Last year the Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report that found QAnon’s following had grown considerably in Australia during 2020, with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter driving increased engagement.
The report found Australia was the fourth largest country for QAnon activity, behind the US, UK and Canada. Its presence in Australia is also evident on less mainstream sites. For example as Canadian QAnon research Marc-Andre Argentino has pointed out, there were at least six Australian Q “research boards” on the site 8kun with about 4,000 posts by January last year. That had increased to 11 boards by the start of 2021.
Last year, Guardian Australia revealed QAnon had found a follower in Tim Stewart, a family friend of the prime Scott Morrison. Stewart was behind one of Australia’s largest QAnon-linked accounts, BurnedSpy34.
Six or seven years ago, the idea of “canceling” someone was largely used among younger people online, particularly on Black Twitter, as Vox’s Aja Romano has explained.
In May 2020 the company removed the “unmute all” setting for hosts due to privacy concerns but now has brought it back as a nuanced “unmute with consent,” which allows a host to unmute an individual participant’s microphone at any time in any of the host’s meetings once given permission. But this framing of consent is problematic to say the least. Can you refuse if the host is your boss? What if they not only have authority over you but abusive intent?
Facebook and Twitter are still the most frequently managed company channels. “The top five social media channels managed include Facebook (81%), Twitter (77%), LinkedIn (67%), Instagram (66%), and YouTube (51%),” according to the report.
(Just 6% are managing TikTok channels despite the platform’s meteoric rise.)
The primary role of social media managers is to create content. Forty-one percent of respondents said their primary role as a social media manager was to create content, while 20% said their main goal was to improve brand awareness and reputation.
It’s a female-dominated field. Seventy-nine percent of the 379 respondents are women.
Engagement and replies are the top metric for evaluating performance, but many have no clear objectives. According to the report, 45% of social media managers are evaluated on their engagement and replies, followed by progress toward goals (36%) and follower counts (33%).
Thirty percent said their social media performance was not evaluated at all.
Excellent work in getting a #WebXR build of Tilt Brush exported from Unity by @msub2official.
Lots of ripping out of SteamVR in order to get it to compile & you can see there some controller bugs from the port, but great progress.
More details over on @webaverse‘s #webxr Discord. https://t.co/e83hXC6FgW
Tilt Brush becomes open source. Google’s solution to Tilt Brush’s problems is to give away the source code on GitHub and torch its free 3D asset store Poly, the only asset store compatible with Tilt Brush’s animated brushes.
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.”