President Trump over the weekend falsely blamed Democrats for a “horrible law” separating immigrant children from their parents. In fact, his own administration had just announced this policy earlier this month. His comments followed days of growing alarm that federal authorities have lost track of more than 1,000 immigrant children, mostly from Central America, giving…
Yet the government’s social media manipulation tracks with crackdowns in recent years in other authoritarian states, said Alexei Abrahams, a research fellow at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Even for conversations involving millions of tweets, a few hundred or a few thousand influential accounts drive the discussion, he said, citing new research. The…
President Donald Trump was eager to have a Republican memo alleging bias in the Russia probe released to the public, several people around him said.Now that it’s out, Trump took to Twitter to promote it for that purpose -- although the document may not be as effective as the president wants it to be.It didn’t,…
Back in June 2016, Facebook issued a statement. "Facebook Does Not Use Your Phone's Microphone for Ads or News Feed Stories," is its headline. The copy of the post goes into more detail: "Some recent articles have suggested that we must be listening to people's conversations in order to show them relevant ads. This is…
The interior of the new Toys R Us in Paramus, New Jersey. Shoshy Ciment/Business Insider Toys R Us is back from the dead with a new store in New Jersey after the toy retailer closed all its US locations in the summer of 2018.Tru Kids was created to resurrect the brand this year and is in…
The new year has started in a familiar, chaotic way at Tesla. It wasn't supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be that the company's financial success at the end of 2018 changed its destiny and DNA, that it would start to behave like the "real car company" CEO Elon Musk so often…
Kevin Hassett, the chair of President Donald Trump's Council of Economic Advisers, offered a frank assessment of the cost of the ongoing government shutdown, warning that the closure could result in a mess for the US economy. Hassett told CNN in an interview on Wednesday that US economic growth could be zero for the first…
Uber's and WeWork's well-publicized struggles with public investors may not be a good look for SoftBank, their deep-pocketed backer. But for now, the fallout of those disappointments is likely to be limited, venture-capital experts say. Investors far and wide still have plenty of capital floating around and are constantly looking for ways to invest it,…
For the past two years, Facebook has been roiled by data scandals, a failure to police its service, and a major shift in strategy to focus on privacy. In fixing all the problems, CEO Mark Zuckerberg will now have to do without a key lieutenant who was once seen as a possible successor. Zuckerberg said…
“We have failed to properly manage health risks at our semiconductor and LCD factories.” That’s the sobering message Samsung’s top executives contritely delivered Friday, as the South Korean tech giant signed a settlement to compensate employees who developed numerous types of illness in its factories. Campaigners have since 2007 been pressuring the company over the…
