Nearly half of American teenagers say they are online "constantly," according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The report was based on a survey of 1,391 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted from Sept. 18 to Oct. 10, 2024. The Associated Press reports: As in past years, YouTube was the single most popular platform teenagers used -- 90% said they watched videos on the site, down slightly from 95% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they visit YouTube every day. There was a slight downward trend in several popular apps teens used. For instance, 63% of teens said they used TikTok, down from 67% and Snapchat slipped to 55% from 59%.

This small decline could be due to pandemic-era restrictions easing up and kids having more time to see friends in person, but it's not enough to be truly meaningful. X saw the biggest decline among teenage users. Only 17% of teenagers said they use X, down from 23% in 2022, the year Elon Musk bought the platform. Reddit held steady at 14%. About 6% of teenagers said they use Threads, Meta's answer to X that launched in 2023. [...]

Meta's messaging service WhatsApp was a rare exception in that it saw the number of teenage users increase, to 23% from 17% in 2022. Pew also asked kids how often they use various online platforms. Small but significant numbers said they are on them âoealmost constantly.â For YouTube, 15% reported constant use, for TikTok, 16% and for Snapchat, 13%.

Social media giants confronted a familiar dilemma over user content moderation after murder suspect Luigi Mangione's arrest in the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO on Monday, highlighting the platforms' varied approaches to managing digital footprints of criminal suspects.

Meta quickly removed Mangione's Facebook and Instagram accounts under its "dangerous organizations and individuals" policy, while his account on X underwent a brief suspension before being reinstated with a premium subscription. LinkedIn maintained his profile, stating it did not violate platform policies. His Reddit account was suspended in line with the platform's policy on high-profile criminal suspects, while his Goodreads profile fluctuated between public and private status.

The New York Times adds: When someone goes from having a private life to getting public attention, online accounts they intended for a small circle of friends or acquaintances are scrutinized by curious strangers -- and journalists.

In some cases, these newly public figures or their loved ones can shut down the accounts or make them private. Others, like Mr. Mangione, who has been charged with murder, are cut off from their devices, leaving their digital lives open for the public's consumption. Either way, tech companies have discretion in what happens to the account and its content. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects companies from legal liability for posts made by users.

"$15.8 million every 60 seconds. That's how much US consumers spent in two hours on Monday night," reports CNN, "capping off a five-day spending spree that smashed previous records." U.S. consumers spent a total of $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday, up 7.3% from the previous year, according to Adobe Analytics... Consumers spent a record $41.1 billion across the five days beginning Thanksgiving Day, according to Adobe. "While Cyber Monday remained the season's and year's biggest online shopping day, year-over-year growth was stronger on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday," Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement... The company's data projects that holiday spending from November 1 to December 31 will surpass $240 billion, up 8.4% from the previous year.

The record sales on Cyber Monday were boosted by US consumers shopping on their mobile devices, which accounted for $7.6 billion in spending. This year, 57% of online sales came through a mobile device, compared to 33% in 2019, as shopping on mobile phones has surged in popularity... Buy now, pay later" programs also contributed nearly $1 billion in spending on Cyber Monday, a record high. About 75% of these types of transactions occurred through a mobile device.

Cyber Monday shopping wasn't just confined to the US, either. Global sales reached $49.7 billion, up 3% from the previous year, according to data from Salesforce.
The top-selling items included consumer electronics like the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch OLED, the article points out (adding that "About 78% of all consumer smartphones and 87% of consoles were imported from China in 2023, according to a report from the Consumer Technology Association.")

More interesting statistics from CNN:

• "Discounts on apparel peaked at just over 23% off, while TVs and computers peaked at almost 22% off, according to Adobe. And the discounts might last: Adobe projects discounts of up to 18% off computers through the end of the year... "

• "For US retail sites, the share of revenue from affiliates and partners like social media influencers was 20.3% on Cyber Monday, up almost 7% from the previous year. "

• "Additionally, companies employed AI chatbots to assist consumers, like Amazon's Rufus. Traffic to retail sites from chatbots increased by nearly 2,000% on Cyber Monday, according to Adobe."

Have you been to Enron.com lately?

"It's the comeback story no one asked for," reports CNN, "the resurrection of a brand so toxic it remains synonymous with corporate fraud more than two decades after it collapsed in bankruptcy.

"That's right, folks: Enron is back. But only kind of." TL;DR: A company that makes T-shirts bought the Enron trademark and appears to be trying to sell some merch on behalf of the guy behind the satirical conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real...."

On Monday, the 23rd anniversary of Enron's filing for bankruptcy, rumors began to spread that the former Texas energy giant had come back from the dead. A sleek new website, enron.com, appeared to show that the company had done some serious soul-searching and, inexplicably, reincorporated under its original brand. As a modern energy company, it would be dedicated to "solving the global energy crisis," its press statement reads. The site is packed with the kind of stock art and benign corporate platitudes that lend it credibility. There's a link to job openings, employee testimonials and even a minute-long video titled "I am Enron," a movie-trailer-style mashup of cityscape time lapses, rockets launching into space, a ballerina twirling on a beach — a mess of imagery and baritone voiceover so trite it's almost believable.

But the site and its associated social media accounts are, like Enron's balance sheets, mostly fiction. Unlike the Enron scandal, however, this one appears to be little more than performance art designed to sell branded hoodies. Publicly available documents show that an Akansas-based LLC called The College Company bought the Enron trademark for $275 in 2020... You can tab over to the site's "Company Store" page to browse a selection of Enron-branded hoodies ($118 before tax and shipping), puffer vests ($89), tees ($40) baseball hats ($40), beanies ($30) and water bottles emblazoned with the slogan "you've got great energy."
Somewhere on the site CNN spotted a list of "key pillars" which included a commitment to "permissionless innovation," which CNN took to be "a nod that prompted some speculation online that the new 'Enron' would launch some kind of digital token." That phrase has apparently been changed now to "continuous innovation." An Enron-branded X account posted and later deleted a message teasing at a crypto offering, saying "we do not have any token or coin (yet). Stay tuned, we are excited to show you more soon."
But sharp-eyed X.com users also found the key context to add: that the Terms of Use at Enron.com declare the site's information "is First Amendment-protected parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only."

Still, the site includes this testimonial from someone it says is a current employee. "Like many of my peers in the Enron family, I was skeptical at first.

"Now, not only do I have complete confidence in the integrity of the company, I also genuinely believe that we are leading the way for a new chapter of American business."

Oxford University Press: Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say, we're pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is 'brain rot.'

Our language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year. After two weeks of public voting and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public's input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring 'brain rot' as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024.

'Brain rot' is defined as "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration."

Our experts noticed that 'brain rot' gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

"Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?" asks the BBC. "If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year." It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a "symptom of the time we're living in". Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And "slop".]

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: "While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot — which prevails so much more widely and fatally?" The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Prof Przybylski says "there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media."
The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie" [Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...."

"Slop" has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate," according to Oxford. Like "brain rot," it "represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn," Grathwohl said. "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."

Bluesky (Slashdot is on Bluesky here and Threads here) now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, "Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said."

But "the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators," Engadget reported this week: A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one "doppelganger," with most looking like "cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up.
The article highlighted issues with Bluesky's loose account verification policies. And then, Bluesky announced a new change-of-policy Friday. Engadget reports: The Bluesky Safety account said that the social media service is removing accounts that are impersonating other people and those squatting on handles... Bluesky now requires parody, satire or fan accounts to label themselves as such in both their handles and their bio. If they don't, or if they only indicate the nature of their account in one of those elements, then they'll be treated as an impersonator and will be removed from the platform. Bluesky now explicitly prohibits identity churning, as well. Accounts that start as impersonators with the purpose of gaining new users, and who then switch to a different identity in an attempt to circumvent the ban, will still get booted off the app. Finally, it says it's exploring "additional options to enhance account verification," though they're not quite ready for rollout.
Bluesky says they've "quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress." And in addition, "We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles."

And there's another problem. "The EU's executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn't provide information it was required to share under the bloc's Digital Services Act," reports Bloomberg. Bluesky responded that it's working to comply, " consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU's information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote on Tuesday in an email." "All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established," Thomas Regnier, the commission's spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. "This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed...."

Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the bloc qualify as "very large online platforms" and need to follow stricter content moderation rules under the commission's supervision. Breaches can result in fines of up to 6% of their global annual sales... Smaller platforms are still required to comply with the law, but are regulated by the EU country where they have a legal presence. That's so far unclear in the case of Bluesky, which was created expressly to avoid a centralized ownership structure.

The commission asked EU member countries' national authorities to investigate "and see if they can find any trace of Bluesky" in their jurisdictions, Regnier said

The New York Post writes that "After the COVID-19 pandemic upended mom-and-pops around the city and resulted in thousands shuttering for good, it is important — now more than ever — to shop local."

America's Small Business Administration issued their own statement urging shoppers to "champion small businesses nationwide and #ShopSmall on Saturday, linking to a site mapping small businesses in your area. (And there's also a directory listing online small businesses.) Small Business Saturday was founded by American Express in 2010 and officially cosponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration since 2011. It is an important part of small businesses' busiest shopping season.

- In 2023, the reported projected spending in the U.S. from those who shopped at small businesses on Small Business Saturday was around $17 billion

- Since 2010, the total reported U.S. spending at small businesses during the annual Small Business Saturday is an estimated $201 billion
"Let's keep the Shop Small tradition going," urges the American Express web site — encouraging shoppers to also use the #ShopSmall hashtag on social media.

Major technology companies criticized Australia's new law banning social media access for users under 16, which passed parliament on Thursday with bipartisan support. The legislation threatens fines up to $32 million for platforms failing to block minors. TikTok warned the ban could drive young users to riskier online spaces, while Meta called it a "predetermined process," questioning the rushed parliamentary review that gave stakeholders only 24 hours for submissions. Reuters adds: Snapchat parent Snap said it leaves many questions unanswered. [...] Sunita Bose, managing director of Digital Industry Group, which has most social media companies as members, said no one can confidently explain how the law will work in practice. "The community and platforms are in the dark about what exactly is required of them," she said.

Australia will ban children under 16 from using social media after its senate approved what will become a world-first law. From a report: Children will be blocked from using platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, a move the Australian government argue is necessary to protect their mental health and wellbeing.

The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) bill will impose fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($32.5 million) on platforms for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding accounts. It would take effect a year after the bill becomes law, allowing platforms time to work out technological solutions that would also protect users' privacy. The senate passed the bill 34 votes to 19. The house of representatives overwhelmingly approved the legislation 102 votes to 13 on Wednesday.

A security researcher discovered an unprotected database belonging to SL Data Services containing over 600,000 sensitive files, including criminal histories and background checks with names, addresses, and social media accounts. The Register reports: We don't know how long the personal information was openly accessible. Infosec specialist Jeremiah Fowler says he found the Amazon S3 bucket in October and reported it to the data collection company by phone and email every few days for more than two weeks. [The info service provider eventually closed up the S3 bucket, says Fowler, although he never received any response.] In addition to not being password protected, none of the information was encrypted, he told The Register. In total, the open bucket contained 644,869 PDF files in a 713.1 GB archive.

Some 95 percent of the documents Fowler saw were labeled "background checks," he said. These contained full names, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, employment, family members, social media accounts, and criminal record history belonging to thousands of people. In at least one of these documents, the criminal record indicated that the person had been convicted of sexual misconduct. It included case details, fines, dates, and additional charges. While court records and sex offender status are usually public records in the US, this exposed cache could be combined with other data points to make complete profiles of people -- along with their family members and co-workers -- providing everything criminals would need for targeted phishing and/or social engineering attacks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court signaled it may take up a case that could determine whether Internet service providers must terminate users who are accused of copyright infringement. In an order (PDF) issued today, the court invited the Department of Justice's solicitor general to file a brief "expressing the views of the United States."

In Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications, the major record labels argue that cable provider Cox should be held liable for failing to terminate users who were repeatedly flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads. There was a mixed ruling at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the appeals court affirmed a jury's finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement but reversed a verdict on vicarious infringement "because Cox did not profit from its subscribers' acts of infringement." That ruling vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Cox and Sony are both seeking a Supreme Court review. Cox wants to overturn the finding of willful contributory infringement, while Sony wants to reinstate the $1 billion verdict.

The Supreme Court asking for US input on Sony v. Cox could be a precursor to the high court taking up the case. For example, the court last year asked the solicitor general to weigh in on Texas and Florida laws that restricted how social media companies can moderate their platforms. The court subsequently took up the case and vacated lower-court rulings, making it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment.

Meta wants to force Apple and Google to verify the ages of people downloading apps from their app stores, reports the Washington Post — and now Meta's campaign "is picking up momentum" with legislators in the U.S. Congress.

Federal and state lawmakers have recently proposed a raft of measures requiring that platforms such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram block users under a certain age from using their sites. The push has triggered fierce debate over the best way to ascertain how old users are online. Last year Meta threw its support behind legislation that would push those obligations onto app stores rather than individual app providers, like itself, as your regular host and Naomi Nix reported. While some states have considered the plan, it has not gained much traction in Washington.

That could be shifting. Two congressional Republicans are preparing a new age verification bill that places the burden on app stores, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans... The bill would be the first of its kind on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have called for expanding guardrails for children amid concerns about the risks of social media but where political divisions have bogged down talks. The measure would give parents the right to sue an app store if their child was exposed to certain content, such as lewd or sexual material, according to a copy obtained by the Tech Brief. App stores could be protected against legal claims, however, if they took steps to protect children against harms, such as verifying their ages and giving parents the ability to block app downloads.
The article points out that U.S. lawmakers "have the power to set national standards that could override state efforts if they so choose..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game's influence's 20 years later.

For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a real preview of a future where everyone would connect to friends and strangers online. For another, the game made billions of dollars with a business model combining monthly subscriptions with in-game purchases (including for pets and animals that players could ride), becoming a massive cash cow for Blizzard and pointing the way to future internet business models.

Brazilian officials are scrambling to control a gambling boom that has led some citizens to take out loans with interest rates as high as 438% to fund their betting habits, sparking concerns about household debt levels.

The surge in online betting has doubled Brazil's gambling population to 52 million in six months, with the central bank estimating monthly gambling spending between 18-21 billion reais ($3.1-3.6 billion) through August 2024. Central Bank President Roberto Campos Neto said lower-income families are disproportionately affected, with 20% of government social program payments in August directed to online gambling sites.

The Finance Ministry has accelerated regulatory measures, requiring over 100 betting companies to submit operating paperwork ahead of schedule. New rules starting January 1 will allow authorities to limit bet amounts, block payment systems, and monitor for money laundering. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva recently raised concerns at the UN about gambling's impact on Brazil's poorest citizens, while officials are moving to ban credit card use for betting and restrict gambling advertisements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The Australian government plans to enact laws requiring big tech firms to protect its citizens online, the latest move by the center-left Labor administration to crack down on social media including through age limits and curbs on misinformation. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced the government's plan for a legislated Digital Duty of Care in Australia on Wednesday night, saying it aligned with similar laws in the UK and European Union. "It is now time for industry to show leadership, and for social media to recognize it has a social responsibility," Rowland said in a speech in Sydney announcing the measures. It would "keep users safe and help prevent online harms."

In response to the laws, Facebook and Instagram operator Meta Platforms Inc. called for the restrictions to be handled by app stores, such as those run by Google and Apple Inc., rather than the platforms themselves. The government has ignored those requests, but has yet to announce what fines companies would face or what age verification information will need to be provided. At the same time, Albanese has moved forward controversial laws to target misinformation and disinformation online, which opponents have labeled an attack on freedom of speech. Earlier this month, Albanese said the government would legislate for a ban on social media for children under 16, a policy the government says is world-leading. "Social media is doing harm to our kids and I'm calling time on it," Albanese told a news conference.

The European Union has fined Meta $840 million for unfairly tying its Facebook Marketplace classified ads service to its social network, marking the company's first EU antitrust penalty.

The European Commission ruled Meta must stop bundling Marketplace with Facebook's social platform and cease imposing unfair conditions on competing classified ads services. Regulators found Meta exploited Facebook's massive user base to disadvantage rivals and used competitors' advertising data to enhance Marketplace.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Meta "tied its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it online, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts announced. Teixeira received the sentence before Judge Indira Talwani in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In March, the national guardsman pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. He was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in April 2023 and has been in federal custody since mid-May 2023.

According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed classified documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform mostly used by online gamers. He began sharing the documents in or around 2022. A document he was accused of leaking included information about providing equipment to Ukraine, while another included discussions about a foreign adversary's plot to target American forces abroad, prosecutors said. [...] While the documents were discovered online in March 2023, Teixeira had been sharing them online since January of that year, according to prosecutors.

Android Authority's Rita El Khoury argues that the decline in punctuation use and capitalization in social media writing, especially among younger generations, can largely be attributed to the iPhone keyboard. "By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch, the iPhone keyboard encourages the biggest grammar fiends to be lazy and skip punctuation," writes El Khoury. She continues: Pundits will say that it's just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it's one extra tap too many. When you're firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you're doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed. [...]

The real problem, at the end of the day, is that iPhones -- not Android phones -- are popular among Gen Z buyers, especially in the US -- a market with a huge online presence and influence. Add that most smartphone users tend to stick to default apps on their phones, so most of them end up with the default iPhone keyboard instead of looking at better (albeit often even slower) alternatives. And it's that same keyboard that's encouraging them to be lazy instead of making it easier to add punctuation.

So yes, I blame the iPhone for killing the period and slaughtering the comma, and I think both of those are great offenders in the death of the capital letter. But trends are cyclical, and if the cassette player can make a comeback, so can the comma. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, writing like a five-year-old will be passe, too, and it'll be trendy to use proper grammar again.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: If you've recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you've probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn't posted on the company's actual website -- or any of their social media pages -- you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it's possible they're not hiring at all. "Ghost jobs," or ads for positions that aren't actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes.

According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it's also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to "trick overworked employees" into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.

After interviewing 1,641 hiring managers, Resume Builder researchers found that 40% of employers posted fake job listings in 2024, and that three in 10 currently had ghost jobs listed. The idea to post them mostly trickled down from HR, followed by senior management and executives, their June 2024 article continued. Though the listings were posted on multiple hiring platforms, the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies' websites. Evidence suggests this trend is taking hold throughout the Bay Area, too. A collaborative document circulating online reveals a growing list of employers accused of posting ghost jobs. Many of them, it turns out, are tech companies with offices based in California.