Misinformation hit a crescendo during the pandemic, sowing distrust in COVID-19 vaccines and inciting riots at the Capitol. Now a coalition of experts on misinformation and disinformation are making a specific set of recommendations to lawmakers on how to fix the issue–and big tech might not be so happy. Most notably, the proposal calls for changes to Section 230, the controversial part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that protects online platforms from getting sued over user-gener
Facebook may have changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms, but that won’t end its troubles—or efforts to rein in the social media company’s business practices. Lawmakers are pondering new ways to regulate Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in 2019 that he welcomed new “rules governing the internet.” With that in mind, The Conversation asked three experts on social media, technology policy, and global business to offer one specific action the gover
Every “first” since the start of the pandemic comes with an extra dose of excitement, as well as anxiety. For me, last week included plenty of both. It was the first time I travelled on an airplane, and the first time I crossed an international border, since early 2020. I was headed to Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, the fifth time I was attending Europe’s largest tech conference. (The organizers covered my travel expenses in exchange for me moderating some panels.) There wa
The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, together with Microsoft and the digital cultural heritage company Iconem have unveiled a digital reconstruction of ancient Olympia, the site of the original Olympic Games, as it stood more than 2,000 years ago. A website and mobile app enables anyone to take a virtual guided tour through 27 sites such as the ancient Olympic Stadium, a gymnasium where athletes trained, and temples devoted to the Greek gods Hera and Zeus. The basic models of the buildings
To say it’s been a while since I’ve been an iPad owner would be something of an understatement. I eked every last molecule of utility out of the iPad 3, which came out in 2012, then drifted around Apple-lessly for years before finally picking up the new iPad Mini 4. I like its USB-C charging, the compact size, and my new daily routine of hand-solving crossword puzzle PDFs with a cheapo third-party stylus I bought. Oh, and iPadOS has come a long way since 2012. Though they 
Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company Amazon acquired in 2020, says she’s been informally meeting with other Amazon leaders in anticipation of potential collaborations, but she characterized her conversations as “discovery, nothing official.” Speaking at Fast Company‘s Agenda 2022: Rethink, Reimagine, Reinvent event on Wednesday, Evans says the Zoox team is singularly focused on creating its “robotaxi,” a driverless car designed for ri
Like many people, Peggy Johnson was dazzled by Magic Leap’s technology when she visited the company’s Florida headquarters. Seeing the way its AR headset fused the real world and digital imagery into a single experience, she was “blown away by the technology—I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. And then, when she learned in the spring of 2020 that founder Rony Abovitz was stepping down as CEO, she acted on her long-held ambition to run a company an
Chef Amanda Shulman is chattering away as she expertly whacks a pile of charred beets with a knife and tosses them into a bowl. “I just want them to be roughly chopped,” she says. “I like when things are recognizable. You should be able to take a bite [of a dish], and it should be full of all these things, not, like, minced.” Shulman is prepping a course—leek and Gruyere fritelle—for dinner that night at her Philadelphia pop-up restaurant, Her Plac
When Goldbelly CEO Joe Ariel launched his artisanal food marketplace in 2013—shipping gumbo right from New Orleans’s famed Commander’s Palace or noodles from New York’s Ivan Ramen to foodies throughout the United States—he approached the Food Network with an idea. “I thought the Food Network or some old food media brands would be great partners,” he recalls. “They could showcase food that viewers could then order through Goldbelly and consu
For better or worse, You.com isn’t like any other search engine you’ve used before. Instead of arranging results in a vertical list, you.com presents users with rows of horizontal panels—the company calls them “apps”—grouped by source. There’s an app for Yelp, an app for Reddit, an app for Twitter, and an app for standard Bing results, among others. Users can then promote or demote these panels as they browse the results, creating a search engine