Mike Isaac

For all the good that has come from the internet, the online world has also served as a powerful device for recruiting terrorists and spreading their propaganda. A coalition of top technology companies is now trying to change that.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft announced that they have teamed up to fight the spread of terrorist content over the web by sharing technology and information to reduce the flow of terrorist propaganda across their services. The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook. Through the coalition, technology companies will use “hashes,” or what they describe as “unique digital fingerprints,” to identify terrorist imagery and videos uploaded to their services.

With millions of people regularly tuning in to his YouTube video blogs every morning, Casey Neistat has a millennial fan base coveted by both marketers and media companies. Now, one of those big media outlets is bringing Neistat — and, it hopes, his youthful audience — in-house. CNN announced that it had agreed to acquire the technology and talent behind Beme, the social media app built and started by Neistat and Matt Hackett, a former vice president of engineering at Tumblr. Beme’s 12 employees will join CNN as part of the deal, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed.

Beme was intended to be a social sharing application that Neistat described as “more authentic,” a way of putting four-second bursts of video out into the social sphere without giving users the ability to edit or tweak the content. Taking video was as simple as holding a smartphone’s front-facing sensor to one’s body, as if the camera were an extension of one’s chest. Neistat hopes to bring that idea of authenticity to a news and media environment to draw in a younger audience largely untapped by the cable news network. CNN will shut down the Beme app, which had 1.2 million downloads before losing steam.

After more than a week of accusations that the spread of fake news on Facebook may have affected the outcome of the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg published a detailed post describing ways the company was considering dealing with the problem.

Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chairman and chief executive, broadly outlined some of the options he said the company’s news feed team was looking into, including third-party verification services, better automated detection tools and simpler ways for users to flag suspicious content. “The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible.” The post was perhaps the most detailed glimpse into Zuckerberg’s thinking on the issue since Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 election. Within hours of his victory being declared, Facebook was accused of affecting the election’s outcome by failing to stop bogus news stories, many of them favorable to Trump, from proliferating on its social network. Executives and employees at all levels of the company have since been debating its role and responsibilities.

Google and Facebook have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. Those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources. Google kicked off the action saying it will ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites. Taken together, the decisions were a clear signal that the tech behemoths could no longer ignore the growing outcry over their power in distributing information to the American electorate.

On Election Night 2016, a private chat sprang up on Facebook among several vice presidents and executives of the social network. What role, they asked each other, had their company played in the election’s outcome?

Facebook’s top executives concluded that they should address the issue and assuage staff concerns at a quarterly all-hands meeting. They also called a smaller meeting with the company’s policy team, according to three people who saw the private chat and are familiar with the decisions; they requested anonymity because the discussion was confidential. Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted. The online conversation among Facebook’s executives, which was one of several private message threads that began among the company’s top ranks, showed that the social network was internally questioning what its responsibilities might be.

Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source — Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook affecting the election was “a pretty crazy idea” — many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.

Late on July 7, when sniper fire rang out across downtown Dallas (TX), a bystander, Michael Kevin Bautista, used his smartphone to stream the events in real time on Facebook Live. Within the hour, CNN was rebroadcasting the footage. The day before, Diamond Reynolds streamed on Facebook Live after local police in Falcon Heights (MN) shot her boyfriend, Philando Castile, ratcheting up a controversy surrounding how police officers treat African-Americans. The two real-time videos catapulted Facebook, in the span of 48 hours, into a spot as the prime forum for live events and breaking news. It is a position that the company has long jockeyed to be in as it seeks to keep its 1.65 billion members ever more engaged. Yet the brutal nature of the events that appeared on Facebook Live also put the company in a tricky situation.

Facebook is confronting complexities with live videos that it may not have anticipated just a few months ago, when the streaming service was dominated by lighter fare such as a Buzzfeed video of an exploding watermelon. Now Facebook must navigate when, if at all, to draw the line if a live video is too graphic, and weigh whether pulling such content is in the company’s best interests if the video is newsworthy.

In 2014, Messenger, a photo and text messaging service, appeared to be almost an afterthought at Facebook, the social networking giant. Messenger often took a back seat to the limelight enjoyed by WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook had bought for $19 billion. And Messenger’s capabilities were so limited that you could not send friends an animated GIF of a dancing Shiba Inu, as you could with many other messaging services. But since mid-2014, Facebook has been playing a furious game of catch-up with Messenger.

That June, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, hired a PayPal executive, David Marcus, to take over Messenger and build it into a world-class competitor. The company has added a string of features to the service, including letting people send money to friends through the app, pull up a voice or video call, or order a private car from inside the app. On July 8, Facebook said it will also begin testing “secret conversations” inside Messenger, a feature that offers end-to-end encryption on some messages to be read only on the two mobile devices that users are communicating with. While it stops short of the full encryption that other messaging services like WhatsApp have adopted, it gives Messenger a heightened mode of security that Facebook hopes will attract global audiences to download the app.

Facebook offered up an apology to its users, after it came to light that the company had manipulated the news feeds of more than half a million people so it could change the number of positive and negative posts that appear from their friends.

This is hardly the first time Facebook has apologized for its behavior. Over its 10-year history, the company has repeatedly pushed its users to share more information, then publicly conceded it overstepped if an upset public pushed back.

[Commentary] If you’re like me, you woke up scratching your head this morning after seeing that Facebook had acquired the company behind Moves, a popular fitness app.

Does Facebook want to enter the fitness app market, especially as others seem so ready to do the same? I doubt it. Here’s why.

Moves is a fitness app, yes. But using your iPhone’s accelerometer and other hardware, Moves’ core technology automatically recognizes your movements throughout the day, while logging your habitual routes and the places you usually visit. The company spits out a visualized map of your activity, which it calls a “daily storyline” of your life. And all of this is done passively, as the technology runs in the background on your smartphone while using minimal battery power.

This is exactly the type of data and technology Facebook loves. Facebook wants to be the be-all, end-all for your online identity -- that’s why it asks you about where you’re going, where you’re from and the type of stuff you like to do. It’s all an effort to build a complete digital profile of exactly who you are.

The Turkish Constitutional Court ruled that a countrywide Twitter ban violated principles of free speech in Turkey, and ordered Turkey’s Telecommunications Directorate to cease the block on the microblogging service immediately.