Terms and conditions of Social Media Companies
categories: social media
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more on social media in this IMS blog
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Archive of ‘social media’ category
Philosophy podcasts
An Intro Philosophy Course that Uses Podcasts Instead of Readings
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A Big List of Philosophy Podcasts
fluctuations in social media
categories: Facebook, social media
WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update from r/worldnews
A poorly explained update to its terms of service has pushed WhatsApp users to adopt alternative services such as Signal and Telegram in their millions.
Apps like Signal, Telegram, Wickr, and WhatsApp offer privacy features ranging from end-to-end encrypted data transfer to ‘self-destructing messages’.”
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Fast-Growing Alternative To Facebook And Twitter Finds Post-Trump Surge ‘Messy’
MeWe markets itself as privacy forward. It doesn’t harness users’ data to sell ads or decide what content to show them. My note: but has to charge somehow, so, differently from FB Messenger, one needs to pay, in order to do audio call in MeWe.
MeWe’s Weinstein resists the comparison to Parler or Gab, which tout themselves as free-speech sites. For one thing, he says, MeWe is serious about putting limits on what people can say.
The tech website OneZero uncovered right-wing militia groups on MeWe as well as a “Stop the Steal” group that discussed shooting people. The company removed the groups after OneZero flagged them.
“I think we all still treat social media companies like they’re these inexpensive startups, but maybe they need to be treated more like starting an airplane company or a company that makes cars,” said Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies online extremists. “You’ve got to think about seat belts.”
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media
Tik Tok data exposure
Researchers find new flaw that left TikTok user data exposed, including phone numbers and profile information https://t.co/9scLgdQgTs
— Business Insider Tech (@SAI) January 26, 2021
https://www.businessinsider.com/check-point-researchers-tiktok-user-data-exposed-second-time-2021-1
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more on tik tok on this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=tik+tok
more on data privacy in this blog
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social media censorship Russia
Tens of thousands took to the streets across Russia, sharing photos and videos on social media faster than they could be removed, urging others to join.
Posted by NPR on Sunday, January 24, 2021
But the Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor quickly jumped to pressure social media platforms to remove videos that it said called for minors to participate in protests, warning that it was illegal for them to do so. On Friday, the government claimed that 38% of all offending videos on TikTok, 50% on YouTube and 17% on Instagram had been removed. By Saturday Roskomnadzor said more messages had been deleted on TikTok and Russian social media app Vkontakte. Facebook and Google, the owners of Instagram and YouTube respectively, expressed uncertainty about the accuracy of the numbers, Gizmodo reported.
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more on censorship in this IMS blog
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Twitter bots climate disinformation
categories: Twitter
Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation. Researchers determined that nearly 9.5% of the users in their sample were likely bots. But those bots accounted for 25% of the total tweets about climate change on most days from r/science
paper published last week in the journal Climate Policy is part of an expanding body of research about the role of bots in online climate discourse.
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more on climate in this IMS blog
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Social Media Censorship
Youtube, TikTok and Instagram Delete Russian Posts Promoting Navalny Protests from r/worldnews
Social Media Platforms Delete Russian Posts Promoting Navalny Protests – State Censor
Social media platforms are taking down Russians’ calls to protest in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny over the government’s claims that they illegally incite minors to attend unauthorized rallies.
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more on censorship in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=censor
Social Media news usage
Using social media for news: the latest Pew update.
Solid work by @asmitch :https://t.co/82uvEEZ1Iz pic.twitter.com/cZ4CHhMxQ0
— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander) January 16, 2021
https://bryanalexander.org/digital-literacy/using-social-media-for-news-the-latest-pew-update/
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more on SM News in this IMS blog
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Herd Immunity to Internet Propaganda
Internet propaganda is becoming an industrialized commodity, warns Phil Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet…
Posted by SPIEGEL International on Friday, January 15, 2021
Posted by SPIEGEL International on Friday, January 15, 2021
Can We Develop Herd Immunity to Internet Propaganda?
Internet propaganda is becoming an industrialized commodity, warns Phil Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute and author of many books on disinformation. In an interview, he calls for greater transparency and regulation of the industry.
Platforms like Parler, TheDonald, Breitbart and Anon are like petri dishes for testing out ideas, to see what sticks. If extremist influencers see that something gets traction, they ramp it up. In the language of disease, you would say these platforms act as a vector, like a germ that carries a disease into other, more public forums.
at some point a major influencer takes a new meme from one of these extremist forums and puts it out before a wider audience. It works like a vector-borne disease like malaria, where the mosquitoes do the transmission. So, maybe a Hollywood actor or an influencer who knows nothing about politics will take this idea and post it on the bigger, better known platform. From there, these memes escalate as they move from Parler to maybe Reddit and from there to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. We call this “cascades of misinformation.“
Sometimes the cascades of misinformation bounce from country to country between the U.S., Canada and the UK for example. So, it echoes back and forth.
Within Europe, two reservoirs for disinformation stick out: Poland and Hungary.
Our 2020 report shows that cyber troop activity continues to increase around the world. This year, we found evidence of 81 countries using social media to spread computational propaganda and disinformation about politics. This has increased from last years’ report, where we identified 70 countries with cyber troop activity.
identified 63 new instances of private firms working with governments or political parties to spread disinformation about elections or other important political issues. We identified 21 such cases in 2017-2018, yet only 15 in the period between 2009 and 2016.
Why would well-funded Russian agencies buy disinformation services from a newcomer like Nigeria?
(1) Russian actors have found a lab in Nigeria that can provide services at competitive prices. (2) But countries like China and Russia seem to be developing an interest in political influence in many African countries, so it is possible that there is a service industry for disinformation in Nigeria for that part of the world.
(1) Russian actors have found a lab in Nigeria that can provide services at competitive prices. (2) But countries like China and Russia seem to be developing an interest in political influence in many African countries, so it is possible that there is a service industry for disinformation in Nigeria for that part of the world.
Each social media company should provide some kind of accounting statement about how it deals with misuse, with reporting hate speech, with fact checking and jury systems and so on. This system of transparency and accountability works for the stock markets, why shouldn’t it work in the social media realm?
We clearly need a digital civics curriculum. The 12 to 16 year olds are developing their media attitudes now, they will be voting soon. There is very good media education in Canada or the Netherlands for example, and that is an excellent long-term strategy.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
Oculus Quest and Education
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oculus-quest-education-dave-dolan/
The Go had to be paired with a phone to enable it to work. How can that possibly be an option in a school with many dozens of headsets? Content had to either go through the Oculus Go Store, which is being shut down at this very moment, or side-loaded through an odd “Developer Mode” access, which is extremely difficult when dealing with large numbers of headsets. Even something as mundane as printing the serial number of that VR device on the headstrap, which can easily be mixed up with other headsets, is a troubling and odd choice to make. Those serial numbers are very important when bulk loading content onto a number of devices at a time, which is the only way they can be managed by school IT departments, and once again shows a lack of understanding of the needs from within schools.
Of course, there is also the elephant in the room… Facebook.
This mandatory attachment to a for-profit, social media behemoth, currently facing antitrust litigation [ Facebook Halts Sale of Rift & Quest in Germany Amid Regulatory Concerns ] should be reason enough to seriously question its inclusion into an academic institution.
Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR video ]
Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that some have come to call “shadow contact information.”
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more on quest in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=oculus+quest