Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way.

Source: The Largest Autocracy on Earth

Many service workers at Silicon Valley tech campuses aren’t sure whether the delta variant will delay their returns even longer or even jeopardize their jobs entirely if in-office work becomes less critical than it once was. As many white-collar workers have settled into a work-from-home routine, blue-collar workers are struggling even more for answers after more than a year of unpredictability.

Source: Big tech blue collar workers cling to hope for return to work soon

 Slang for doc-dropping, doxing is the process of making someone’s address, contact information, identity, or other information public, usually in order to intimidate, harass, or incite public outrage. The term dates back to the mid-2000s, but doxing has since become a well-known harassment tactic. There aren’t clear statistics on how many people have been doxed, but a 2021 report from the Anti-Defamation League estimates 9 percent of Americans have experienced doxing. 

Source: Should Doxing Be Illegal? – The Markup

Organizers of a GoFundMe fundraiser to help queer and trans individuals in Afghanistan have been barred from withdrawing the money they raised, they said, leaving vulnerable Afghans in peril amid the Taliban’s takeover of the country and raising questions about the popular fundraising platform’s policies.

Source: Organizers Of A GoFundMe To Help Queer And Trans Afghans Say The Platform Won’t Allow Them To Access The Money

How a handful of volunteer moderators have kept one of the platform’s premier dating subreddits from becoming a recruitment portal for the manosphere

Source: A Red-Pill Army’s Insidious Battle to Take Over Reddit’s Largest Dating Forum

Online advertisers are always trying to sell you something, and in the case of slip-on sneakers or leather handbags, that something is pretty clear. But other times, the motive behind a sponsored post is less transparent. Why, for instance, are oil companies buying prime space in your social media feed to prattle on about “innovative” climate solutions and visions of a “lower-carbon future”?

Source: Big Oil spent $10 million on Facebook ads — to sell what, exactly?

Before he’d become a posthumous social media symbol of Reddit-ish male angst, Bukowski wrestled with the pros and cons of a digital world. Social media users are again debating the merits of Charles Bukowski, the late Los Angeles-based writer known for his poetry describing a coarse, often boorish version of American masculinity replete with drinking, gambling, and not-always-successful womanizing.

Source: Charles Bukowski: poet, Twitter punch line—and internet visionary