Business, Spoken

Last week, as thousands of Central American migrants made their way northward through Mexico, walking a treacherous route toward the US border, talk of "the caravan," as it's become known, took over Twitter. Conservatives, led by President Donald Trump, dominated the conversation, eager to turn the caravan into a voting issue before the midterms. As it turns out, they had some help---from propaganda bots on Twitter. Late last week, about 60 percent of the conversation was driven by likely bots.

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IBM just spent $34 billion to buy a software company that gives away its primary product for free. IBM Sunday said it would acquire Red Hat, best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat is an open source software company that gives away the source code for its core products. That means anyone can download them for free. And many do. Oracle even uses Red Hat’s source code for its own Oracle Linux product.

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At its birth, the social network Gab issued a call for free speech. “We promote raw, rational, open, and authentic discourse online," said Andrew Torba, the CEO and founder, in an early interview with WIRED. And now, as it fights for its life, it’s doing the same. The site has been knocked offline after the Squirrel Hill massacre.

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The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime.

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A few years after the Great Recession, you couldn’t scroll through Google Reader without seeing the word “disrupt.” TechCrunch named a conference after it, the New York Times named a column after it, investor Marc Andreessen warned that “software disruption” would eat the world; not long after, Peter Thiel, his fellow Facebook board member, called “disrupt” one of his favorite words.

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The future of humanity will be shaped by artificial intelligence. Now some of the best brains working on the technology are riven by a debate about a four-letter acronym that some say contributes to the field's well-documented diversity problems. NIPS is the name of AI’s most prominent conference, a venue for machine learning research formally known as the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

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Twitter dropped an almost unfathomably large archive of tweets connected to two alleged influence campaigns on Wednesday. The trove included over 9 million tweets associated with 3,841 accounts connected to Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, or IRA, as well as more than a million tweets attributed to a network of 770 Iranian propaganda-pushing accounts. Twitter has never before released an archive of this size.

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On Tuesday, Facebook released a new tool that shows who's spending the most money on political ads on the platform in the US. At a glance, the Ad Archive Report suggests that Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke is the biggest spender, having plowed more than $5 million into Facebook ads since May. But the fine print reveals a more surprising finding: The advertiser spending the most on political and issue ads on Facebook is, well, Facebook.

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Only six social media apps in the world have a billion or more users, and four of them belong to Facebook. Tops is the eponymous flagship app, known as “Big Blue,” followed by three apps all focused on messaging: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. So when Facebook decided to do a significant redesign of the latter—currently used by 1.

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The internet went down on February 28, 2017. Or at least that's how it seemed to some users as sites and apps like Slack and Medium went offline or malfunctioned for four hours. What actually happened is that Amazon's enormously popular S3 cloud storage service experienced an outage, affecting everything that depended on it. It was a reminder of the risks when too much of the internet relies on a single service.

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