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Facebook has taken down hundreds of fake accounts that formed part of a Russia-based disinformation operation seeking to discredit the AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines.

A network of 65 Facebook and 243 Instagram accounts responsible for spreading misleading information about the jabs was traced to Fazze, a subsidiary of a UK-registered communications firm that mainly operated in Russia.

Using fake profiles and occasionally influencers, the content was spread as widely as possible on various platforms, including Reddit, Medium and Change.org.

One falsehood spread by the campaign was that the AstraZeneca jab was "turning vaccine recipients into chimpanzees".

"Disinformation is not always subtle," Ben Nimmo, head of Facebook's influence operations cybersecurity team, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

"This campaign was working like a laundromat," the social networking giant said, noting in its report on the operation that the Instagram portion of the disinformation effort was "crude and spammy".

The campaign came to light in May when several French and German influencers active in the fields of health and science spoke out about offers they had received to publicly criticise the Pfizer vaccine in return for payment.

"Unbelievable. The address of the London agency that contacted me is bogus. They never had premises there, it's a cosmetic laser centre! All the employees have weird LinkedIn profiles... which disappeared this morning. Everyone worked in Russia before," Lo Grasset, a science YouTuber with over a million subscribers, said on Twitter.

In the end, most of the content posted on Instagram - mainly targeting India and Latin America - received "no likes", Facebook said.

"It fell flat," Nimmo said.

Along with deleting the accounts involved, the Fazze agency is now banned from the platform, Facebook said.

"It was a sloppy campaign, but the process was sophisticated," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's director of security policy.

"There was spam, influencers, document hacking... So, it's harder for one platform to catch this kind of campaign in its entirety," he added, calling on all civil society - including academics and journalists - to mobilise alongside the networks on the front line".

The California-based social media giant is regularly accused of helping push a massive amount of disinformation online.

Last month, US President Joe Biden said Facebook and other social media platforms were "killing" people by spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccinations. Biden was subsequently forced to U-turn on his comments.

"Facebook does not kill people," he said, clarifying that he had been referring to the disinformation spread by some social media users which could "harm those who listen to them" and ultimately "kill people".

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Facebook shuts down COVID vaccine disinformation effort that targeted AstraZeneca and Pfizer jabs - Euronews

Maybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. In 1998, he also famously claimed, By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internets impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines. I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse wont happen.

The metaverse, for those who dont know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others cant. Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One.

The concept of the metaverse isnt new. The phrase was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, which was set in a near future in which the virtual world and the physical world are inextricably interconnected. Silicon Valleys tech billionaires seem increasingly convinced that an actual metaverse is just over the horizon; the previously niche concept has been mentioned on earnings calls for Microsoft and Facebook. In a recent interview with The Verge, an enthusiastic Zuckerberg described the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet, and a kind of embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content you are in it.

At the same time as the metaverse discourse has been heating up, its been a breakout year for the crypto community. The non-fungible token (NFT) took the art worlds imagination by storm this winter. Elon Musk stoked and then popped a truly wild Bitcoin bubble. Now, neither Zuckerberg nor Bill Gates tethered their concept of the metaverse to crypto. But I find it interesting that both the centralizers tech giants whose power and influence rival nation states and the decentralizers crypto innovators who remain something of an influential subculture see the new chapter in technological progress in roughly the same terms: to escape reality.

Its important to throw some cold water on this by remembering that the concept of virtual reality which is really what the metaverse is dates back a long time. Virtual reality was popularized by computer scientist and tech contrarian Jaron Lanier in the 1980s; his company VPL Research, short for Virtual Programming Languages, achieved such success that the toymaker Mattel licensed their DataGlove device a kind of wired glove to create a Nintendo game controller.

Yet its been more than three decades. Virtual and augmented reality of any kind hasnt exactly taken off. Despite all the chatter about Oculus the VR headset company that Facebook acquired, to much fanfare, in 2014 few of even my most technophilic friends have hopped on the Oculus train. Ive only encountered the Oculus VR gear as a forlorn gadget in startup HQs a novelty unceremoniously dumped next to the WiFi router. As tech analyst Benedict Evans recently tweeted, My son is approximately 1000x more interested in Roblox an online game platform on which users can create their own games for other users to try than in getting my VR headset out of the cupboard. Different models of the future. VR was the techno-utopian future that Generation X was promised. But as the Substack writer Paul Skallas recently noted: Back in 1999/2000 people would tell you VR was right on the cusp of taking over. That it would change everything. Its 2020. Where is it.

VR and AR after it have run into a continual problem: people mostly like reality. People have liked visual entertainment for as long as there have been screens, for as long as there have been theaters. But, like all entertainment, visual entertainment has its time and its place. Remember Google Glass? I had a pair. It was abominable to use. Who wants email notifications obscuring their field of vision all day? My phone is distraction enough. The synthesis of wearable tech and augmented reality pretty quickly parted ways. Augmented reality became fun Snapchat filters that make you look like a Pixar character. Wearable tech became Apple watches to count your steps and alert you if youre having a heart attack.

Two factors determine whether new technology catches on: capacity and incentive. Not all things that tech can do (capacity), people want (incentive). Think back to the mid-2000s, or rewatch David Finchers 2010 classic The Social Network. The building blocks of social networking existed long before Zuckerberg created Facebook. In fact, several social networks already existed. Remember Friendster and MySpace? The capacity was there. But what was the incentive? To get people to join his network in droves, Zuckerberg added two ingredients that the earlier social networks lacked: exclusivity and status.

When Facebook first launched, only those who attended a small group of prestigious colleges could join. I graduated high school in 2005, and Im ashamed to say that Facebook influenced my school choice. Facebook in the early days was additive. It was where you found friends before you arrived on campus, solidified nascent relationships, shared boozy and embarrassing memories. My question for metaverse boosters is this: what does the metaverse add to everyday life?

Ive used Oculus goggles before. I found they had a weird time distortion effect. When I took them off, I felt vaguely tired. Coming out of the pandemic, which has reminded everyone that a Zoom call is very much not the same thing as hugging your mom, Im skeptical that Zoom-fatigued workers will be interested in leveling up to working in the metaverse whatever that may mean. A new youth survey by Dazed reports that just 9% of Gen Zers want to stay on social media; fatigue with digital substitutes for real life may be even broader than just the Zoom-fatigued legions working from home.

Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, with his Sauron-like ambition to own the One Ring to rule them all, seem like the worst choice to put in charge of building a new world. Im more sympathetic to the crypto communitys nascent interest in the metaverse. The promise of crypto, it seems to me, is its potential to spark decentralization in an already overly centralized world, to play Gutenberg to the next generations Martin Luthers. The metaverse proposes a smoothed-out and rationalized version of our messy and chaotic world. The question that crypto seems to face most pressingly is: Why should crypto matter to everyone? If crypto is to be truly revolutionary, then it will have to give an answer that formats digital life down to a human scale, not up to a megalomaniacs.

Sean Monahan is a writer and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. He co-founded K-Hole, the trend forecasting group best-known for coining the term normcore. He releases a weekly trends newsletter at 8ball.substack.com

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Techies think were on the cusp of a virtual world called the metaverse. Im skeptical - The Guardian

For the past 12 years, growth stocks have ruled the roost on Wall Street. This isn't a huge surprise given that historically low lending rates and abundant access to capital have allowed fast-paced companies to borrow in order to hire, acquire, and innovate.

The striking outperformance of growth stocks has been readily on display via the Nasdaq 100 -- an index comprised of the 100 largest nonfinancial companies listed on the Nasdaqexchange. Since the trough of the Great Recession on March 9, 2009, the benchmark S&P 500 has gained 556%, whereas the Nasdaq 100 has galloped higher by 1,350%!

Yet, in spite of the Nasdaq 100's clear outperformance over the S&P 500, investors can still find value within the index. The following trio of Nasdaq 100 stocks can be confidently bought hand over fist by investors in August.

Image source: Getty Images.

Historically speaking, when there's any weakness in the FAANG stocks, it's an opportunity for long-term investors to go shopping. That's why social media behemoth Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) stands out as a stock investors can buy hand over fist in August.

Two weeks ago, Facebook lifted the hood on its second-quarter operating results and cautioned that revenue growth could slow in the second half of the year. It's a common message we've heard from a number of online and mobile-based companies that benefited immensely from the coronavirus pandemic. However, a quick peek at Facebook's operating data shows no true cause for concern.

When the June quarter came to a close, Facebook recorded 2.9 billion people visiting its namesake site on a monthly basis, as well as 610 million additional unique visitors to WhatsApp and/or Instagram, which Facebook also owns. That's 3.51 billion people (44% of the world's population) visiting a Facebook-owned asset monthly. Advertisers are well aware that there's no social media company on the planet that offers access to more eyeballs than Facebook. This gives the company exceptional ad pricing power.

As a shareholder, what I continue to find most impressive about Facebook is the revenue and profit growth it's achieved while only meaningfully monetizing half of its assets. The roughly $54 billion in ad revenue generated on a year-to-date basis comes almost entirely from Facebook and Instagram. Despite being top social destinations, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp haven't been substantively monetized, as of yet. This gives Facebook another growth gear it can eventually shift into.

It would be wise not to overlook Facebook's opportunity in virtual and augmented reality, either. Although the company doesn't break out sales of its Oculus devices, "Other" category revenue, which encompasses Oculus, has been soaring this year. Ultimately, Oculus could represent one of the many ways Facebook keeps users within its ecosystem of products and services.

The bottom line is that a dominant company with a 20%-plus growth rate shouldn't be valued at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of less than 23. Despite its trillion-dollar market cap, Facebook remains a bargain.

Image source: Getty Images.

Another Nasdaq 100 stock just begging to be bought in August is semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions provider Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO).

The single biggest growth driver for Broadcom looks to be the shift to 5G wireless infrastructure. It's been a decade since wireless carriers last made significant upgrades to download speeds. With carriers spending big bucks to update their infrastructure, we're liable to see consumers and businesses undertake a multiyear tech replacement cycle to take advantage of faster download speeds.

The reason this is such a positive for Broadcom is that the company generates a majority of its revenue from smartphone components. It develops and supplies original equipment manufacturers with wireless LAN/Bluetooth combination solutions, as well as proximity sensors, amplifiers, and global navigation satellite system receivers, to name a few core solutions. This multiyear upgrade cycle should lead to steady demand and highly predictable cash flow for Broadcom's biggest operating segment.

The big data push in the wake of the pandemic is also going to be a major boost to Broadcom's growth potential. Prior to March 2020, we were witnessing a steady shift by businesses to move data into the cloud. But once the pandemic struck, businesses had little choice but to create an online presence and ensure that data was accessible in the cloud, especially with remote workforces. This has substantially boosted data center storage demand.

While Broadcom has industrial and networking applications, it's the role it can play as a provider of connectivity and access chips to data centers that's most intriguing (beyond its smartphone sales). With cloud infrastructure still, arguably, in its early innings of growth, demand for data center infrastructure solutions should remain robust for a long time to come.

And don't overlook Broadcom's exceptional dividend growth. Whereas most tech stocks reinvest a lot of their cash flow back into innovation, Broadcom is so profitable that it can afford to parse out a base annual payout of $14.40 annually to its shareholders -- good enough for a 3% yield. Since the company began paying a dividend a little over 10 years ago, its quarterly payout has grown by more than 5,000%!

Image source: Getty Images.

The third Nasdaq 100 stock that growth investors can confidently buy hand over fist in August is China-based e-commerce company JD.com (NASDAQ:JD).

For the past couple of months, China-based tech stocks have come under pressure from the Chinese government for a variety of reasons, including data security and allegations of antitrust violations. Since it's unclear which Chinese tech stocks could fall into the crosshairs of the government's watchful eye, pretty much all China-based growth stocks, including JD.com, have been hammered. But in JD's case, this discount looks like an opportunity.

Currently, JD slots in as China's second-largest online retailer, behind Alibaba (NYSE:BABA). For those who might recall, Alibaba was hit with a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine by Chinese regulators four months ago. But even though these two are China's largest online retailers, their operating models are very different.

Alibaba operates as a third-party marketplace, where it essentially acts as the middleman. Meanwhile, JD generates its online revenue almost exclusively as a direct retailer. This means JD handles inventory and logistics, just like Amazon. This added autonomy makes it far less likely that JD will become a target of Chinese regulators.

And it's not just the rapid growth of online retail in China that should excite investors. JD has been investing in a number of higher-margin ancillary operations that should help lift its profitability and operating cash flow. This includes advertising, healthcare services, and cloud services. The latter is especially exciting, with Cloudflareand JD partnering up in late April. This deal, which will see Cloudflare utilize JD's cloud infrastructure, will create a steady stream of revenue for this high-margin operating segment.

Although I'd dub JD as the riskiest of the three stocks here, primarily due to geopolitical uncertainty, it's tough to overlook this company's growth potential in the second-largest economy in the world. Paying 30 times forward earnings for a company with a sustainable 20%-plus growth rate is a solid deal for investors.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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3 Nasdaq 100 Stocks to Buy Hand Over Fist in August - The Motley Fool

Think that the shift to remote working, coupled with ever more sophisticated technology, has rendered active personal networking useless? Think again. Recent trends may have changed how professional networks are built, but building a network remains as crucial as everespecially for business leaders.

If hearing the word networking fills you with dread, panic, or fear, this probably isnt welcome news. But it does not have to be as difficult or time-consuming as many people believe, especially if you dutifully follow the three pieces of advice below.

LinkedIn is not a little-known secretwith more than 750 million members, its an essential tool in the business world. Touting itself as the worlds largest professional network on the internet, the platform offers networkers the opportunity to get in touch with former colleagues, conduct research on potential employers, take a deep dive into profiles of potential future coworkers, and so much more. By allowing you to connect with people, from interns to CEOs, and search for people with specific job roles, it might just be the most powerful professional networking tool to ever grace the world (yes, really).

Of course, to take advantage of the site, you will have to do more than just create an account and hope for the best. Adding people at random is not recommended, either.

Publish posts: To get your name out there and increase your chances of connecting with the right people, the best strategy is to create and publish interesting posts. And make sure to post regularly, too experts suggest that posting up to five times per week is ideal for engagement on LinkedIn (as long as hitting that milestone doesnt come at the expense of quality).

Also, put some thought into your timing. Generally, the best times to post are during the morning and evening commute or during lunch break (although there is some variation between sectors).

And what about the content itself? Carve out some to consider who you are trying to reach and what their areas of interest may be. Some ideas include:

Giving your opinion on breaking industry news.

Sharing an interesting thought piece.

Writing your thoughts on a recent experience (personal or professional).

When all else fails and you are at a loss, consider that according to one recent study, how-to posts tend to grab readers attention the best. Furthermore, comments boost engagement, so asking your followers for their thoughts is a great way to get more eyeballs on your work.

While it is not reasonable to expect your very first post to attract the attention of the CEO of a multinational, you might be surprised at how much you can achieve through consistency.

If you belong to the 90% of the population that does not enjoy networking events full of strangers (I just made that statistic up, but its probably accurate), the idea of sticking to the internet to meet new people will probably sound appealing.

But just because meeting people in person can be daunting doesnt mean that it should not be done.

You might have heard the following Jim Rohn quote: Youre the average of the five people you spend the most time with. But most of us are not spending the most time with the people who can push us to grow and develop ourselvesso go out there and meet them.

There is no secret hack to this one. Just look for networking events near you, push yourself to attend them, and practice approaching people. Some good places to find local opportunities include:

Meetup.

Eventbrite.

Your college or graduate school.

LinkedIn.

Twitter.

Instead of expecting yourself to magically become an expert networker in your first interaction, change your mindset. Why not give yourself the challenge of contacting five to 15 people daily with the sole intention of polishing your skills?

One day, you might just wake up and realize you are better than you were when you began.

Whether you are networking online or in person, the initial encounter is not the only thing that matters.

You might believe that first impressions are key, but a follow-up can be a unique opportunity to show that you remembered someone and were genuinely interested in what they had to say. Return to them and offer value.

For instance, if you were having a conversation with a marketing executive who told you they were struggling to find the right e-learning platform for their team and you later came across a suitable solution, you could drop them a message to let them know.

Or maybe you met two people on separate occasions with similar visions who could benefit from connecting. Why not introduce them and become a super-connector?

If you are contacting five to 15 people daily, it might seem overwhelming to have to follow up with each one of them, but the least you can do is note down their details on a spreadsheet so you can remember who they are.

Also, dont go overboard with your messages. Youre 50% more likely to get a response to your email if your message is just 125 words long.

After more than a year of constant lockdown and limited social contact, many of us are feeling rusty in the social sphere, but dont let that hold you back. Its time to dust off your people skills, put yourself out there again, and get networking.

Your future self will thank you.

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How leaders build networks to enhance their careers Fast Company - Fast Company

US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that he was "very concerned" about case trends among school children. He noted that most of the children getting sick are living in states with low vaccination rates. "So, my plea is that for those who are not vaccinated, think about it."

As on August 10, 51 per cent of the US population is fully vaccinated. More than 71 per cent of US adults have got at least one shot. The White House is calling the latest wave a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and pleading with holdouts to get their shots.

The first case of Covid-19 in the US was reported on January 21, 2020. On August 10, the country reported 184,346 new confirmed cases. The virus is blamed for more than 618,000 deaths in the US alone, which accounts for the world's highest caseload and deaths since the start of the pandemic.

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94,000 US kids got Covid-19 last week, the panic is real as schools reopen - National Herald