Newsletter Archives

• Social-media apps are killing our kids. Do adults care?

  Posted on July 8, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Rates of suicide and self-harm among teens and preteens in the US and other countries have doubled, tripled, and even quintupled in the past dozen years. Now we may finally know why.

  An explosive front-page article in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2024, revealed that Instagram — with more than 2 billion monthly active users — feeds disturbing videos to viewers who register as minors. The website’s Reels stream, the newspaper said, feeds to teenagers three times as many sex videos as it sends to adults over the age of 30, 1.7 times as much violence, and 4.1 times as much bullying.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.28.0, 2024-07-08).

  Public Defender Bullying, Instagram, Mental Health, Newsletters, Self-harm, Social Media, Suicide

• Secure messaging on Windows with Signal

  Posted on March 18, 2024 at 02:45 CDT by Mary Branscombe • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.11 • 2024-03-18

  PRIVACY

  

  By Mary Branscombe

  Signal is a smartphone secure-messaging app that also works in Windows. Here’s why you want it, and how to get started.

  Sometimes you need to send a message that you can be certain will stay private. Perhaps a friend urgently needs a place to stay while you’re out of town, and you must give them your alarm code (and maybe tell the neighbor who has your spare key how to recognize them).

  Or perhaps you want to discuss a medical condition, or something that’s perfectly legal but might still get you into trouble at work, such as whistleblowing or staging a protest.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.12.0, 2024-03-18).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Privacy Instagram, Mastodon, Newsletters, RCS, Signal, SMS, Twitter, WhatsApp, X

• Will Threads be the real Twitter killer?

  Posted on July 24, 2023 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The parent company of Facebook and Instagram — Meta Platforms — launched this month Threads, a Twitter-like social network. It looks like the first serious contender to knock Twitter off its perch.

  Unlike other Twitter competitors — Mastodon, Bluesky, Truth Social, and many more — Threads has already attracted a gigantic audience. The Threads app for iOS and Android surpassed 100 million users in just its first five days. That makes it the fastest-growing app ever, besting ChatGPT, which required two months to hit the same mark.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.30.0, 2023-07-24).

  Public Defender Facebook, Instagram, Newsletters, Social networks, Threads, Twitter

• Facebook admits, one hour before the Mueller report press conference, that oh golly “millions” of Instagram users had plain-text passwords exposed

  Posted on April 18, 2019 at 14:38 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Talk about Friday night news dumps…

  Iain Thomson, writing for The Reg, wasn’t distracted by today’s news. Previously, Facebook said that “tens of thousands of Instagram users” had their plain text passwords stored on company servers.

  Now the tech goliath has decided to revise that figure, and, well, let’s just say it massively underestimated that number.

  “Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” the amendmentreads today.

  “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users.”

  Other Facebook, Instagram