Category Archives: Digital media

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

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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.

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Associated Newspapers pays damages for revealing Sand Van Roy as Luc Besson accuser

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MailOnline published actor’s identity as complainant in rape case against French director

Associated Newspapers has paid substantial damages and apologised to actor Sand Van Roy for revealing her identity as a complainant in a rape case against the French film director Luc Besson.

In May 2018, Van Roy filed a complaint with French police alleging that she had been raped by Besson. She expected to remain anonymous, as is her right under French law, but details of her complaint were leaked and reported in the French press, breaching her right to anonymity, the high court heard.

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Spanish aid volunteer abused online for hugging Senegalese migrant

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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.

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The new food stars of TikTok

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The app’s snappy videos are the new gateway to food fame. Its breakout stars explain the secrets of their success

When Poppy O’Toole was made redundant from her job as junior sous chef at the AllBright private members club in Mayfair during the first wave of the pandemic, she expected to return to work soon enough. “I thought, I’ve got three weeks to cook some nice food at home,” 27-year-old O’Toole remembers, “and be back in work in a few weeks.”

With lockdown opening up in front of her, O’Toole decided to upload the recipes she was cooking for herself on to the video-sharing app TikTok. “I’d always wanted to do the social media thing,” she says, “but I never had time, because I worked 70-hour weeks.” On 1 April 2020, O’Toole uploaded her first TikTok video under the handle @poppycooks. “Hi everyone … I’m going to start cooking at home doing TikToks,” said O’Toole. She captioned the video “hope this TikTok doesn’t flop like my career”.

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How missing CCTV footage turned a Chinese family’s tragedy into a national conspiracy

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A mother’s search for the truth about her son’s death exposes the level of public distrust in China’s authorities

On Mother’s Day last Sunday, 17-year-old Lin Weiqi wished his mother – referred to only as Madame Lu in Chinese media – a good day. “Mum, enjoy your day,” he said to her that morning. He was Lu’s only child. Like most Chinese parents of the one-child generation, Lin was her pride and joy.

Late in the afternoon, before Lin had gone back to his school in the south-western city of Chengdu, Lu prepared snacks for him in case he was hungry in the evening. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until an hour later.

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No shame: the podcast taking on the Arab world’s sex and gender taboos

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Eib is now in its seventh season, fearlessly tackling subjects from Beirut’s drag queen scene to Jordanian widows’ rights

Rude, fault or blemish; flaw, disgrace or shame. The word has many shades, but nearly every woman who grows up in Arabic-speaking households knows its singular weight. “Anything related to women is eib,” says Tala El-Issa, from her home in Cairo. “If they want to talk about their bodies, it’s eib, their problems – eib. Just being a woman is almost eib.”

When the team at Sowt, an Arabic podcasting network based across the Middle East, wanted to create a show that charged fearlessly into the region’s taboos around sex and gender, the title was obvious. “Eib” is now in its seventh season, the company’s longest-lasting podcast and its most popular.

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Donald Trump returns to social media with glorified blog

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Ex-president unveils retro webpage featuring series of statements resembling blogposts ahead of Facebook oversight board’s decision on his suspension

Banned by Facebook and Twitter, Donald Trump has gone back to the future with an online communication tool that might be described as a glorified blog.

His retro webpage, billed “From the Desk of Donald J Trump”, appears at DonaldJTrump.com/desk and features a small photo of the 45th president writing in a book on his desk.

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Substack: how the game-changer turned poacher

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It started as a newsletter platform for unknown writers. Now it is becoming a media giant in its own right – with many of the problems it was supposed to avoid

Isabelle Roughol was done with her day job at LinkedIn and was ready to start something of her own. She quit in early 2020 and launched Borderline, a podcast and newsletter aimed at “defiant global citizens”, and to help her build it she became an early user of a new online service: Substack.

Substack has marketed itself aggressively to people such as Roughol as a new type of tech company, one that will let writers build their own brands and communities. The company offers software to help people set up free or paid-for newsletters and promises the people creating them that they can write what they want and that they own their own mailing list and can take it with them if they leave.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Covid listener surge sees podcast firm’s results perking up

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Shares and revenues at UK-based Audioboom are soaring despite stiff competition from the world’s digital giants

A year ago, podcast producer Audioboom was facing an uncertain future as management sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to find a buyer to inject cash to expand the business. When the company gives its latest financial update this week, it will be telling a very different story: in the past 12 months its market value has more than tripled and a maiden profit is looming as Audioboom joins the ranks of the pandemic winners.

Digital entertainment services from Netflix to Spotify have been supercharged by lockdown viewing and listening, and Audioboom has been no exception. It now draws 25 million listeners a month with content from partners ranging from Formula One to the former Bake Off presenter Sue Perkins.

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How Leslie Jordan made it big: ‘If you want to get sober, try 27 days in county jail’

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After starring in Will & Grace and American Horror Story, his life took a twist in lockdown and he became an Instagram superstar at 65. He discusses fame, fun and sharing a cell with Robert Downey Jr

For a man of such diminutive stature – 4ft 11in in shoes – Leslie Jordan loves a tall tale. A cursory question at the start of our interview about where he is calling from, for example, results in this glorious flight of fancy: “I got on a bus in 1982, from the hills of Tennessee. I had $1,200 sewn into my underpants by my mother and I arrived in LA and found West Hollywood, which is where I currently live.”

Such vivid storytelling – delivered in a honey-thick southern drawl, accentuated perfectly by a knowing campness – is part of the reason for Jordan’s unexpected career boost at 65. A jobbing actor best known for his role in American Horror Story and his Emmy-winning turn as Beverly Leslie, the acid-tongued rival of Megan Mullally’s Karen in Will & Grace, Jordan spent most of 2020 becoming an accidental internet sensation, racking up 5.6 million Instagram followers – including the likes of Rihanna and Lily Allen – thanks to his charmingly chaotic videos.

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Facebook guidelines allow users to call for death of public figures

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Exclusive: public figures considered to be permissible targets for otherwise-banned abuse, leaked moderator guidelines show

Facebook’s bullying and harassment policy explicitly allows for “public figures” to be targeted in ways otherwise banned on the site, including “calls for [their] death”, according to a tranche of internal moderator guidelines leaked to the Guardian.

Public figures are defined by Facebook to include people whose claim to fame may be simply a large social media following or infrequent coverage in local newspapers.

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‘A letter tells someone they still matter’: the sudden, surprising return of the pen pal

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In the pandemic, many have rediscovered the sheer pleasure of writing to strangers, with new schemes spreading hope and connection around the world

A few months ago, when the rules had been sufficiently relaxed to allow friends to sit together outside, Liz Maguire had coffee with a woman she had never met. The pair had already been communicating for months, and quickly fell into easy conversation. Later on, this woman tweeted about their meeting, to which another woman replied: “You met Liz Maguire? As in the Liz Maguire?”.

The Liz Maguire is a 27-year-old American expat living in Dublin. Though undoubtedly a celebrity in her chosen field, she is not a professional, but that is simply because she is not paid to do what she loves, which is to write letters to strangers.

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‘The fakery is all part of the fun’: the hoax of the mirror selfie

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An influencer has claimed that the popular social media pose is a form of visual trickery. But why would you bother, when it’s so easy to do by yourself? And does it matter if it’s fake or not?

Even if the phrase “mirror selfies” isn’t in your daily lexicon, you likely know what it means: a selfie which, rather than being taken directly – camera-phone to face – is taken using a mirror, giving you a photograph of your own reflection.

Last week the internet trope - a mainstay of influencers such a Kendall Jenner, recognisable for the placement of a phone in front of the face - became freshly controversial.

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Unmasked: man behind cult set to replace QAnon

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The creator of the rapidly growing ‘Sabmyk Network’ is said to be a Berlin art dealer with a record of media manipulation

The mysterious individual behind a new and rapidly growing online disinformation network targeting followers of QAnon, the far-right cult, can be revealed as a Berlin-based artist with a history of social media manipulation, a prominent anti-racism group claims.

Since Donald Trump left the White House, QAnon’s vast online community has been in a state of flux as it comes to terms with the reality that its conspiracy theories – such as the former US president being destined to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles – amount to nothing.

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Why bands are disappearing: ‘Young people aren’t excited by them’

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Maroon 5’s Adam Levine was scoffed at for suggesting there ‘aren’t any bands any more’ – but if you look at the numbers, he’s right. Wolf Alice, Maximo Park and industry insiders ask why

“The moment that we started a band was the best thing that ever happened,” sings Matty Healy on the 1975’s recent single Guys. The song is an ardent love letter to the band, and to the romance of bands in general: the camaraderie, the solidarity, the joyous fusion of creativity and friendship. It’s an old sentiment but an increasingly rare one.

“It’s funny, when the first Maroon 5 album came out [in 2002] there were still other bands,” the band’s frontman Adam Levine told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe this month. “I feel like there aren’t any bands any more … I feel like they’re a dying breed.” Levine was quick to clarify that he meant bands “in the pop limelight” but the internet doesn’t really do clarification, so his remarks sparked bemusement and outrage among the literal-minded, from aggrieved veterans such as Garbage (“What are we Adam Levine? CATS?!?!?”) to fans of newcomers such as Fontaines DC and Big Thief.

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Facebook and Twitter say Australia wants to give regulator too much power in bid to combat online bullying

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The social media giants raise concerns about the eSafety commissioner’s investigative powers and lack of oversight

Facebook and Twitter have raised concern controversial new legislation aimed at curbing bullying and governing online activity will give Australia’s eSafety commissioner too much power over speech online with little oversight.

The online safety bill, introduced into parliament last week, is aimed at giving a broad range of powers to the eSafety commissioner to target bullying and harassment online, extending existing powers protecting children from online bullying to adults, as well as powers over abhorrent violent and terrorist material and adult content online and on social media in Australia.

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