October 22, 2021 by Ethics in Tech board member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams Contrary to claims by former U.S. President Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians and pundits that Twitter favors posts by liberals, new internal research shared Thursday by the social media titan showed that conservative tweets received greater algorithmic amplification Read more…
October 20, 2021 by Ethics in Tech board member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams Digital rights advocates on Wednesday shrugged off reports that Facebook is planning to change its name by accusing the company of attempting to divert attention from its failure to address problems plaguing the platform and calling for Read more…
August 2, 2021 by Ethics in Tech board member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams Despite promises to crack down on hate speech, social media companies took no action against over 80% of the anti-Jewish posts—which included incitements to violence against Jews and Holocaust denial—reported on their platforms during a recent six-week Read more…
July 19, 2021 by Ethics in Tech board member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday clarified his remarks from last week that social media companies like Facebook are “killing people” by allowing the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, explaining instead that users are posting deadly “bad information.” Read more…
May 4, 2021 by Ethics in Tech board member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams After a coalition of digital rights and other groups launched a campaign on Monday aimed at thwarting Facebook’s planned privacy rollback on its popular WhatsApp messaging application, competitor Signal—which does not collect user data—on Tuesday began trolling the Read more…
January 14, 2021 by Ethics In Tech board member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams Seeing President Donald Trump banned from social media might feel good, and it might even thwart some criminal acts inspired by the president’s inflammatory rhetoric. But kicking Trump off Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms sets a perilous precedent Read more…
November 30, 2020 by Ethics In Tech Board Member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams Silicon Valley tech giants Facebook and YouTube have allowed themselves to become complicit in Vietnamese government repression, including censorship, harassment, and more, according to a report published Monday evening by Amnesty International. The report, entitled Let Us Read more…
November 10, 2020—By Ethics In Tech Board Member Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams President Donald Trump’s Republican nominee to the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday failed to disclose to the Senate his support for an effort backed by the president to gut what one leading advocacy group called “the most Read more…
By Brett Wilkins One would be remiss to say it all started with the tweets suggesting that MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough murdered his young aide nearly 20 years ago. To do so would ignore a years-long relationship between Donald Trump and Twitter in which the social Read more…
By Brett Wilkins Coronavirus misinformation is making me sick. Conspiracy theorists and armchair epidemiologists are running rampant on social media. This, despite tech companies’ best efforts to cure this cancer. If you’re familiar with the work of Ethics In Tech, you know that we are highly and incessantly critical of Read more…