Image by DEZALB, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:
1. Last week we found out that Facebook provided private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles to a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica. There has been a lot of stuff in the news about how to deal with this issue, and Wired wrote up an excellent guide about how to download your Facebook data and what to look for once you have it. So if you've still got a Facebook account by now, it's worth taking a look at this guide so that you can strip out anything that you don't want the company to know about you anymore. Bear in mind that Facebook will still have that information—they just won't be able to directly advertise to you with it, or use it to filter your News Feed.
2. I think this next one's pretty interesting. After the Chinese government shut down feminist groups online, women began using coded emoji to express their thoughts and enable communication in the feminist movement. For example, the emoji sequence "Rice Bunny"—where a user would use the bowl of rice emoji followed by the rabbi emoji—is pronounced "mi tu" when it is spoken aloud. This technique of using emoji to cleverly evade detection is innovative and impressive. I just love seeing stuff like this.
That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.