Starting today, Youtube will begin removing the “dislike” count from videos, saying that too many people had participated in “dislike” mobs to downvote videos (often political videos). The dislike button will remain, and content creators can see the count, but the count will no longer be visible to others.
Government has used third-party services to track the locations of all smart phones in a given area. This is made possible by apps that collect location data (but may not make this clear to users) and sell it to data brokers. Data brokers, in turn, have then provided this information to the police and other government agencies, and the example here, gave it to public health authorities. Your smart phone is a literal 24×7 surveillance device to track you in real time.
The most viewed items on Facebook are actually content stolen from other social media and web sites.
Nature published over 40 papers that were nonsense gibberish and has now retracted them.
Is it time to cut back on this blog? Today everyone seems aware of the issues with social media, and to a large extent, the issues with media manipulating our thinking. Is this blog still needed?