Technology

Snopes has been given the power to police Facebook users’ newsfeeds and censor any stories they deem to be ‘fake’.  According to an announcement by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, Facebook will empower a handful of left-wing Hillary supporting websites to tackle the so-called ‘fake news’ problem on the social media platform. The consequence of allowing a provably biased fake news blog to decide what users are allowed to see on their own newsfeeds will likely result in the mainstream media stifling dissenting opinions and burying independent media.

NASA scientists have found brand new evidence of life on Mars in the form of a chemical element that is essential for DNA synthesis. According to a 14 December announcement at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, NASA’s Curiosity rover found the chemical element boron on the surface of the red planet – a chemical that is crucial in supporting life. Sputniknews.com reports: “No prior mission to Mars has found boron,” said Patrick Gasda, a researcher at the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

New York Times CEO, Mark Thompson, has urged advertising networks to cease funding all forms of independent media outlets, claiming that they are guilty of spreading “fake news”. Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club, Mark Thompson urged advertising networks to starve all forms of alternative media and independent news websites of cash, thus causing them to disappear from the Internet altogether. “As for the digital giants, I believe they need to think hard about transparency and accountability.

Having admitted in September to 200 million accounts hacked, and then confessed it was half a billion in October, Yahoo has just come out with statement confirming that an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with more than one billion user accounts, and this is likely distinct from the incident they previously disclosed. They do still say that "we have connected some of this activity to the same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the previousdata theft."