Yahoo Takes on ISIS, in Its Way
January 9, 2017
The article on VentureBeat titled Yahoo Takes Steps to Remove Content Posted From ISIS and Other Terrorist Groups remarks on the recent changes Yahoo made to its community guidelines. The updated guidelines now specify that any content or accounts involved with terrorist organizations, even those that “celebrate” violence connected to terrorist activity are up for deletion or deactivation. The article speaks to the relevance of these new guidelines that follow hard upon the heels of Orlando and San Bernardino,
Twitter has responded as well, “suspending over 125,000 accounts” related to terrorism. Messaging app Telegram has also blocked 78 channels that engaged in ISIS-related activity. Kathleen Lefstad, Yahoo’s policy manager for trust and safety, wrote that this new category is in addition to other types of content that are flagged, including hate speech, bullying or harassment, and sharing adult or sexualized content of someone without their consent.
ISIS has grown infamous for its social media presence and ability to draw foreign supporters through social media platforms. Yahoo’s crackdown is a welcome sign of awareness that these platforms must take some responsibility for how their services are being abused. Priorities, folks. If Facebook’s machine learning content security can remove any sign of a woman’s nipple within 24 hours, shouldn’t content that endorses terrorism be deleted in half the time?
Chelsea Kerwin, January 9, 2017
Infomania, the FOMO Struggles of Millennials
January 9, 2017
The article titled Drowning In a Sea of Information on Clayton d’Arnaut’s online magazine Digital Culturist questions the effect of unlimited information on the audience that can’t seem to stop looking for more. Like bears preparing for hibernation, we seek out connections, news, memes, ideas, and opinions. Perhaps we believe that if we “know” enough, we can never die. But what does it mean if all the information we search on Google, we take in, but then almost immediately discard? Decreased attention spans, concentration, chronic distraction, creativity, these are just a few of the symptoms of our maniacal dependence on information. The article concludes,
A few months ago I took part in Infomagical, an experiment hosted by the WNYC podcast Note to Self. The purpose of this experiment is “to turn all of your information portals into overload-fighting machines.” It worked. After a full week of information consumption challenges and monitoring my progression, I felt clear, focused, organized, and more creative. I felt like someone took my brain and wrung it out like a wet sponge?—?refreshed and ready to tackle the next thing.
This sort of cleanse might be difficult, but it might be necessary to prevent us from losing our minds, literally and figuratively, if d’Arnault is to be believed. I have, on occasion, closed a tab open to Facebook only to be confronted with another tab open to Facebook. Did I close that one immediately or check the second tab? An Infomanic never consumes and tells.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 9, 2017
Austrian Ministers Wants to Look into Your Private Communications
January 2, 2017
Under the garb of curbing terrorist activities, an Austrian minister has proposed setting up of federal Trojan or an agency that can read encrypted messages over WhatsApp and Facebook.
DeepDotWeb in an article titled Austrian Government Wants a Federal Trojan to Patrol the Dark Web says:
Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka (ÖVP) is preparing to implement a “federal trojan” to patrol the dark net. With this state spying software, Austrian law enforcement authorities hope they can prevent cybercriminal activity on the dark web.
The minister is demanding that government should possess a Trojan or technology that will allow it to read what messages exchanged by people over WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. This ze feels is necessary to foil terrorist attacks in Austria.
The entire argument hinges on:
Multiple researches have proven that the Islamic State uses social media platforms and encrypted messaging for recruiting potential terrorists and for other communications. The German government is also working on a similar device by the Central Agency for Information Technology in the security area (Zitis). Currently, about 400 IT professionals are on the project.
This is the second attempt by the Interior Minister to get a Bill passed that allowed federal agencies to snoop on private citizens. The minister wants unfettered access to messages and other data of citizens; terrorists or not.
If the Bill is passed, it will have serious implications on privacy of citizens. However, what would be more interesting is to see how companies like Facebook, Google and Apple respond to it.
Vishal Ingole January 2, 2017
How the Future of Mobile Looks Like the past of TV for Advertising
December 15, 2016
The article titled How Mobile Today Is Like TV Six Decades Ago on The Atlantic explores the radical changes in advertising in the last five years. The era of advertising through newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio is effectively over, replaced by digital advertising, which is almost exclusively mobile. That mobile content is split between Facebook and Google. Those two giants account for half of all digital media advertising. The article explains what this means for news,
For newspapers, magazines, and websites, there are several paths forward. First, billionaires can rescue media organizations from the stormy seas of the mobile Internet and fund journalism that the ad market won’t support. Second, companies like Facebook may determine that it is in their own interest to preserve some news and entertainment publishers, and they will directly pay media companies, the same way cable companies pay carriage to television channels.
The article also considers a return to the subscription model, or companies shifting to event and marketing strategies for revenue. But any company that tries to ignore the seismic shifts in the news landscape is in for an abrupt and painful shock. The article preaches an optimistic approach based in the history of TV. News is here to stay, but how it is paid for and what the advertising looks like is going to change.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 15, 2016
Twitter Fingers May Be Sharing News Story Links but That Does Not Mean Anyone Read the Article
December 14, 2016
The article on ScienceDaily titled New Study Highlights Power of Crowd to Transmit News on Twitter shows that Twitter is, in fact, good at something. That something is driving recommendations of news stories. A study executed by Columbia University and the French National Institute found that the vast majority of clicks on news stories is based on reader referrals. The article details the findings:
Though far more readers viewed the links news outlets promoted directly on Twitter… most of what readers shared and read was crowd-curated. Eighty-two percent of shares, and 61 percent of clicks, of the tweets in the study sample referred to content readers found on their own. But the crowd’s relative influence varied by outlet; 85 percent of clicks on tweets tied to a BBC story came from reader recommendations while only 10 percent of tweets tied to a Fox story did.
It will come as no shock that people are getting a lot more of their news through social media, but the study also suggests that people are often sharing stories without reading them at all. Indeed, one of the scientists stated that the correlation between likes, shares, and actual reads is very low. The problem inherent in this system is that readers will inevitably only look at content that they already agree with in a news loop that results in an even less informed public with even more information at their fingertips than ever before. Thanks Twitter.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 14, 2016
Ten Search Engines That Are Not Google
December 13, 2016
Business-design firm Vandelay Design shares their 10 favorite alternatives to Google Search in their blog post titled, “Alternative Search Engines for Designers and Developers.” Naturally, writer Jake Rocheleau views these resources from a designer’s point of view, but don’t let that stop you from checking out the list. The article states:
New intriguing search engines frequently pop up as a replacement to the juggernaut that is Google. But it’s tough to find alternative search engines that actually work and provide real value to your workflow. I’d like to cover a handful of alternatives that work well for designers and developers. These aren’t all web crawler search engines because I did throw in a few obscure choices for design resources too. But the sites in this list may be better replacements for Google no matter what you’re searching for. …
All 10 of these search engines are viable choices to add into your workflow, or even replace existing sites you already use. Designers are always looking for new tools and I think these sites fit the bill.
Rocheleau describes his selections and gives tips for getting the most out of each. He leads with DuckDuckGo—come for the privacy, stay for the easter eggs. StartPage also promises privacy as it pulls results from other search engines. Designers will like Instant Logo Search, for locating SVG vector logos, and Vecteezy for free vector designs. Similarly, Iconfinder and DryIcons both offer collections of free icons.
For something a little different, try The WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive, where you can comb the archives for any previously existing domain. Rocheleau suggests designers use it to research competitors and gain inspiration, but surely anyone can find interesting artifacts here.
We are reminded that one can get a lot from WolframAlpha if one bothers learning to use it. Then there is Ecosia, which uses ad revenue to plant trees across the globe. (They have planted over four million trees since the site launched in December of 2009.) The final entry is Qwant, another engine that promises privacy, but also offers individual search features for categories like news, social-media channels, and shopping. For anyone tired of Google and Bing, even non-designers, this list points the way to several good alternatives.
Cynthia Murrell, December 13, 2016
Google Aims to Try Social Media Again with YouTube
December 12, 2016
One of the biggest problems that Google faced in social media was that it was trying to compete against Facebook. Ever hear the saying, “don’t fix it, if it is not broke?” It is not that Google was trying to fix Facebook, but it was trying to offer a solution to something that was not broken to begin with. What was broken? We are still trying to figure that out, but rest assured it was more than likely Google selling a Facebook knockoff.
Google, however, already owns one of the largest social media Web sites, if not the most popular: YouTube. Google might open a new section of YouTube called Backstage that allows users to communicate, share links, share links, videos, and polls. Does that not already sound like Facebook?
There is more:
Backstage will introduce new types of posts to YouTube. Google plans to differentiate between regular videos and Backstage videos. The latter allows channels to push videos only to subscribers and not to users discovering the channel through search or other means. Backstage is an internal project currently and it is unclear if and when it will be made available. While YouTube is highly popular when it comes to video publishing and watching, it lacks in the social department. While users may post comments under videos or channels, there is little in terms of communication going elsewhere.
People already socialize on YouTube through the comments section. Backstage might simply add more order to an already chaotic comments block.
Whitney Grace, December 12, 2016
When Censorship Means More Money, Facebook Leans In
December 8, 2016
The article on Vanity Fair titled Facebook Is Reportedly Building a Censorship Tool to Win Over China suggests that the people nervous about what it will mean to address the fake news proliferation are correct. The fear that Facebook managing fake news stories might lead to actual censorship of the news is not so far-fetched after all. The article states,
Auditing fake news is considered to be a slippery-slope problem for the company, which is just now starting to use fact-checkers to “grade” the veracity of news stories shared on its Web site and to crack down on false or partially false news stories shared on Facebook. Still, beneath it all, Facebook remains a publicly traded company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders—and that duty is to make money.
Zuckerberg’s interest in capturing China’s 700M+ internet users has led to the creation of a censorship tool that can “automatically suppress content in specific geographic areas.” The tool has not been implemented (yet), but it suggests that Zuckerberg has a flexible relationship with freedom of information, especially where money is at stake. And there is a lot of money at stake. The article delves into the confusion over whether Facebook is a media company or not. But whatever type of company it is, it is a company. And that means money comes first.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 8, 2016
Is Sketch Search the Next Big Thing?
December 5, 2016
There’s text search and image search, but soon, searching may be done via hand-drawn sketching. Digital Trends released a story, Forget keywords — this new system lets you search with rudimentary sketches, which covers an emerging technology. Two researchers at Queen Mary University of London’s (QMUL) School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science taught a deep learning neural network to recognize queries in the form of sketches and then return matches in the form of products. Sketch may have an advantage surpassing image search,
Both of those search modalities have problems,” he says. “Text-based search means that you have to try and describe the item you are looking for. This is especially difficult when you want to describe something at length, because retrieval becomes less accurate the more text you type. Photo-based search, on the other hand, lets you take a picture of an item and then find that particular product. It’s very direct, but it is also overly constrained, allowing you to find just one specific product instead of offering other similar items you may also be interested in.
This search technology is positioning itself to online retail commerce — and perhaps also only users with the ability to sketch? Yes, why read? Drawing pictures works really well for everyone. We think this might present monetization opportunities for Pinterest.
Megan Feil, December 5, 2016
Social Media Surveillance Now a Booming Business
December 5, 2016
Many know that law enforcement often turns to social media for clues, but you may not be aware how far such efforts have gotten. LittleSis, a group that maps and publishes relationships between the world’s most powerful entities, shares what it has learned about the field of social-media spying in, “You Are Being Followed: The Business of Social Media Surveillance.”
LittleSis worked with MuckRock, a platform that shares a trove of original government documents online. The team identified eight companies now vending social-media-surveillance software to law enforcement agencies across the nation; see the article for the list, complete with links to more information on each company. Writer Aaron Cantú describes the project:
We not only dug into the corporate profiles of some of the companies police contract to snoop on your Tweets and Facebook rants, we also filed freedom of information requests to twenty police departments across the country to find out how, when, and why they monitor social media. …
One particularly well-connected firm that we believe is worth highlighting here is ZeroFOX, which actively monitored prominent Black Lives Matter protesters in Baltimore and labeled some of them, including former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay McKesson, ‘threat actors.’ The company reached out to Baltimore officials first, offering it services pro-bono, which ZeroFOX executives painted as a selfless gesture of civic responsibility. But city officials may have been especially receptive to ZeroFOX’s pitch because of the powerful names standing behind it.
Behind ZeroFOX are weighty names indeed, like Mike McConnell, former director of the NSA, and Robert Rodgiguez, who is tied to Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and a prominent security firm. Another company worth highlighting is Geofeedia, because its name appears in all the police-department records the project received so far. The article details how each of these departments have worked with that company, from purchase orders to contract specifications. According to its CEO, Geofeedia grew sevenfold in just the last two years.
Before closing with a call for readers to join the investigation through MuckRock, Cantú makes this key observation:
Because social media incites within us a compulsion to share our thoughts, even potentially illegal ones, law enforcement sees it as a tool to preempt behavior that appears threatening to the status quo. We caught a glimpse of where this road could take us in Michigan, where the local news recently reported that a man calling for civil unrest on Facebook because of the Flint water crisis was nearly the target of a criminal investigation. At its worst, social media monitoring could create classes of ‘pre-criminals’ apprehended before they commit crimes if police and prosecutors are able to argue that social media postings forecast intent. This is the predictive business model to which Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris aspires. [The link goes to a 23-minute interview with Harris at YouTube.]
Postings forecast intent”— because no one ever says anything online they don’t really mean, right? There is a reason the pre-crime-arrest concept is fodder for tales of dystopian futures. Where do details like civilian oversight and the protection of civil rights come in?
Cynthia Murrell, December 5, 2016
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