Items tagged with Social Networks
Facebook has policies in place that are intended to curb bad behavior, including hate speech. Yet horrible things get posted on the social network (and other places on the web, such as Twitter), sometimes seemingly faster than moderators can remove them. Part of the problem is that the battle never ends, but even so...
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Have you read about the morgue employee who fell asleep on the job and was accidentally cremated? Or what about Denzel Washington referring to former President Barack Obama as the "criminal-in-chief?" These things did not happen, nor did an NFL team declare bankruptcy over player's taking a knee in protest. These are...
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Facebook is a mixed bag, isn't it? On one hand, Facebook is a wonderful platform for keeping in touch with old friends and family members when you're separated by distance. Through the wonders of social media, you can stay plugged into the lives of people who might otherwise be lost acquaintances. But in order to do...
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Facebook users often find themselves cruising the news feed looking for videos to check out during downtime. The videos we all watch right now are, for the most part, created by our friends or amateur content producers, but that is changing. Facebook has announced "Watch", which is described as a "new platform for...
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Policing the world's largest social playground in which there are nearly 2 billion monthly active users must be a rather daunting task. This is the Internet, after all, where many people feel empowered to say inappropriate things and act in a manner that is completely different than how they might act in real life...
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Imagine for a moment if British forces never arrived at Lexington and Concord over 240 years ago. The colonial militia would have accused Paul Revere of spreading fake news after his infamous midnight ride to warn patriots of the advancing redcoats. It did not play out that way, of course, but had he lived in an era...
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Facebook has been catching heat over allegations that its news team frequently buries conservative news topics, allegations it denies. Nevertheless, the world's top social network is making some changes to its Trending topics feature that promotes certain news stories over others in an effort to make the process more...
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It might seem counterintuitive, but new research hailing from Australia is suggesting that teenagers who play video gamers actually score higher on academic tests than their non-gamer counterparts. The data was compiled from over 12,000 Australian high schoolers that took the 2012 Program for International Student...
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Starting soon Instagram users will be able to silence obnoxious trolls by turning off comments on their own posts. It's not the best solution in the world to dealing with Internet butt-hats who get their jollies by being jerks to others behind the relative anonymity that the Internet provides, but for those who are...
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Every so often, Facebook does something that sets off the alarm of privacy advocates—perhaps it's inevitable when you're the largest social network on the planet with over 1.65 billion users. Right now that something is tapping into your smartphone's location data to suggest friends based on where you're at or where...
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If you haven't changed your LinkedIn password in several years, now would be a good time to get on that. Not only is it good practice to change passwords much more frequently than that, there's a chance that your login details were compromised four years ago and are just now being shopped around in an underground...
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Part of Twitter's charm is that messages are short and to the point. The 140-character limit on tweets makes them easily and quickly digestible, negating the need for tl;dr summaries at the end. On the flip side, it can sometimes be tough getting an idea across in 140 characters. and it's even more challenging when...
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A million users isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion users...in a single day! That's the milestone Mark Zuckerberg's social network passed for the first time ever on Monday, and not that it needs put into perspective, but that works out to one in seven people on this planet we call Earth using...
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Be careful what you post in jest on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even YouTube, lest the U.S. government labels you as a potential terrorist threat. It's the online world we live in these days, and in an effort to thwart the bad guys (and gals) before they can do harm, a new bill would encourage...
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Facebook gave the world a heads up earlier this month that it was planning to host full-length news articles as part of a new initiative called Instant Articles, and now just over a week later, the social network is ready to make good on that promise. What that means for you (assuming you use Facebook) is a better...
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Folks, there is no such thing as a deadly snow snake, even though someone may have posted a disturbing article on your Facebook feed warning of a white snake that hides in the snow and, once bitten by it, causes your blood to freeze. While these and other hoaxes may seem obviously fake to some, they often spread with...
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Unless you happen to hail from north of the border or otherwise follow the digital design industry, you probably have never heard of Teehan+Lax, one of Toronto's most successful digital design agencies. And it's a name you may soon forget, though three of its top partners are headed to Facebook in what's being described as a talent acquisition,
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Like just about every social networking service, Twitter tries out new things every once in awhile. Unfortunately for Twitter, people are creatures of habit, so these changes don't always go over very well, particularly the most recent one -- now when you click on the star icon to favorite a tweet, it will get...
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In a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Twitter disclosed that around 23 million of its monthly active users are actually bots, or programs that automatically post updates "without any discernible additional user-initiated action." That works out to about 8.5 percent of of the...
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A man in China has been arrested for writing on WeChat that three people carrying explosives were shot and killed by police outside a hospital in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Chinese authorities detained the individual just hours after government officials issued new rules on instant messaging tools, one of which bans spreading panic....
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People have a tendency to get ticked off if you mess with their heads, especially without their permission. Facebook, the world's largest social network, found this out the hard way when it revealed that it had altered nearly 700,000 user feeds to study people's emotions. Not cool, but are these types of studies...
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Soccer might not be the most popular sport in the U.S., but it's certainly growing on Americans. Of course, soccer enjoys an enormous global audience, and if anyone needs reminding of that, just check out the World Cup activity on Facebook. At only halfway through the tournament, there are more than 1 billion related...
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