Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 11
Posts 1 - 10

Crackdown on Online Criticism Chills Pakistani Social Media

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 27.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, law, misunderstanding, social media, threat
Summary | The Pakistani government has passed a very strict law that prohibits any anti-government or anti-army posts on social media. Some people have already been arrested. They claim that their posts were not criticizing the armed forces and that it was all a misunderstanding. This is a huge issie when people get arrested for trivial tweets.
Image Description | Getty image of a protest.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), text

Donald Trump Threatens Ted Cruz’s Wife, Eliciting Angry Retort

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.3.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | hashtags, misunderstanding, politics, Twitter
Summary | Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have started a public feud on Twitter over their spouses. Trump thinks that Cruz has used footage of Melania Trump modeling nude for GQ magazine in a commercial against Trump. Trump then threatened to reveal secrets about Heidi Cruz. It turned out the anti-Trump advertisement was not made or paid for by Cruz and Cruz shamed Trump via Twitter for threatening his wife with the hashtag #classless.
Image Description | Image of Ted Cruz speaking with his wife Heidi in the background.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Planning a Trip With the Help of Google Home

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 31.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, misunderstanding, smartphone, translation
Summary | Google's artificial intelligence assistant is getting better every day. It is available on all Android smartphones and on the home speaker. It can find out web search queries, translate phrases, and help book a flight by keeping one updated about changing flight fares. Sometimes one however has to adjust one's syntax so that the AI assistant will correctly decode one's request.
Image Description | The Google home personal (AI) assistant speaker.
Image Tags | Google

Social Insecurity? internet Turns Boomers Into Twits

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 5.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, Facebook, misunderstanding, research/study, youth
Summary | Elders are coming to Facebook and it's not pretty. Most young people find their older relatives' activities on Facebook cringey because they appear to regress back into their younger selves which is somehow undignified for the elderly. They also sometimes use wrong emojis because they tend to be too small for them to properly see. Young people are moving on to other platforms.
Image Description | Images of Cher, Donald Trump, and Larry King as well as some of their Tweets.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), Twitter

What Chatbots Reveal About Our Own Shortcomings

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 24.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, marketing, misunderstanding, threat, Twitter
Summary | Artificial intelligence is the new big thing but it is mostly geared towards commercial services like ordering pizza, etc. Microsoft for instance proudly announced that their AI assistant can now even understand slang inputs. But this way of learning from actual users has shown to be risky when Microsoft released their AI robot Tay on Twitter and people trolled them by teaching Tay offensive things.
Image Description | Illustration and a GIF of smartphones typing.
Image Tags | gifs, smartphone, text

Emojis: The death of the written language?

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Newspaper | CNBC
Date | 24.6.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, misunderstanding, word/writing
Summary | People are using more and more emojis, which can be seen as a threat to written language. Indeed, people are starting to replace words with emojis in order to communicate a feeling or emotion, and according to the author of the article, this is worrying. Moreover, using emojis can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. Finally, if school start to incorporate emojis in their curriculum, it can be perceived as a regress back to hierogylphics.
Image Description | Getty image of a keyboard composed of emojis, and image of a series of Apple emojis representing diversity.
Image Tags | emojis, keyboard

The Complicated, Distressing Relationship Teens Have With The News

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Newspaper | Huffington Post
Date | 8.3.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | misunderstanding, research/study, youth
Summary | Most youths get their news from their family, through the news media their parents consume, or through social media. The majority does not visit traditional news channels on their own initiative. Studies have shown that many youths cannot tell sponsored from editorial content. They are increasingly skeptical of news reports and at the same time unable to differentiate fake news or set valid news into a meaningful context.
Image Description | Silhouette of a person using a smartphone.
Image Tags | smartphone

It or not, emoji evolving as language to be taken seriously

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 28.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, law, misunderstanding, threat
Summary | Emojis as legal evidence crop up in court rooms more and more since people communicate much more on various social media. Two cases are known of students being questioned in court because they had posted something negative about school on social media accompanied with gun, bomb, or explosion emojis. Defendants text messages have been presented to the jury as evidence with the emojis because they can signal sarcasm or a joke. A general discussion has opened up about whether emojis should be regarded as evidence in court and if yes, how? Emojis do not have a set meaning, they are very context-dependent.
Image Description | N/A

Was It Something I Texted?

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 22.11.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | misunderstanding, sexting, texting
Summary | A woman waits for her current love interest to text back. The night before she had sent him a text with sexual innuendo and he hadn't texted back until morning. Now she is obsessing over checking her phone constantly to see if he texted back. She starts over-interpreting how he may have misunderstood or what might have tipped him off. She concludes that, ultimately, it would be better if they figured out this early that they are no good match. Finally, he texts her back.
Image Description | Illustration of a woman blow-drying her hair with the smartphone laying nearby.
Image Tags | female(s), smartphone

To Text or Not to Text: A Dating Conundrum

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 28.1.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | misunderstanding, texting
Summary | A woman and a man meet, show interest in each other, and go on a date. After that they text for two months without ever seeing each other again face to face. The woman is upset that the man does not aske her out again but she cannot overcome traditional conventions about women not initiating a date. After two months she breaks up the non-relationship by saying that she does not need a penpal. Then the man invites her for dinner and they get married several years after.
Image Description | Illustration of a man and a woman with a giant smartphone separating them and the woman holding a chainsaw.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone

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