Yesterday we reported that Jack Dorsey announced Twitter would ban all political ads, placing pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider Facebook’s laissez-faire approach to such content. As the CEOs’ opposing philosophies are generating a great deal of media buzz, screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin published an open letter to Zuckerberg, criticizing the chief executive for not doing his part to stop the spread of misinformation on the social network. In response, Zuckerberg used lines from the Sorkin-penned 1995 film “The American President” to essentially call Sorkin a hypocrite. Continue reading Zuckerberg Responds to Sorkin’s Open Letter of Criticism

Ahead of next year’s U.S. Presidential election, social platform Twitter is planning to introduce a new policy that intends to help curb manipulated media including altered videos known as “deepfakes.” Twitter plans to create its first ever such policy regarding deepfakes and will seek feedback from the public in doing so. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services has joined Facebook, Microsoft and others in the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) and will serve as a tech partner and committee member helping to oversee the challenge. Continue reading Major Tech Firms Are Taking Action to Combat Deepfakes

Facebook revealed that it found and took down four disinformation campaigns, three of which originated in Iran and one in Russia, all of them aimed at users in the United States, Latin America and North Africa. The posts, which crossed ideological lines and covered multiple categories, touched on Middle Eastern conflict and racial strife and mentioned New York’s Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Russian campaign, comprised of 50 accounts, focused on the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Continue reading Disinformation From Iran and Russia Deleted by Facebook

Columnist Todd Martens avoids violent entertainment unless it comes in the form of a video game. “It’s not because I write about them for a living. It’s because the modern, big-budget game that doesn’t celebrate the art of shooting is as rare these days as an original Intellivision console,” he writes. In other words, if you want to play modern video games, you almost have to play violent ones. Continue reading Video Game Violence: Time for Industry Self Evaluation?

On the heels of Vice President Joe Biden’s announcement to establish a gun control task force, Kris Graft, the editor-in-chief of video game trade publication Gamasutra, wrote an editorial decrying the inclusion of members of the video game industry. His editorial criticized “the games industry for allowing itself to be implicated in debates about mass shootings in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre,” writes The Atlantic. Continue reading Should Video Games Be Part of Gun Violence Conversation?