Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 7
Posts 1 - 7

Facebook and Google activate safety features after Barcelona attack: How to mark yourself safe

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Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 17.8.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | After the Barcelona attacks, Facebook and Google have activated their safety features.
Image Description | Screenshots of Facebook and Google's safety features, and three tweets.
Image Tags | Facebook, Google, Twitter

A Hunt for Ways to Combat Online Radicalization

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Google, research/study, social media, threat, YouTube
Summary | Social media companies have only recently begun waking up to the fact that their unpoliced platforms are safe spaces for all kinds of extremism. Studies show that extremists nowadays get radicalized online, whether they be islamists or white supremacists. While these two movements may differ in ideologies, they resemble each otehr very strongly in their internet strategies of recruitment and organization of offline events. A research group at Google has now come up with a diversion strategy to combat the radicalization of individuals online. They target people who watch extremist recruitment videos on YouTube with video suggestions that present differing arguments and the downsides of that ideology. So far, there can be no knowing whether this strategy is helping but the redirection videos are being watched.
Image Description | GIF with mouse cursor arrows: black arrows surrounding a white arrow.
Image Tags | gifs

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)

YouTube Sets Policies To Restrict Extremism

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, marketing, threat, YouTube
Summary | Google has been using artificial intelligence to weed out offensive videos from YouTube and take them down. It is quite good at detecting nudity, graphic violence, and copyright violations. However, other less straightforward offensive material remains on the platform such as cultish sermons by extremist muslims. These are however not being monetized by displaying advertising next to them.
Image Description | An image of the London Tower and a portrait of a man.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

China Disrupts WhatsApp Service in Online Clampdown

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, Facebook, Google, Instagram, privacy, threat, Twitter, WhatsApp
Summary | The Chinese government has partly shut down the use of WhatsApp within their borders. The app is widely used around the globe and was used by some in China do communicate with people outside of Chine with end-to-end encryption. Other popular social media platforms and internet sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are blocked under the "Great Firewall" in China.
Image Description | Woman using a smartphone and women standing in front of Facebook and Instagram logos as well as emojis.
Image Tags | emojis, Facebook, female(s), Instagram, logo, smartphone

Google's future is useful, creepy and everywhere: nine things learned at I/O

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 18.5.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, privacy, threat
Summary | Google presented their new technology and their main focus is artificial intelligence. Google's Assistant is now proactively listening and making suggestion (for instance to leave the house early because of traffic) without users having to activate it by saying "OK Google". It will also be available accross devices. Google are attempting to replace Siri on Apple devices. Google's Assistant is much better developed in being able to understand colloquial commands. They are also working on connecting their Assistant with the camera, so that one could hold up the phone to a restaurant and get reviews about that restaurant pulled up. This has huge potential for making the lives of visually impaired people easier.
Image Description | Reuters and Getty images of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and the Google Assistant home speaker.
Image Tags | female(s), Google, male(s), YouTube

In Race Against Fake News, Google and Facebook Stroll to the Starting Line

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Newspaper | New York Magazine
Date | 25.1.2017
Language | German
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Facebook, fake news, Google, politics, threat
Summary | Google and Facebook are beginning to respond to the wide criticism that they do nothing to combat fake news on their platforms. Critics blame the uncontested spread of fake news for the voting of Donald Trump. Facebook and Google are now trying to block new providers on their platforms that spread misleading content but critics doubt that these measures are very effective.
Image Description | Getty image of a Google cafeteria.
Image Tags | Google, male(s), smartphone

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