Facebook has been fending off accusations of censorship and bias against conservatives over the last year or so and just ahead of the mid-term elections it has made a risky decision. On Thursday, the company announced that it had removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts for rule violations. It said many of the accounts were engaged in spreading political content. Read More >>

On Tuesday, a researcher for Google’s Project Zero security team published a report revealing how WhatsApp users could lose control of their account just by answering a video call from a bad actor. Read More >>

Twitter has made a subtle, but not insignificant change to the way it counts emoji in its 280-character limit. Moving forward, all of its natively supported emoji will count as two characters. Previously, adding skin tone and gender modifiers to an emoji unintentionally penalised users and many likely didn’t even realise it. Read More >>

For years, a team at Amazon reportedly worked on software that vetted the resumes of job applicants in an effort to surface the most likely hires. It gradually became clear that no matter how hard engineers tried to fix it, the recruitment engine found a way to discriminate against women, Reuters reported today. Read More >>

Google’s Pixel 2 was a good smartphone with a great camera. For the Pixel 3, the company’s bringing us a bunch of new software solutions to make the photos look even better. Read More >>

We’re at a critical inflection point for the World Wide Web. Everything is changing, disappearing, splintering, expanding, and being remade. It’s time we provide legal protection to what’s left of this moment in history. And one way to do that is to make it a national monument. Read More >>

WikiLeaks’ founder has been stuck in Ecuador’s London embassy for six years and cut off from accessing the internet for six months. Those circumstances have made it difficult for him to do the job of running WikiLeaks and the organisation announced on Thursday that Assange will step aside as its editor-in-chief. Read More >>

Earlier this week, controversy arose around the latest release of Google’s Chrome web browser because it’s far too easy for users to be forced to log in without realising they’re doing it. Google now says it’ll be making some changes to solve the problem. Read More >>

On Monday, the founders of Instagram announced they were leaving to focus on new opportunities. To the surprise of no one, it’s looking like the problem was the CEO of Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. And with those meddlesome founders out of the way, users should worry about a Facebook-ified Insta. Read More >>

In honour of its 20th anniversary, Google is making a load of changes to search, some you’ll notice and others will be more subtle. All will likely leave some users asking: “Do I really want this?” Read More >>

Once again, Google has rankled privacy-focused people with a product change that appears to limit users’ options. It’s easy to miss the fact that you’re automatically being logged-in to Chrome if you’re not paying attention. Read More >>

The 2016 US Presidential Election was undoubtedly the worst thing that’s ever happened to Facebook, and it’s doing everything it can to signal that it wants to avoid a repeat of that nightmare. On Thursday, it told reporters that it will stop dispatching employees to work directly with political campaigns. Read More >>

The three architects of the Mirai botnet just wanted to devise a scheme to make some money in the competitive business of hosting Minecraft servers. The weapon they built ended up showing the world how dangerous DDoS attacks can be. Now, their lives have taken another unexpected turn as the US Justice Department has given them a pass and some work to do. Read More >>

The Wall Street Journal spoke with numerous Gmail users who are a little weirded out by the now-fully rolled out Smart Reply feature that scans your email for context and suggests three potential replies. Among the anecdotes about awkward interactions and giving up our personhood to the machines, the piece also revealed that Google will soon make the feature optional on desktops. Read More >>

Twitter is finally leading the way in making a change to its platform that every social network should implement: It’s bringing back the chronological timeline. I’ve been using a workaround to do this for a bit and people have no idea how strong the algorithmic Stockholm syndrome can be. Read More >>