An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The FCC has announced (PDF) it's investigating deals the broadband industry strikes with landlords that block broadband competition in apartment complexes, condos, and developments. While the FCC passed rules in 2008 attempting to prevent such deals, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have exploited massive loopholes in the restrictions for more than a decade. "With more than one-third of the U.S. population living in condos and apartment buildings, it's time to take a fresh look at how exclusive agreements between carriers and building owners could lock out broadband competition and consumer choice," interim FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel said of the announcement. "I look forward to reviewing the record."

The inquiry comes after President Biden signed an executive order in July urging regulators to take a closer look at competition and monopoly issues in several sectors. The order also mandated the creation of a competition council, which urged the FCC to take a closer look at the anticompetitive nature of these arrangements. The FCC's existing rules technically bar landlords and ISPs from colluding to restrict broadband competition. But in a 2016 piece in Wired, Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford outlined the various ways big telecom wiggles around the restrictions -- often by simply calling what they're doing -- something else. "Sure, a landlord can't enter into an exclusive agreement granting just one ISP the right to provide Internet access service...but a landlord can refuse to sign agreements with anyone other than Big Company X, in exchange for payments labeled in any one of a zillion ways," Crawford wrote. "Exclusivity by any other name still feels just as abusive."

For example, to get around FCC rules expanding access to an ISP's in-building wiring, companies like Comcast or Charter will often deed ownership of these wires to a landlord, then turn around and pay that landlord to ensure that nobody else can have access. Because the landlord now technically owns the wires, the FCC rules no longer apply. ISPs also pay landlords to sign agreements that ban any other competing ISPs from advertising in the building. If you're a landlord that violates such arrangements, you can then expect a nastygram from a company like Comcast for violating your deal. In addition, many landlords will charge "door fees" to any company that needs access to a building to install new wiring, creating an additional layer of difficulty and expense for smaller broadband competitors trying to compete with dominant ISPs. Collectively such restrictions serve the same function as blocking broadband competition outright. Much as it does on the national level, this lack of block by block competition directly contributes to higher prices, slower speeds, and comically-terrible customer service.

"After 9/11, I took the threat of terrorism seriously, still do," U.S. Senator Ron Wyden tells Fast Company. "But also I was concerned about how the new surveillance authorities might be abused..."

From Fast Company's report: After the 9/11 attacks, one big concern was connecting the dots. Failing to do so was why we missed the warning signs of the attacks and how we would prevent the next ones, the thinking went. One solution, according to the Pentagon, was a project to gather as much data as possible, to look for signs of future bad behavior. It was called Total Information Awareness...

Since the 1970s, Congress has been charged with preventing further abuse of the government's surveillance powers, particularly when it comes to spying on Americans. And few in Congress have questioned these powers as vigorously as Sen. Ron Wyden...

Sen. Wyden: Total Information Awareness was an ominous sounding idea to put together as much data on Americans as possible, and when used with what was then so-called predictive technology, identify who to watch as a way to stop terrorism. In the fight in Congress, here's the lesson that goes to the concerns we had 20 years ago: Total Information Awareness made it clear that the threat is not just surveillance through the aggressive collection, amalgamating, and mining of information through existing authorities. The bigger problem now is the amount of data on Americans that's available commercially or on social media... the threat to people's privacy is just as great. And the job of getting people's attention is still very, very challenging...

This is a national security issue: The personal data of Americans that the data brokers are selling is a gold mine for foreign intelligence services who can exploit it, to target supercharged hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns. So I'm leading an effort right now that encompasses the biggest online advertising companies, to ask if they're sharing Americans' web browsing and location data with foreign companies.

The well-known three-arrows symbol doesn't necessarily mean that a product is actually recyclable. A new bill would limit the products allowed to feature the mark. From a report: The triangular "chasing arrows" recycling symbol is everywhere: On disposable cups. On shower curtains. On children's toys. What a lot of shoppers might not know is that any product can display the sign, even if it isn't recyclable. It's false advertising, critics say, and as a result, countless tons of non-recyclable garbage are thrown in the recycling bin each year, choking the recycling system. Late on Wednesday, California took steps toward becoming the first state to change that. A bill passed by the state's assembly would ban companies from using the arrows symbol unless they can prove the material is in fact recycled in most California communities, and is used to make new products.

"It's a basic truth-in-advertising concept," said California State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat and the bill's lead sponsor. "We have a lot of people who are dutifully putting materials into the recycling bins that have the recycling symbols on them, thinking that they're going to be recycled, but actually, they're heading straight to the landfill," he said. The measure, which is expected to clear the State Senate later this week and be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is part of a nascent effort across the country to fix a recycling system that has long been broken.

Though materials like paper or metals are widely recycled, less than 10 percent of plastic consumed in the United States is recycled, according to the most recent estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, most plastic is incinerated or dumped in landfills, with the exception of some types of resins, like the kind used for bottled water or soda. For years, the United States also shipped much of its plastic waste overseas, choking local rivers and streams. A global convention now bans most trade in plastic waste, though U.S. waste exports have not completely ceased. This summer, Maine and Oregon passed laws overhauling their states' recycling systems by requiring corporations to pay for the cost of recycling their packaging. In Oregon, the law included plans to establish a task force that would evaluate "misleading or confusing claims" related to recycling. Legislation is pending in New York that would, among other things, ban products from displaying misleading claims.

Apple will start asking for permission to enable Personalized Ads in iOS 15, the company's method of serving relevant ads in the App Store and Apple News by analyzing what you read, purchase, and search for on your device. From a report: The company used to collect that information by default, but now it plans to ask for permission. Apple required other developers to seek users' permission with the debut of App Tracking Transparency, so it seems like it's showing that it will hold itself to a similar standard. The Personalized Ads pop-up should show up when you open the App Store if you're running the most recent iOS 15 beta. In the pop-up, Apple writes that the ads will help you discover relevant apps, products, and services while protecting your privacy by using "device-generated identifiers and not linking advertising information to your Apple ID."

New submitter Chaldean42 shares a report from The Verge: On Wednesday, September 1st, a number of channels on Twitch will go dark as streamers participate in #ADayOffTwitch, a walkout designed to bring attention to the ongoing hate and harassment that's plagued the platform for the last several weeks. [...] A Day Off Twitch was born out of the #TwitchDoBetter movement, a hashtag created by streamers affected by the hate raids that have exploded across Twitch in recent weeks. Though the action of bombing a streamer's chat with racist, sexist, transphobic, and generally abusive messages is not new, the phenomenon has seen a dramatic increase, thanks to users employing bots to overwhelm chats with hundreds of automatically generated messages. In response to what they thought was Twitch's slow response to the abuse, streamer RekitRaven created the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag to urge the Amazon-owned streaming platform to deploy better tools to stem the tide of harassment.

Twitch has promised that fixes are forthcoming, but in the meantime, streamers are left to contend against the hate raids with community-developed tools and resources. [...] The responses to A Day Off Twitch have been varied, even among its supporters. Because of Twitch's endemic hold on the streaming community, it's just not feasible for some smaller streamers, arguably the population most affected by hate raids, to take a day off. For some creators, Twitch is their only means of income. Users trying to make or maintain affiliate or partner status -- designations that grant creators access to many different methods of monetization -- could jeopardize their finances or the health of their channel by taking even one day off. There are also contractual obligations like advertising deals or partnerships that prevent streamers from skipping a day. Other streamers oppose A Day Off Twitch for more philosophical reasons. To them, the people behind these hate raids are working to bully marginalized streamers off the platform, and taking a day off is giving them exactly what they want. Continuing to stream and speaking out against the abuse is therefore the best way to counter trolls who might not otherwise face repercussions for their actions. A spokesperson for Twitch told The Verge, "We support our streamers' rights to express themselves and bring attention to important issues across our service. No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for, and we are working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators."

Amazon.com is planning to hire 55,000 people for corporate and technology roles globally in the coming months, Chief Executive Andy Jassy told Reuters. From the report: That's equal to more than a third of Google's headcount as of June 30, and close to all of Facebook's. Jassy, in his first press interview since he ascended to Amazon's top post in July, said the company needed more firepower to keep up with demand in retail, the cloud and advertising, among other businesses. He said the company's new bet to launch satellites into orbit to widen broadband access, called Project Kuiper, would require a lot of new hires, too.

With Amazon's annual job fair scheduled to begin Sept. 15, Jassy hopes now is a good time for recruiting. "There are so many jobs during the pandemic that have been displaced or have been altered, and there are so many people who are thinking about different and new jobs," said Jassy, who cited a U.S. survey from PwC that 65% of workers wanted a new gig.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks software, is in talks to buy email marketing firm Mailchimp for more than $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. No final decision has been made and discussions could fall through, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn't public. Another buyer could also emerge for the company and others are interested, they added. The deal would unite two providers of services for small businesses. Intuit has offered QuickBooks accounting software to clients for decades, supplementing it with services such as Credit Karma, which it acquired last year. Mailchimp is focused on digital marketing services, including social advertising, so-called shoppable links and automation products. [...] If talks are successful, it would be the largest deal to date for Intuit, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

A new article at ZDNet argues that "The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL."

"Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Once upon a time, roughly thirty years ago, there was a computer network called America Online... There was already an Internet, but most people didn't know how to use it or even that it existed. AOL, and a couple of competitors, Compuserve and Prodigy, offered people online things they could do, such as chat with other people... The services had only one drawback, which was that they were limited. People couldn't do just whatever they wanted, they could only pick from a small menu of functions, such as chat, that the services provided... As it grew and grew, the World Wide Web became an amazing place in contrast to AOL... People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. The three services withered...

People got excited about Facebook because it was a place where they could find real people they knew, just like MySpace, but also because it had some features like AOL, like the game Farmville. Business people were even more excited because Facebook started to generate a lot of advertising revenue. Advertisers liked Facebook because it not only knew who was talking to whom, it also knew a little bit about the hobbies and interests of people. Advertisers liked that because they could use the information to "target" their ads like never before. Smart people said that Facebook had what are known as "network effects." It became more powerful the more people joined it...

There were just a couple problems with Facebook. Facebook was a lot like AOL. It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate.... One of the bad things was that people no longer had control. They had given so much information about themselves to Facebook and its competitors that it was like those companies owned people when they were in Cyberspace. The services didn't seem to do a great job of handling people's information, either.
What's interesting about this article is it even tells you how the story ends: Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.

People got excited again, like the first time they found the Web and gave up on AOL.

But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written.

Megan Borovicka forget all about her Facebook account after 2013, reports the Washington Post. "But Facebook never forgot about her." The 42-year-old Oakland, California, lawyer never picked any "friends," posted any status updates, liked any photos or even opened the Facebook app on her phone. Yet over the last decade, Facebook has used an invisible data vacuum to suction up very specific details about her life — from her brand of underwear to where she received her paycheck... It isn't just the Facebook app that's gobbling up your information. Facebook is so big, it has convinced millions of other businesses, apps and websites to also snoop on its behalf. Even when you're not actively using Facebook. Even when you're not online. Even, perhaps, if you've never had a Facebook account.

Here's how it works: Facebook provides its business partners tracking software they embed in apps, websites and loyalty programs. Any business or group that needs to do digital advertising has little choice but to feed your activities into Facebook's vacuum: your grocer, politicians and, yes, even the paywall page for this newspaper's website. Behind the scenes, Facebook takes in this data and tries to match it up to your account. It sits under your name in a part of your profile your friends can't see, but Facebook uses to shape your experience online. Among the 100 most popular smartphone apps, you can find Facebook software in 61 of them, app research firm Sensor Tower told me. Facebook also has trackers in about 25 percent of websites, according to privacy software maker Ghostery...

Facebook got a notice when I opened Hulu to watch TV. Facebook knew when I went shopping for paint, a rocking chair and fancy beans. Facebook learned I read the websites What To Expect, Lullaby Trust and Happiest Baby. Over two weeks, Facebook tracked me on at least 95 different apps, websites and businesses, and those are just the ones I know about. It was as if Facebook had hired a private eye to prepare a dossier about my life. Why does Facebook think that's okay? The company emailed me answers about how its tracking technology works, but declined my requests to interview its chief privacy officer or other executives about its alleged monopoly....

Who in their right mind thought they were signing up for this much surveillance back when they first joined Facebook?
The article points out that in 2014 Facebook began allowing its advertisers to target users based on websites they'd visited...and now also gathers more data about users from other companies. And "While many companies were using browser cookies, which could be easily cleared or blocked, Facebook tied what it learned to real identities — the names on our Facebook profiles." And beyond that, companies "can report other identifying information to Facebook like your email to help it figure out who you are... If you've never had a Facebook account at all? It may still be watching."

It's a lucrative business, the Post points out. "In 2013, the average American's data was worth about $19 per year in advertising sales to Facebook, according to its financial statements. In 2020, your data was worth $164 per year."

What does Facebook know about your off-Facebook activity? You can find out at this URL.

If you just want to stop them from giving this information to advertisers, the right side of that page has an option to "Clear History — Disconnect off-Facebook activity history from your account." But you then have to also click "More Options" and then "Manage Future Activity" to also stop them from later matching up more of your off-Facebook activity to your profile for advertisers.

If you try to select it, Facebook warns what you'll be missing — that "Keeping your future off-Facebook activity saved with your account allows us to personalize your experience." And proceeding anyways then generates a popup reminding you that "We'll still receive activity from the businesses and organizations you visit. It may be used for measurement purposes and to make improvements to our ads systems, but it will be disconnected from your account."

And apparently your activity on Oculus isn't covered, and will still remain connected to your Facebook account.

Microsoft is announcing today that it won't block people from installing Windows 11 on most older PCs. While the software maker has recommended hardware requirements for Windows 11 -- which it's largely sticking to -- a restriction to install the OS will only be enforced when you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 through Windows Update. From a report: This means anyone with a PC with an older CPU that doesn't officially pass the upgrade test can still go ahead and download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually. Microsoft announced its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements in June, and made it clear that only Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPUs were officially supported. Microsoft now tells us that this install workaround is designed primarily for businesses to evaluate Windows 11, and that people can upgrade at their own risk as the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability. Microsoft won't be recommending or advertising this method of installing Windows 11 to consumers.

YouTube has issued a cease-and-desist order against the creator of Groovy, who has agreed to shut down the widely-popular music bot on August 30th. PC Gamer reports: Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room, Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos, joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users [...]. It was ridiculously popular, reportedly installed on over 16 million servers. But it seems Google wasn't so hot on the bot, with a spokesperson for the company told The Verge that Groovy violated YouTube's terms of service for "modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes."

In that same report, Groovy creator Nik Ammerlaan (who made the bot because "my friend's bot sucked and I thought I could make a better one") admitted that this was likely a long-time coming. Groovy circumvents YouTube's front-end and advertising entirely. "I'm not sure why they decided to send it [a cease and desist] now," said Ammerlaan. "They probably just didn't know about it, to be honest. It was just a matter of seeing when it would happen."

For the first time, Google has published the number of geofence warrants it's historically received from U.S. authorities, providing a rare glimpse into how frequently these controversial warrants are issued. ZDNet's Zack Whittaker reports: The figures, published Thursday, reveal that Google has received thousands of geofence warrants each quarter since 2018, and at times accounted for about one-quarter of all U.S. warrants that Google receives. The data shows that the vast majority of geofence warrants are obtained by local and state authorities, with federal law enforcement accounting for just 4% of all geofence warrants served on the technology giant. According to the data, Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019 and 11,554 in 2020. But the figures only provide a small glimpse into the volume of warrants received and did not break down how often it pushes back on overly broad requests.

Geofence warrants are also known as "reverse-location" warrants, since they seek to identify people of interest who were in the near vicinity at the time a crime was committed. Police do this by asking a court to order Google, which stores vast amounts of location data to drive its advertising business, to turn over details of who was in a geographic area, such as a radius of a few hundred feet at a certain point in time, to help identify potential suspects. Google has long shied away from providing these figures, in part because geofence warrants are largely thought to be unique to Google. Law enforcement has long known that Google stores vast troves of location data on its users in a database called Sensorvault, first revealed by The New York Times in 2019. Google spokesperson Alex Krasov said in a statement: "We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement. We developed a process specifically for these requests that is designed to honor our legal obligations while narrowing the scope of data disclosed."

There is a corner of LinkedIn free from humble brags, self-promotion, thought leadership and strict decorum. You just need to connect with a zoomer. Although LinkedIn is not a popular online hangout for Generation Z, some of their most viral posts are parodies of LinkedIn itself. From a report: Shiv Sharma graduated from the University of Southern California last year, according to his LinkedIn. A few months ago, he updated his profile listing himself as the assistant chef at the fictional restaurant from Sponge Bob Square Pants. "I have accepted an offer to work for The Krusty Krab Restaurant as part of their Entry Level Chef Program in Bikini Bottom," he wrote. The post garnered more than 5,000 reactions and dozens of comments. Harry Tong is a software development intern at a tech company. But, according to a popular post on his profile: "I am officially the CEO of a BILLION dollar company," he wrote. "For my series Z, my mom invested $10 for 0.000001% of my company, giving it a $1 billion valuation."

This subculture of subversion on LinkedIn has inspired countless TikTok videos, a Twitter account called @LinkedinFlex and a devoted Reddit community called LinkedInLunatics. The memes reflect the weariness people feel toward the site -- "primarily a place for bragging," said Jake Zhang, a Toronto-based college student. "People tell stories about how their entire lives have built up to this one moment of getting a job or a promotion, or experts claim they'll change your life with a piece of advice," Tong said. "And I'm just here to poke at the facade a little bit." Most young people treat LinkedIn as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" to be used sparingly, said AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, an advertising agency that specializes in the Microsoft Corp.-owned professional networking site. Maintaining a profile is a "necessary evil," Zhang said. "Everyone I know creates an account due to school or peer pressure," Zhang said. "We use it because there's no alternative for job hunting. But with all the toxic content and bragging, no one I know really likes it." Which is what makes the parodies on LinkedIn so interesting. Most people wouldn't put a joke on their resume. The posts are a byproduct of a generation that lives fearlessly on the internet, eager to entertain and call out any whiff of inauthenticity.

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: Facebook said Tuesday that it has removed hundreds of accounts linked to a mysterious advertising agency operating out of Russia that sought to pay social media influencers to smear Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and AstraZeneca. A network of 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts was traced back to Fazze, an advertising and marketing firm working in Russia on behalf of an unknown client.

The network used fake accounts to spread misleading claims that disparaged the safety of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. One claimed AstraZeneca's shot would turn a person into a chimpanzee. The fake accounts targeted audiences in India, Latin America and, to a lesser extent, the U.S., using several social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram. Russia has been actively marketing its Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, abroad in what some analysts see as an effort to score geopolitical points...

The Fazze network also contacted social media influencers in several countries with offers to pay them for reposting the misleading content. That ploy backfired when influencers in Germany and France exposed the network's offer....

Facebook investigators say some influencers did post the material, but later deleted it when stories about Fazze's work began to emerge.
The article also summarizes reporting from the Associated Press about the offers received by those YouTube influencers. It "urged influencers not to mention that they were being paid, and also suggested they criticize the media's reporting on vaccines."

Google's Pixel 6 phone will be powered by a Tensor processor which PCMag UK believes is "clearly designed to accelerate machine learning and AI." But does it have bigger implications? Tensor is a signpost, not a destination. Google has never sold huge numbers of Pixel phones and isn't signaling a change in strategy there. Rather, it's saying that it would like Android as a whole to shift toward more on-device processing for AI and ML. That could give a big boost to Google's two core businesses, advertising and data. It could also create problems for the future of 5G...

The more your phone can handle its own ML and AI, the less it needs the cloud. For example, a Tensor-enabled phone could potentially analyze your photos and share data locally with on-device advertising APIs, letting Google proclaim that its cloud services never access your raw data. That would help bridge the gap between the privacy you want and the targeted ads Google needs to survive. But a lot of consumer 5G app ideas assume your phone will offload processing or rendering onto the network.

Phones that are mostly self-sufficient aren't going to need high-bandwidth, low-latency networks or "mobile edge computing." Sure, the rise of more Tensor-like ML-focused chips would take pressure off the carriers' still-shaky 5G builds, but it'll also keep raising the question of why consumers need 5G in the first place. That could reduce carriers' willingness to keep investing in their consumer 5G networks.
Although the first sence of the article's last paragraph adds, "Maybe I'm overstating the issue here..."

Reddit, the self-declared 'front page of the internet,' says it is now valued at more than $10 billion after raising an additional $410 million in funding, with the final round expected to grow to up to $700 million. The Verge reports: "We are still planning on going public, but we don't have a firm timeline there yet," Reddit's co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times in an interview. "All good companies should go public when they can." The company previously raised $250 million in funding earlier this year for a valuation of $6 billion. But Huffman told the Times the company was approached with this recent financing round by Fidelity Investments and were made "an offer that we couldn't refuse."

Reddit makes most its money from advertising on the site, and although it's a minnow compared to the likes of Facebook and Google, it's growing its business quickly. The company says it made $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021, up 192 percent compared to the same period last year. Though for context, Google made $61.9 billion in this year's second quarter, mostly from YouTube and Search advertising. Reddit now has roughly 52 million daily users (compared to 1.85 billion daily Facebook users) and more than 100,000 active sub-reddits. Earlier this year, the company said it planned to double its staff count by the end of 2021 to around 1,400 employees.

Websites and apps featuring pirated movies and TV shows make about $1.3 billion from advertising each year, including from major companies like Amazon.com, according to a study. From a report: The piracy operations are also a key source of malware, and some ads placed on the sites contain links that hackers use to steal personal information or conduct ransomware attacks, according to the online safety nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance and the anti-piracy firm White Bullet Solutions. While law enforcement officials have sought to stop some of the online criminality, the groups identified at least 84,000 illicit entertainment sites.

The study underscores just how tough a problem piracy is for both Hollywood studios and companies that distribute digital ads. The situation has been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left more people watching films and television shows over the web, where criminals have a greater chance of successfully targeting victims. "Piracy causes direct harm to creators and others who lose income when their content is stolen," the authors of the report wrote. "And major brands face reputational risks when their advertising appears on illicit websites."

Facebook could be forced to sell gif creation website Giphy after an investigation by the UK competition regulator found its takeover could harm competition among social media companies and the digital advertising market. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an in-depth investigation earlier this year into Facebook's acquisition of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, after identifying a number of concerns about the $400m deal which was struck last year.

The CMA said in its provisional findings that "our initial view [is] that the only effective way to address the competition issues that we have identified is for Facebook to sell Giphy, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer." The watchdog found that Facebook's ownership of Giphy, which it aims to integrate with its Instagram social media site, could lead to it stopping supplying gifs to other social media sites. Or Facebook could demand more user data from Giphy's social media customers to continue to get access to its gifs, increasing the company's already "significant" market power. "Millions of people share gifs every day with friends, family and colleagues, and this number continues to grow," said Stuart McIntosh, chair of the independent inquiry group investigating the deal. "Giphy's takeover could see Facebook withdrawing gifs from competing platforms or requiring more user data in order to access them."

"Part of the reason that misinformation about vaccines is so intractable is that it can be very lucrative," argues a new article in Slate: For years anti-vaccine figures have made money publishing books and giving speeches, and only in the past couple of years have major sites like YouTube started preventing anti-vaxxers from directly earning revenue from advertising. During the pandemic, as the coronavirus created new markets for health hoaxes, conspiracy theorists have been able to make money online by using the misinformation that they publicize on major sites like Facebook to sell supplements and books to followers via e-commerce shops. Now, vaccine skeptics with large followings are turning to crowdfunding platforms — both the relatively obscure GiveSendGo and the decidedly mainstream GoFundMe — to monetize their activities, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars...

On GiveSendGo and GoFundMe, vaccine truthers often portray themselves as little guys in a fight against the pro-vaccine tyranny of big pharma, big tech, and big government, and in doing so rake in money from thousands of sympathetic donors. They're able to do it in part because of lax standards and moderation blind spots, and in part by operating in gray areas... Over the past few months, GiveSendGo has been hosting fundraisers for causes casting doubt on vaccines that have racked up huge sums... But it isn't just GiveSendGo, though, that's facilitating donations for efforts to resist coronavirus vaccines. GoFundMe is also providing services to these causes. There, however, skeptics have a workaround: They're not raising money to oppose vaccines, per se, but to oppose vaccine mandates... [T]here are numerous other GoFundMe campaigns to support people who are choosing to leave their jobs instead of getting the vaccine.

GoFundMe does, however, appear to be placing banners with links to information from the CDC and WHO on fundraising pages that promote vaccine hesitancy, unlike GiveSendGo. "Fundraisers raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe's terms of service and will be removed from the platform," GoFundMe's senior communication manager Monica Corbett wrote in an email. "Over the last several years, we have removed over 250 fundraisers attempting to promote misinformation related to vaccines. Fundraisers for legal challenges do not violate our terms of service...." As the Daily Beast reported, users have in the past found ways to get around GoFundMe's ban on vaccine misinformation by crafting their campaigns in the name of anti-vax dog whistles like "medical freedom" and "informed consent...."

[T]he platform has tried to crack down on vaccine misinformation, finding itself walking the content-moderation tightrope that other large social media platforms are familiar with, which inevitably leaves loopholes in place that purveyors of misinformation try to exploit.

Scammers are abusing Instagram's protections against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation to purposefully target and ban Instagram accounts at will, with some people even advertising professionalized ban-as-a-service offerings so anyone can harass or censor others, according to screenshots, interviews, and other material reviewed by Motherboard. From the report: It appears that in some cases, the same scammers who offer ban-as-a-service also offer or are at least connected to services to restore accounts for users who were unfairly banned from Instagram, sometimes for thousands of dollars. "Me (and my friend's) currently have the best ban service on-site/in the world," one advertisement for a ban service on the underground forum OG Users reads. "We have been professionally banning since 2020 and have top-tier experience. We may not have the cheapest prices, but trust me you are getting what you are paying for."

War, the pseudonymous user offering the ban service, told Motherboard in a Telegram message that banning "is pretty much a full time job lol." They claimed to have made over five-figures from selling Instagram bans in under a month. War charges $60 per ban, according to their listing. Another banner on a different underground forum offers the service for between 5 euros and 30 euros per account, depending on the number of followers. That listing advertised bans for accounts up to 5,000 followers, but claimed that higher follower accounts are also possible to ban. The first listing said it can impact accounts with up to 99,000 followers. War said they didn't know why particular customers may use their service, but added "obviously individuals who have money to throw around." Both listings say that a target account must have a human in the profile photo. In War's case, they said they ban users by filing a fraudulent impersonation complaint to Instagram.

For banned accounts, victims generally have to provide Instagram with several pieces of information such as their name, phone number, and linked email address [...]. [P]reviously, once an account was banned, the owner could try to restore it themselves straight away. Recently, Instagram introduced a 24 hour buffer window where a user has to wait before trying to restore the account, they said. But it appears that in other cases some of the people offering restore services are connected to those banning the accounts in the first place. [S]ome victims receive a message offering account restoration immediately after being banned, and that in their own case, the two accounts that launched the ban attack and the one offering the restore service follow each other on Instagram.