A part of Donald Trump's campaign website looked different than usual until Monday morning. Its "action" subdomain, which usually houses his calls to action, contained a Turkish message instead. "Do not be like those who forgot Allah, so Ally made them forget themselves. Here they really went astray," the message in Turkish said, according to Newsweek. The page also contained a video embed of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as a link to the hacker's Instagram and Facebook pages.

A hacker calling themselves RootAyyildiz has claimed responsibility for the defacement — and for many others in the past. The National Intelligence Council released a report earlier this year linking them to the defacement of Biden-Harris' presidential campaign website, as well. Back then, Biden's website showed a message in Turkish, the country's flag and a photo of the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid II. 

RootAyyildiz told Motherboard that they used a technique called Server Side Template Injection (SSTI) to inject their own code into the site's template and that they had control of the site for three months. According to Forbes, references to RootAyyildiz first appeared on the website on October 9th, at the latest. The hacker added in a statement to Motherboard: "There are many areas of hacking attacks, for example, hacking social media accounts or websites, I am a hacktivist and I have been working on websites for a long time and I choose this management to have my voice heard." 

Before the US Presidential Elections last year, hackers were also able to gain control of Trump's website. They replaced its About page with a message threatening to discredit the then-POTUS by sharing incriminating data. 

If Facebook is going to become a "metaverse company," it's going to need talent — and more of that talent is on the horizon. The social network has unveiled plans to add 10,000 "high-skilled" jobs across the European Union over five years to build its virtual and augmented reality experiences. The recruiting drive will hire workers in countries including France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

Facebook characterized the move as a "vote of confidence" in the European tech sector. It has a large customer base, of course, but the social media company also pointed to bleeding-edge teams in multiple fields as well as "first class" university education. Facebook even touted the EU's "leading" policies on issues like freedom of speech, privacy and transparency despite the firm's run-ins with regulators.

The tech giant already has a Reality Labs office in Cork, Ireland, and has opened an AI research lab in France. In 2019, Facebook partnered with the Technical University of Munich to create an AI ethics research center.

As with many jobs announcements, this is as much a public relations move as it is a practical investment. It may 'remind' the EU of Facebook's economic contribution and influence relevant policies. Nonetheless, the move hints at the long-term scale of the metaverse transition — Facebook is changing its overall direction, not just shuffling a few resources.

Netflix has fired an employee, alleging they shared confidential, commercially sensitive information about Dave Chappelle's new standup special, The Closer, with media outlets, Variety reported. 

The employee is accused of leaking data that appeared in Bloomberg about how much Netflix paid for a handful of shows and standup specials, including The Closer and previous Chappelle contracts. According to Bloomberg, Netflix spent $24.1 million on The Closer, compared with $23.6 million for his 2019 show, and just $3.9 million for Bo Burnham's Emmy-winning special Inside. Squid Game, the biggest series debut in Netflix history, cost the company $21.4 million, the report said.

“We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company," the company said in a statement to Variety.

Netflix employees and external equality groups — including GLADD and the National Black Justice Coalition — have called for The Closer to be removed from the streaming service, arguing it contains hateful transphobic and homophobic rhetoric. In the special, Chappelle doubles down on his previous transphobic comments and defends the bigotry of anti-trans feminist JK Rowling. As of now, the special is still available on Netflix.

"With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States — the majority of whom are Black transgender people — Netflix should know better," David Johns, executive director of the NBJC, said to CNN. "Perpetuating transphobia perpetuates violence. Netflix should immediately pull The Closer from its platform and directly apologize to the transgender community."

Netflix executives have said little publicly about the controversy, though CEO Ted Sarandos reportedly said in an internal memo that The Closer was too popular to remove.

The fired employee was a leader of the company's internal trans resource group, and was helping to organize a walkout in protest of Netflix's handling of the Chappelle special, The Verge reported. The walkout is planned for October 20th. The former employee is Black and pregnant, and actually spoke out against leaks with colleagues, arguing that they could hurt the walkout, according to The Verge.

Earlier this month, Netflix suspended a trans software engineer who tweeted her disapproval of the Chappelle special. The employee was reinstated a day later and Netflix said the suspension was due to an unrelated matter.

New research has found that policies put in place by YouTube to curb election misinformation had a significant impact on the number of false and misleading videos on Facebook and Twitter. The findings come from a report a team of researchers from theCenter for Social Media and Politics at New York University shared withThe New York Times. In the immediate aftermath of the US election on November 3rd, the researchers recorded a dramatic increase in the number of YouTube election fraud videos shared on Twitter. That month, those clips represented approximately one-third of all election-related videos shared on the platform.

After December 8th, the day YouTube said it would remove videos that claimed widespread errors and fraud changed the outcome of the contest, there was a dramatic drop in misleading election claims on Twitter. In that time period, the ratio of election fraud videos shared on Twitter from YouTube dropped to below 20 percent. That ratio fell again following the US Capitol riot when YouTube said it would hand out strikes to any channel spreading misinformation about the results of the election. By the time President Biden swore the Oath of Office on January 20th, only around five percent of all election fraud videos on Twitter were coming from YouTube.

The researchers saw that same trend play out on Facebook. Before YouTube’s December 8th policy decision, about 18 percent of all videos shared on the platform were related to election fraud theories. By Inauguration Day, that number fell to four percent. To compile their findings, the team at New York University collected a random sampling of 10 percent of all tweets each day and then isolated the ones that linked out to YouTube videos. They did the same on Facebook using the company’s CrowdTangle tool.

If nothing else, the findings highlight the outsized role YouTube plays in how information is shared in our current moment. As the most ubiquitous video platform on the internet, the company has an enormous amount of power to shape political discourse. Its policies can do both great harm and good. “It’s a huge part of the information ecosystem,” Megan Brown, a researcher at the Center for Social Media and Politics told The Times. “When YouTube’s platform becomes healthier, others do as well.”

LinkedIn will shut down the Chinese version of its service later this year. The company cited "a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China" as the reasons for closing the local edition of its social network for professionals.

"While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs and economic opportunity, we have not found that same level of success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed," LinkedIn said in a statement. As such, the company isn't abandoning China completely. It's working on a standalone job board app called InJobs, which won't have a social feed or any way to share posts or articles.

LinkedIn agreed to adhere to state restrictions and block certain content when it launched in China in February 2014. However, some signs of trouble bubbled up this year. In March, the company prevented new Chinese users from signing up for a spell while it made sure it was abiding by the countries' laws. A couple of months later, China said 105 apps were violating data collection laws, including LinkedIn.

The Microsoft-owned service was the last major US social network that was still officially operating in China. The country banned Signal and Clubhouse earlier this year. Facebook and Twitter have been blocked there since 2009, and China barred Instagram in 2014.

Don't be surprised if your Twitter feed is cluttered with more advertising than usual. The Vergereports that Twitter is testing a format that displays ads in the replies to a given tweet. As Revenue Product Lead Bruce Falk explains, those involved in the test will see ads under the first, third or eighth reply to a tweet. The experiment is worldwide and applies to both Android and iOS users.

Falck said the ad format produces value and "aligns incentives for creators and advertisers." However, he also acknowledged that it wasn't a surefire concept. Twitter would spend the "coming months" testing the frequency, layouts and other aspects of the ads to see how well they perform and affect the community. This could be helpful for advertisers, of course, but it might also lead to more compensation for Twitter users.

This probably isn't the sort of Twitter test you'd want to see, but it's not surprising. Twitter has been eager to find new sources of revenue for both itself and its most prolific users, ranging from Blue subscriptions to Tip Jar donations. Ads in replies could not only improve Twitter's bottom line, but attract creators used to making money from sponsored Instagram and TikTok posts.

One of the obvious goals of almost every computer vision project is to enable a machine to see, and perceive, the world as a human does. Today, Facebook has started talkingabout Ego4D, its own effort in this space, for which it has created a vast new data set to train future models. In a statement, the company said that it had recruited 13 universities across nine countries, who had collected 2,200 hours of footage from 700 participants. This footage was taken from the perspective of the user, which can be used to train these future AI models. Kristen Grauman, Facebook’s lead research scientist, says that this is the largest collection of data explicitly created for this focus.

The footage was centered on a number of common experiences in human life, including social interaction, hand and object manipulation and predicting what’s going to happen. It’s, as far as the social network is concerned, a big step toward better computing experiences which, until now, have always focused on sourcing data from the bystander’s perspective. Facebook has said that the data sets will be released in November, “for researchers who sign Ego4D’s data use agreement.” And, next year, researchers from beyond this community will be challenged to better train machines to understand what exactly humans are doing in their lives.

Naturally, there is the angle that Facebook, which now has a camera glasses partnership with Ray Ban, is looking to improve its own capabilities in future. You probably already know about the perils of what this potential surveillance could entail, and why anyone might feel a little leery about the announcement.

Facebook is slowly expanding its effort to weed out political content from News Feed. The company is now testing its “less political” feed in 75 new countries, Facebook said in an update.

The company has already introduced a version of the revamped News Feed in the United States, as well as Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia. But the latest update marks a significant expansion of the effort, and brings the total number of countries involved to more than 80. Facebook didn’t identify the latest countries to join the test, but a spokesperson confirmed the company is showing the News Feed changes to “a small percentage of people” in each country. The spokesperson added that countries with upcoming elections and those “at higher risk of conflict” are not included in the tests.

Mark Zuckerberg first announced plans to make News Feed less political in January, just weeks after the insurrection. “People don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience,” he said at the time.

Rolling out the changes to more countries could help Facebook learn more about how to lower the temperature on its platform, which could be particularly useful as the company is accused of making its service angrier to boost engagement. At the same time, the company has acknowledged the changes could hurt publishers. “As we get more insights from these tests, we’ll share updates on what we’re learning and will continue to make changes accordingly,” Facebook wrote in an updated blog post.

Some Snapchat users are having problems with the app this morning, with several noting on Twitter that they're unable to send snaps. The company acknowledged the outage and said it was looking into the matter. 

Outage reports from users skyrocketed on Down Detector just before 7AM ET before tapering off somewhat at around 9:30AM. A heat map indicated that reports were coming in from across the US and, at the time of writing, users are still grousing about the outage on Twitter. Engadget has contacted Snap for more details, and we'll update this post when things look like they're getting back to normal.

This is the latest big outage to affect a major social media service over the last week or so. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for more than six hours on October 4th. Facebook blamed the outage on a "faulty configuration change" that caused havoc with the DNS servers. Facebook's apps went down yet again for a couple of hours last Friday. Twitter, meanwhile, briefly had issues of its own on Tuesday evening, with tweets not loading for some users for a spell.

Twitter's latest test is all about how you view tweets in the app. Some users on iOS will be able to swipe between the Home feed, which shows the top tweets in your timeline, and a chronological look at the latest tweets (the proper way to use Twitter, but you do you).

It's a fairly small user interface change, but a handy one for those who dart between the two views. The current method of switching between the views is through the button on the top right of the screen, but a swipe is quicker than a couple of taps.

The update could make the app's home screen a little messier if you have pinned lists that you swipe through. Still, it could be a welcome quality of life change for some folks while making the two options more prominent.