ASMR horror film ‘Tingle Monsters’ captures the terror of online trolls

Alexandra Serio stares directly into the camera, a ring light reflected in her eyes and a microphone resting on the desk in front of her. She smiles like she’s just seen an old friend and whispers into the metal mesh, welcoming viewers as they join h...

China reportedly spread COVID-19 misinformation

A report by The New York Times claims Chinese operatives helped spread false COVID-19 information via text and social media across the US. According to US intelligence officials, the Chinese operatives amplified disinformation about a national lockdo...

Instagram’s ‘huge booty’ problem keeps getting worse

There isn't a day when I don't come across comments from bots on Instagram. They're all over the place. But there's nothing they love more than to spam high-profile pages with millions of followers. Whether it's LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, ESPN or...

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 violat...

Bots have invaded Instagram comments

The last thing I expected to find on Instagram was someone telling me not to look at their Story if I didn't want to masturbate. But that comment, which I can only assume was intended reverse psychology, wasn't just directed at me. It was left on a p...

Russia worked hard to recruit social media users to campaign for Trump

We already knew that the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is essentially a farm of bots and trolls, exposed 126 million Americans on Facebook to Russian-backed propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election. But today's release of the redac...

‘Overwatch’ endorsements reduced toxic behavior by 40 percent

Blizzard has been waging a war against toxic players for a while, but how is it faring, exactly? Quite well, it seems. The company's Natasha Miller has revealed that the number of matches with "negative behavior" has dropped 40 percent since the ad...