Engineers at Facebook have recently developed a "Sympathize" button as an alternative to the not-always-appropriate "Like" button. "Sympathize" would become a response option specifically for status updates containing depressing content — like news of breakups, pets dying or alerts signaling that you've been listening to…
It's pretty common to hear particular technologies presented as being either for dudes (i.e., srs bsns gadgets) or for girls (think messaging apps and anything related to shopping). It's also common to see technologies adopted by female consumers as either fluffy or some quasi-miraculous sign of alien life—see every…
Shortly after we wrote about Facebook's refusal to remove a page glorifying the New Zealand Teen Rape Club known as the "Roast Busters," the page quietly disappeared from the social networking site. But don't bake Facebook any fucking cookies; there's still no way for users to report pages for "sexual violence." And other …
I'm not sure what drags fear-mongering garbage memes like this 2009-vintage "Developer of Gardasil Admits that Vaccine Is Basically Just Bubonic Plague" hoax back from the dead every couple of years, but there it is, going around and around on my Facebook feed again today. Because this apparently needs to be said: THIS…
The New Zealand teen rapists
Ugh, Facebook, could just quit creepin' on my shit all the time? Like, it's fine if you want to provide a convenient platform for me to accidentally let my mom know that I got a parking tickets, for obviously fake people named "Dennis" to sexually proposition me, and for misogynists to steal my pics and photoshop chewed…
Earlier this month
Over the past weekend, I fell into the booby-trap of the internet, and it saved my life. After hanging out with some rad, critical, hilarious, and fun friends over the weekend, I got tricked into thinking that Facebook is, in general, a great place to engage others in critical and meaningful conversations about how…
A pair of teenagers in Morocco were arrested earlier this week for violating public decency after posting a photo of themselves kissing on Facebook. The photo caused all the pearls to be clutched in the small, northeastern town of Nador, and the teens, along with their friend who took the picture, are scheduled to…
The RomCom is having enough time remaining culturally relevant
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have analyzed 700 million words and phrases from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers. The resulting word clouds show the extent to which our use of language is influenced by our personality, age, and sex.
As of yesterday, Facebook Graph Search has officially opened its big, omniscient arms
Dave Eggers' new novel, The Circle, is about a young woman who lands a job at a massive Silicon Valley company clearly modeled after Facebook. Funny thing, though: early Facebook employee Kate Losse already wrote about her experience in a 2012 memoir, The Boy Kings. Based on the The Circle's introduction alone, it…
The internet is not the place to go if you’re looking for universal validation for your life choices. Sure, you may run into a lot of similarly-minded people who will tell you, “Oh, it is extremely cool that you’re having a Christian Slater marathon this afternoon, and you’re right — best not even to bother with…
Until the morning, Facebook was running two ads for a Canadian dating site, both of which featured photos of Rehtaeh Parsons
Last July, Facebook proudly announced that more than one million companies now advertise on your newsfeed. We've noticed. Facebook has started to resemble a SkyMall catalog, only without the potential to buy engraved chin-rest neck-holders for your dog — most ads we get range from obnoxious to actually offensive.
If you make an OKCupid account but never check it because you only get messages from self-proclaimed Nice Guys/the entire endeavor fills you with existential dread, the site will attempt to reel you back in by telling you how hot and elite you are.
It seems banning actual breastfeeding wasn't enough for Facebook, they're now going after booby seabirds, too!
Facebook isn't content to solely live on your screens, it must also cover the digits you use to communicate with the master in its Social Butterfly Blue.
You know when you're herding cows to the slaughter and one cow starts going in one direction and so all the other cows follow? No, that's not an experience you're familiar with? Well the internet is sort of like that, says a new study released on how "liking" a comment will prompt other people to "like" it too.
Derek Medina, 31, fatally shot his wife, Jennifer Alfonso, in their South Miami home this morning. He then posted a confessions and pictures of her dead, bloody body to his Facebook wall.
As a feminist, I'm occasionally accused of both witchcraft and hating children, which isn't fair. I don't hate children; I love them. I only have two problems with children: first, that people keep having them and then acting like the first person in human history to ever have a baby, and second, that people keep…
Navigating social media can be both difficult and daunting: for the average Internet user, controlling your privacy settings is often simply baffling (I stopped understanding how they function about three "new Facebooks" ago and I basically sleep with my laptop clutched to my breast). For any survivor of domestic…
Sean Parker's wedding is the gift that keeps on giving. For those that were enraptured by the 364 beautiful costumes
Grief-stricken Kelly Cutrone, the Joe Pesci of Bravo, unleashed her Facebook wrath on NYT's Margalit Fox for skimming over her deceased ex-husband Ronnie Cutrone's art world cred:
If there's anything I've learned from popular television programs that feature surly adolescents going, "MOOOOOM, STOOPPPP!!!", it's that teens are ungrateful little shits. Out of your own body, you expunge a beautiful, tiny infant; it grows into a glorious and sweet child; then it hunches its way through puberty and…
On Sunday, Tom Stocky, a manager at Facebook, wrote a post on his um, Facebook about his experience taking paternity leave at a company that actually allows its employees to take a respectable paternity leave. The result is a totally unsurprising look at the ways that men are discouraged by those around them from…
In a segment called Bring It Online (good one), a concerned bigot asked televangelist troll Pat Robertson whether "Liking" things on Facebook that go "against what is written in the Bibles" — like your Pride pics — is a sin worthy of eternal damnation. (Pressing stuff! Next up: "If I take an Instagram selfie, am I a slut…
