Hanna Kozlowska

It’s become the norm in the United States that when a suspect is named in a high-profile violent incident, fake profiles with their name immediately pop up on Facebook and Instagram. This happened with Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooting suspect, and Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the alleged Santa Fe shooter. It’s also happening with Cesar Sayoc, the man arrested in Florida for allegedly sending multiple explosive devices to prominent opponents of Donald Trump.

Using the mail is a good way for a bomber to get caught.

Law enforcement agencies use Facebook as a way to communicate with the communities they police. They post important public service announcements, and get useful tips from citizens. But they are imploring people: don’t use Facebook Messenger to contact them in emergency situations.

Silicon Valley is deeply implicated in the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, a new report says. It points at two companies in particular: Amazon, which provides cloud services to government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Palantir Technologies, which makes case management software for the agency.

Brendan Iribe, a co-founder of virtual reality startup Oculus, has left Facebook, which acquired the company in 2012. He’s the sixth founder of a high-profile acquisition to exit Facebook in the last two years, following the founders of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Iribe’s co-founder Palmer Luckey. It’s also been two years since Oculus’ last major launch, the Oculus Rift headset.

Facebook says it’s heavily investing in protecting elections around the globe from misinformation, scams, and sketchy actors trying to influence the results. But the efforts, as this week’s news from the United States and Brazil has shown, are proving to have significant shortcomings.

In an unusual choice, Facebook is bringing on Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, to head up its policy and communications teams.

We’ve reached peak #wanderlust: You can now book travel on your smartphone by simply taking a screenshot of an Instagram post of a destination that looks particularly appealing.

The media industry started feverishly spending on digital video content several years ago, based on the premise it was what users wanted—and could generate much-needed revenue for news organizations. Soon after, however, the “pivot to video” became a “bloodbath,” as headlines put it. Hundreds of staffers were laid off after video’s promised return on investment—especially on social platforms—did not live up to reality.

Donald Trump is not running for office in the midterm elections. And yet, judged by the number of Facebook ads politicians have placed in the run-up to the Nov. 6 vote, he is the most prolific campaigner.

With the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the world’s eyes are turned to Saudi Arabia and its ruling royal family, who are suspected of ordering his assassination earlier this month.

Pope Francis named seven new saints during Mass in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Sunday (Oct. 14), including two of the Catholic Church’s most controversial and influential figures of the 20th century: Pope Paul VI, and the martyred Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero.

If you search #ballet on Instagram, you’ll find stunning photos of dancers striking poses in flowy costumes, delightful fragments of performances or rehearsals. But a large chunk of this collection of 10.7 million images will be photos of a different kind: bodies, often quite young, contorted into unbelievable positions, or mind-boggling tricks like multiple pirouettes in a row, filmed in a dance studio. These clips can be found on YouTube as well.

The US Supreme Court has rejected another case that would make the justices consider the constitutionality of solitary confinement in prison. The matter gave justice Sonia Sotomayor an opportunity to criticize the practice—and use the words of Charles Dickens to help her argument.

Facebook announced Friday (Oct. 12) that the breach it uncovered more than two weeks ago resulted in nearly 30 million people having various information accessed and scraped by hackers.

Campaigns may spend piles of money and devote thousands of volunteers to register people to vote. But, it’s possible that just one Instagram post from Taylor Swift has been just as, if not more, effective.

Information from fitness tracker Fitbit has helped advance another criminal case—this time because it pinned down the exact time of the victim’s death by measuring her heart rate speed up and fall to zero.

If you’re on both Facebook and Instagram, chances are you don’t follow the exact same people on both platforms. Usually, Facebook friends are people you actually know, whereas your Instagram feed is a mix of friends and of strangers that you find interesting. Facebook wants to change that, in what appears to be part of a strategy to link the two platforms more closely.

Margrethe Vestager is arguably the world’s most powerful opponent of tech giants like Google or Facebook. She also thinks she might be out of her job by next year.

US suburban-mall staple JCPenney has long been in financial trouble, unable to keep up with the demands of a society that is shifting away from malls and towards the convenience of e-commerce. Now, it appears to have a new idea for how to save its failing business: Instagram.

The new “USMCA” deal the US, Canada, and Mexico tentatively agreed to provides wide-reaching protection to internet giants from lawsuits and liabilities for what appears on their services.

Over the weekend, a post started making its way around Facebook, urging women to “black out” their profile photos to raise awareness about domestic abuse. It did not achieve the virality of #MeToo, where women shared their experiences with sexual violence, or its more recent iteration of #WhyIDidntReport, where they said why they didn’t report their perpetrators. And it almost certainly won’t.

Immediately after Facebook announced on Friday (Sept. 28) that more than 50 million accounts were compromised in a massive hack, the European regulatory agency that oversees Facebook, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), said it was looking into the breach. If Facebook violated the provisions of Europe’s strict new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it could face a fine as high as $1.63 billion, which is 4% of the company’s annual revenue.

US Senate Republicans took the unusual step to hire a prosecutor to ask questions for them during congressional hearings today that pitted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who accuses him of sexually assaulting her in high school.