Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 61
Posts 31 - 40

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

Blind Facebook users 'see' photos

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Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 5.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, diversity, Facebook, Instagram
Summary | Facebook has a new function that is meant to make the predominantly visual platforms of Facebook and Instagram more inclusive to people with visual impairments. The new software uses artificial intelligence to tell blind users what is in the images. It is not perfect yet but the image recognition can identify simple things like specific sports, etc.
Image Description | Screenshots of Facebook feeds with the image content captioned.
Image Tags | Facebook

WhatsApp Introduces End-to-End Encryption

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 5.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Facebook, law, privacy, threat, WhatsApp
Summary | Facebook has introduced end-to-end encryption for all WhatsApp communication including one-on-one and group chats and multimedia data sent in chats. This is a step to protect user privacy because breaches have happened in the past. The federal government however opposes this step because it denies the police access to communications which may be crucial to crack criminal cases.
Image Description | WhatsApp and Facebook logos.
Image Tags | Facebook, logo, WhatsApp

Facebook Groups Act as Weapons Bazaars for Militias

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 6.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Facebook, law, marketing, threat
Summary | Since Facebook has enabled the transmission of payments via the site, it has seen an increase of commerce on the platform. Most worryingly, many Middle Eastern Facebook group pages advertise and apparently sell fire arms (everything from pistols over machine guns to missiles) via Facebook. Facebook has forbidden the sale of fire arms on their platform but they have to rely on users to report such cases.
Image Description | Images of the weapons on sale on Facebook, ISIS fighters, and refugee boats.
Image Tags | Facebook, male(s)

'Chatbots' are coming

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Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 7.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, research/study, WhatsApp
Summary | The future is artificially intelligent. All major digital companies seem to see the most potential in messenger-based, artificially intelligent chatbots. Studies have shown that people value messaging services most highly on their smartphones so any innovation needs to be accessible through a messaging service. WhatsApp is a very significant one, it has 900 mio users.
Image Description | Getty image of Mark Zuckerberg in front of the Facebook Messenger logo and a screenshot of an Uber chatbot conversation.
Image Tags | Facebook, logo, male(s)

Die Integration von Syrern funktioniert - über Facebook

(The integration of Syrians works - on Facebook)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 12.10.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | digitized education, diversity, Facebook, law
Summary | The Syrian community in Germany is excellently connected on Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of people are joined in Facebook groups and share their knowledge about asylum-seeking procedures, how to get cheap train tickets, and short video classes about complicated grammatical constructions. The Syrians are pooling their knowledge of all aspects of German culture and are succeding with the integration into the society. Even video comedians explain cultural differences humoristically so that they are getting more and more German viewers. Lately, they have even helped the German police find a terrorist posing as a refugee by sharing his image in their Facebook groups.
Image Description | Screenshots of the Facebook groups.
Image Tags | Facebook, male(s)

Neuronales Netzwerk beschreibt Fotos für Blinde

(Neuron network describes pictures for blind people)

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Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 5.4.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, diversity, Facebook
Summary | Facebook is testing a new function that tells blind users what is depicted by an image on Facebook. The system does not need human input to recognize the content of images - it has been feed with millions of images to "learn" to recognize certain things like the outdoors and sports. This is a way to include people with visual disabilities better on social media because a lot of the activity there is visual.
Image Description | Facebook feed with photographs explained.
Image Tags | Facebook, female(s), male(s)

Wie Facebook unsere Sprache ausspähen will

(How Facebook wants to spy on our language)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 11.3.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | emojis, Facebook, research/study, word/writing
Summary | Facebook is planning to systematically keep track of linguistic innovations on their platform. They want to compile a slang dictionary ("social glossary") with the freshest expressions. Linguists are also very interested in this project. American linguist Gretchen McCulloch has already posed the research question what verbs and nouns will enter our speech for the new Facebook emoji reactions. We already speak of likes and liking something but how will we speek of users reacting with sad or angy emojis?
Image Description | Image of an eye reflecting a Facebook like symbol and a tweet by linguist Gretchen McCulloch.
Image Tags | Facebook, Twitter

Das Monster lebt

(The monster is alive)

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Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 31.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | censorship, cyberbullying, Facebook, law, threat
Summary | Facebook is hiring thousands of new employees to battle cyberbullying on their platform and to remove offensive material as quickly as possible. But a couple thousand are not very many people to combat wrongdoings of 2 billion users. German politicians are trying to make Facebook comply with local laws about removing illegal content from the internet but Facebook is nowhere near fulfilling those requirements.
Image Description | A photograph of a man holding a smartphone showing the Facebook logo and the face of a monster.
Image Tags | Facebook, hand(s), logo, male(s), smartphone

Gesucht: Putzkräfte fürs Netz

(Wanted: cleaning personnel for the net)

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Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 10.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, cyberbullying, Facebook, fake news, law
Summary | Facebook is hiring thousands of people to check their platform for offensive content. Artificial intelligence and algorhythms have proven to be incapable of dealing with all nuances of human communication. They were not able to reliably identify cyberbullying content and fake news. Facebook is admitting the boundaries of technological possibilities and now hiring humans to do the job.
Image Description | Reuters image of a hand holding a smartphone in front of a screen showing the Facebook logo.
Image Tags | Facebook, hand(s), logo, smartphone

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