Now that I’m an adult, I see how Instagram is extremely dangerous for teens with an unhealthy body image—and they need our help to lessen the harms of social media.
When I was 15 years old, I was diagnosed with anorexia. I fully recovered, unlike many of my peers, but it was an uphill battle.
For companies who want to reach this generation, it’s not too late to embrace TikTok.
Are you wiping your vulva the right way?
In the photo, Beyoncé looks beatific, with a closed-lip Mona Lisa smile. But it’s easy enough to give her a toothy grin. Just dial up her “Happiness” to the maximum level using Adobe Photoshop’s Smart Portrait tool, and her face gets a Cheshire cat-like smile, white teeth appearing out of thin air.
Over the years, social media platforms have gone on the record countless times about plans to “finally” curb harassment, hate speech, and misinformation. Last month was no different: YouTube announced a ban on all anti-vaccine content, Facebook said it had created a new policy against “coordinated social harm,” and Twitter unveiled new tools that it said would lead to better filtering and limiting replies.
Many websites and apps use black box algorithms to aggregate how many stars an item or experience receives—sometimes in a misleading way.
A while back, I bought a mouthwash that was advertised on Amazon. It was from a well-known brand, and it had a high consumer-rating score. The mouthwash turned out to be greasy, the bottle was poorly designed, and it tasted awful: I would have given the item one star. The high rating was baffling. Surely, others agreed with me, so I returned to the item’s page to see if there were other low ratings. It turned out there were many, and nearly all those reviews reiterated my criticisms. Despite so many 1-star reviews, how did the product get such a high overall rating?
China’s government is cracking down on what technology companies can develop—an approach that will halt innovation.
China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), recently issued a draft proposal of regulations to manage how technology companies use algorithms when providing services to consumers.
For years, we’ve seen the massive expansion of the surveillance state, a network of public and private tracking tools that can monitor nearly every aspect of our lives. These tools have been used to terrorize communities of color, rip undocumented families apart, and enable other abuses. But as anti-choice bounty hunters start to enforce Texas’s terrifying new law, these same systems will likely have a new target: abortion.