Lots of social media in the news this week:
- Twitter suspends prominent alt-right accounts
Twitter has suspended a number of accounts associated with alt-right figure Richard Spencer. Spencer is the president of a white nationalist think tank. In the past, Twitter has faced criticism for failing to suspend accounts engaged in “targeted abuse or harassment of others.” (WaPo) - Cybersecurity CEO fired for posting death threats to Trump on Facebook
Matt Harrigan was fired from his job as CEO of cybersecurity firm PacketSled after he posted comments on Facebook threatening to kill the president-elect and claiming he was going to get a sniper rifle and place himself “where it counts.” Harrigan’s Facebook account was set so that only his friends could see his posts, but that didn’t keep his posts from being screen shotted and shared on social media.Harrigan told the Washington Post:
“I said some things that I’m deeply regretful for, and I would apologize to anybody, including the president-elect,” Harrigan said. “If I could take it all back, I absolutely would, because of course I don’t mean any of those things. They’re absurd.”“It was intended to be funny, but it was a very bad joke in very poor taste,” he said.
Hint: Death threats against anyone are never funny. They are especially not funny when directed against the president or president-elect.
- Google to ban “fake news” sites from advertising using AdSense
There’s been a big backlash as of this week about fake news being shared through social media such as Facebook. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google has responded to this by banning the sale of AdSense ads to companies that on pages that “‘misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose’ of the website.”