Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 35
Posts 21 - 30

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

Die gefährlichen Nebenwirkungen der totalen Vernetzung

(The dangerous side effects of the complete network)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 29.10.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | cyberbullying, politics, social media, threat, WhatsApp
Summary | In this age of massive amounts of data being generated every day, we face a lot of dangers. We are at greater risk of being ideologically radicalized because the social media only show us content that we like and even so, there is too much information being thrown at us that we can even comprehend. There is no protection against online slander and bullying. People are becoming reluctant to take political offices because of it. We should be mindful of our data use in the same way that we try to minimize our energy use. We waste a lot of our concentration on irrelevant WhatsApp messages.
Image Description | An @-sign made our of a lit bomb fuse and a compilation of Facebook sites.
Image Tags | Facebook

Pour être branché, débranchez-vous

(To be hip, unplug)

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Newspaper | Les Echos
Date | 6.1.2016
Language | French
Country | France
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, technology-free
Summary | The author of the article talks about one of his recent experiments: he tried to stay away from social networks for 10 days. Although it was difficult at first, he thought it was a positive experience. He found his ability to concentrate, and realized that his thoughts could be summarized in more than 140 characters. According to a British survey, more than half of adults consider themselves addicted. Harvard researchers claimed that Facebook and Twitter can be as addictive as alcohol or nicotine.
Image Description | Screenshot of a facebook page and a pointer clicking on "log off"
Image Tags | Facebook

Auf die Bombe folgten die Explosionen

(The bomb was followed by explosions)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 10.12.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | Facebook, law, politics, privacy
Summary | Recently the news story about a company called Cambridge Analytica made waves: they claimed to have extracted an accurate psychological profile of all adult US citizens based on their Facebook likes. The company uses those profiles to target very specific audiences with political advertising. Such rigorous profiling based on data that was not willingly given for the purposes of such analysis would be illegal in Europe.
Image Description | Bloomberg image of a woman with glasses (only eyes portion of face visible), the glasses reflecting a screen showing the Facebook logo.
Image Tags | Facebook, female(s), logo

Jetzt kommt die Sticker-Schwemme

(The sticker flood is on its way)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 15.11.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | abbreviations, emojis, Facebook, language threat, marketing, social media
Summary | Emoticons (f.i. ":-D") and abbreviations (f.i. "LOL") have trickled down from "geek speak" and established themselves in the mainstream. Emojis are nowadays ever present in our digital communication as well as in other arenas such as film or advertising. Now various social media platforms, among them Facebook, offer users various palettes of stickers. They are larger versions of emojis and are sent as an image file rather than included on the keyboard as a letter. Because many sticker palettes need to be purchased, a whole economy is beginning to form: The Japanese messaging app Line has sold over $250 mio worth of stickers last year. We do not need to fear that emojis and co. will replace language as we know it.
Image Description | Commodified emojis in various forms (as balls, as tattoos, as bed sheets, as food, on clothing, as masks, etc.) and Facebook messenger chats using/purchasing sticker collections.
Image Tags | emojis, Facebook, male(s), social media

Facebook reportedly testing new tool to combat fake news

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 6.12.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | Facebook, fake news, threat
Summary | Facebook is apparently looking into ways to combat fake news spreading on their platform. They have had to face much criticism because of this. Users have started getting little survey questions after clicking on news media links posted on Facebook asking them to evaluate how trustworthy the article is. It is not known what Facebook will do with the results of this poll.
Image Description | Getty image of the Facebook logo on various screens and a tweet.
Image Tags | Facebook, logo, male(s), Twitter

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