Attacks and hacks are realities of our digital world. But Facebook has quite the issue on its hands after it was revealed the platform experienced a major security breach. Meanwhile, Instagram has recovered after experiencing a worldwide outage. But one of the most interesting stories coming out of the social media world is the exposure of a fake news ecosystem on Twitter! These are the stories trending in social media this week.
Facebook Breach Raises Questions
In mid-September, Facebook engineers discovered that the platform had experienced its biggest security breach ever. Even after engineers discovered the issue, it took 11 days to stop the hemorrhaging.
Facebook has reported that the breach touched 50 million users, and that the hackers could have seen everything. The attackers figured out how to exploit three separate vulnerabilities in Facebook’s code. As a result, Facebook will be forced to find some answers to the following questions: Was September 16, the day the engineers noticed something was amiss, the beginning of the attack? Were the hackers stealing data for the 11 days it took to fix the problem? Or, worst of all, were the hackers in the platform long before Facebook ever detected something was wrong?
Instagram Goes Down Across the World
Instagram addicts across the world when the mobile app and website went down for a period of time last week, sending users into a panic. During the outage, the app displayed an error message saying, “couldn’t refresh feed,” while the website would not load for users.
Frustrated users swamped Twitter to grumble about the outage, tweeting jabs and comments along with the #instagramdown hashtag.
Fake News Ecosystem on Twitter Confirmed
In a twist that should be filed under “surprising to nobody,” a new study has revealed that tweets sent before and after the 2016 presidential election reveal a “fake news ecosystem” on Twitter.
The study, which was commissioned by the Knight Foundation, and produced by The George Washington University, found that 4 million tweets linked to “fake news and conspiracy” publishers were found on Twitter between mid-March 2017 to mid-April 2017.
“More than 80% of accounts that repeatedly spread misinformation during the 2016 election campaign are still active,” the Knight Foundation said, “and they continue to publish more than a million tweets on a typical day.”
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