Business, Spoken

Tumblr was never explicitly a space for porn, but, like most things on the internet, it is chock full of it anyway. Or at least it was. On Monday, to the shock of the millions of users who had used the microblogging site to consume and share porn GIFs, images, and videos, Tumblr banned the “adult content” that its CEO David Karp had defended five years prior.

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Google says a very small percentage of its search results are personalized, a claim that has helped insulate the company from scrutiny over filter bubbles, especially compared with Facebook and YouTube, a Google subsidiary. But a new study from DuckDuckGo, a Google rival, found that users saw very different results when searching for terms such as “gun control,” “immigration,” and “vaccinations,” even after controlling for time and location.

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Kate Brandt has a radical idea for how we’ll have to live in the future, if we’re going to be in balance with nature. She envisions a world without landfills, where ownership is obsolete, and everything down to the socks on our feet is rented and shared. Brandt is Google's sustainability officer. And she’s obsessed with one idea: the “circular economy,” which aims to eliminate waste.

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The past three months have not been kind to large public technology companies. Amid crescendos of criticism about monopolistic power, these companies saw their market value plummet. The rampant selling has leveled off, at least for the moment, so it’s an opportune time to ask: What comes next? WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. This was hardly the first drop in these firms’ share prices, and it won't be the last.

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Over the past year, two popular forums for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, have been banned by Reddit and a domain registrar in response to members’ history of toxic misogyny and celebrating violence against women. Now, some of these men are trying to turn the tables. Members of the incel community—including the official Twitter account for incels.

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Two years ago, Alphabet researchers made computing history when their artificial intelligence software AlphaGo defeated a world champion at the complex board game Go. Amazon now hopes to democratize the AI technique behind that milestone—with a pint-size self-driving car. The 1/18th-scale vehicle is called DeepRacer, and it can be preordered for $249; it will later cost $399.

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Time is running out for Congress to restore net neutrality protections this year. The Federal Communications Commission last year voted to jettison Obama-era rules prohibiting broadband internet providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful internet content. Earlier this year, the Senate passed legislation to restore those protections. But the Senate used an unusual legislative maneuver that requires the House of Representatives to pass the same bill by Dec. 10.

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A British lawmaker suggested that Facebook was made aware of suspicious Russian behavior on its platform as early as 2014 during a hearing on fake news and disinformation that took place in London on Tuesday. The MP, Damian Collins, was drawing on a cache of internal Facebook documents that he seized last week, and which the social networking giant has fought for months to keep sealed.

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Among the biggest spenders on Facebook political ads during the midterms are some names you’d probably expect. There’s Beto O’Rourke, who lost to Ted Cruz in Texas’s recent Senate race. There’s President Trump—both his campaign and his Super PAC. There are billionaires like JB Pritzker, incoming governor of Illinois, and Tom Steyer, the environmentalist leading the campaign to impeach Trump.

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Instagram Monday said it would again crack down on users who pursue “inauthentic activity” to boost an account’s popularity. Within hours, BlackHatWorld, a forum popular with self-proclaimed “black hat” social media marketers, was in crisis. In a section of the forum usually reserved for sharing the best deals on obtaining fake Instagram followers, concerned users started at least 13 threads to discuss the policy change.

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