Business, Spoken

At its birth, the social network Gab issued a call for free speech. “We promote raw, rational, open, and authentic discourse online," said Andrew Torba, the CEO and founder, in an early interview with WIRED. And now, as it fights for its life, it’s doing the same. The site has been knocked offline after the Squirrel Hill massacre. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few years after the Great Recession, you couldn’t scroll through Google Reader without seeing the word “disrupt.” TechCrunch named a conference after it, the New York Times named a column after it, investor Marc Andreessen warned that “software disruption” would eat the world; not long after, Peter Thiel, his fellow Facebook board member, called “disrupt” one of his favorite words. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The future of humanity will be shaped by artificial intelligence. Now some of the best brains working on the technology are riven by a debate about a four-letter acronym that some say contributes to the field's well-documented diversity problems. NIPS is the name of AI’s most prominent conference, a venue for machine learning research formally known as the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Twitter dropped an almost unfathomably large archive of tweets connected to two alleged influence campaigns on Wednesday. The trove included over 9 million tweets associated with 3,841 accounts connected to Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, or IRA, as well as more than a million tweets attributed to a network of 770 Iranian propaganda-pushing accounts. Twitter has never before released an archive of this size. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Tuesday, Facebook released a new tool that shows who's spending the most money on political ads on the platform in the US. At a glance, the Ad Archive Report suggests that Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke is the biggest spender, having plowed more than $5 million into Facebook ads since May. But the fine print reveals a more surprising finding: The advertiser spending the most on political and issue ads on Facebook is, well, Facebook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Only six social media apps in the world have a billion or more users, and four of them belong to Facebook. Tops is the eponymous flagship app, known as “Big Blue,” followed by three apps all focused on messaging: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. So when Facebook decided to do a significant redesign of the latter—currently used by 1. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The internet went down on February 28, 2017. Or at least that's how it seemed to some users as sites and apps like Slack and Medium went offline or malfunctioned for four hours. What actually happened is that Amazon's enormously popular S3 cloud storage service experienced an outage, affecting everything that depended on it. It was a reminder of the risks when too much of the internet relies on a single service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Call It Franchising 2.0. The tech industry is setting its sights on the little guy, looking to turn ambitious go-getters into small-business owners. Tech companies provide the tools and support; you supply services. Bedeviled by last-mile delivery costs, Amazon began enabling entrepreneurs to launch their own package-delivery hubs this summer. Starting at a relatively modest $10,000, “delivery service partners” can lease fleets of 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every single gosh-darn good-for-nothing day, some piece of “frictionless” “seamless” “user-friendly” technology craps out on me. Touch ID fails—cool. Bluetooth can’t connect—awesome. If I’m on the road, Google Maps freezes at the most crucial turn. If I’m watching TV: “Sorry, we could not reach the Netflix service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices