Technology

As part of a Blackout Tuesday protest originally organized by workers in the music industry, users on social media, particularly Instagram, are sharing images of black squares in solidarity with black victims of police violence. But many are tagging their posts with the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM, obscuring a channel that’s being used to share vital information about protests, organization donations, and document police violence. The singer Kehlani and rapper Chuck Inglish were among those to call out the problem, retweeting a video of an Instagram feed of black images shared under the #BLM hashtag. As the video’s original poster noted: “once you click on the blm hashtag you’re directed to an overflow of black images, instead of other more useful content people could look at for i...

Microsoft is crediting a developer after he accused the company of copying the core mechanics of its new Windows Package Manager. AppGet developer Keivan Beigi provided a detailed account of Microsoft reaching out with interest about his package manager, inviting him for interviews, and then ghosting him for months before unveiling its own package manager that he felt was inspired by his work. Beigi claimed the “core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure” of Microsoft’s Windows Package Manager (winget) are all heavily inspired by AppGet. Microsoft only briefly mentioned AppGet once in its announcement, in a throwaway line that lists other Windows package managers. A variety of Windows package managers exist, and are used t...

Grindr, a popular gay dating app, will remove ethnicity filters from its app, the company tweeted today. The decision is meant to show solidarity with protests in the US over police brutality against black women and men. The filters, which allow people to pay to avoid seeing people of certain ethnicities, will be removed in the next app update. The ethnicity filters have been controversial for years, but they went unchanged even as Grindr launched an anti-racism campaign on the platform in 2018. That same year, Landen Zumwalt, Grindr’s former head of communications, told The Guardian that the company discussed removing the ethnicity filters but wasn’t ready to get rid of them. The team wanted to talk to its users first, he said, and the filters gave people in minority groups a chance to ma...

In order to comply with local curfew orders, food delivery platform DoorDash and ride-sharing companies Lyft and Uber are temporarily suspending service in some cities across the US, CNBC reported. More than three dozen cities have implemented curfews following demonstrations protesting the May 25th death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Police in several cities used tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters, and some businesses were vandalized. A Lyft spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that the company is following the direction of local government. She did not provide a number of cities or offer details about which specific cities were affected. An Uber spokesperson told The Verge it had suspended operations over the weekend during curfew hours in Minneapolis, Oakland, San Fr...

An apparent Twitter joke got out of control this weekend, falsely convincing some users — and possibly even the leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory — that MSNBC ran a broadcast with World War Z shots instead of real protest footage. Over the past day, an image and video clip have spread around Twitter comparing a news broadcast with a scene from the Brad Pitt film World War Z. The clip seems to show MSNBC reporting on the weekend’s nationwide protests, narrating over an aerial view of Philadelphia dotted with fires and smoke plumes. If you look up World War Z’s trailer, you can see the same shot midway through the video, suggesting the news outlet either badly screwed up its reporting or deliberately falsified the story. But if you look back at the MSNBC video, you’ll see something else:...

At this moment, more than 104,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus and more than 1.8 million have been infected. It can be hard to wrap your head around the devastation the coronavirus has wreaked on families across the US, especially as some states try to gradually reopen and return to whatever normal looks like now. As part of its stellar Voices from the Pandemic series, The Washington Post has a first-person account of a nursing home worker whose mother died of suspected coronavirus last month. Francene Bailey had been suffering from coronavirus symptoms for weeks and was trying to stay away from the rest of her family. The thing is, I was trying so hard to be careful from the very beginning. It’s not like I was one of those people who didn’t pay attention. I work at a nursing hom...

Spotify will add an 8 minute and 46-second moment of silence to select playlists and podcasts on the platform to honor George Floyd. The length of the moment of silence is equal to the amount of time former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd down by the neck with his knee, resulting in Floyd’s death and sparking universal outcry and demonstrations in US cities and around the world. Spotify’s action is part of a broader movement in the music industry called Blackout Tuesday designed to protest police violence and racism. A number of record labels are participating following a call to action from Atlanta Records marketing chief Jamila Thomas and former Atlantic employee Brianna Agyemang that started with the hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused. ViacomCBS is also participating in ...

I. The CEO On Friday afternoon, Facebook made one of its most controversial content moderation decisions in company history. After President Trump posted to Facebook some tweets that Twitter had placed behind a warning for “glorifying violence,” Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would allow them to stand. “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post, “but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies.” “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump had tweeted — quoting a former Miami police chief who, in 1967, called for a violent crackdown on the city’s black community. And just as the president sugg...

If you’ve been participating in the recent protests and want to do more, or if you’re unable to participate and want to do something, one way to help is to donate your money or your time. There are a range of organizations that are providing activists with bail bonds and legal help, or that are helping small businesses and other community resources that have been adversely affected. What follows is only a limited list. Two things should be kept in mind: First: before you click on a link to donate to an organization or fund, make sure that it is legitimate. Unfortunately, whenever there is a crisis, there are also those out there who will try to take advantage of the larger community’s eagerness to help. In addition, some well-meaning people may start a GoFundMe or other fundraising campaig...

After the Dallas Police Department asked people to send videos of “illegal activity from the protests” happening in the city over the weekend using a special app called iWatch Dallas, K-pop fans flooded the software with content from their favorite artists and seemingly overloaded the reporting system in the process. The day after the Dallas Police Department tweeted out the original request, a secondary tweet confirmed that “due to technical difficulties iWatch Dallas app will be down temporarily.” Replies to both tweets are a mix of clips from various K-pop groups performing, games like Animal Crossing, anime GIFs, and other pop culture references calling out the request and later celebrating the app being down. K-pop fans crashed the app within a day of the original request Buzzfeed New...

TikTok on Monday laid out a series of actions it plans to take to address criticisms that its recommendation algorithm suppresses black creators. These steps include launching what it calls a “creator diversity council” aimed at “recognizing and uplifting the voices driving culture, creativity, and important conversations on the platform,” the company wrote in a blog post. TikTok says it will also reassess its moderation strategies, build out a new “user-friendly” appeals process, and develop a new creator portal for expanding communications and “opportunities for our broader creator community.” TikTok said it will “stand in solidarity with the Black community” on Tuesday by participating in “Black Out Tuesday,” a day of action against racial injustice planned by the music industry. TikTok...

Twitter has restricted a tweet from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for violating its policies against glorifying violence, following a similar action taken against President Donald Trump last week. In a tweet published Monday, Gaetz wrote, “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” The post was retweeted over 12,000 times before Twitter took action against it. Hours after it was posted, Twitter determined that it violated its policies against glorifying violence. In doing so, the tweet is hidden from Gaetz’s profile and users must click a “view” button before seeing. Likes, retweets, and replies are all disabled from the tweet in an effort to limit its reach. “We have placed a public interest notice on this Tweet from @mattgaetz. The ...