The company’s campaign to encourage vaccination is fighting against the dynamics of its own platform. — In the most idealistic view of Facebook’s mission, this is the sort of moment it was built for. With Covid-19 killing thousands of people every day, humanity is in a race to vaccinate enough of the global population to curb the pandemic — ideally before it evolves in ways that…

A grotesque segment mocking Black farmers illustrates just how much bigotry a conservative star can get away with — An overtly racist video by conservative YouTube star Steven Crowder did not violate YouTube’s hate speech policy, the company told OneZero, though it has been taken down for other reasons. …

Blockchain takes a substantial toll on the environment that experts are beginning to reckon with — The price of one bitcoin, as I write this, is $57,383 — more than 10 times what it cost just a year ago. That price is volatile, so it will be different by the time you read this. But rest assured it will remain expensive. There’s another toll, though, for…

An industry veteran on why recent moves from the tech giants should be the impetus for a federal privacy law — Jules Polonetsky remembers the moment that shattered his naivete about the internet. “I was the consumer affairs commissioner for New York City 20 years ago when some company I’d never heard of came in with a big billboard,” he recalls. “It said, ‘Welcome to Silicon Alley,’ sponsored by DoubleClick.” I’d…

Why the search giant can afford to kill the cookie — For two decades, the cookie has been an emblem of the online advertising model that powers much of the open web — and the privacy invasions that come with it. Now, the cookie as we know it is dying. Online advertising will live on, of course, and so will privacy…

‘Twitter description guy’ isn’t a guy. It’s Twitter’s curation team, and I talked to the woman who runs it. — “Twitter description guy,” in users’ collective imagination, is a beleaguered soul, constantly scrambling to comprehend the bizarre subcultural memes that go viral on the site so that he can write sober-minded summaries of them for Twitter’s trending section. In December, Twitter’s description of a Minecraft-related trending topic led Twitch streamers…

Apple’s new privacy measures will test the theory that underlies Facebook’s business model — Facebook recently launched an ad campaign to defend personalized advertising against Apple’s new privacy measures. The campaign, called “Good Ideas Deserve to Be Found,” touts targeted ads as a boon for small businesses. Here’s one of the ads, which I found amusing, if perhaps not exactly in the way that…

Products like Clubhouse and Twitter’s “Super Follows” offer a new kind of engagement — Open Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or Pinterest, then look at your index finger. If you’re like me, you’ll find it already hovering over the screen, poised for scrolling. Our algorithmic feeds have conditioned us to expect little from any given post, flicking our eyes across each one just long enough…

How to bolster the media without breaking the internet — A proposed law intended to bolster the struggling news media at the expense of thriving tech platforms is playing out quite poorly in Australia. Google reluctantly obeyed the legislation, which is expected to pass in the next week, by agreeing to pay large sums to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and…