Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 24
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)

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

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

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)

Names of the Brussels Victims Emerge Online, One by One

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 24.3.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Facebook, social media, texting, threat
Summary | In the aftermath of the Brussels airport terrorist attacks, cell phone service was unreliable so people worried about their loved one's went on social media in search for missing persons. Entire bulletin boards were created on Facebook where people posted pictures of the missing family members and friends. Shortly after, deaths were being published on Facebook and other social media.
Image Description | A Getty image showing the airport evacuation in Brussels and Twitter posts with pictures of missing persons.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), Twitter

To Fight Critics, Donald Trump Aims to Instill Fear in 140-Character Doses

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 27.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | cyberbullying, politics, social media
Summary | Donald Trump is known for his bullying, he is very good at finding other people's greatest weaknesses and repepatedly hitting them right there. One case of a woman who criticized him on Twitter for being a poor debater has shown how stubbornly he keeps insulting and degrading his critics. He behaves exactly like a stereotypical "mean girl" and recruits his followers to help him with his cyberbullying.
Image Description | Donald Trump speaking to a crowd of people.
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)

Why Kids Can't Write

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 2.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | grammar, punctuation, school, smartphone, social media, spelling, texting, threat, word/writing
Summary | Many students struggle with writing despite various pedagogical models that have been implemented in past years to tackle that perpetual issue. This is all the more suprising considering that today's students may do moret voluntary writing than any generation before it. They text and post on social media a lot but the writing register is different there. The format's main principle is shortness so grammar, spelling, and punctuation take a back seat.
Image Description | GIF of a hand writing and a group of teachers in a workshop.
Image Tags | female(s), gifs, text

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