spam
X is warning users they may see a reduction in their follower counts as the company attempts to clear the network of some spammers and bots in a large sweep.…
Caller ID app Truecaller today blocks between 38 billion and 40 billion spam calls annually for its 374 million+ users. Now, in hopes of getting more people to sign on…
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications. But Discord has yet…
A spam attack that impacted the open source X rival Mastodon, Misskey and other apps highlights how the decentralized social web, also known as the fediverse, is open to abuse.…
A bug on X, formerly Twitter, was causing numerous posts over the weekend to be flagged as “Sensitive Media,” thwarting the company’s own attempts to make its platform more approachable…
It looks like X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has a Verified bot problem. Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help…
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s becoming more adept at generating human-like text.
Google today is announcing a series of significant changes to how it handles email from bulk senders in an effort to cut down on spam and other unwanted emails. The…
YouTube Shorts is making a change to address the growing issues around spam on the short-form video platform. The company says that starting on August 31st, links that appear in…
Featured Article
Scammers publish ads for hacking services on government websites
Scammers have published various advertisements for hacking services on the official websites of multiple U.S. state, county and local governments, a federal agency, as well as numerous universities. The advertisements were contained in PDF files uploaded to official .gov websites belonging to the state governments of California, North Carolina, New…
Featured Article
QuickVid uses AI to generate short-form videos, complete with voiceovers
Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images…
LinkedIn rolls out focused inbox and messaging safety tools as it gets to grip with spam and scams
LinkedIn, the social platform for the working world for networking and recruitment, hasn’t been the biggest name in headlines when it comes to how social media is leveraged for spam,…
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed new rules to fight back against so-called “robotext” campaigns — the barrages of scam texts sent by malicious actors and large criminal…
How an Armenian startup plans to use a new innovation to tackle the billion-dollar phishing industry
So-called “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance,” or DMARC, is a technical standard that is designed to protect the senders and recipients of email from spam, spoofing and phishing. Before…
Users on Twitter have been receiving messages purporting to be from “Twitter Support” urging them to act quickly to avoid suspension, often even from users with a blue check. But…
Spam isn’t a new problem for social media, but everyone seems to agree that it’s gotten a lot worse lately. YouTube is chipping away at its own spam woes with…
In a new tweet fired at Twitter before market open, Elon Musk has reiterated that his $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform is on hold over the…
Twitter staff must really be wishing for a quiet life… Elon Musk, the gadfly billionaire who recently decided he wants to add the social media platform to his collection of…
Despite several efforts from carriers, telecom regulators, mobile operating system developers, smartphone makers and a global pandemic, spam calls continued to pester and scam people around the globe this year…
YouTube has banned a large number of Chinese accounts it said were engaging in “coordinated influence operations” on political issues, the company announced today; 2,596 accounts from China alone were…
A number of startups over the years have promised to re-invent email only to have fallen short. Even Google’s radical re-imagining, the Inbox app, finally closed up shop last year.…
Do you feel you have been receiving more spam calls of late? You are probably not wrong — or alone. The volume of spam calls has grown by 18% globally…
Twitter today says it’s expanding its policies to prohibit financial scams on its platform — something you’d think would have already been banned, but apparently was never directly addressed through…
Twitter is testing a new way to filter unwanted messages from your Direct Message inbox. Today, Twitter allows users to set their Direct Message inbox as being open to receiving…
To cut down on spam, Twitter cuts the number of accounts you can follow per day
Twitter just took another big step to help boot spammers off its platform: it’s cutting the number of accounts Twitter users can follow, from 1,000 per day to just 400.…
Periscope cracks down on inauthentic behavior, including fake hearts, follows, chats and more
Twitter’s video streaming app, Periscope, is cracking down on spam and, specifically, fake engagements. The company says it’s updating its policies around how it enforces its anti-spam rules, and is…
Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some…
Instagram has been earning money from businesses flooding its social network with spam notifications. Instagram hypocritically continues to sell ad space to services that charge clients for fake followers or…
Instagram is swaying the balance toward simplicity but away from originality. It’s adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling…
Twitter’s spam reporting tool now lets you specify type, including if it’s a fake account
Twitter is adding more nuance to its spam reporting tools, the company announced today. Instead of simply flagging a tweet as posting spam, users can now specify what kind of…
