Danish research institutions have accused Snapchat of enabling “an overwhelming number of drug dealers,” thereby making it easier for minors to access substances like cocaine, opioids, and MDMA.
The platform claims to be actively employing technology to eliminate profiles engaged in drug sales. However, a study by Digitalt Ansvar, a Danish organization advocating for responsible digital development, revealed that usernames did not effectively limit drug-related language. The organization also criticized Snapchat for not adequately addressing reports of profiles that openly promote drug sales.
Investigators utilized a simulated 13-year-old profile and found numerous individuals selling drugs on Snapchat with usernames containing terms like “cola,” “weed,” and “molly.” After reporting 40 such accounts to Snapchat, only 10 were removed, while the remaining 30 were dismissed.
Snapchat claims that 75% of reported accounts are “actively disabled,” yet the platform has now acted on all reports.
The research highlighted that, despite prior criticisms, Snapchat’s recommendation system endorses and promotes profiles of individuals engaged in illegal drug sales, even reaching children who have not previously interacted with any drug-related content.
Within hours, the test profile for the 13-year-old was suggested to add a friend associated with a drug trafficking profile.
“We are eager to see future improvements,” remarked Hesby Holm Ask, CEO of Digitalt Ansvar.
“Snapchat claims to filter profiles that actively utilize the platform for drug sales, yet our findings indicate otherwise. Snapchat permissively allows the presence of drug-related profiles and fails to adequately address either implicit or explicit drug-related language in usernames.”
He further emphasized that not moderating profiles with such clear drug-related usernames implies that “children and young individuals can easily access illicit substances on Snapchat.” He stated, “The technology exists; what is lacking is the will. Snapchat could effortlessly filter out such usernames.”
According to Snapchat, by 2023, 90% of Scandinavians aged 13-24 were users of the platform. Digitalt Ansvar has accused Snapchat of violating EU digital service regulations concerning child safety and has called for action from authorities.
A Snapchat representative stated: “We have a zero-tolerance policy for drug sales on Snapchat. Although the accounts flagged in the study were not all reported via the app, over 75% were already disabled by our team before this report was noted.
“We are committed to combating the misuse of our platform by drug dealers, investing significantly in resources to achieve this goal. We employ rigorous detection methods to identify and disable these accounts, collaborate with law enforcement to prosecute dealers, and educate the community about drug risks. Our dedication to maintaining a hostile environment for drug dealers is unwavering.”
Apps with the highest total number of notifications: – message:391 – new york post:190 – slack:121
Elon during the election campaign
Elon Musk spoke on stage alongside Donald Trump at a campaign event in Pennsylvania this month. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
Elon Musk is having a very difficult time against Donald Trump.
The CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX gave tens of millions of dollars to pro-Trump political action committees and planned a packed campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania. The newspaper said he speaks with President Trump multiple times a week and has encouraged other billionaires to support the Republican candidate en masse in private gatherings. new york times.
Taken together, Mr. Musk’s actions are unprecedented in modern times. Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of one of the most influential mass communications outlets, is putting all his efforts into political candidates. He is no longer a billionaire dabbling in politics. Elon Musk is here to stay as a political actor.
Last weekend, Musk appeared with President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of Trump’s first assassination attempt. He plans to make additional stops in the Keystone State in the three weeks leading up to the election. Politico coverage. he also $47 referral bonus Anyone who is registered to vote in a battleground state can sign a petition filed by his political action committee, America Pac. Remember, Musk forced all Tesla employees to return to the office five days a week in mid-2022. One might wonder how he will manage the company’s affairs since he will be spending so much time in Pennsylvania.
Tesla’s CEO contributes not only IRL but also online. He is bending Twitter/X to his political ends: He @America behind the wheel For this week’s America pack. Last month he Hacked materials from the Trump campaign Published by independent journalists. Musk’s own feed is filled with support for Trump and retweets from people who support him.
President Trump seemed excited about all of the above, sending out a fundraising email with the subject line “Elon!” Elon! Elon! ”’ He also asked supporters to buy the black-on-black “Dark Maga” hat that Musk wore while jumping for joy behind Trump in Pennsylvania.
Elon Musk stands on stage with President Trump during a campaign rally at the site of Trump’s first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on October 5, 2024. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
As the world’s richest man fights for the Republican nomination, he is following a familiar rabbit hole down the rabbit hole for President Trump’s surrogates. He is increasingly appealing to the fringe of the “Make America Great Again” movement. “If you don’t vote, this will be your last election in America,” Musk said in Pennsylvania. It’s an irony reminiscent of the storming of the Capitol. He repeats the line, “If Kamala Harris wins, she’s going to jail.”
President Trump expressed a similar idea, albeit a more optimistic one, telling a group of Christian supporters in July: We’ll fix it just fine, so there’s no need to vote. ” This is a hopeful statement in the sense of ending democracy. Mr. Musk’s version is a repudiation of Mr. Trump’s, and is full of the doom of election deniers. This contrast is similar to the dynamic between President Trump and J.D. Vance, who has expressed extreme anti-abortion views in speeches and interviews, although Trump himself has said he would return the issue to the states. I’m trying to get around this problem by repeating this.
You might think science is a top priority for a tech CEO, but Musk also defers to Trump on science issues. but, This week’s interview with former Fox News host Tucker CarlsonMusk touted the anti-vaccination movement while walking off a cliff, saying, “I’m not anti-vaccine in general…we shouldn’t force people to get vaccinated,” before praising smallpox and polio vaccines. did. Trump himself called the coronavirus “one of humanity’s greatest achievements.” But during the campaign, he said he would cut funding to schools that require vaccinations and appoint the nation’s most notorious anti-vaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to his transition team.
In the same conversation with Carlson, Musk repeated a statement he had previously recanted and wondered out loud why no one was trying to assassinate Harris.
Musk previously called Trump a “ruthless loser.” Trump once said with a vengeance that he could make tech moguls “bend the knee.” This strange partnership affected at least one of Musk’s businesses. A shift to the right and the launch of the Hot Wheels-style Cybertruck transformed Tesla from a brand coveted by Hollywood and Silicon Valley people to a brand beloved by law enforcement. It’s a change similar to that of Mr. Musk himself. Corporate value has fallen by tens of billions of dollars.
We will be keeping a close eye on Mr. Musk’s next steps on the campaign trail.
Art on Samsung TV and Art in the Museum
Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is on display.
What is the purpose of digital reproduction of paintings?
Samsung announced yesterday that it has entered into a partnership to license 20 paintings from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to be used on its Frame TVs. To promote this collaboration, the Korean electronics giant organized a tour of MoMA. I saw Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”, Claude Monet’s giant “Water Lilies”, and surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s “And I Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”.
“Water Lilies” by Claude Monet. Photo: Noah Karina/Guardian
Two weeks before this announcement, the Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands published a study measuring the neurological effects of art. Scientists have discovered that an original work of art stimulates a response in the viewer’s brain that is 10 times stronger than the response evoked by a reproduction of the same painting.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin theorized this finding about 100 years ago. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in 1937, he argued that original works have an indescribable aura that replicas can never match. Samsung seems to agree with him to invite journalists on a private MoMA tour to view original works. So what are the benefits of artwork on Frame TV?
Robin Saetta, MoMA’s director of business development, said during the tour that the partnership aligns with the museum’s goal of “extending and expanding access to modern and contemporary art.” I agree. Benjamin writes of the reproduction of a work of art, “Above all, it allows the original to meet the viewer half-heartedly.”
Sensor array for the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter experiment in South Dakota
Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility
The latest search for dark matter has so far been fruitless, but the good news is that it has allowed physicists to place the toughest constraints yet on the properties of this mysterious substance. New measurements from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment in South Dakota mean that we are closer than ever to finding dark matter particles, or that we have refuted the most likely explanation.
Dark matter is invisible to the naked eye because it does not interact significantly with normal matter or light. We only know that dark matter exists through its gravitational effects, which tell us that it makes up more than 80 percent of all matter. The leading explanation for dark matter has been that it is composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but searches for these fundamental entities have yet to turn up anything.
LUX-ZEPLIN is a dark matter detector made of seven tonnes of liquid xenon buried 1.5 kilometres underground and is the most sensitive to date, but after 280 days of searching it has yet to find any WIMPs. “We are number one in the world at not finding dark matter,” says an LZ spokesman. Chamkaur Gag At University College London.
While this result may seem disappointing, it allows physicists to place tight constraints on the nature of dark matter, narrowing the range of properties it could have. The constraints are nearly five times tighter than the best known, significantly limiting the possibility of WIMPs. The work was presented at two physics conferences. TeV Particle Astrophysics In the United States lysine It will be held in Brazil on August 26th.
“It’s like they say there’s a magic fish in the ocean, but we don’t know where it is,” Gag says. “You go in and swim around, you get out, you snorkel around, and you still don’t find it, so you use a submarine.” If the magic fish is a WIMP, he says, researchers have explored about 75 percent of the oceans and still haven’t found it.
“This is the next big step forward, one in a long line of such steps.” Dan Hooper “It’s probably fair to say that at any of these steps forward we can’t expect to see anything, but it doesn’t seem unlikely that we’ll see something if we take enough of these steps,” said David G. Schneider, a researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois who was not involved in the study.
At this point, many of the initially popular ideas for possible types of WIMPs have been ruled out. There are still a few left, but LZ isn’t done yet. It plans to observe for a total of 1,000 days before wrapping up in 2028. “If LZ doesn’t detect a WIMP, and our next-generation detector, XLZD, doesn’t detect a WIMP, then WIMPs are over,” Gag says. The XLZD project is still in the planning stages.
If WIMPs don’t constitute dark matter, it would be a major paradigm shift, but physicists aren’t giving up on finding dark matter entirely. “If you’re trying to solve a murder investigation and you have 20 suspects, 10 of them are unaware,” he says. [alibis]”We don’t go, ‘Oh, it looks like it wasn’t a murder.’ We just get a better idea of who the right suspects are,” Hooper said. “We take some suspects off our list, we narrow the scope of the investigation, we narrow the focus. That’s what progress looks like in this field.”
UUntil recently, visitors to New York essentially had two options. A hotel room or a short-term rental platform like Airbnb. But in September 2023, the city began enforcing a 2022 law that prohibits people from renting a home for less than 30 days (unless the host stays in the home with a guest).
Currently, hotel rooms are the only legitimate option for people visiting the city, but they are out of reach for many. Most Times Square hotels don’t have rooms for less than $300 a night. Searches on Thursday, May 2nd found Muse for $356, Hampton Inn for $323, and Hard Rock for $459 (but due to dynamic pricing, these can change regularly). They become more expensive. Hotel prices rose at twice the rate of inflation from the first quarter of this year to the first quarter of 2023, said Jan Freitag, an analyst at real estate data firm Coster Group.
Many visitors and New Yorkers are turning to the underground rental market, where Facebook groups, Craigslist posts, Instagram listings, and reviews have become the go-to for finding short-term rentals in the five boroughs.
If you have friends in New York, you’ve probably seen their Instagram stories. “Hello everyone! I’m renting out my room in my 5-bed apartment to him again for 4 days over Easter! I have to deal with a dog and a rude roommate! DM me if you’re interested!”
Other travelers headed to New Jersey, making the kaleidoscopic city across the Hudson the nation’s fastest-growing Airbnb demand market, according to analytics site AirDNA. Other companies are snapping up hotels, which are expected to become even more expensiven the coming years. For many tourists, a good answer to the so-called Airbnb ban has not yet been found.
Yoya Busquets, 56, had been considering an Airbnb in New Jersey, but she really wants to stay there when she visits from Barcelona with her husband and two teenage daughters in early September. . She took a quick peek at her Facebook, where she chatted on Messenger with some people advertising short-term rentals. The last time she visited New York was in 2012, when she stayed at an Airbnb in Brooklyn, and she hopes to have a similar experience. She might get lucky.
“I’ve been in contact with a girl who has a room available for a week, and it’s listed on Airbnb as in New Jersey, but when I contacted her, she said it was in Brooklyn,” she said.
The apartment happened to be close to the area she had previously stayed in and was within her $160 per night budget. Considering the cost of a hotel and the space her daughters needed to relax after a busy day, it was the best option she found. But that setup is probably in violation of the new law, which is why the apartment is listed in Jersey.
Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. For a hotel, “you have to pay about $400 a night, and we don’t have that kind of money,” said one New Yorker who tried to accommodate his parents. Photo: Ryan DeBerardinis/Alamy
AirDNA, which tracks data from short-term rental sites like Airbnb and Vrbo, says listings for stays of less than 30 days have declined by 83% since August 2023, when the regulations began taking effect. At one time in New York City he had 22,200 short-term properties available. That number currently stands at just 3,700, according to AirDNA.
Tesin Parra, 24, was looking for a job that would allow her to continue living in the United States after completing her thesis and classes, while also looking for a place for her family to stay as she graduates from New York University in May. Program for Journalism.
“This is their first time in New York City, so I want them to have a good experience,” Para, who is originally from India, said of her parents and grandmother. “She wanted to do an Airbnb so she could also cook,” she said.So she was disappointed when she learned that short-term rentals weren’t really an option anymore.
Parra wants a place with space for her family to gather. As a sign of her gratitude and respect, she wants to cover the cost of her family’s accommodation and has budgeted around $200 (£160) per night for a week-long stay.
“I’m kind of stuck as to what to do,” Parra said. “Probably a hotel, but I’d have to pay about $400 a night, and I don’t have that kind of money.”
Now, with the double stress of finishing school and facing hotel bills she can’t afford, she’s at a crossroads. She either chooses a hotel, has her parents pay for it, or rents something short-term, which is technically impossible in New York. Legal?
Without the accountability and protection that platforms like Airbnb offer, avoiding scams when searching for short-term rentals has become the norm. So Pala skipped scanning his Craigslist altogether. Currently, she is considering booking an Airbnb in New Jersey, but she worries that the local PATH train traffic will be an inconvenience for her grandmother.
This regulation was passed with the goal of keeping rent prices in check for New Yorkers by putting apartment inventory back on the market, but it is often important for New York renters and homeowners who lived in apartments while still living in apartments. It also cut off a major source of income. Where they were when they were out of town. Some New Yorkers are still looking for ways to bring in funds.
Kathleen, whose last name is withheld for privacy reasons, only recently began renting an East Village apartment on the underground rental market. The 29-year-old travels frequently for her personal finance job and to visit her family in North Carolina. According to her, she’s out of town for about four months a year, and of course, she still has to pay $2,600 a month in rent while she’s away. To make up for some of her lost money, she started connecting with undocumented people through Facebook groups.
In 2015, Airbnb protesters gathered at New York City Hall. Photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
“I thoroughly vetted a lot of people,” she said, voicing concerns about how her space would be treated given the lack of protection that short-term rental platforms offer hosts. I made it. She has two guests: her. One is a weekend visitor, the other stays at her apartment for three weeks in the summer. They pay her $50 a night.
“I always have a side hustle,” she said. “If I can make extra money, why not make extra money? I live in a great place. I thought it would be a nice, cute place.”
This is the spot where a visitor like Juan José Tejada could become a champion. Tejada, a wellness influencer from Bogotá, Colombia, is visiting New York for nine days in July with his best friend. He began his location search by looking at hotels, but he soon realized they were too expensive.
“I’m 25 years old. I’m traveling with my best friend. And, you know, we don’t have that much of a budget,” he said. At the suggestion of a cousin who lives in the city, Tejada used Facebook to search for short-term rental properties. What he discovered was four times his budget of $100 to $200 per night. But that wasn’t the only problem.
“When I was looking for short-term rental properties, the payment situation was a little tough,” Tejada said. Not in Colombia. “
Tejada and her friend ended up booking a hostel called Hi New York City on the Upper West Side, which cost about $55 a night for a bunk room with a shared bathroom. was. Tejada said she considered Airbnb, which has an on-site host, but couldn’t find a suitable option. It’s not the apartment he dreamed of breezed in and out of as if he were a local, but it’s good enough.
People are coming up with their own solutions for short stays. On Instagram, there are accounts like Book That Sublet NYC, where over 4,000 followers tune in to frequently posted daily and weekly sublets, as well as endless “sublets.”Book my apartment!“, or an apartment exchange callout shared on Instagram Stories. And there are long-standing apartment exchange sites like HomeExchange and HomeLink that offer visitors another way to get their foot in the door of a city apartment.
Supporters of the new regulations thought that limiting short-term rentals would bring long-term rentals back onto the market and perhaps help lower rents in the notoriously expensive city. Jamie Lane, chief economist at AirDNA, said after nearly seven months, there was still no widespread impact.
Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel, said that although a small number of apartments have returned to the rental market since the law was changed, mortgage rates remain high and mortgage rates are declining. He explained that this is because it has been gradually increasing since its inception. In 2017, prospective buyers refrained from making purchases for the time being, and rents rose.
Parra, a New York University student, doesn’t think the regulations are the most effective way to address New York’s housing crisis. “I don’t understand how this regulation makes sense. Not in terms of relieving the burden of the number of Airbnbs, but considering that New York City is an immigrant city. ‘Is it fair?’ she said.
But Busquets, who will be visiting in September, has seen firsthand the impact of tourism and short-term rentals on the world-renowned destination.
“I come from a city where the Airbnb craziness is actually displacing local residents and people who have lived there for years,” she said. “The owners wanted to keep people who were there just for short-term rentals because it was more profitable.”
Busquets said Airbnb made Barcelona uninhabitable and she eventually left for the suburbs herself. She added: “It’s changed. It’s not the same city it was 10, 15 years ago.”
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