Methane emissions declined slightly in 2020 amid lower oil and gas production

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed down many facets of life last year, leading to a small reduction in methane emissions, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report. The organization primarily attributed an approximate 10 percent drop in emis...

Watchdog accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic

A new report by the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic. According to the group, Amazon increased the prices of essential items like masks, hand sanitizer, disinfectant spray, paper towels and to...

Reddit has banned nearly 7,000 hateful subreddits since June 29th

Reddit says it’s ramping up its fight against hate speech. Since rolling out its new content policies on June 29th, the platform has banned nearly 7,000 subreddits for hateful content. While the company admits it has more work to do, it says it’s enc...

Twitter ‘super-spreaders’ shared bogus COVID-19 info with 3 million users

A new report by NewsGuard says a handful of COVID-19 misinformation “super-spreaders” have shared false and misleading claims with more than three million Twitter users. The report identified 10 accounts with more than 100,000 followers each that pro...

Pentagon probe can’t confirm Trump interfered with the JEDI contract

After a months-long saga over whether President Trump’s “personal vendetta” cost Amazon a $10 billion Pentagon contract, the Pentagon’s inspector general said it found no evidence that the decision to award the cloud-computing contract to Microsoft w...

Driver in fatal Tesla crash had reported problems with Autopilot

The Apple engineer killed in the fatal Tesla crash in Mountain View, California, in March 2018 had reported problems with the Autopilot driver-assistance system, Reuters says. On prior trips, the driver, Walter Huang aka Wei Lun Huang, reported that...

Senate: Obama Admin. wasn’t prepared to handle Russian interference

Today, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report (PDF) detailing the Obama administration's response to Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. The report says the Obama administration was not well-prepared to handle the unprecede...

Twitter will let you report posts aimed at suppressing voters

Twitter is rolling out another tool meant to protect the 2020 US election. Today, it announced that during "key moments" of the election users will be able to report misleading information about how to participate in an election or other civic event....

Congresswoman calls on YouTube to stop promoting climate misinformation

Congresswoman Kathy Castor (D-Florida) is calling on YouTube to stop including climate change misinformation in its recommendation algorithm and to demonetize videos that deny climate change. In a letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Castor...

Facebook pledges $130 million for its content oversight board

Over the past year, Facebook has been working to put together a content oversight board. We've heard Mark Zuckerberg's vision, and Facebook shared a charter outlining its rules. Now, Facebook is committing $130 million to the effort.