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Bungie sues 'Destiny 2' player over alleged threats and cheating
The player, Luca Leone, allegedly said one of the game's community managers was 'not safe.'
Australia plans laws to make social networks identify trolls
Australia plans to introduce laws that could force social networks to reveal the identities of trolls, raising privacy questions.
Twitch lets streamers require verification before viewers can chat
Twitch streamers now have the option or requiring phone or email verification before viewers can chat, potentially curbing abuse.
Amazon taps 'Undone' co-producer for show about an internet troll
The next project from an Undone creator may hit a little too close to home for social media mavens. Deadline understands Amazon has started work on Troll, a comedy series co-produced and written by Undone's Lee Sung Jin. It tells the tale of a would-be documentary maker who responds to online bullying by making a movie about his troll and discovering what could be a "geopolitical conspiracy." If you've ever been convinced that a nasty commenter was throwing more than a temper tantrum, this might be your ideal show.
Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw paid a Russian troll to spread disinformation
In the name of research, Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw and a partner security firm paid a Russian troll $250 for a disinformation campaign. As Wired reports, the experiment was meant to prove how easy it is to purchase social media propaganda campaigns. But the experiment has attracted plenty of critics.
Trolls swamp unused Twitch category with pirated shows and porn
Twitch just learned first-hand about the challenges of moderating live video. Trolls have hijacked the site's largely unused category for Valve's Artifact (which previously had few if any streamers) to livestream material that most definitely violated Twitch's terms of service. Motherboard noted that it started out with memes, but on Memorial Day weekend included pirated Game of Thrones episodes, porn and in one case video from the Christchurch mass shooting.
Twitter bans right-wing activist Jacob Wohl over fake accounts
Twitter has cracked down on one of its more overt offenders. The social network told Daily Beast it has banned conservative activist Jacob Wohl for "multiple violations" of its rules by creating and running numerous fake accounts. He'd admitted to USA Today in an interview that he intended to open fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to manipulate the 2020 election in favor of Trump, and it appears that he didn't waste time. A Daily Beast source said he'd already crafted "several" Twitter accounts before Twitter dropped the hammer.
Trolls threaten laid off reporters in coordinated online campaign
Unfortunately, sustained online harassment campaigns are still a reality. NBC News has learned that trolls have launched a coordinated threat campaign against BuzzFeed and Huffington Post (owned by Engadget parent Verizon) journalists recently let go as part of layoffs. They appear to have originated from 4chan and used the same far-right memes before launching into racist and sexist slurs as well as death threats. The attackers have largely targeted writers on social networks like Twitter and Instagram, although they've also used email and even PayPal.
Facebook purges more than 500 Russian-led disinformation pages
"Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" is such an anodyne way of describing weaponizing information to poison attitudes and democracies. That's the euphemism that Facebook is employing to talk about its latest purge of accounts and pages that may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. More than 500 pages and accounts have recently been removed, according to a report by Facebook's cybersecurity policy chief.
FBI apprehends troll for seizure-inducing Twitter attack
The perpetrator who tweeted a seizure-inducing image to a journalist has been apprehended by the FBI. In December a troll sent Vanity Fair and Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald, who is epileptic, a flashing, auto-playing image. Earlier this morning, Eichenwald tweeted that following three months of research, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested the suspect. Eichenwald says that the perpetrator faces federal charges and will be indicted by the Dallas district attorney (where Eichenwald lives) on "different charges" over the next few days.
Science shows that anyone could become an online troll
It's easy to dismiss internet trolls as freaks. Surely they weren't raised well, right? Don't be so quick to judge. Cornell and Stanford researchers have published a study suggesting that anyone can engage in trolling if the circumstances are right. In an experiment, the schools skewed the moods of participants by making them complete either very easy or very difficult tests. They were then unleashed on the comment sections of online articles, some of which had trolling posts... and, well, you might have a hunch as to what came next.
Celebs ask Twitter to tackle a specific harassment case
Twitter has frequently been accused of waiting until harassment campaigns are big enough to make the news before it responds to them -- just ask Leslie Jones. And unfortunately, it looks like history might just repeat itself. Comedians Patton Oswalt, Tim Heidecker and others are calling on Twitter to take action following allegations that "alt-right" figure Mike Cernovich is conducting a sustained harassment campaign against Tim & Eric collaborator Vic Berger IV in retaliation for jokes and videos making fun of Cernovich.
'Vanity Fair' editor sues Twitter troll for giving him a seizure
Who knew trolls can use social media not just to dish out death threats but to cause someone actual physical harm? A Twitter user who went by the name @jew_goldstein very recently tweeted a GIF with rapidly flashing graphics at Vanity Fair and Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald, a known epileptic and Donald Trump critic. Shortly after that, Eichenwald's wife replied that the auto-playing animation gave Eichenwald a seizure and that she called the police to report the assault along with the info they have on the user.
Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot feeds the emptiness of alt-right trolls
Engaging with "alt-right" Pepe-spewing racists on Twitter is a diversion I have yet to tire of, but the fact is even I can't tweet enough satisfy the masses. Fortunately, automating the process is a viable option, as shown by writer Sarah Nyberg's @Arguetron Twitter bot. It's not the first such scripted process to hit social media (according to Nyberg, her inspiration came from a number of similar bots created by Nora Reed including @opinions_good and @good_opinions.), but it does have a remarkably deep capability to create benign but baiting responses. One egg avatar'd tweeter determined to defend the honor of a not-as-popular-as-his-follower-count-suggests alt-righter went back and forth with Arguetron for about ten hours without catching on.
Kanye West, incest and Twitter's First Amendment conundrum
NSFW Warning: This story may contain links to and descriptions or images of explicit sexual acts. On Nov. 11th, 2014, Kim Kardashian's ass broke the internet. Her iconic posterior, photographed by Jean-Paul Goude, graced the cover of Paper magazine and became an instant meme. Like a pillow-y flesh bomb, Kardashian's butt exploded into a firestorm of praise and disgust. The New York Times warned of the perils of a massive ass, while social networks and daytime talk shows teemed with hot takes about the young mother's butt.
PayPal won't refund a Twitch troll's $50,000 in donations
An Australian teen is learning one of the many reasons why you shouldn't cause grief for Twitch streamers. PayPal has refused to refund Anthony Archer after he made a total of $50,000 in donations to several well-known Twitch users (including LegendaryLea and NoSleepTV) as part of a trolling scheme. He'd intended to cancel the transactions through PayPal a month after making them, leaving the streamers high and dry, but PayPal wasn't having any of it -- he's on the hook for the full amount. And given that he appears to have used his parents' credit card, he's in more than a little trouble with them, too.
Guide helps you fight online harassment
Harassment may be a regular part of the modern internet landscape, but that doesn't mean that you have to simply sit there and take it. Feminist Frequency, which is all too familiar with harassment and threats, has posted a guide to protecting yourself against the onslaught of digital bullies, stalkers and trolls. In some ways, it's about observing common sense privacy and security policies: avoid sharing more personal info than necessary, use difficult-to-crack passwords and stay on guard against malware and other exploits.
Post a racist comment online, see it on a billboard near your house
Messages posted on Facebook, Twitter and other online spaces may feel like they carry less weight than things said in the physical world -- but that's not the case, argues Brazilian civil-rights group Criola. This year, Criola launched a campaign labeled, "Virtual racism, real consequences," which pulls racially bigoted comments from the internet and places them on billboards in the neighborhoods where the commenters live. Criola finds racist messages online and then uses geotag data to locate the author's neighborhood; the group then rents billboard space nearby and prints the comments for the world -- and the original writer -- to see. The names and images of the commenters are blurred out, but the message rings clear: Things said online affect people in real life, in real ways.
Texas judges make it harder to fight patent trolls
Federal courts might have made it harder for patent trolls to sue over vague ideas, but the Eastern District of Texas (the trolls' preferred venue) just put the ball back in their court. Some judges in the region now demand that the targets of these lawsuits get permission before they file motions to dismiss cases based on abstract concepts. If the defendants don't show "good cause" for needing those motions, the lawsuits go ahead -- and historically, that means that the trolls either win their cases or extract settlements from companies unwilling to endure the costs of a prolonged legal battle.
Trolls are using Twitter ads to push hate speech
As much as Twitter is doing to fight harassment lately, it's clear that ill-willed users are still slipping past the social network's defenses -- and sometimes, in very conspicuous ways. Users have spotted trolls using Twitter's promoted tweet ads to spread racist and anti-transgender messages, guaranteeing a wide audience for their hate. The company tells The Guardian that it's pulling these ads and suspending the offending accounts, but it's not offering an explanation for why these tweets got through despite policies that explicitly ban hateful language. The failures suggest that Twitter's ad approvals are relatively hands-off, and that it needs to keep a much closer eye on things so that its ads remain friendly. [Image credit: Señor Nejo, Flickr]
