EU cites ‘anti-vaccine campaign’ as reason to toughen social media code

Posted on May 26, 2021 by Admin

European Commission proposes more factchecking and algorithm changes to tackle disinformation

A “massive anti-vaccination campaign” has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation.

Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked.

Spanish aid volunteer abused online for hugging Senegalese migrant

Posted on May 20, 2021 by Admin

Luna Reyes targeted by far-right supporters after footage of gesture goes viral

The image captured the raw humanity of the moment: a Red Cross volunteer tenderly consoling a Senegalese man moments after he stepped foot in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta.

Hours after the footage went viral, however, Luna Reyes set her social media accounts to private after she was targeted by a torrent of abuse from supporters of Spain’s far-right Vox party and others incensed by the unprecedented arrival of 8,000 migrants in Ceuta.

Lucky review – spirited Ghanaian romcom captures the social media age

Posted on May 3, 2021 by Admin

An idling student enlists the help of a wideboy friend in pursuit of a hot date in a comedy that veers between likable and laddish

Here is a vibrant, idiosyncratic portrait of Ghanaian youth, bursting with wisecracks and a boyish restlessness. There is an amateurish shakiness to the visuals, but the film overcomes this with a lot of charm and an innate understanding of its young subjects.

Footballers and clubs to boycott social media in mass protest over racist abuse

Posted on April 24, 2021 by Admin

Professionals and teams from top English leagues will log off Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for the whole of next weekend

The world of English professional football will unite for an unprecedented four-day boycott of social media next weekend to protest at the continued abuse and racism aimed at players.

Clubs in the English Premier League, English Football League, Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship will switch off their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts in response to “the ongoing and sustained discriminatory abuse” of footballers, and their despair over a lack of action from the tech companies.

Shadow and Bone star Jessie Mei Li: ‘Fans find out everything’

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Admin

The actor is about to hit the TV big time as a girl with special powers in Netflix’s new young adult fantasy. And the internet is in a frenzy

Jessie Mei Li currently inhabits a weird stratum of celebrity. At 25 years old, her biggest screen credit to date has been a single episode of the Channel 5 docudrama Banged Up Abroad. She hasn’t worked for a year. And yet, at the same time, a growing portion of the internet has become borderline hysterical about her.

Search for her name and you’ll get the idea. There are tweets declaring things like “Jessie Mei Li you have my whole heart” and “I believe in Jessie Mei Li supremacy”. There are more than a dozen Jessie Mei Li stan accounts on Instagram – fan-based accounts dedicated to a particular celebrity – many of them shrieking their obsession in frenzied all-caps captions several times a day. Tumblr, as you might expect, is an almighty mess.

Facebook and fear in Manila: Maria Ressa’s fight for facts

Posted on April 18, 2021 by Admin

Ex-CNN reporter and founder of the news site Rappler on life under the relentless social media assault of the Duterte regime

As terrible as the events were that played out on Capitol Hill on 6 January, Maria Ressa admits to feeling “a small amount of relief” about them. An ex-CNN bureau chief, and now the founder of her own news organisation, Rappler, she had spent the past two years sounding a warning about what she’d seen happen in her native country, the Philippines.

There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries – she calls herself “the first of the CNN hybrids” – she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. “A lie told a million times becomes a fact,” she repeated again and again.

‘In this world, social media is everything’: how Dubai became the planet’s influencer capital

Posted on April 17, 2021 by Admin

Once a small port on the edge of a desert, Dubai is now a magnet for reality stars and a jet set crowd looking to beat the vaccine queue. But do the filtered images tell the whole story?

On the electric blue tarmac of a helipad on the edge of Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island on the Dubai coastline, Busra Duran stands on tiptoes. Wearing multicoloured trainers and a pink tulle minidress, the 28-year-old Turkish influencer is posing for photos in front of a red helicopter. Her husband, Gökhan Gündüz, snaps away as she models her pink sunglasses in the shadow of the Atlantis, a blush-coloured hotel with green pointed rooftops which resembles the fake castles of Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom.

‘Gündüz, 29, wears a striped T-shirt with the word “positive” emblazoned around the collar. Duran skips over to check the photos he’s taken, before they discuss her Instagram shots from the ride. Duran approached the helicopter company to request this free 12-minute tour, the shortest available, and they were happy to oblige. “It was amazing,” she says, flatly, sounding unconvinced. The trip is one of a whole roster of experiences Duran has set up for the benefit of her 608,000 Instagram followers. In a few days, the couple have arranged to play golf – another free gift – and Duran often poses for pictures at restaurants in exchange for a meal. Her glittering Dubai lifestyle is displayed on her Instagram: one day she’ll be perching on the side of a bubble bath in an upmarket hotel reading a copy of Gulf News; the next in a red swimsuit beside a pool, a glass of rosé in one hand and a copy of a Paulo Coelho novel in front of her.

‘I blamed myself’: how stigma stops Arab women reporting online abuse

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Admin

Women in the Middle East and north Africa say social codes leave them unable to talk about social media abuse as pandemic pushes sexual harassment off the streets

The first pornographic picture sent shivers of shock through Amal as she stared in horror at the phone screen. Until now, she had responded politely to the older man who had been messaging her on Facebook, hoping to deter his questions about her life with curt, one-word replies.

More lurid pictures followed, some from pornographic magazines, others of the man himself in sexual poses. “I started to blame myself and feel that I invited this because I had replied to him,” says the 21-year-old, who is a university student in Amman, Jordan.

How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower’s account

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Admin

The inside story of Sophie Zhang’s battle to combat rampant manipulation as executives delayed and deflected

Shortly before Sophie Zhang lost access to Facebook’s systems, she published one final message on the company’s internal forum, a farewell tradition at Facebook known as a “badge post”.

“Officially, I’m a low-level [data scientist] who’s being fired today for poor performance,” the post began. “In practice, in the 2.5 years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve … found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions.”

A room with a view: the Twitter account that spent a year staring into people’s homes

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Admin

As the pandemic forced us inside and online, Room Rater was one Twitter account giving doomscrollers a well-needed levity break. A year on, co-founder Claude Taylor explains how he plans to keep going

With its stately lamp and verdant window view, Hillary Clinton’s “Zoom room” is nicer than most. So when Room Rater – a Twitter account which scores the video conference backgrounds of high-profile figures – gave it nine out of 10 last spring, Clinton took her disappointment to social media: “I’ll keep striving for that highest, hardest glass ceiling, the elusive 10/10,” she tweeted at the account.

Judging the backgrounds on video calls has been the armchair sport of the past year. Room Rater just happened to screengrab these moments. As we doomscrolled through bleak statistics online, it was cheering to see shots of Meryl Streep’s sterile shelves or the copies of Fahrenheit 451 and The Twits propped up behind Boris Johnson at a school in Leicestershire. Scrolling through the posts a year after it launched, these images have become emblematic of just how quickly coronavirus forced all of us inside and online.

Who needs Twitter? Trump wishes happy Easter to ‘radical left crazies’

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Admin

Ex-president marks holy day with brief, abusive statement
Trump ‘money bomb’ raised millions from unwitting donors

Donald Trump is reportedly working on a social media platform of his own, after being banned from Twitter and Facebook for inciting the Capitol riot.