"A Russian satellite has positioned itself uncomfortably close to an American spy satellite in orbit around Earth..." reports the Verge, adding that the Russian satellite "has been in constant view of its U.S. target for nearly two weeks now."

An anonymous reader quotes The Drive: Russia has a number of what it calls "space apparatus inspectors" in orbit, which the U.S. government and others warn the Kremlin could use to gather intelligence on other satellites or function as "killer satellites," using various means to damage, disable, or destroy those targets.

On Jan. 30, 2020, Michael Thompson, a graduate student at Purdue University focusing on astrodynamics, posted a detailed thread on Twitter... [H]ow Cosmos 2542 is orbiting now means that it now has a "consistent view" of USA 245. "As I'm typing this, that offset distance shifts between 150 and 300km depending on the location in the orbit," according to Thompson....

One possibility is that it could be using onboard systems, such as cameras or other sensors, to gather information about the [U.S. satellite] KH-11, the capabilities of which are highly classified... It may also be possible to gather electronic or signals intelligence data that could be of additional value. Beyond that, the ability of Cosmos 2542 to get into this position at all is notable and is exactly the kind of orbital maneuvering that the U.S. government had pointed to in the past as evidence of potential "killer satellites." A highly maneuverable, but small satellite could possibly get close enough to disrupt the operation of, disable, or destroy another object in space using a variety of means, ranging from electronic warfare jammers to directed energy weapons, such as a laser...

Russia is known to be interested in anti-satellite capacities and has developed or is developing a number of terrestrial anti-satellite weapons, including ground-based and air-launched interceptors, too. China is pursuing similar developments, as well.


The article points out that is all happening "as the U.S. military is very publicly working to address concerns about the increasing vulnerability of various space-based systems that it relies on heavily... The most obvious expression of this recent push is the creation of U.S. Space Force, an entirely new branch of the U.S. military to focus on American military activities in and related to space, as well as the procurement of satellites and other related systems and infrastructure."

And then late Saturday night, Thompson posted another update on Twitter: that the Russian satellite had made yet another manuever on Friday, "and is now drifting back towards USA 245."

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."

"It's been almost a year since Instagram pledged to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on its platform. But today, it continues to do the exact opposite," reports the Huffington Post: When HuffPost created a new Instagram account and searched for the term "vaccines" on Saturday, almost all of the top results were anti-vax pages... At the very top was a profile with more than 74,000 followers and posts pushing blatant falsehoods about vaccines and the Wuhan coronavirus. As soon as HuffPost followed that account, Instagram recommended dozens more that, just like it, were promoting dangerous medical misinformation amid a global health emergency.

With its 1 billion users, the role that Facebook-owned Instagram plays in shaping public discourse is not easily understated.

CaptainDork spotted CNN's update about best-selling author Stephen King: "I'm quitting Facebook," the author said on Twitter Friday. "Not comfortable with the flood of false information that's allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users' privacy...."

His Facebook profile has since been deleted. King encouraged his fans to follow him on Twitter. But meanwhile... Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday slammed Twitter and Google for the rise in trolling networks and scams via fake bots on both the platforms.... "The crypto scam level on Twitter is reaching new levels. This is not cool," Musk reacted to a follower's tweet. "Report as soon as you see it. Troll/bot networks on Twitter are a *dire* problem for adversely affecting public discourse and ripping people off," he continued.

He also criticised Google for allowing scammers to flourish. "Trolls/bots just need to be deemphasized relative to probable real people who aren't being paid to push an agenda or scam. Google still shows bs/scam pages, they're just several clicks away," Musk stressed.
And elsewhere, criticisms of Facebook and Google continued: in a new interview, venture capitalist and tech critic Roger McNamee specifically singled out Facebook and Google for their roles in spreading disinformation... "[T]hey're the reason we can't fix climate change," McNamee, author of the book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," said this week on the [Yahoo Finance show] Final Round. "They're the reason why we have an epidemic of measles due to the anti-vaxers. They're the reason why white supremacy and gun violence are on the rise because they empower the most disaffected people in society, and they give them a disproportionate political voice....

"If we want to do something about climate change or gun violence or white supremacy or anti-vaxers, we're going to have to fix Facebook and Google."

AmiMoJo quotes Mashable: A new study from the University of Alberta, published Tuesday in the medical journal The BMJ, tested smart assistants Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant on their ability to respond helpfully to first aid questions. While Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa way outperformed Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, the results as a whole were underwhelming.

The researchers asked all of the smart assistants 123 questions on 39 first aid topics such as heart attacks, poisoning, and nose bleeds. Google Assistant and Alexa recognized the topics over 90 percent of the time, and gave accurate and helpful responses in about half of those instances. Meanwhile, Siri and Cortana's responses were so poor that it "prohibited their analysis."

Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy quotes ZDNet: Security experts have published a report Tuesday warning that the new and fast-rising LoRaWAN technology is vulnerable to cyberattacks and misconfigurations, despite claims of improved security rooted in the protocol's use of two layers of encryption.

LoRaWAN stands for "Long Range Wide Area Network." It is a radio-based technology that works on top of the proprietary LoRa protocol. LoRaWAN takes the LoRa protocol and allows devices spread across a large geographical area to wirelessly connect to the internet via radio waves...

But broadcasting data from devices via radio waves is not a secure approach. However, the protocol's creators anticipated this issue. Since its first version, LoRaWAN has used two layers of 128-bit encryption to secure the data being broadcast from devices — with one encryption key being used to authenticate the device against the network server and the other against a company's backend application. In a 27-page report published Tuesday, security researchers from IOActive say the protocol is prone to misconfigurations and design choices that make it susceptible to hacking and cyber-attacks. The company lists several scenarios it found plausible during its analysis of this fast-rising protocol.
Some examples:

• "Encryption keys can be extracted from devices by reverse engineering the firmware of devices that ship with a LoRaWAN module."
• "Many devices come with a tag displaying a QR code and/or text with the device's identifier, security keys, or more."

Due to a U.S. government ban on sales to Huawei, Google revoked its license for popular apps last spring (including Gmail and the Play Store). But this week Huawei executive Fred Wangfei suggested that even if that ban is lifted, Huawei would continue developing its own app ecosystem instead to avoid the possibility of future political complications.

The vice president of risk management and partner relations at Huawei later called those remarks "incorrect," while elsewhere Huawei issued a slightly different statement -- that "An open Android ecosystem is still our first choice, but if we are not able to continue to use it, we have the ability to develop our own." But BGR was already noting that Huawei "is ready to invest $3 billion this year to incentivize more than 4,000 developers to improve its Huawei Mobile Services system. Another billion is reserved for marketing purposes."

And Android Authority suggests Huawei should stick to its original statement. "Maybe it's time for Huawei to go all-in on Harmony OS and do what it can to bring a viable alternative to Android and iOS..."
If there's any company today that has the financial resources and raw talent necessary to bring in a viable third choice for smartphone operating systems, it's Huawei... Sure, it would be a long-term investment and there would inevitably be short-term losses as the company tries to find its footing and develop Harmony OS to have its own identity. But it would prevent something like the Huawei ban from happening to the company again as well as further the company's ambitions as not only a smartphone manufacturer but as a technology creator....

Huawei would have major difficulties in encouraging wide adoption of Harmony OS for one major reason: it's Huawei. The Huawei ban exists because the United States government doesn't trust Huawei and there are numerous (as yet unproven) accusations against the company related to espionage, IP theft, fraud, and even violations of international treaties... Huawei is already in a bad situation. It's going to need to dig itself out of the hole it's in regardless, so why not use this opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade and develop Harmony OS as a viable third option on the way?

Maybe the industry needs a shake-up... Maybe a new operating system is just the kind of fire OEMs need to turn the market around. Maybe a real, potent threat that the billions of people who use Android and iOS just might jump ship to something else would scare companies into taking some real risks.

As I said earlier, there aren't too many companies out there right now that could do this, but Huawei could.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: General Motors is resurrecting the Hummer, best known as a gas-guzzling, military-style SUV, as an all-electric "super truck" with massive horsepower, acceleration and torque. The Detroit automaker confirmed the plans Thursday and released three online teaser videos for the "GMC Hummer EV" pickup ahead of a 30-second Super Bowl ad for the vehicle featuring NBA star LeBron James. The spot is scheduled to air during the second quarter of Sunday's game.

The Hummer EV pickup, according to GM, will feature 1,000 horsepower; 0 to 60 mph acceleration of three seconds; and 11,500 pound feet of torque. It didn't announce a price. The Hummer EV pickup is expected to go into production in the fall of 2021 at a plant in Detroit, followed by sales starting toward the end of the year. The teaser videos detail the specifications and preview the front of the pickup, which features a new iteration of Hummer's well-known slotted grille with "HUMMER" backlit across the front of the truck.

Writing in Analytical Chemistry, Paige Hinners and Young Jin Lee of Iowa State University say they have figured out an accurate way to data to within 24 hours when a fingerprint under a week old was made -- and thus whether it is associated with a crime temporally, as well as spatially. The Economist reports: They knew from work conducted by other laboratories that the triglyceride oils contained in fingerprints change by oxidation over the course of time. That provides an obvious way to date prints. The problem is that the techniques which have been applied to analyze these oils are able to distinguish age only crudely. In practice, they can determine whether or not a print is over a week old, but nothing else. Dr Hinners and Dr Lee wondered if higher precision could be obtained by thinking a bit more about oxidation. Oxygen molecules in the air come in two varieties. Most have a pair of atoms but some, known as ozone, have three. Though far rarer than diatomic oxygen, ozone is more reactive and also reacts in ways different from those of its two-atomed cousin. The two researchers therefore decided to focus their attentions on ozonolysis, as triatomic oxidation is known.

Triglycerides, as their name suggests, are three-tailed molecules. Each tail is a chain of carbon atoms, with hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbons. The chains are held together by bonds between the carbon atoms. These are of two varieties, known as single and double bonds. Single bonds are, in chemistry-speak, saturated, and double bonds unsaturated. By extension, molecules with one or more double bonds in them are also referred to as unsaturated, while those with only single bonds are called saturated. Unsaturated bonds are more reactive, and it is here that ozonolysis does its work. Ozone breaks up triglycerides at their double bonds, with one or more of the ozone's oxygen atoms becoming attached to the carbon chain, to create new chemical species. In principle, this should result in a gradual loss of unsaturated triglycerides and a concomitant rise in the reaction products of ozonolysis. And that, in practice, is what Dr Hinners and Dr Lee found.

A reader shares a report from The Atlantic, written by Sidney Fussell: Uber has banned guns in cars, for both drivers and passengers, since 2015. But over email and Facebook Messenger, four current and four former drivers told me they carry firearms on the job. In explaining why, they each cited the same self-determinalist rhetoric Uber has slapped on subway ads to entice drivers and used in hearings to justify the business model: Drivers maintain good ratings, own their own cars, set their own hours, act as their own bosses, and follow local laws. But ultimately, they work for themselves, and Uber is, to use a Silicon Valley term of art, just a platform.

In 2017, Jose Mejia, a Miami driver, filed a federal class-action suit against Uber to reverse its firearm ban. Florida's 2008 "bring your gun to work" law empowers employees to store legal firearms in personal lockers or their own cars. With Uber, of course, the car is the workplace. Mejia claimed that Uber policy violated Florida law and, citing an incident in which an Uber driver with a concealed-carry license shot and disarmed a Chicago gunman, argued that arming Uber drivers could save lives. But Mejia couldn't prove that Uber violated his rights: He hadn't been fired or threatened with suspension. The company had announced a ban, yes, but never materially stopped him from carrying a firearm. The Florida court dismissed the suit (PDF) without prejudice in 2018. Here we have a uniquely American absurdity: Drivers can carry guns to work, to a bar, to a supermarket, but not in their own cars while using the app to transport passengers. Like Mejia, they exist in this space between name and effect, adherent to a ban with little practical enforcement.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) demanding more information about the private equity takeover of the .org domain registry. The attorney general is seeking answers to 35 questions concerning the sale as well as documents sent between ICANN, private equity firm Ethos Capital, and Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages the .org domain. Mashable reports: Ethos Capital disclosed last year that it was acquiring PIR from its non-profit parent organization, the Internet Society, for $1.135 billion. ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees domain names, disclosed the letter on its website along with its own correspondence with PIR, informing it of the development. Previously, ICANN had until Feb. 17 to approve or deny the sale. According to ICANN, as a result of the California AG's letter, it's seeking to delay this deadline until April 20.

ICANN says it's "fully cooperating" with the request. In its letter to PIR, ICANN gives a heads up that it will be providing the attorney general "confidential material" to comply with the AG's demands. As ICANN's letter states, it has terms in its contract with PIR which forbid the organization from disclosing information that the registry deems confidential unless required by law. ICANN clearly views the AG's letter as applicable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A social media boosting startup, which bills itself as a service to increase a user's Instagram followers, has exposed thousands of Instagram account passwords. The company, Social Captain, says it helps thousands of users to grow their Instagram follower counts by connecting their accounts to its platform. Users are asked to enter their Instagram username and password into the platform to get started. But TechCrunch learned this week Social Captain was storing the passwords of linked Instagram accounts in unencrypted plaintext. Any user who viewed the web page source code on their Social Captain profile page could see their Instagram username and password in plain sight, so long as they had connected their account to the platform.

Making matters worse, a website bug allowed anyone access to any Social Captain user's profile without having to log in -- simply plugging in a user's unique account ID into the company's web address would grant access to their Social Captain account -- and their Instagram login credentials. Because the user account IDs were for the most part sequential, it was possible to access any user's account and view their Instagram password and other account information with relative ease. The security researcher who reported the vulnerability provided a spreadsheet of about 10,000 scraped user accounts to TechCrunch.

"The spreadsheet contained about 4,700 complete sets of Instagram usernames and passwords," the report says. "The rest of the records contained just the user's name and their email address."

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is moving away from Facebook Workplace to instead make use of more open-source software packages. Phoronix reports: Facebook Workplace is Facebook's corporate-focused product for internal real-time communication and related communication needs within organizations. CERN had been making use of Facebook Workplace and in addition to data privacy concerns, they were recently confronted with either paying Facebook or losing administrative rights, no more single sign-on access, and Facebook having access to their internal data. But now they have assembled their own set of software packages to fill the void by abandoning Facebook Workplace.

CERN is now using the Mattermost open-source software for online chat and Discourse for further information exchange. CERN's IT department is working on filling the gaps further left by getting rid of Facebook Workplace. [CERN has published a post with more details about the move.] ZDNet points out that this latest announcement "ends a nearly four-year trial with Facebook Workplace and means CERN will remove its presence from the platform on January 31, 2020."

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is working on a bill that would reduce legal protections for apps and websites, potentially jeopardizing online encryption. The Verge reports: The draft bill would form a "National Commission on Online Child Exploitation Prevention" to establish rules for finding and removing child exploitation content. If companies don't follow these rules, they could lose some protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely shields companies from liability over users' posts. Reports from Bloomberg and The Information say that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is behind the bill, currently dubbed the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (or EARN IT) Act. It would amend Section 230 to make companies liable for state prosecution and civil lawsuits over child abuse and exploitation-related material, unless they follow the committee's best practices. They wouldn't lose Section 230 protections for other content like defamation and threats.

The bill doesn't lay out specific rules. But the committee -- which would be chaired by the Attorney General -- is likely to limit how companies encrypt users' data. Large web companies have moved toward end-to-end encryption (which keeps data encrypted for anyone outside a conversation, including the companies themselves) in recent years. Facebook has added end-to-end encryption to apps like Messenger and Whatsapp, for example, and it's reportedly pushing it for other services as well. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has condemned the move, saying it would prevent law enforcement from finding criminals, but Facebook isn't required to comply. Under the EARN IT Act, though, a committee could require Facebook and other companies to add a backdoor for law enforcement.

The Trump administration on Friday declared a public healthy emergency over the coronavirus outbreak and said any foreign national who has traveled within China in the last 14 days will not be allowed to enter the country. The Wall Street Journal reports: The announcement [from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar] came as stock markets tumbled amid concern about how the impact of the virus could slow global growth. At the same time, Mr. Azar sought to minimize fears about the virus spreading further in the U.S. "I hope that people will see that their government is taking responsible steps to protect them," he said at a White House briefing. "The risk is low... but our job is to keep that risk low."

There are six confirmed cases in the U.S. and 191 people are under investigation, officials said. Meantime, Americans who were evacuated from the epicenter of the China coronavirus outbreak will be quarantined for 14 days at a U.S. military base to prevent any spread of the infectious disease, federal health authorities said Friday. The quarantine -- the first in the U.S. ordered by the federal government in roughly 50 years -- came as the U.K. and Russia each reported their first cases of the dangerous virus, while other countries moved to limit air traffic with China as the number of people infected there approached 10,000. The quarantine applies to 195 U.S. citizens evacuated Wednesday from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak, and brought to the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, Calif., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The State Department also on Friday advised Americans in China to consider leaving and requested all nonessential U.S. government personnel to postpone travel there.

The State Department's "Do Not Travel" advice placed China on the same list as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. It follows the WHO's designation Thursday of the coronavirus as a global public-health emergency.

Additionally, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the outbreak. Delta's suspensions will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told lawmakers Friday he intends to propose fines against at least one U.S. wireless carrier for sharing customers' real-time location data with outside parties without the subscribers' knowledge or consent. From a report: The FCC has been investigating for more than a year following revelations that subscriber location data from AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint made its way to a resale market used by bounty hunters. Pai said in letters to several lawmakers that the agency's investigation has found that "one or more wireless carriers apparently violated federal law."

Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said on Friday that they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak. Delta on Friday said its China service suspension will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30, but it will continue to operate the service until then to "ensure customers looking to exit China have options to do so." From a report: Dozens of carriers including United, Cathay Pacific, British Airways and others have slashed or suspended service to China because of the outbreak. Delta was the first in the U.S. to suspend service altogether. Large companies spanning industries from technology to packaged food have suspended business trips to the country because of coronavirus, driving down demand for flights to China. Time has a more comprehensive list.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Facebook issued a disappointing quarterly report, sending its stock price down by 6%, reports CNBC. In the report, Facebook reported a 51% rise in expenses and "warned of advertising headwinds related to privacy and regulatory changes on the horizon, leading to slowing growth in the U.S. Facebook said privacy improvements on Apple's iPhones and Google's Android software could hurt its ability to target advertising." Here are the key numbers from Facebook's fourth-quarter earnings report, per CNBC:

Earnings (EPS): $2.56 vs. $2.53 per share forecast by Refinitiv.
Revenue: $21.08 billion vs. $20.89 billion forecast by Refinitiv.
Daily active users (DAUs): 1.66 billion vs. 1.65 billion forecast by FactSet.
Monthly active users (DAUs): 2.5 billion vs. 2.5 billion forecast by FactSet.
Average revenue per user (ARPU): $8.52 vs. $8.38 forecast by FactSet.

Several delivery services, including Postmates, Seamless, Grubhub, and DoorDash, are offering food from restaurants without their explicit permission. "The delivery apps pull up restaurant menus listed online, from which customers make their selections, and couriers working for the apps place orders on their behalf," reports Eater. "The process essentially inserts third-party apps as middlemen into a service many restaurants say they want control over, or wish to opt out of entirely." From the report: Recently, in a move to compete with the Postmates and Doordash model, Grubhub and Seamless adopted a similar policy, adding "non-partnered" restaurants to their platform. Starting a few months ago in some cities like San Francisco, Grubhub added restaurants without their permission based on local demand -- i.e., searches -- for them. If Grubhub can demonstrate public interest in getting delivery from a particular restaurant, the plan goes, maybe restaurants will actually partner up. In a previous statement to Eater, a Grubhub spokesperson said the company has been adding non-partnered restaurants "so we will not be at a restaurant disadvantage compared to any other food delivery platform." "The non-partnered model is no doubt a bad experience for diners, drivers and restaurants," the spokesperson admitted. "But our peers have shown growth -- although not profits -- using the tactic, and we believe there is a benefit to having a larger restaurant network: from finding new diners and not giving diners any reason to go elsewhere."

According to a report by the Counter, Grubhub has registered more than 23,000 web domains for real restaurants, creating "shadow pages" that often compete with restaurants' real websites. If its shadow pages show up higher on Google search results than a restaurant's own site -- or are added by Google's listings themselves -- it's an advantage for Grubhub, since the delivery service charges higher fees to restaurants when it can claim it helped customers discover them. Grubhub argues that its contract with restaurants includes a provision reserving the right to purchase domain names to set up "microsites" on their behalf. In a similar maneuver, Grubhub also sets up new phone numbers for restaurants with whom they have contracts, displaying those numbers instead of the restaurant's direct lines on their websites and apps. Grubhub then forwards those calls to restaurants and charges fees for calls that lead to orders. Some restaurants, like Tiffin Indian Cuisine in Philadelphia, claim that Grubhub charges fees for every phone call, many of which don't result in orders, or are just calls to check in on existing orders. Tiffin's owner filed a class-action lawsuit in in Philadelphia federal court seeking $5 million in damages; Grubhub disputes the restaurant's claims.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Research presented at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona today supports the notion that YouTube's platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies. The study, carried out by researchers at Switzerland's Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, found evidence that users who engaged with a middle ground of extreme right-wing content migrated to commenting on the most fringe far-right content.

Their paper, called "Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube," details a large-scale study of YouTube looking for traces of evidence -- in likes, comments and views -- that certain right-leaning YouTube communities are acting as gateways to fringe far-right ideologies. Per the paper, they analyzed 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels -- broadly classifying the videos into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) and the Alt-right -- and using user comments as a "good enough" proxy for radicalization (their data set included 72 million comments). The findings suggest a pipeline effect over a number of years where users who started out commenting on alt-lite/IDW YouTube content shifted to commenting on extreme far-right content on the platform over time. The rate of overlap between consumers of Media content and the alt-right was found to be far lower. "The researchers were unable to determine the exact mechanism involved in migrating YouTube users from consuming 'alt lite' politics to engaging with the most fringe and extreme far-right ideologies -- citing a couple of key challenges on that front: Limited access to recommendation data; and the study not taking into account personalization (which can affect a user's recommendations on YouTube)," reports TechCrunch.

"But even without personalization, they say they were 'still able to find a path in which users could find extreme content from large media channels.'"