In July of last year, I drafted an article announcing the end of The Daily Banter. In January of 2018, we saw a severe decline in referral traffic from Facebook. Having dealt with Facebook algorithm changes for many years, we didn’t think too much of it and continued as if it ...read more
In a bombshell report released yesterday, The New York Times revealed that Facebook allowed companies such as Netflix and Spotify to harvest its users' data without their consent, potentially violating their 2011 Federal Trade Commissions agreement. Over the past few years, ...read more
The number of digital media outlets completely destroyed in the wake of Facebook's newsfeed purge earlier this year is unknown. We've experienced the devastating effects of their war on journalism at the Banter, and have been brought to our knees after they took roughly 70% of ...read more
Chuck Schumer was comfortably re-elected as Senate Minority Leader yesterday by the Democratic caucus, but a stunning New York Times exposé of Facebook reveals that he attempted to impede investigations into the tech giant. The story, which runs about 5,000 words and carries ...read more
A few years ago, the right tried to make its own version of Twitter and Facebook. They were tired of having to talk to all of those pesky liberals and really just wanted to be able to share racist memes with each other and talk about the good ol' days where the darkies knew ...read more
Last week, the US House Intelligence Committee released approximately 3,517 Facebook ads purchased by the Russians between 2015-17, meant to influence the 2016 election, all of which are available to download. USA Today conducted a study of the ads and concluded that more than ...read more
by Kate Harveston When they came to light, the Panama and Paradise papers revealed a globe-spanning oligarchy that has laid siege to most of our governments and the entire world’s industrial apparatus. This situation has been the case for a very long time, but at last, there was ...read more
Societies have long known that when inventors don't ask hard questions of themselves, the results can be catastrophic. Mark Zuckerberg learned this the hard way this week when he testified before Congress over two consecutive days concerning Cambridge Analytica's breach of ...read more
I write this as a veteran of dozens and dozens of Facebook news feed algorithm changes over the past few years: local news publishers beware, Mark Zuckerberg and the news feed team are about to wreck your business. Today, Facebook announced that users will start to see more ...read more
I grew up in Los Angeles and now live in Brooklyn, so it's fair to assume that I live in "a bubble." However, I went to college at Northwestern University, right outside of Chicago, and even at a school whose political makeup was mostly center-left, we had quite a few ...read more
Asides from eating up half of the internet, allowing Russian spammers to spread fake news during the most important election in recent US history, and doing its best to punish legitimate websites from reaching their audience (ours included), Facebook has started to really, ...read more
In this special 'Facebook Live' episode of the Bantercast, Ben and Michael discuss the complexities and confusion surrounding the Aziz Ansari scandal and talk about the rise and fall (and rise again?) of Bitcoin. Is the Aziz Ansari episode a turning point in the #MeToo movement? ...read more
You may have heard the news that Facebook is going to be completely reorganizing the way people see stories on their newsfeed. This is horrendous news for every responsible media outlet -- including us. After allowing clickbait sites and fake Russian websites to spam users for ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Creators, inventors, and CEOs often have a hard time understanding the consequences of their products when used for ill means, arguing that technology, when it first comes into existence, is a tabula rasa -- that is neither all good nor all bad.. To continue ...read more
Note: This is the third part in a series of articles analyzing the problem of sexism on the left. This article was written as a follow-up to the first in this series, which you can read here. One of the reasons I wanted Jon Ossoff to win his special election last June is because ...read more
In this week's issue of Banter M: Politically Correcting the Past - Chez Pazienza is none too happy with a writer at Uproxx who attempted to recast Ferris Bueller in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' as an example of male white privilege. "What you have in this article is a harmless ...read more
I'm not the greatest Facebook fan in the world. In fact, most of the time I look upon the platform as a twisted sociological experiment, one in which we're all dupes -- suckered and manipulated into doing whatever Mark Zuckerberg wants. Along those lines, it was recently made ...read more
News broke this week that the Facebook trending news team block news stories that could be of interest to conservative readers -- a revelation that undermines Facebook's reputation as an unbiased social network that adapts to what people are interested in, then disseminates ...read more
In this week's edition of Banter M, our long form digital magazine for members: The Facebook Death Star and the End of Clickbait - Daily Banter founder Ben Cohen reports on what it is like navigating a website in the post clickbait era of the internet and coming to terms with ...read more
The divisiveness in American politics today is almost entirely attributable to the existence of epistemic closure. Simply put, epistemic closure is an advanced and extreme form of confirmation bias -- or, in a colloquial sense, it's what we often refer to as bubbles or ...read more
In what could prove to be a completely revolutionary idea, family owned shops in a small town in Wales town have decided to play corporations at their own game. The residents in Crickhowell (see photo above) are copying complicated offshore arrangements utilized by large global ...read more
A firey little hangnail of a news story kept popping up in my feed over the past couple of days and I'm going to share it with you because I'm a huge fan of things that make me laugh. Apparently, a man who denies being a Men's Rights Activist (MRA) has created a web site called ...read more
(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Yesterday, Drew Magary published an entertaining little screed over at Deadspin that tore into the internet's ever-expanding professional grievance industry. He pegged it off of a series of breathtakingly douchey tweets he found that had ...read more
During a public speaking engagement in Ottawa over the weekend, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald was asked why he and his source, the National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, don't use Facebook. Greenwald's response was predictable and, as usual, contradictory: "He doesn’t ...read more
It's times like this when it's really difficult to not become even more cynical about the intellect of the American voter. In my nearly 30 years covering politics, I've seen very few elections that are quite this incomprehensible and, sadly, I don't think it'll be the last. ...read more
On a day when the spoiled-rotten First World exults in the premiere of Apple's latest overpriced fashion accessory, I suppose someone has to be the cranky old man, so here goes. While reading about the rollout of the new iPhone 6 and something called the Apple Watch, I stumbled ...read more
Facebook is using all of us as its experimental guinea pigs, and it's reported the lab results in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Approximately 680,000 Facebook users had their news feeds artificially engineered in order to attempt to manipulate their emotions. ...read more
Everyone loves to hate Facebook. Why? Probably because you spend every waking hour on it, and part of you knows you need to talk to real human beings once in a while. But the lure of finding out what ex-boyfriends are up to, and who the cute girl is in the office next to you is ...read more
My dearest friends are always warning me to stop being baiting into political shovel fights on social media. And while I've somewhat restrained my natural compulsion to do so, I simply can't help it. It's what I do. If there's someone who's marketing in crapola online, I can't ...read more
There is something very, very wrong with society if you can arrange to buy an illegal, high-powered firearm through a social media network within 15 minutes. But then this is America, and GO GUNS!!!! From VentureBeat: On Tuesday, a VentureBeat reporter and his colleague spent ...read more
If recent history is any indication, you may want to go ahead and pick up those rocks now and assume a throwing stance. Yesterday, Facebook announced that it was expanding the options its users could choose from when labeling gender status on their profiles. From now on, in ...read more
For reasons best known to themselves, Facebook banned a pretty funny photo of Jesus complaining to his followers about coming back to find everyone celebrating his life with symbols of the cross. Someone posted it to The Daily Banter's Facebook wall, and we were almost ...read more
Sometime over the weekend, a fan of ours on Facebook posted a funny image on our page. I got the notification on my phone, but between then and the time I tried to log in to Facebook on my computer, I was told that something on our Facebook page was deemed inappropriate, given ...read more
Happy Almost-Friday! Here's what's happening on the interweb: 1. 2 million Facebook, Gmail and Twitter passwords stolen in massive hack Hackers have stolen usernames and passwords for nearly two million accounts at Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and others, according to a ...read more
You know how you actually hate most of your “friends” on Facebook? Well since they’ll never know that you’re hiding their dumb baby pictures or useless status updates from your newsfeed, there’s now a great new way to let them know how much you dislike them: Hate With Friends ...read more
Want to know how to get valued at $13 billion? Apparently, make sure you lose $79.4M a year, and have your primary business model revolve around sending teenage-like text messages in public. From a relatively unknown startup to being one of the biggest social media giants in ...read more
I was tempted to title this post "Sarah Palin's Snub of Piers Morgan Is Grotesque, Will Make the Right Come in Its Pants." That's actually far more fitting now that I think about it, because really these kinds of stunts from Palin are actually very easy to believe and are ...read more
Particularly since I just moved to New York City from Los Angeles, Facebook can be a valuable tool for me to keep up with friends and family in faraway cities. But much of the time, it's boring as shit. I like to think I'm less boring than other people, of course, but those ...read more
Only recently did my dad tell me that he thought of my name after slapping my mom on the ass... They had been volleying a few names back and forth when the actress Fanny Brice’s name popped into his head after an archaic bit of word association. But once they had the first ...read more
Here's what you should be reading this Friday morning instead of making your plans to rush out the door early when no one's looking: 1. Sean Gone? If this is true, it's a very big deal and incredibly unexpected. Drudge is reporting that Megyn Kelly's new Fox News time-slot ...read more
Gawker's John Cook on the much discussed lunch between President Obama and Mitt Romney in an article titled 'Barack Obama Ate Some White Turkey With a White Turkey Today': On the menu was "Southwestern grilled chicken salad," according to a readout released by the White House ...read more
This really is Jon Stewart at his best. Responding to the Right's call for the poor to pay more taxes, Stewart calculates the net worth of the 50% of Americans who pay no tax at all (they own around $1.45 trillion, or 2.5% of the nation's wealth), then asks what taking half of ...read more
By Ben Cohen: On a fairly regular basis, I'm asked to comment on various political and economic issues on the RT network (the English language Russian news network). I enjoy going on the shows and engaging in debate and commentary that is never seen on regular cable news. RT has ...read more
By Ben Cohen: The news that Facebook shareholders are suing the social network, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and a number of banks that collaborated with Facebook's IPO last week should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the murky dealings of Wall St. The shareholders are ...read more
Facebook has priced its shares ahead of one of the most eagerly-anticipated share flotations in recent stock market history. The social network said on Thursday that it valued shares at $38 (£24) each, and that its shares would begin trading in New York on Friday. At this ...read more
By Chez Pazienza Well, it was good while it lasted. A couple of weeks ago, CNN correspondent Drew Griffin -- who's an old friend of mine going back to our time together at KCBS in the mid-90s -- caused a minor stir by saying the word "nigger" live on the air during a report he ...read more
The protests taking place on Wall St and around the country are snowballing into something far, far more serious than previously thought. Just take a look at the photo below: Chez Pazienza sums it up: It's more than just a bunch of "deluded kids" now. It's the ...read more
One of the saddest aspects of American political culture is the disconnect between reality and perception. In response to a grossly unfair system of corporate socialism, many middle class Americans channel their rage against programs that would actually benefit them like ...read more
Vice Magazine has done a great report on the first wave of violence on the streets of London. The footage below shows youths openly confronting the police, attacking them with weapons and smashing up their cars: How long it takes before relations are repaired between the younger ...read more
If it wasn't clear before that Fox News is not a news organization and acts only as a mouthpiece for the GOP and Rupert Murdoch's financial interest, after the phone hacking scandal, it really should be. Fox News's coverage of the scandal has been, to put it mildly, hilarious. ...read more
