Clubhouse announced Wednesday that it would end its waitlist and invite system, opening up to everyone. TechCrunch reports: Clubhouse is also introducing a real logo that will look familiar -- it's basically a slightly altered version of the waving emoji the company already used. Clubhouse will still hold onto its app portraits, introducing a new featured icon from the Atlanta music scene to ring in the changes. "The invite system has been an important part of our early history," Clubhouse founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth wrote in a blog announcement. They note that adding users in waves and integrating new users into the app's community through Town Halls and orientation sessions helped Clubhouse grow at a healthy rate without breaking, "but we've always wanted Clubhouse to be open."

According to new data SensorTower provided to TechCrunch, Clubhouse hit its high point in February at 9.6 million global downloads, up from 2.4 million the month prior. After that, things settled down a bit before perking back up in May when TikTok went live on Android through the Google Play Store. Since May, new Android users have accounted for the lion's share of the app's downloads. In June, Clubhouse was installed 7.7 million times across both iOS and Android -- an impressive number that's definitely in conflict with the perception that the app might not have staying power.

Clubhouse's success is a double-edged sword. The app's meteoric rise came as a surprise to the team, as meteoric rises often do. The social app is still a wild success by normal metrics in a landscape completely dominated by a handful of large, entrenched platforms, but it can be tricky to maintain healthy momentum after such high highs. Opening up the app to everybody should certainly help.

A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that lead to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today. Krebs on Security reports: Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals that's been "swatting" and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames. At Sonderman's sentencing hearing today, prosecutors told the court the defendant and his co-conspirators would text and call targets and their families, posting their personal information online and sending them pizzas and other deliveries of food as a harassment technique.

Other victims of the group told prosecutors their tormentors further harassed them by making false reports of child abuse to social services local to the target's area, and false reports in the target's name to local suicide prevention hotlines. Eventually, when subjects of their harassment refused to sell or give up their Twitter and Instagram usernames, Sonderman and others would swat their targets -- or make a false report to authorities in the target's name with the intention of sending a heavily armed police response to that person's address. [...]

Sonderman might have been eligible to knock a few months off his sentence had he cooperated with investigators and refrained from committing further crimes while out on bond. But prosecutors said that shortly after his release, Sonderman went right back to doing what he was doing when he got caught. Investigators who subpoenaed his online communications found he'd logged into the Instagram account "FreeTheSoldiers," which was known to have been used by the group to harass people for their social media handles. Sonderman was promptly re-arrested for violating the terms of his release, and prosecutors played for the court today a recording of a phone call Sonderman made from jail in which he brags to a female acquaintance that he wiped his mobile phone two days before investigators served another search warrant on his home. "Although it may seem inadequate, the law is the law," said Judge Norris after giving Sonderman the maximum sentence allowed by law under the statute. "The harm it caused, the death and destruction... it's almost unspeakable. This is not like cases we frequently have that involve guns and carjacking and drugs. This is a whole different level of insidious criminal behavior here."

Google is expanding the number of cities where Maps offers information about public transport crowding. The number of cities covered is increasing from around 200 today, to "over 10,000 transit agencies in 100 countries," the company says. As well as crowdedness, Google says Maps is also being updated to offer more information about past travel. From a report: Google Maps' crowdedness information originally launched pre-pandemic in 2019, but over the past year social distancing has made it more important than ever. Crowdedness information is generated from a mixture of historical location data, as well as self-reporting from Maps users on individual trains. Google says it anonymizes the location history data used. As well as expanding the crowdedness predictions to more cities, Google is also making them more granular in New York and Sydney. In these cities users will see how crowded individual train carriages are instead of just general crowding on the transit line. The feature works using data provided by transit agencies themselves, and Google says it plans to expand the capability to more cities soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos has heard the complaints about billionaires like himself funneling their money into private rocket companies instead of donating to causes on Earth, and he doesn't disagree. In an interview with CNN ahead of his planned Tuesday morning space voyage in a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, Bezos was asked for his thoughts on critics who call the extraterrestrial flights "joyrides for the wealthy, and [who say] you should be spending your time and your money and energy trying to solve problems here on Earth." "Well, I say they are largely right," said Bezos, who Bloomberg estimates is worth $206 billion. "We have to do both. We have lots of problems here on Earth and we have to work on those."

Bezos and fellow billionaires [...] have been characterized by critics as deaf to issues on the ground and too obsessed with making space more accessible when they could put their resources elsewhere. The 57-year-old Bezos, who earlier this month stepped down as CEO of Amazon, said it's important to "look to the future ... as a species and as a civilization." In his view, the work being done today will lay the foundation for future generations to work in space, which "will solve problems here on Earth." In an opinion piece for MSNBC, Talia Lavin views billionaires going to space through a more incendiary lens, writing: "What they seek to leave behind is a planet burning and flooding and full of the kind of small and ordinary suffering such fortunes could alleviate in an instant."

The space program of the 1960s, which resulted in the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, "may have been mired in the bitter and petty rivalries of the Cold War, and limned by prejudice about who could excel," writes Lavin, "but it was a project funded and created by our government, an achievement held in common by the masses. No such common pride can be held in the launch of the titans of capital."

"In this billionaire battle, there is no pretense at a sense of collective pride or communal achievement. Even the drumbeat of nationalism would be better than this obscene egotism, whose fumes are more putrid than rocket-jet emissions. It feels like a parody of hubris, and a colossal celebration of the social failure to moderate preposterous accumulations of wealth."

Thoughts?

Venmo announced it's removing its global social feed on Tuesday, the payment appâ(TM)s notorious feature that allows strangers to potentially view payments you make and receive on Venmo. From a report: Now Venmo's social elements will be limited to your actual friends on the app in the "friends feed" without you having to toggle any features in the app. The company buried the change in a blog post detailing an update to the Venmo app. [...] Until recently, Venmo also offered users no control over who saw their friends list within the app, which is potentially incriminating in an entirely separate way from seeing the content of a transaction. After Buzzfeed News discovered President Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle via the friends list, the company added additional privacy controls for the visibility of your Venmo contacts.

Malaysian authorities seized 1,069 bitcoin mining rigs, laid them out in a parking lot at police headquarters, and used a steamroller to crush them, as part of a joint operation between law enforcement in the city of Miri and electric utility Sarawak Energy. CNBC reports: Assistant Commissioner of Police Hakemal Hawari told CNBC the crackdown came after miners allegedly stole $2 million worth of electricity siphoned from Sarawak Energy power lines. A video of the event posted last week by local Sarawak news outlet Dayak Daily has since gone viral on social media.

Acting on a tip, authorities on the island of Borneo confiscated the rigs in six separate raids between February and April. In total, police destroyed about $1.26 million of mining equipment. Police opted to crush the mining gear rather than sell it, in accordance with a court order. Other countries, like China, have taken a different route, reportedly auctioning off seized rigs. Hawari said that electricity theft by bitcoin miners led to three houses burning down in the city. The Miri police chief told CNBC that there are no other active mining operations underway currently. The report notes that crypto mining is not illegal in Malaysia, although "there are stringent laws around power use."

"The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance estimates that Malaysia accounts for 3.44% of all the world's bitcoin miners, placing it in the top ten mining destinations on the planet."

President Joe Biden walked back some of his criticism of Facebook, saying Monday he meant to accuse a dozen users, but not the social media platform itself, of spreading deadly lies about Covid vaccines. From a report: "Facebook isn't killing people," Biden said. Biden added that he hopes Facebook will do more to fight "the outrageous misinformation" about coronavirus vaccines being spread on its platform "instead of taking it personally that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people." Last week, Biden appeared to say just that: Asked outside the White House what his message was to platforms like Facebook regarding Covid disinformation, Biden said, "They're killing people. I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that's -- they're killing people," Biden said Friday.

International investigation finds 23 Apple devices that were successfully hacked. From a report: The text delivered last month to the iPhone 11 of Claude Mangin, the French wife of a political activist jailed in Morocco, made no sound. It produced no image. It offered no warning of any kind as an iMessage from somebody she didn't know delivered malware directly onto her phone -- and past Apple's security systems. Once inside, the spyware, produced by Israel's NSO Group and licensed to one of its government clients, went to work, according to a forensic examination of her device by Amnesty International's Security Lab. It found that between October and June, her phone was hacked multiple times with Pegasus, NSO's signature surveillance tool, during a time when she was in France. The examination was unable to reveal what was collected. But the potential was vast: Pegasus can collect emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact lists, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories, according to security researchers and NSO marketing materials.

The spyware can activate cameras or microphones to capture fresh images and recordings. It can listen to calls and voice mails. It can collect location logs of where a user has been and also determine where that user is now, along with data indicating whether the person is stationary or, if moving, in which direction. And all of this can happen without a user even touching her phone or knowing she has received a mysterious message from an unfamiliar person -- in Mangin's case, a Gmail user going by the name "linakeller2203." These kinds of "zero-click" attacks, as they are called within the surveillance industry, can work on even the newest generations of iPhones, after years of effort in which Apple attempted to close the door against unauthorized surveillance -- and built marketing campaigns on assertions that it offers better privacy and security than rivals.

[...] Researchers have documented iPhone infections with Pegasus dozens of times in recent years, challenging Apple's reputation for superior security when compared with its leading rivals, which run Android operating systems by Google. The months-long investigation by The Post and its partners found more evidence to fuel that debate. Amnesty's Security Lab examined 67 smartphones whose numbers were on the Forbidden Stories list and found forensic evidence of Pegasus infections or attempts at infections in 37. Of those, 34 were iPhones -- 23 that showed signs of a successful Pegasus infection and 11 that showed signs of attempted infection.

Cellphones "can be transformed into surveillance devices," writes the Guardian, reporting startling new details about which innocent people are still being surveilled (as part of a collaborative reporting project with 16 other media outlets led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories).

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the newspaper's critique of a "privatised government surveillance industry" that's made NSO a billion-dollar company, thanks to its phone-penetrating spy software Pegaus: [NSO] insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of "legitimate criminal or terror group targets". Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data... The presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools. Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state. Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO's technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware.

But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups [which track the general locations of cellphone users] can be exploited in this environment.

It is not possible to know without forensic analysis whether the phone of someone whose number appears in the data was actually targeted by a government or whether it was successfully hacked with NSO's spyware. But when our technical partner, Amnesty International's Security Lab, conducted forensic analysis on dozens of iPhones that belonged to potential targets at the time they were selected, they found evidence of Pegasus activity in more than half.
The investigators say that potential targets included nearly 200 journalists around the world, including numerous reporters from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, and even the editor of the Financial Times.

In addition, the investigators say they found evidence the Pegasus software had been installed on the phone of the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NSO denies this to the Washington Post. But they also insist that they're simply licensing their software to clients, and their company "has no insight" into those clients' specific intelligence activities.

The Washington Post reports that Amnesty's Security Lab found evidence of Pegasus attacks on 37 of 67 smartphones from the list which they tested. But beyond that "for the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty's detective work."

Familiar privacy measures like strong passwords and encryption offer little help against Pegasus, which can attack phones without any warning to users. It can read anything on a device that a user can, while also stealing photos, recordings, location records, communications, passwords, call logs and social media posts. Spyware also can activate cameras and microphones for real-time surveillance.

Florida's fired Department of Health data manager Rebekah Jones lost access to her 400,000 followers on Twitter last month — which she'd been using to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for downplaying the severity of the state's Covid-19 crisis. Then Jones announced she'd be running for Congress. "This also means, under Desantis' recently signed social media law, I get to fine Twitter $250K per day until my account is restored starting July 1."

Orlando Weekly reports: After a media frenzy, Jones deleted the post. She said she was attempting to point out Gov. Ron DeSantis's "hypocrisy" in writing a law that allowed political candidates to sue media companies that ban them, while still celebrating her Twitter suspension...

The bit became real when she filed to run as an Independent in Florida's 1st congressional district on June 25...

On her campaign website, she lists eight issues on her platform: protecting Florida's environmental systems, promoting government transparency, fighting for media accountability in disinformation, giving access to representatives, ensuring the district's veterans are taken care of, scrutinizing restrictive voting laws, funding science and research, and boosting support for all levels of education. Jones says there's still room for other issues on her platform, after she talks to more residents.
Jones' GoFundMe account ("DefendScience") now directs visitors to her official campaign site if they want to make campaign contributions. (And the GoFundMe page also notes that her campaign has been endorsed by 90-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study on the Vietnam War.)

But the last six weeks have been a wild ride for the data scientist:

• Last month Florida's Inspector General granted official whistleblower status to Jones.
• Six days later Twitter told Slashdot they'd "permanently suspended" Jones' account "for violations of the Twitter Rules on spam and platform manipulation."
• When Jones then created a new Twitter account for her campaign, "it was suspended within a day of its creation," Orlando Weekly reports.
• Jones created a new account on Instagram named "insubordinatescientist". Yet since June 16th Instagram has also marked it as "unavailable," saying the link "may be broken, or the page may have been removed." (Since June 16th Instagram has not responded to Slashdot's request for an explanation.)
• Jones' GoFundMe page now refers visitors to an entirely different Instagram page.

Yesterday the official coronavirus coordinator for the White House reported that one in five of America's Covid-19 cases this week have come from Florida.

Thursday's California's lawmakers approved America's first state-funded guaranteed income program for both qualifying young adults who have recently left foster care and for pregnant women, reports CNBC. The votes — 36-0 in the Senate and 64-0 in the Assembly — showed bipartisan support for an idea that is gaining momentum across the country. Dozens of local programs have sprung up in recent years, including some that have been privately funded, making it easier for elected officials to sell the public on the idea. California's plan is taxpayer-funded, and could spur other states to follow its lead.

"If you look at the stats for our foster youth, they are devastating," Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk said. "We should be doing all we can to lift these young people up."

Local governments and organizations will apply for the money and run their programs. The state Department of Social Services will decide who gets funding. California lawmakers left it up to local officials to determine the size of the monthly payments, which generally range from $500 to $1,000 in existing programs around the country. The vote came on the same day millions of parents began receiving their first monthly payments under a temporary expansion of the federal child tax credit many view as a form of guaranteed income. "Now there is momentum, things are moving quickly," said Michael Tubbs, an advisor to California governor Gavin Newsom, who was a trailblazer when he instituted a guaranteed income program as mayor of Stockton. "The next stop is the federal government."

"Cuban officials rallied tens of thousands of supporters in the streets on Saturday — nearly a week after they were stunned by the most widespread protests in decades," the Associated Press reports.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel — accompanied by 90-year-old former President Raul Castro — "made an impassioned speech blaming unrest on the U.S. and its economic embargo, 'the blockade, aggression and terror... The enemy has returned to throw all it has at destroying the sacred unity and tranquility of the citizens.'" "I think the government is just trying to signal to people that it understands their desperation and that it's going to try to alleviate some of the misery that they're experiencing. The problem is that the government just doesn't have much in the way of resources that it can devote to doing that," said William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba at the American University in the United States.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Psiphon Inc's freely available internet censorship circumvention tool has helped nearly 1.4 million Cubans this week gain access to websites, the company said on Friday, after Cuba's government curbed access to popular social media and messaging platforms... Thousands of Cubans joined nationwide protests over shortages of basic goods, limits on civil liberties and the government's handling of a surge in COVID-19 infections on Sunday, the most significant unrest in decades in the communist-run country.

Psiphon said 1.389 million users accessed the open web from Cuba through its network on Thursday, as well as 1.238 million as noon EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday.

"Internet is ON; circumvention tools ARE working," Psiphon said in a statement.

Psiphon said the roughly 1.4 million represents about 20% of Cuban internet users. Its open source circumvention tool can be downloaded from app stores like Google Play or Apple to "maximize your chances of bypassing censorship," according to the company. Canadian university researchers developed the software in 2007 to let users evade governmental internet firewalls.
The censorship-circumvention tool — which combines VPN, SSH, and HTTP Proxy tools — has also been used in Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar, according to recent news reports. Bloomberg notes that the Toronto-based nonprofit Psiphon "has received funding from the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government nonprofit that aims to support global internet freedom technologies...

"On Thursday, President Biden said the U.S. is examining whether it's able to restore internet access shut down by the Cuban government."

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. From a report: The research project reveals how Google's service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences -- such as whether Beijing's Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters. Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. "Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities," Ochigame says. Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.

Just like Google's homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate. Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals "information borders" created by the way Google's search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.

Critics said the pandemic would make the industry flee San Francisco and its southern neighbor, Silicon Valley. But tech can't seem to quit its gravitational center. New York Times: The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area's tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas -- where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don't exist. But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri [Editor's note: anecdote in the story who is the chief executive of Akash Network] is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region's bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live. And on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.

Employees are waiting to hear whether their remote work plans will be approved. From a report: Google software engineers reported something in a recent survey that surprised higher-ups: they felt as productive working from home as they did before the pandemic. Internal research at the Alphabet unit also showed that employees want more "collaboration and social connections" at work, according to Brian Welle, a human resources vice president. Welle declined to provide exact figures but said "more than 75%" of surveyed employees answered this way. Most staff also specifically craved physical proximity when working on new projects. "There's something about innovative work -- when you need that spark," Welle said in an interview. "Our employees feel like those moments happen better when they're together."

That's partially why, despite the rebound in productivity, the technology giant is sticking with its plan to bring most employees back to offices this fall. As Google deliberates which individual employees will get to continue working full time from home and who will need to come in, some staff are increasingly frustrated by the lack of clear direction and uneven enforcement of the policy. Internal message boards lit up this month when a senior Google executive announced he was going to work from New Zealand. Meanwhile, most lower-level staff are waiting to learn if they can relocate, or have to come into the office.

AmiMoJo shares a report from VentureBeat: Apple critics such as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney have complained about Apple's alleged anticompetitive behavior with the App Store. But Consumer Acquisition's Brian Bowman has frequently sounded the alarm on Apple's decision to favor user privacy over targeted ads by changing access to its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). Based on Consumer Acquisition's analysis of $300 million in paid social ad spending, IDFA has had a devastating impact, Bowman said in an interview with GamesBeat. In a report issued today, Bowman said that iOS advertisers are experiencing a 15% to 20% revenue drop and inflation in unattributed organic traffic.

Starting in April, Apple began releasing iOS 14.5, which prompted users to answer whether they would allow their data to be tracked for advertising purposes. Apple believes this puts privacy front and center. But Consumer Acquisition and many of its game developer advertisers worry it will break personalized advertising. Only 20% of consumers are saying yes to Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt, which means they will enable apps to personalize ads by tracking their personal data. For the traffic Bowman's company evaluated, performance has faded. Across paid social platforms, downstream event optimization and "lookalike audience performance" is also eroding. [...] Bowman believes -- or at least holds out hope -- that Apple will roll back or soften the IDFA changes by Black Friday.

According to Politico, "Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are [...] planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages." The White House is also planning to work with social media platforms and traditional media outlets to combat misinformation and ultimately improve vaccination rates. TmoNews reports: The White House could ask carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T to step in and stop the spread of these text messages. This is one way they hope they will be able to get their vaccination message across better and eliminate misinterpretation. There is no word yet on whether or not the White House has reached out to these carriers to help them screen anti-vax messages. But if it does, it will be interesting to see how this will be acted upon and which tools would be used. Then again, it could open a can of worms with potential issues that would violate customer privacy and an individual's right to free speech. "We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover," White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. "When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter saw a surge in government demands worldwide in 2020 to take down content posted by journalists and news outlets, according to data released by the social media platform. In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year. Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia. India topped the list for information requests by governments in the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States for the first time, the report said.

The company said globally it received over 14,500 requests for information from July 1 to Dec. 31, and it produced some or all of the information in response to 30% of the requests. Such requests can include governments or other entities asking for the identities of people tweeting under pseudonyms. Twitter also received more than 38,500 legal demands to take down various content, down 9% from the first half of 2020, It complied with 29% of the demands. In the updated transparency report, Twitter said the number of impressions, or views of a tweet, that violated Twitter's rules accounted for less than 0.1% of the total global views in the second half of 2020, the first time the platform has released such data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the government plans to ban anyone guilty of online racist abuse from soccer matches as authorities continue to respond to the lawlessness connected to England's loss in the final of the European soccer championship. Johnson on Wednesday told lawmakers that it was time to act after three Black members of England's national team were targeted by racist abuse on social media after they failed to score during the penalty shootout that sealed the team's loss to Italy on Sunday night. The government plans to add online racism to the list of offenses for which fans can be barred from matches, he said.

"What we are doing is taking practical steps to ensure that the football banning regime is changed so that if you are guilty of racist abuse online on football, then you will not be going to the match," Johnson said during his weekly prime minister's questions session. "No ifs, no buts, no exemptions, no excuses." Courts are allowed to issue banning orders if a fan is convicted of a "relevant offense" linked to a match, including crimes such as disorderly behavior or possession of weapons.

Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users' high engagement levels with right-wing media sources. From a report: One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle's co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network's integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day. The announcement, which left CrowdTangle's employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings. On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform -- good, bad or ugly.

On the other side were executives, including the company's chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much. They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful -- showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets. These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves. Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost. An internal battle over data transparency might seem low on the list of worthy Facebook investigations. But the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook's obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform. And it gets to the heart of one of the central tensions confronting Facebook in the post-Trump era. The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.