Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 12
Posts 1 - 10

For this company, online surveillance leads to profit in Washington’s suburbs

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 10.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | Babel Street is a startup that uses online surveillance; they try to get private information from online platforms in order to catch cybercriminals. For instance, police departments might use the service provided by the company in their investigations and scan posts online. Experts try to track dangerous criminals while analyzing posts in more than 200 languages, including the emoji language. Emoji has actually been a challenge for analysts. Another challenge the company faces is to make sure sure it doesn't violate people's privacy.
Image Description | Photograph of a man standing in a news room in front of several TVs, and two other people.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

The limits of instant activism

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 28.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | politics, social media
Summary | A new book titled "Twitter and Tear Gas" by Zeynep Tufekci is coming out. It discusses the infuence of social media on protest culture. The author has been present in many recent protest movement: Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the Tahrir Square protests, and many more. In her book, she concludes that social media help mobilize many people very quickly, as the anti-Trump marches have shown. However, this ease with which people are mobilized to attend a protest make the ties within the protest community looser making it difficult for the movements to overcome issues later on in the process.
Image Description | Image of the March on Washington in 1963.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), text

The 'empowered consumer' doesn't get much say

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 16.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | marketing, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | The perceived multiplication of choices in consumer culture, for example when buying a plane ticket (optional luggage fees, insurance fees, prioritized boarding fees, etc.), just looks like an advantage for the consumer on the surface. In the end, we end up paying more and giving away our data. The data will in turn be used to milk consumers even further by knowing to which advertisements they are particularly susceptible.
Image Description | Airport check-in area.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 6.1.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, cyberbullying, Facebook, law, politics, social media
Summary | Facebook has recently decided to comply with German law rather than their own corporate policies when it comes to hate language on their platform contributed by users from Germany. Germany is very strict about prohibiting hate language against minorities. Critics say this is a step in the wrong direction towards censorship.
Image Description | Protest crowd holding a canvas.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), text

Techie teens help bridge generational digital gap

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 16.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | email, emojis, smartphone, social media, youth
Summary | Teenagers are volunteering to teach elders about technology. They teach them simple things like how to use email, social media, how to connect to wifi, as well as how to use emojis. The elderly taking the courses love it because the kids do not use complicated language to explain the technology because they have learned it all intuitively as digital natives.
Image Description | Teenagers and elderly people using a laptop.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

New ideas for treating concussions

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 12.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, smartphone, texting
Summary | Doctors are looking into new ways to treat concussions and one of those ways is to stop texting or using a smartphone. Concussion-related headaches are often visually triggered so staring at a screen for hours like many people routinely do does not help heal from a concussion.
Image Description | Hands of a woman placing a football helmet on a boy's head.
Image Tags | female(s), hand(s), male(s)

Taking poetic license with AI personalities

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 7.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, emojis, gender, research/study
Summary | Artificial intelligence assistants are now being creatively enganced by educated and professional writers and poets so as to make their conversation appear more human-like (f.i. by using emojis) and their personalities more authentic. Polls have shown that users prefer female voices for AI assistants and most companies have acted accordingly. Microsoft has however pre-empted reinforcing stereotypes about female assistants by limiting the number of apologies and self-deprecating comments for their AI assistant Cortana.
Image Description | Image of a meeting of professional writers working in AI at Microsoft.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

In search of 'lulz,' trolls hijack civic engagement

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 7.11.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | cyberbullying, politics, social media, threat
Summary | Internet culture's sense of humor has become careless. A meme was recently circulated in Pennsyvania that said that one could vote online by just commenting the name of their candidate. Even though this was a joke, it was dangerously close to disenfranchising people of their votes. In the same way some people post anti-semitic or racist/sexist things and then claim to just do it to combat the tyranny of political correctness and not really meaning any harm. Such content however promotes extremism and is harmful - no matter the intentions.
Image Description | Man holding up Hillary Clinton toilet paper.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Today’s protest signs are sharper, meaner, funnier — and live on long after the rallies

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 2.2.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | politics, social media
Summary | Protest signs are becoming increasingly wittier as popular culture and politics converge by politics increasingly becoming entertainment. The protest sign are not only wittier but also live longer thanks to their digital footprint. The funniest/best protest signs are spread online and are seen by thousands of people nowhere near the protest which is why such signs may be remembered for longer.
Image Description | Various protesters with signs.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), text

The Resistance

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 27.12.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, smartphone, threat
Summary | The rapid development of new media has many people worrying about the 'end of the human era' especially with advancements in the development of artificial intelligence. We are constantly connected with our smartphones and are hardly ever 'in the moment'. Driving and texting is illegal but it still causes many accidents. The EU are passing a law for "the right to be forgotten" forcing search engines to suppress ambarrassing content from an individual's past. Many people are worried about government and other surveillance, leading them to use encrypted instant messaging services and cover up their webcams with duct tape. A resistance is developing lead by techno-skeptics.
Image Description | Portraits of individuals mentioned in the article: Astra Taylor & Jaron Lanier.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

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