United States
I'm a senior majoring in Journalism with a minor in Digital Technologies and Emerging Media at Fordham University (Graduation Date: May 2019). I'm interning at NBC News Digital for the Fall of 2018, where I work as a beat reporter for their technology sect.
A small number of automated Twitter accounts were able to play an outsized role in spreading content from low-quality publishers and overwhelm the efforts of fact checkers, according to a new study that highlights how the sizable platform was able to be manipulated by bad actors.
Bitcoin plunged below $5,000 on Monday, adding to what has turned into nightmare 2018 for investors who touted the cryptocurrency. The continued declines come after bitcoin's value shot up in December 2017, nearly touching $20,000. As of Tuesday, a single Bitcoin was trading around $4,400 - its lowest level of the year.
Four Democratic senators joined a growing chorus of Facebook critics on Friday, sending a letter to the company's leadership requesting answers about its employment of a Washington public relations firm.
Helipads, services for pets, public transportation perks and even naming rights were among the many fringe benefits that U.S. cities offered up to Amazon in pursuit of its new headquarters. Amazon announced on Wednesday that New York City and an area of Northern Virginia just outside Washington would split "HQ2," ending a more than two-year process in which the company received 238 proposals from cities across North America.
Marc Benioff, the billionaire Salesforce co-founder and co-chief executive officer, has a message for the leaders of big tech: You're thinking too small. "I believe that business is the greatest platform for change," Benioff said. "This is a more important time to have positive global impact than ever."
Experts this week warned against entertaining the idea that blockchain could fix the voting system despite growing frustration with the long lines and malfunctioning machines that caused problems during the midterm election. "If you're trying to convince Walmart it needs blockchains to track avocados or whatever, be our guest," Arvind Narayanan, an associate professor of computer science at Princeton, tweeted.
Facebook said on Friday it had discovered Iranian disinformation activity on the social network a week ago and removed more than 80 inauthentic accounts, groups and pages spreading "politically charged" posts targeted at U.S. and U.K. citizens.
Microsoft announced on Friday that the company was standing by its decision to bid for "JEDI," a U.S. government project aimed at redesigning the digital infrastructure of the Department of Defense, despite pushback from company employees. Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, explained the company's stance in a blog post.
Facebook has developed new artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to fight child exploitation on their platform, the company announced on Wednesday. "We've been working on this issue for a really long time, because unfortunately since the inception of the internet people have been trying to exploit children," Antigone Davis, head of global safety at Facebook, wrote in a post to the company's blog.
Denials, skepticism and calls for a retraction are piling up in response to a Bloomberg article that said Chinese microchips had ended up in the computers of at least 30 major U.S. companies in a major cybersecurity breach. Bloomberg stands by the article.