Social Media

Ahmed al-Sharaa founded the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, but is now advocating unity. The Atlantic's Robert Worth discusses al-Sharaa's leadership and the Trump administration's group chat on Signal.

A new law gives TikTok a Jan. 19 deadline to sell to a non-Chinese company or face a nationwide ban. Law professor Alan Rozenshtein explains what this means and how President-elect Trump might intervene.

Congress and President Biden say TikTok must shed its financial ties to China or face a ban in the U.S. But Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell says selling the company is complicated.

Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell says the unpublished report shows that tech companies didn't respond to employees' warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms.

Tech journalist Casey Newton says Elon Musk did not inherit a company in crisis — but after massive layoffs and upheaval the social media giant is losing money and Musk is warning of bankruptcy.

Time magazine's Vera Bergengruen says Ukraine's citizen IT force, led by a 31-year-old minister of digital transformation, is blunting Russian disinformation and galvanizing international support.

Eliot Higgins is the founder of an online collective that picks apart conspiracy theories and investigates war crimes and hate crimes using clues from the Internet. His new book is We Are Bellingcat.

New York Times Magazine writer Emily Bazelon says false content moves through the Internet unchecked — undermining the political process along the way: "Lies often go viral faster than truth."

With all our texting, tweeting and social media posting, billions of people are using typed words for the kind everyday communication that used to happen more often in conversation. A new book argues that we’ve created a unique new language to reproduce the shades of meaning that we used to convey verbally. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the new rules of language that he calls chat-speak.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her new collection of essays is written from the perspective of a millenial about subjects like social media and politics, feminist dilemmas, sexual harassment, and sexism.

During his 20-year tenure running the British newspaper The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger collaborated with NSA contractor Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on blockbuster stories drawn from secret government documents. He also had to help remake the paper in the digital age.

P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking say social media has been manipulated to fuel popular uprisings and affect the course of military and political campaigns. Their new book is LikeWar.

A talk with New Yorker staff writer EVAN OSNOS about the crisis at Facebook. Serious data breaches and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign have put the company and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, under scrutiny as the mid-term elections approach.

The former YouTube star says he wanted his film, Eighth Grade, to take an "emotional inventory" of what today's adolescents are experiencing. Originally broadcast July 18, 2018.

Klausner plays an unsuccessful comic who quips about celebrities in her Hulu series, which recently launched its third season. Originally broadcast Aug. 16, 2016.

In Difficult People, Klausner and her co-star Billy Eichner play unsuccessful New York comics who constantly make snarky comments about celebrities, movies, TV shows and theater. Klausner says that though the tone of the show is often one of anger or annoyance, the energy behind it isn't all negative.

Author Sarah Hepola has complained for years about the random hatred of the Internet. Then, with one careless post, she became part of the problem.

Social media and dating apps are putting unprecedented pressures on America's teen girls, author Nancy Jo Sales says. Her new book, American Girls, opens with a story about one 13-year-old who received an Instagram request for "noodz" [nude photos] from a boy she didn't know very well.

CNN's Peter Bergen describes how the Internet and social media have been used to radicalize and recruit Americans to jihad — and how some new jihadists then use those same tools to draw in others.

Pinterest has created a database of things that matter to humans. And with a programming team that's largely been hired away from Google, the company has begun offering what it calls "guided search."