Social Media

A Belgian security researcher has found an unusual quirk in Facebook’s search function. Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to play dice if you want to look up pictures of your male friends. The bizarre find was discovered this weekend by notorious Belgian white-hat hacker Inti De Ceukelaire. We just launched Plugged It’s our cool new gadget site. Take me TNW has managed to replicate the glitch across several Facebook accounts. When you type “photos of my female friends” into the search bar, Facebook will return a seemingly-random selection of photos from your female friends. Switching out “female” with “male” returns something completely different. Instead of pictures of friends from within your social network, you’re instead shown a selection of pictures from across the social network. In our experience, these came from accounts and groups we did not follow. Facebook will also ask if you … [Read more...] about Facebook lets you search for pictures of your female friends, but not your male ones

On Monday, the day before President Trump’s State of the Union Address, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended a performance celebrating her life at a museum in Washington — her first public appearance since December. It did little to convince the internet’s most morbid conspiracy theorists that she wasn’t dead. Justice Ginsburg, or RBG as she’s known to her fans on the internet, underwent surgery on her left lung in November to remove malignant nodules, a surgery that doctors say went well before declaring her cancer free — again. It was her third bout with the disease. Here be gadgets Not here exactly, but on our new hardware site Plugged. Here In 1999, RBG underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments after she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She didn’t miss a day on the bench during her treatment. She went under the knife again in 2009, this time for pancreatic cancer. RBG’s tumor was discovered at an … [Read more...] about Justice Ginsburg made a public appearance last week — but the internet still thinks she’s dead

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice on how to get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Show of hands: how often do you use that button on Instagram that looks like a bookmark? If you don’t already use it, you should. We just launched Plugged It’s our cool new gadget site. Take me With collections, you basically save any Instagram post into a Pinterest-style board with the theme of your choice. You can save your favorite pics, tasty recipes, fashion looks, or goofy stuff your friends post. Unlike Stories or regular posts, collections are private and only accessible to the collector. For example, here are a few posts saved to a food-based collection in my own Instagram. To start a collection, open the sidebar on your profile and find the “Saved” option (this used to be on your main profile, but has since been moved). Within this page, you hit the + button in the top right to create a new … [Read more...] about How to use Instagram collections like a makeshift Pinterest

A new film being shown in schools warns children and teenagers against becoming absorbed by social media. Me, Myselfie And I, by Islington-based Bafta-winning video platform TrueTube.co.uk, is described as “Big meets Black Mirror” and features a schoolboy who gets trapped inside his smartphone. The film mixes smartphone footage with cinematic shots in a retelling of the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. It stars Michael Bunani, who appeared in Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, as John, a selfie addict obsessed with capturing his own image and posting the shots on social media streams. Producer Alastair Collinson said Me, Myselfie And I, shot in north London, was inspired by the “ever-increasing time we spend on our phones in our own little echo chambers” as “a narcissism epidemic sweeps society”. It has been released to coincide with Safer Internet Day today. This week the Government is due to publish its first guidance on … [Read more...] about New film shown in schools warns children of dangers of social media

Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. SUBSCRIBE Feb. 2, 2019, 2:55 PM GMT By Ben Collins and Joe Murphy A new batch of troll accounts identified by Twitter as having ties to Russia’s propaganda operation revealed an emphasis on promoting far-right conspiracy theories such as Qanon to Americans. Twitter announced Thursday the removal of 418 accounts tied to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, the disinformation group whose employees were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller last February for attempted election interference. The accounts’ tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Donald Trump, almost 38,000 times — the most of any hashtag. #ReleaseTheMemo, a social media campaign pushed by allies of the president last year that aimed to discredit some members of the FBI, was tweeted 37,583 times. In all, the 400-some accounts … [Read more...] about Russian troll accounts purged by Twitter pushed Qanon and other conspiracy theories