Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 52
Posts 1 - 10

Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein In a Wild Web

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 17.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, Facebook, marketing, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | Facebook’s head of global policy management recently agreed to remove anything that violates the Vietnamese law from the social network. Governments around the world (even in the US) are increasingly trying to keep control of what's happening online. As a result, governments and big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon don't always agree with each other. On the one hand, big tech companies want to have more control and power, and on the other hand, nations want to gain more control over people's online behvior. Facebook's desire to expand everywhere (e.g. in China) is one of the reasons for today's struggle between tech companies and nations. Facebook also faced some issues in Europe and Africa.
Image Description | Photograph of people using computers in a computer room, map of Facebook's users, two women laughing in front of a board displaying social media icons, Mark Zuckerberg and other people running in China, Mark Zuckerberg, his wife and daughters, glass building, people in front of a thumb-up sign, woman, crowd (some of them are using their phones), and people on their computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, Facebook, female(s), male(s), smartphone, social media

Doppelte Zeichenzahl bei Twitter? Nicht für Donald Trump

(Doubled number of characters for Twitter? Not for Donald Trump)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 28.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | politics, texting, threat, Twitter
Summary | Twitter has announced that they will be testing a doubled 280 characters limit per tweet with a small test group. The 140 character limit is a remnant of Twitter's text-message related past and they have considered expanding it before, now they finally test it. The expansion of the character limit is meant to apply to all languages except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean because these languages already require less characters to express more content. Multiple Twitter users already panicked on Twitter saying that nothing can stop an international conflict if Donald Trump gets twice as much space on Twitter now. Twitter however confirmed that @realDonaldTrump is not included in the small test group.
Image Description | A screenshot of @realDonaldTrump's profile and a tweet about the new 280 character limit.
Image Tags | female(s), hashtag, male(s), Twitter

Emma Watson, Emilia Clarke and Harry Styles Instagram accounts HACKED in major social media security breach

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Newspaper | Mirror
Date | 1.9.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | Instagram, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | A few celebrities' Instagram accounts have been hacked because of a bug in the system. The phone numbers and email addresses of celebrities were being sold on the dark web.
Image Description | Portraits of Emma Watson, Emilia Clarke and Harry Styles, charts, and hand on a keyboard.
Image Tags | chart, computer/laptop, female(s), hand(s), male(s)

Screens and teens: survival tips for parents on the technology battlefield

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Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 23.9.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, smartphone, social media, threat, youth
Summary | A mom talks about her battle over digital screens with her children. Children are spending more time online, and research keeps showing the negative effects that screens can have (e.g. isolation, bullying, porn, suicide etc.). Since the phenomenon is so new, it is difficult for parents -they have no guide to follow. Technology is not necessarily bad, but parents should make sure their children are okay and happy. The article provides a list with some advice concerning young people and screens; from screen time limit to online groups and social media.
Image Description | Photograph of a young girl using her laptop, a mom and her daughter with a laptop and tablet, three children behind books, and a mom and her two kids with a laptop, tablet, and smartphone.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s), smartphone, tablet

Posting photos online is not living. You are producing your own obituary

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 29.5.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | social media
Summary | When people go on vacation, they take a lot of pictures and mostly see their screens. They don't need to look at landscapes -they have copies of sunsets and palm trees on their smartphones. Storing everything in digital form has become so common today. It seems that our experiences need to be recorded digitally in order to be real. Since we live in a materialistic world, our behavior makes sense. Our social media posts are just an obituary we write for future generations in order to show them that we lived.
Image Description | Photograph of a woman taking a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Image Tags | female(s), selfie

Teaching Kids Coding, by the Book

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 21.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, gender, school
Summary | A non-profit organization called "Girls Who Code" provides after-school coding classes and coding camps to girls all over the country. It started as an attempt to recruit more girls to computer programming and now the demand is far larger than the available spots. The organization is now publishing a series of books of entertaining nature whose protagonists are girls who code so as to make girls relate to computer programming and imagine themselves as coders.
Image Description | Women/girls huddled over a laptop together.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), school

Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | Artificial intelligence systems have made huge development leaps in recent times but there is still a lot of learning to do. The image recognition AI assistants of Facebook and Google demonstrate how, on the one hand, they can recognize a lot of images correctly if they have had enough data to learn from and, on the other hand, how it still makes bold mistakes. It suffices to manipulate a few pixels and the AI system gets confused. Developing AI systems not only takes a lot of data but also trial and error phases which are monitored and taught by human teachers.
Image Description | Programmers working on computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 27.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, marketing, school
Summary | The Partovi brothers who are early investors in some major tech companies have started inversting in computer programming teaching. They advocate that all public schools in the US should teach students coding. Of course tehy have a personal interest: the more skilled coders there are, the better their field wil develop.
Image Description | Illustration of a man in front of a computer screen and a man teaching little children.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 29.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, threat
Summary | Computer programming classes are increasingly in demand at universities across the country. Reports of students plagiarizing and copying code from each other are however also increasing. It is difficult to find out whether students have cheated but identical mistakes are a dead giveaway. One programming professor has also written a programm to compare codes and find how similar they are indicating the likelihood that the two codes were collaboratively written.
Image Description | Image of a lecture hall showing the lecturer's laptop and an image of a female student walking on campus.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

Facebook takes a new crack at halting fake news and clickbait

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Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 17.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Facebook, fake news, threat
Summary | Facebook has announced that it will work on new strategies to flag fake news on their platform by labeling them "disputed". Facebook's activism will also target click bait stories which can be equally misleading. Click bait are headlines which leave out essential content or grossly exaggerate to lure people into clicking on the link.
Image Description | Getty image of a woman's hand holding a smartphone showing the Facebook logo in front of a screen showing the Facebook sign-in page.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, Facebook, female(s), hand(s), logo, smartphone

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