The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, says the Trump administration wants the removal of 'untrusted' Chinese apps from service in the country. Calling popular social media platforms TikTok and WeChat dangerous, Pompeo also raised concerns around data theft of intellectual property, including potential Covid-19 vaccines, through cloud-based services
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Facebook removes Trump post for spreading false information on Covid
Post included video in which Trump wrongly said that children were ‘almost immune’ from illness
Facebook has removed a post from Donald Trump’s page for spreading false information about the coronavirus, a first for the social company that has been harshly criticized for repeatedly allowing the president to break its content rules.
The post included video of Trump falsely asserting that children were “almost immune from Covid-19” during an appearance on Fox News. There is evidence to suggest that children who contract Covid-19 generally experience milder symptoms than adults do. However, they are not immune, and some children have become severely ill or died from the disease.
Continue reading...TikTok row: Microsoft pursues deal as Pompeo says Trump will take action soon
Microsoft confirms acquisition plans, hours after US secretary of state says Chinese software companies are feeding data directly to Communist party
Donald Trump will take action in coming days to tackle an array of national security risks presented by TikTok and other Chinese software companies, Mike Pompeo has said, as Microsoft revealed it was pursuing a deal after speaking to the US president.
Microsoft said late on Sunday that - after a conversation between Trump and its CEO, Satya Nadella – it would move quickly on acquisition talks with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, completing talks no later than 15 September. It pledged to ensure that all private data of American users was transferred to, and remained in, the US.
Continue reading...TikTok: China’s ByteDance agrees to divest US operations after Trump threat
Proposed deal would see Microsoft take over TikTok in US, insiders say, after president said he would ban video app
China’s ByteDance has agreed to divest the US operations of TikTok completely in a bid to save a deal with the White House, after Donald Trump said on Friday he had decided to ban the popular short-video app, two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.
US officials have said TikTok under its Chinese parent poses a national risk because of the personal data it handles. ByteDance’s concession will test whether Trump’s threat to ban TikTok is a negotiating tactic or whether he is intent on cracking down on a social media app that has up to 80 million daily active users in the US.
Continue reading...TikTok: Trump suggests US may ban Chinese-owned app
The US is reportedly preparing to take action against the popular short video app over concerns for the security of personal data
Donald Trump on Friday again suggested the US may take action against the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, floating a potential ban.
“We’re looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House on a trip to Florida.
Continue reading...Madonna leads celebrity vogue for Covid-19 conspiracy theories
Singer’s claim vaccine is being concealed is latest example of stars spreading falsehoods during pandemic
Dancer, singer, songwriter, actor, director – Madonna has had quite the career.
But the queen of pop’s latest reinvention came this week in the form of a video posted on Instagram that shared a coronavirus conspiracy theory with her 15 million followers.
Continue reading...Monica Lewinsky ‘wins the internet’ with joke about internship
Lewinsky made light of affair with Bill Clinton in ‘I have a joke’ tweet that quickly went viral
Monica Lewinsky has made light of her affair with Bill Clinton with a tweet that quickly went viral.
“I have a joke” was trending on Twitter on Friday, prompting users to offer up one-line witticisms. When one user tweeted “I have a Charles Manson joke and it kills”, Lewinsky offered her own take: “I have an intern joke and it … nevermind.”
Continue reading...‘I cannot be silent’: exposing the racial pay gap among influencers
The disparity between the fees paid to black influencers and their white counterparts has come under scrutiny after a group of campaigners spoke out
At the start of the pandemic, Vanity Fair asked whether the influencer era was over because people were tired of glossy, edited lives on social media and wanted something more “real”. Instead, it seems the world of influencers is adapting to reflect changes in the rest of the world. In recent weeks, the focus has been the shocking pay disparity between white influencers and influencers of colour.
In June, a group of influencers of colour shared an open letter on Instagram that called out Fohr, a marketing agency that work as a middleman between brands and influencers. Women including Valerie Eguavoen spoke out. “I cannot be silent when I see clear evidence of pay disparities between Black women and other creatives who work with you,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “I cannot be silent when you refuse to address racism form [sic] individuals on your team adequately. Enough is enough.” (Fohr replied on Instagram, apologising for its conduct, writing: “We HAVE to do a better job listening to, promoting and working with black influencers.”)
Continue reading...TikTok halts talks on London HQ amid UK-China tensions
Video-sharing app suspends building plans, with British ban on Huawei 5G kit seen as factor
The Chinese social media firm TikTok has pulled back from talks to site the headquarters for its non-China business in the UK, threatening the creation of 3,000 jobs, as fears grow of a tit-for-tat trade war between London and Beijing.
Its parent company, ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, had spent months in negotiations with the Department for International Trade and No 10 officials to expand operations in addition to the near 800 employed by TikTok.
Continue reading...‘Too big to fail’: why even a historic ad boycott won’t change Facebook
The company has survived previous seemingly existential crises with little damage to its monarchical structure
On the evening of 13 July 2013, a few hours after George Zimmerman was acquitted over the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Alicia Garza logged on to her Facebook account and typed a phrase that would change the world: “#blacklivesmatter”. A few minutes later, she posted again: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
That Facebook played a small role in the inception of a movement that may have become the largest in US history is the kind of story that the embattled company likes to point to when it makes its case that it does more good than harm. CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted of the hashtag’s origin on Facebook in October 2019, when he delivered a speech about his view of free expression at Georgetown University.
Continue reading...Rowling, Rushdie and Atwood warn against ‘intolerance’ in open letter
Harper’s letter asserts way to ‘defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion’, but critics accuse authors of censorious mentality
JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to a controversial open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” is leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.
Rowling, whose beliefs on transgender rights have recently seen scores of Harry Potter fans distance themselves from her, said she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech”.
Continue reading...‘Disappointing’ Zuckerberg meeting fails to yield results, say Facebook boycott organizers
Civil rights groups say company did not commit to concrete plan to address hate speech and misinformation
The organizers behind a major advertiser boycott of Facebook have called a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and other executives “disappointing”, saying the company failed to commit to concrete solutions for addressing hate speech and misinformation on the platform.
Officials at Facebook, including Zuckerberg, the CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, met with members of the coalition of civil rights groups over video chat for an hour on Tuesday to discuss the largest boycott in Facebook history, which has gained the support of more than 1,000 of its advertisers, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks.
Continue reading...‘Please for the love of God do not vote for my dad’: Republican’s daughter voices opposition
Conservative Robert Regan blames daughter’s ‘socialist university’ but says he’s ‘happy she feels confident’ to oppose him publicly
It’s not the usual rallying cry one might expect from a political candidate’s child as their father runs for office, but the daughter of a Republican candidate has urged people in Michigan to “please for the love of god” not vote for her father.
“Tell everyone,” Stephanie Regan wrote in a viral tweet – which has now been liked more than 180,000 times on Twitter.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Viber severs ties with Facebook in growing boycott
Service adds to firms shunning Facebook over refusal to act against Donald Trump posts
The messaging service Viber, the fifth biggest with more than a billion users around the world, is severing all ties to Facebook as part of a growing boycott of the company by commercial partners.
The campaign, initially started in the US after Facebook’s refusal to take action against posts from Donald Trump which critics said incited violence, has now grown to become an international movement.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Saudi dissident warned by Canadian police he is a target
Omar Abdulaziz, who was close to murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, told of threat posed by Saudi Arabia
A prominent Saudi dissident who is living in exile in Canada said he was recently warned by Canadian authorities that he was a “potential target” of Saudi Arabia and that he needed to take precautions to protect himself.
Omar Abdulaziz, a 29-year-old activist who had a close association with Jamal Khashoggi, the murdered Washington Post journalist, told the Guardian that he believed he was facing a threat to his safety and that the Canadians had credible information about a possible plan to harm him.
Continue reading...Twitter aims to limit people sharing articles they have not read
Test to promote informed discussion will ask users if they want to retweet unread links
Twitter is trying to stop people from sharing articles they have not read, in an experiment the company hopes will “promote informed discussion” on social media.
In the test, pushed to some users on Android devices, the company is introducing a prompt asking people if they really want to retweet a link that they have not tapped on.
Continue reading...EU says China behind ‘huge wave’ of Covid-19 disinformation
Brussels shifts position by accusing Beijing for first time of running false campaigns
China has been accused by Brussels of running disinformation campaigns inside the European Union, as the bloc set out a plan to tackle a “huge wave” of false facts about the coronavirus pandemic.
The European commission said Russia and China were running “targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns in the EU, its neighbourhood, and globally”. While the charge against Russia has been levelled on many occasions, this is the first time the EU executive has publicly named China as a source of disinformation.
Continue reading...Teenager’s collection of 37,000 tadpoles turns her into a TikTok star
Hannah McSorley’s videos prove a big hit online and lead to deal with influencer agency
“TikTok tadpole influencer” is not a career path that Hannah McSorley would have been told about at school. In lockdown, however, with her GSCEs on hold, the 17-year-old has turned a time-honoured pastime – collecting frogspawn – into a potentially lucrative online empire.
McSorley’s hypnotic daily videos of her tens of thousands of tadpoles have attracted 535,000 followers on TikTok as @.baby.frogs, leading to a deal with a US influencer agency.
Continue reading...Covid-19 misinformation: pro-Trump and QAnon Twitter bots found to be worst offenders
Researchers find coordinated effort to promote conspiracy theory that coronavirus is a bioweapon engineered by China
Misinformation about the origins of Covid-19 is far more likely to be spread by pro-Trump, QAnon or Republican bots on Twitter than any other source, according to a study commissioned by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.
In late March, when the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold in the US and across much of the rest of the world, two researchers at Queensland University of Technology, Timothy Graham and Axel Bruns, analysed 2.6m tweets related to coronavirus, and 25.5m retweets of those tweets, over the course of 10 days.
Continue reading...Trump signs executive order to narrow protections for social media platforms
Move comes amid president’s feud with Twitter after it fact-checked him for the first time
Donald Trump has fired a shot across the bows of “big tech” companies by signing an executive order that aims to narrow their protections from liability over the content posted on their services.
The move came as the US president stepped up his attacks against social media giants after Twitter fact-checked him for the first time over a false assertion that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.
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