supremacist “alt-right” and others used for the harassment of women, minorities and other people. The bans were a reversal of Reddit’s prior policy to not ban “questionable” content—and drew predictable outrage,…
The temptation to use the anonymous online commenting for the purpose of telling other people how stupid they are is strong. But one judge in England has learned the hard way that giving yourself a pseudonym doesn’t mean that no one will ever find out who’s talking shit.
Yes, I know the song Justin Timberlake did for Trolls is ubiquitous. That does not mean that the movie it came from has managed to penetrate my consciousness. I expect Trolls 2 to be the same.
A decade is all it took, more or less, for the internet to become unmanageable.
Life is full of mysteries. Some of them are simple, like, “If there’s a god, why is there evil in the world?” Others are far more illusive and can only be answered by the collective wisdom of the world wide web. On Monday, a poster on Reddit’s /r/taco_bell subpage inadvertently posed a question of the latter variety,…
This year has been one painful shot to the face after another. It’s like God decided to make 2016 his personal blooper reel. And while I commend Mike Mitchell for wanting to make a movie about togetherness get us out of this 12-month shitpile, I am pretty sure Trolls is not going to be the shovel we need.
“Don’t feed the trolls” used to be an internet saying, but now it’s a business strategy. Twitter lost bids from two potential acquirers because of the site’s reputation for allowing bullying, trolling, racism, sexism and other forms of lewd communication, according to a Bloomberg report.
It’s been an open secret for some time that Palmer Luckey, the 24-year-old founder of VR company Oculus Rift and heir apparent to the future of gaming, is a strange guy—the type who argues with his customers on Reddit and casually cosplays as My Little Pony characters. Turns out, he also appears to be an active…
Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake, in both real and animated form, do their duty in this trailer for Trolls, Dreamworks’ upcoming CG musical that is “a story about happiness” that also manages to work in a treacly cover of “True Colors.” Who knew the wild-haired plastic toys that inspired this tale could be so emo?
Hollywood generally considers the fall movie season to be awards season. It’s when studios start rolling out their best films as the end of the year approaches. For genre fans, though, we get that and so much more. There are also horror movies for Halloween, big exciting blockbusters, as well as wondrous fantasy for…
Danh Van Le is a YouTube Star whose more recent viral exploits have made him a menace to society. On July 5, 2015, Van Le and some cohorts shot museum heist hoax videos at two separate galleries in London for his YouTube channel Trollstation. One woman reportedly fainted while onlookers ran from the scene. Today,…
The internet is, generally speaking, a garbage dump suffused with vitriol and poison. “But surely,” some might ask, “the one, tiny corner of Twitter devoted to Cool Pope Francis would be a respite for our bitter, blackened hearts?” To which the answer is: of course not, no.
