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Newsletter platform Ghost is the latest service to pledge support for ActivityPub, the open source protocol powering the fediverse. The company announced Monday it would add ActivityPub support later this year in a move that could bring tens of millions of people into the fediverse. The fediverse is a growing collection of services, including Mastodon, Flipboard and Threads, that support the ActivityPub protocol. Its part of a growing movement for decentralized social media services, which rely on open protocols rather than closed networks. Proponents often compare it to email, which allows people to communicate regardless of their preferred app or platform. In a blog post laying out its vision, Ghost said it was joining the fediverse in an effort to bring back the open web. On, Ghost publishers will be able to follow, like and interact with one another in the same way that you would normally do on a social network but on your own website, the company wrote. The difference, of course, is that youll also be able to follow, like, and interact with users on Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Buttondown, WriteFreely, Tumblr, WordPress, PeerTube, Pixelfed... or any other platform that has adopted ActivityPub, too. While Ghost says ActivityPub integration will be optional for publishers, the company notes that its entry into the fediverse could bring "tens of millions" of new people into the space. A number of popular newsletters run on Ghost, including Platformer, Garbage Day, Shes a Beast, as does the independent tech news site 404 Media.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/newsletter-service-ghost-will-support-the-fediverse-protocol-activitypub-231359155.html?src=rss
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A Russian military court sentenced Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in absentia to six years in prison for "publicly defending terrorism," Reuters reports. Stone's lawyer reportedly asked for an acquittal and there are plans to appeal the sentence. A few months after Russian officials placed him on a wanted list and started a criminal investigation, a Moscow court issued an arrest warrant for Stone on several terrorism-related charges in February. It cited Stone's alleged "promotion of terrorist activities, public calls for terrorist activities, public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism and public calls for extremist activities." The measure follows Russia's investigative committee opening a probe into Meta in March 2022. It claimed that Stone had incited extremist activity after lifting "a ban on calls for violence against the Russian military on its platforms." Around that time, Stone said Meta was "temporarily" allowing some posts that would have previously been taken down for inciting violence to stay on its platforms, but noted that the company would still outlaw credible calls for violence against Russian civilians. In any case, it seems unlikely that Stone will actually spend time behind bars in Russia, unless he were to travel there or to a country that has an extradition treaty with the nation. It's not uncommon for a person to be charged or sentenced (often for spying- or hacking-related crimes) in another country and never actually have to deal with those consequences. Russia has designated Meta as an extremist organization. It blocked access to Facebook and Instagram soon after commencing its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Engadget has contacted Meta for comment.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/russian-court-sentences-meta-spokesperson-in-absentia-to-six-years-in-prison-201500601.html?src=rss
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In 2024, four billion people about half the worlds population in 64 countries including large democracies like the US and India, will head to the polls. Social media companies like Meta, YouTube and TikTok, have promised to protect the integrity of those elections, at least as far as discourse and factual claims being made on their platforms are concerned. Missing from the conversation, however, is closed messaging app WhatsApp, which now rivals public social media platforms in both scope and reach. That absence has researchers from non-profit Mozilla worried. Almost 90% of the safety interventions pledged by Meta ahead of these elections are focused on Facebook and Instagram, Odanga Madung, a senior researcher at Mozilla focused on elections and platform integrity, told Engadget. Why has Meta not publicly committed to a public road map of exactly how its going to protect elections within [WhatsApp]? Over the last ten years, WhatsApp, which Meta (then Facebook) bought for $19 billion in 2014, has become the default way for most of the world outside the US to communicate. In 2020, WhatsApp announced that it had more than two billion users around the world a scale that dwarfs every other social or messaging app except Facebook itself. Despite that scale, Metas focus has mostly been only on Facebook when it comes to election-related safety measures. Mozillas analysis found that while Facebook had made 95 policy announcements related to elections since 2016, the year the social network came under scrutiny for helping spread fake news and foster extreme political sentiments. WhatsApp only made 14. By comparison, Google and YouTube made 35 and 27 announcements each, while X and TikTok had 34 and 21 announcements respectively. From what we can tell from its public announcements, Metas election efforts seem to overwhelmingly prioritize Facebook, wrote Madung in the report. Mozilla is now calling on Meta to make major changes to how WhatsApp functions during polling days and in the months before and after a countrys elections. They include adding disinformation labels to viral content (Highly forwarded: please verify instead of the current forwarded many times), restricting broadcast and Communities features that let people blast messages to hundreds of people at the same time and nudging people to pause and reflect before they forward anything. More than 16,000 people have signed Mozillas pledge asking WhatsApp to slow the spread of political disinformation, a company spokesperson told Engadget. WhatsApp first started adding friction to its service after dozens of people were killed in India, the companys largest market, in a series of lynchings sparked by misinformation that went viral on the platform. This included limiting the number of people and groups that users could forward a piece of content to, and distinguishing forwarded messages with forwarded labels. Adding a forwarded label was a measure to curb misinformation the idea was that people might treat forwarded content with greater skepticism. Someone in Kenya or Nigeria or India using WhatsApp for the first time is not going to think about the meaning of the forwarded label in the context of misinformation, Madung said. In fact, it might have the opposite effect that something has been highly forwarded, so it must be credible. For many communities, social proof is an important factor in establishing the credibility of something. The idea of asking people to pause and reflect came from a feature that Twitter once implemented where the app prompted people to actually read an article before retweeting it if they hadnt opened it first. Twitter said that the prompt led to a 40% increase in people opening articles before retweeting them And asking WhatsApp to temporarily disable its broadcast and Communities features arose from concerns over their potential to blast messages, forwarded or otherwise, to thousands of people at once. Theyre trying to turn this into the next big social media platform, Madung said. But without the consideration for the rollout of safety features. WhatsApp is one of the only technology companies to intentionally constrain sharing by introducing forwarding limits and labeling messages that have been forwarded many times, a WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget. Weve built new tools to empower users to seek accurate information while protecting them from unwanted contact, which we detail on our website. Mozillas demands came out of research around platforms and elections that the company did in Brazil, India and Liberia. The former are two of WhatsApps largest markets, while most of the population of Liberia lives in rural areas with low internet penetration, making traditional online fact-checking nearly impossible. Across all three countries, Mozilla found political parties using WhatsApps broadcast feature heavily to micro-target voters with propaganda, and, in some cases, hate speech. WhatsApps encrypted nature also makes it impossible for researchers to monitor what is circulating within the platforms ecosystem a limitation that isnt stopping some of them from trying. In 2022, two Rutgers professors, Kiran Garimella and Simon Chandrachud visited the offices of political parties in India and managed to convince officials to add them to 500 WhatsApp groups that they ran. The data that they gathered formed the basis of a award-winning paper they wrote called What circulates on Partisan WhatsApp in India? Although the findings were surprising Garimella and Chandrachud found that misinformation and hate speech did not, in fact, make up a majority of the content of these groups the authors clarified that their sample size was small, and they may have deliberately been excluded from groups where hate speech and political misinformation flowed freely. Encryption is a red herring to prevent accountability on the platform, Madung said. In an electoral context, the problems are not necessarily with the content purely. Its about the fact that a small group of people can end up significantly influencing groups of people with ease. These apps have removed the friction of the transmission of information through society.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mozilla-urges-whatsapp-to-combat-misinformation-ahead-of-global-elections-200002024.html?src=rss
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Hollywood has really begun flexing its video game adaptation muscle in the wake of the spectacular success of the Fallout TV show and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Even indie publishers are getting some of those sweet, sweet development contracts. Case in point? The hit third-person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere is being adapted into a feature length film, as reported by Deadline. Academy Award nominee LaKeith Stanfield is in talks to both star and produce. Stanfield is known for a slew of great films, like Sorry to Bother You, Judas and the Black Messiah and The Book of Clarence, among others. Di Bonaventura Pictures and Colin Stark will also produce. The game has players control a drug-addicted vampire hunter as he tracks down a blood-sucking ex-girlfriend whos set on ending the world. The movie will follow a similar story structure, according to Deadline. The indie title has been praised for being a fantastic homage to third-person action shooters like the Max Payne series, though one that absolutely oozes surreal charm. In other words, it makes sense as a movie. Of course, this is just the latest video game adaptation to ping our radar. Fallout, The Last of Us and Twisted Metal have all been renewed for second seasons. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is getting a sequel and The Legend of Zelda is finally being adapted into a movie. More recently, it was announced that the horror-tinged fishing sim Dredge is being turned into a movie, as is the action game Sifu. There are also upcoming cartoons based on Splinter Cell, Vampire Survivors and Golden Axe. That's not all. There are upcoming movies based on Borderlands, Minecraft, Gears of War and so many others, not to mention the multimodal Sonic the Hedgehog cinematic universe. Video games and Hollywood are finally besties, after decades of false starts. Now, give me a series adaptation of the Dreamcast-era virtual pet Seaman, you cowards.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/even-the-indie-game-el-paso-elsewhere-is-getting-turned-into-a-movie-191423219.html?src=rss
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The second installment in EA's Star Wars Jedi series is coming to Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass and EA Play this week. Subscribers can continue Cal Kestis' journey in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on April 25, almost a year to the day after its debut. If you haven't checked out the first steps of Cal's adventure, it might be best to get started with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which is also available through those services. Jedi: Survivor picks up five years after the events of the previous game, with Cal continuing his fight against the Empire. This time around, you have five lightsaber stances to make use of, while the maps are larger than in Jedi: Fallen Order (at least the sequel includes fast travel). While Jedi: Survivor was generally well-reviewed, the PC port had notoriously poor performance out of the gate an issue that developer Respawn Entertainment has tried to remedy through updates. A third game is in the works, but there will be a different figure in charge. Stig Asmussen, the director of the first two entries, left EA to set up his own studio. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/star-wars-jedi-survivor-is-coming-to-game-pass-ultimate-and-ea-play-on-april-25-181028179.html?src=rss
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