In an age when people rarely know their neighbours, a ‘buy nothing’ group is one way to acquaint yourself with those living on your street
We all have things we don’t need. For Canberra resident Zoe Bowman, it is melon ballers.
“Someone asked for a melon baller to make some melon balls for a kid’s party, and I looked in the drawer and I had three,” she says. “I don’t need three melon ballers!”
Continue reading...In this remarkable year, our stories are at risk of being locked away on phones and floating, forgotten, in the digital ether
In the process of removing the final vestiges of my things from my parents’ house this year I find a letter from my nana – Big Nana (because she was tall), not Little Nana (who wasn’t) – written in her familiar curly script.
“Last Sunday I went to D’s 80th birthday luncheon – an exciting collection of old has-beens! One old lady said how dreadful she looked these days standing in front of the bathroom mirror (naked). Nearly all of us joined in with tales of horror – including some of the men! Surprising what a few sherrys [sic] can do.”
Continue reading...Proposed legislation would also give government power to unmask identities of anonymous accounts
Australian internet service providers, social media companies and other online platforms will need to remove severely harmful, abusive or bullying content within 24 hours or risk being blocked and fined $555,000 under the federal government’s proposed online safety legislation.
Currently, takedown notices for image-based abuse, cyber-abuse, cyberbullying, and seriously harmful online content needs to be actioned within 48 hours.
Continue reading...Analysis: Facebook says objections to Apple feature that affects apps are bid to defend small businesses – but do we believe it?
Never afraid of a challenge, Facebook appears to have embarked on a campaign to convince the world to hate Apple, love targeted advertising, and believe the social network when it says it is doing it all out of a desire to defend small businesses.
On Wednesday, the company launched a series of full-page newspaper adverts and a press conference where the company put forward small businesses who said they relied on app-tracking to find customers. It also announced it would be siding with the Fortnite developer Epic Games in the latter’s lawsuit over control of the iOS App Store.
Continue reading...Experts voice concern over growth of ‘deviant’ videos, including foster-child abuse fantasies, on Pornhub and other mainstream sites
Groups working on the frontline in the fight against child abuse in the UK have warned that an increase in abuse-themed pornography is “normalising” child abuse.
Children’s charity Barnado’s said it is working with vulnerable children who are being put at risk by “deviant” pornography that fetishises fantasies of sex with children.
Continue reading...Takahiro Shiraishi, 30, admitted killing nine people he befriended online after they expressed suicidal thoughts
A court in Japan has sentenced to death a man dubbed the “Twitter killer” for the murders in 2017 of nine people whom he befriended online after they had expressed suicidal thoughts.
Takahiro Shiraishi, 30, admitted strangling and dismembering his victims, eight of whom were women, over the course of three months. The youngest was 15 and the oldest 26.
Continue reading...Instagram star Sahar Tabar says she is still hoping for a pardon after conviction for corrupting young people
An Iranian woman who posted heavily distorted images of herself online has been sentenced to 10 years in jail, her lawyer has said, a year after she was arrested over her social media activities.
Sahar Tabar, 19, whose real name is Fatemeh Khishvand, came to prominence after posting images of herself with a gaunt, zombie-like face. At one point she had 486,000 followers on Instagram.
Continue reading...Amidst a ‘great awakening’, white Americans overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Are liberals really doing the groundwork they claim?
In the winter of 2018, Gwen Kansen, a 33-year-old self-professed liberal, met a man called Elias in a bar. Within minutes, she knew he was intense. His phone screensaver was of Pepe the Frog – a symbol of the alt-right movement. His style reminded her of a Confederate soldier, and he wore badges proudly proclaiming his hatred for political correctness.
It was not long before he disclosed he was a member of the Proud Boys, a far-right, male-only political organization. Still, Kansen didn’t put an end to the date. They drank rum and cokes; spoke about music, books, and exes; and that night, he walked her home. The two had a brief fling. Later, Kansen wrote an article about coming to terms with her so-called liberal beliefs while still choosing to entertain the affair.
Continue reading...Analysis: Vaccine hesitancy is growing, thanks in part to social media misinformation. Time for the Elvis approach?
The statement by the US president-elect, Joe Biden, that he would be happy to be publicly vaccinated against coronavirus to encourage people to follow suit – following similar pledges from Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton – highlights a fundamental concern in global health circles.
Vaccine hesitancy – as well as anti-vaccination activism, sometimes promoted by celebrities – is growing. Countries that were once measles-free are seeing new cases due to suspicion over vaccination. Vaccine hesitancy was listed a year ago as one of the World Health Organization’s 10 global health threats to watch, alongside Ebola and the threat of a global influenza pandemic. Coronavirus came instead.
Continue reading...Sites such as Facebook will have to publicly disclose identity of people and entities funding such advertising
The “dirty methods” of the Brexit referendum have been cited as a reason for new EU laws aimed at tackling disinformation and forcing online platforms including Facebook to publicly disclose the identity of people and entities funding political adverts.
Věra Jourová, a vice president of the European commission, said the EU rule-book needed to be updated to deal with on-line political campaigning, as she unveiled draft legislation at a press conference in Brussels.
Continue reading...Contrary to their dismissive framing as manufactured robots, South Korea’s BTS use social media, documentary and storytelling to make themselves into profoundly human stars
BTS’s leader RM looks up from under a black baseball cap, then stares back down at his hands. “Doing the promotional interviews, [I kept saying], ‘Music truly transcends every barrier.’ But even while I was saying it I questioned myself if I indeed believe it.”
It’s late September, and the rapper is confiding in over one million fans live from his Seoul studio. His “complex set of feelings” about the explosive, record-breaking success of Dynamite – the first fully English-language single from the South Korean megastars – is not the celebration you’d expect from a band that just topped the US Billboard Hot 100, the first K-pop act to do so. But this kind of frank, unfiltered conversation is exactly what their global “Army” fanbase love: BTS’s candid social media presence has included their fans in every step of their artistic journey, and, as they release new album Be this week, has made them the biggest pop group on the planet.
Continue reading...The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook appear before a US Senate hearing to testify about allegations of anti-conservative bias and their handling of the 2020 election. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg face questioning for the second time in as many months, with Republican lawmakers alleging – without evidence – censorship of conservative views
Continue reading...French president says US election chance to pursue sovereignty amid rising populism
European leaders must not let up on efforts to construct an autonomous bloc that is capable of resisting the duopoly of China and the US, Emmanuel Macron has said in his first extended response to the US presidential election.
The French president said the US would only respect Europe if it was sovereign with respect to its own defence, technology and currency. Warning that US values and interests were not quite the same as Europe’s, he said: “It is not tenable that our international policies should be dependent on it or to be trailing behind it.” The same need for independence applied even more to China, he added.
Continue reading...Travel bloggers have flocked to Pakistan in recent years – but have some of them become too close to the authorities?
Long before she became headline news in Pakistan, Cynthia Dawn Ritchie was simply a tourist. In 2009, Ritchie, an American woman living in Houston, Texas, took a trip to Karachi, the sprawling megacity in southern Pakistan. At the time, Pakistan was beset by terrorist violence, and the travel advice of most western countries could be summarised as “don’t go”. But Ritchie had been persuaded by friends who knew the city. “My Pakistani friends said: ‘Cynthia, you’ve travelled much of the world, but you haven’t been to Pakistan, why not come?’ I was like: ‘Sure, why not?’,” Ritchie told me.
After a couple of weeks eating seafood and sightseeing, Ritchie went back to Houston, where she worked in communications and other roles for local government. The next year, she made a few more trips to Pakistan, funded by various Pakistani-American organisations. Houston is twinned with Karachi, and Ritchie told me that back then she “represented the city as an informal goodwill ambassador”. As foreigners in Pakistan often are, she was immediately offered exciting opportunities – working with local NGOs, advising the health department about social media, giving lectures. That year, she decided to move to Pakistan permanently. “I just felt a kinship here, that I belonged here and had a sense of purpose,” she said when we first spoke earlier this year. She settled in the leafy, relatively secure capital city, Islamabad, where most westerners in Pakistan – diplomats, journalists, aid workers – also lived.
Continue reading...The coronavirus pandemic has left us living more and more of our lives online. But the place where we chat with friends, get our news and form our opinions is full of vile and dangerous conspiracy theories. Is the world’s biggest social network doing enough to combat them?
As with many others in Britain, lockdown hit Rachel and her husband, Philip, hard. Almost overnight, the couple, both in their early 50s, found themselves cut off from friends, family and colleagues. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, they had both been working every day; now Philip found himself furloughed, while Rachel was put on rotation with other essential staff, working fewer shifts at odd hours. They were unable to meet up with their four adult sons and daughters. They had to attend a family funeral while remaining socially distanced.
Initially, Rachel coped in the way many others did. She played more video games than normal, and felt stressed at work, but as far as possible she managed. Her husband didn’t. For him, it seemed there must be more to it than the authorities struggling to cope with a novel virus and evolving expert advice. “The regularly changing and conflicting information that was coming from the government added to the feeling in him that they were making things up or covering something up,” Rachel says now.
Continue reading...After the tortuous last few days, Joe Biden’s election has been welcomed by leaders keen to renew relations with the US
Fiji’s prime minister got in first, gambling on congratulating Joe Biden before the presidential election had been called, slipping in a plea for action on climate change.
But once the result was official, congratulations came pouring in from around the world. Donald Trump’s allies, critics and reluctant partners had all been following the vote counting, weighing up the impact of a radical change of direction expected from Washington under Biden.
Continue reading...The controversial messaging app has moved huge crowds on the streets of Belarus. But who is its secretive puppet master?
One Sunday in August, two weeks after Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko declared an implausibly decisive victory in presidential elections, I joined a crowd of around 100,000 people as it moved through central Minsk. Protest in Belarus was no longer the domain of a few hundred hardy opposition figures, and the homemade placards many people carried illustrated how broad the coalition had become: “Let’s drink to love, from the bartenders of Belarus”; “Teachers against violence”; “Working class, go on strike!”
The previous fortnight had been a time of national awakening, as the country united around the goal of ending Lukashenko’s 26 years in charge. As grim footage of police violence circulated on the messenger app Telegram, large numbers came out to demand that their voices be heard.
Continue reading...Secure messaging app pivotal to organisation of protests and spreading of news about repressions
In a small Minsk apartment one evening last week, a group of people gathered to discuss plans for a Halloween party with a twist. There would be costumes, drinks and games, but the main event was a ceremonial funeral. The plan: to bury Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship.
“Maybe we should bury a pumpkin with a moustache,” suggested one young woman.
Continue reading...Activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand have formed a novel international alliance to defy authoritarian rule
The language, the demands and the backdrop were different, but the protests across central Bangkok last week would have looked familiar to anyone who followed the mass demonstrations that roiled Hong Kong for a year from June 2019.
Crowds of young protesters, dressed in black and wearing hard hats, poured through the streets to locations announced at the last minute on social media. As the police closed in and the protesters prepared for confrontation, hand gestures and human chains ensured supplies including protective masks and water reached the front lines.
Continue reading...Facebook amends code after deletion of black users’ photos sparks outrage
As campaigning victories go, forcing Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire to admit a discriminatory flaw in its policy is no small feat.
But following a campaign launched in this paper, the Observer can exclusively reveal that Instagram and its parent company Facebook will be updating its policy on nudity in order to help end discrimination of plus-size black women on its platforms and ensure all body types are treated fairly.
Continue reading...