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
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
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
At one point, Elizabeth Lee Beck had a semblance of credibility. In July 2015, the New York Times reported that she and her husband Jared, two lawyers from Florida, had grilled Donald Trump in a foreclosure deposition. When they took a break so that she could pump breast milk ...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
The Banter Long Read: What does abuse of power look like? Would we recognize it when the government uses its power to chill political dissent? To continue reading this MEMBERS ONLY article, please go here. Your support directly goes to the writers at the Banter and keeps us 100% ...read more
Barely a month after Republicans voted a self-confessed pussy grabber to be president, but before they elected a pretend Montana cowboy who assaulted a journalist as a congressman, there was Captain Clay Higgins. A disgraced former police captain who was essentially forced to ...read more
In a truly extraordinary article by The New Yorker editor David Remnick, the veteran journalist recounts the time he spent with President Obama in the lead up to election night and in the days after. Remnick, who authored the 2010 biography The Bridge - The Life and Rise of ...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
A high school teacher in South Carolina was forced to resign over a nude photo of her that was shared on social media, but the circumstances surrounding that photo, and her dismissal, are outrageous. Let's just let Leigh Anne Arthur explain how one of her 16 year-old students ...read more
After internet super troll Charles C. Johnson solicited donations for "taking out" civil rights activist DeRay McKesson on Twitter, he was banned from using the social media outlet for violating their policies on violent threats. McKesson rightfully took Johnson's tweet ...read more
I don’t always mind if people invoke the C word when referring to an instance in which a major social media or search platform bans a particular person from posting to it. Yes, Facebook or Twitter banning a user does not meet the technical definition of censorship given that ...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
There's a terrible injustice in the fact that President Clinton is the most popular politician in the world today, while Monica Lewinsky is the cheap punchline to dozens of blow-job jokes. And shame on us all for it. We're nothing more than the villagers from The Scarlet Letter, ...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
Finally, Twitter has taken a small but significant step toward cleaning up the vile filth being spread anonymously (and otherwise) on its popular social media platform. Effective this morning, Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo announced the suspension of any users who tweet the ...read more
As many of us have observed this week, Rush Limbaugh was only the most recognizable troll who turned Robin Williams' tragic suicide into his own cynical, callous soap box. Predictably enough, the dark, cruel occupiers of Twitter's anonymous underworld successfully outdid ...read more
UPDATE below. Who would've guessed that users of social media and the internet, the home of free and unlimited porn and all varieties of widely accepted debauchery, would regularly behave like a clique of second-graders, snickering at "wee-wees" and "pee-pees?" It doesn't ...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
Reading is hard. Having to plow through entire paragraphs is actually a mental exercise. It’s a necessary one, but it's also one that is very easy to skip. But good writing is almost as good as the Mad Men episode you're going to catch up on, so I’m going to announce a new, ...read more
Pre-Script: I know I just wrote about the NFL last week, but this has been one of the strangest weeks of off-field NFL activity that I can remember. But to help remind you (and myself) that football isn't all bad, here's a link to a story about an inspirational middle school ...read more
It's the day after Halloween and it's a Friday, which means I've got about three working brain cells at the moment. The good news is there's the weekend ahead for most of us, so let's give you something to read before you bolt out of the office to get it underway. 1. The Book ...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
There's a really great article currently running over at Forbes from Scott Mendelson, who's a film critic based here in L.A. It used to be that Mendelson wrote for his own blog and as a contributor at the Huffington Post, but he's now been picked up by Forbes where he ...read more
Well, that took even less time than I expected. Yesterday, on the weekly "Bob & Chez Show After Party" that I do with Bob Cesca, I made a prediction that really wasn't a prediction at all since it relied on nothing more than a quick examination of the past rather than any ...read more
I kind of owe Mark Sanford. The scandal that led him to assume the role of poor, dumb, love-struck Paris, willing to bring war to Troy's gates in the name of forbidden desire, was the jumping off point for what I think is the best piece ever to be published over at my little ...read more
