From Oslo pram guy to the teenage vacuum expert: inside the obsessive world of niche online reviewers

Posted on July 31, 2021 by Admin

Wade can tell you the best pram for a tall parent; Matthew knows which cleaner has superior suction power. But how do you become a respected reviewer on the wild west of the internet?

Once a month, every month, more than 8,000 strangers pay James Hoffmann a total of £16,263 so he can go out and buy coffee machines. Hoffmann, 41, from London, is an author, business owner, coffee connoisseur and, above all, a YouTuber: more than 900,000 people subscribe to his channel, on which he discusses everything to do with beans and brewing. Around a third of Hoffmann’s videos are product reviews: grinders, espresso machines, storage canisters and filters have all been scrutinised by him.

Hoffmann’s monthly £16,000 comes from Patreon, a membership platform that allows fans to pay creators a regular fee. The money is intended to keep him impartial: it enables him to buy machines to review directly – just like you or me – instead of getting them on loan from brands.

White House official and Pelosi aide test positive for Covid, reports say – live

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Admin

Pair escorted delegation from Texas around Capitol this week
President walks back ‘Facebook is killing people’ comment

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Many were surprised by the strong stance that Fox News host Sean Hannity took on Covid-19 Monday night when he told viewers, “I believe in science, I believe in the science of vaccination.”

Instagram ‘pushes weight-loss messages to teenagers’

Posted on July 19, 2021 by Admin

Researchers find minimal interactions by teen users can trigger a deluge of thin-body and dieting images

Instagram’s algorithms are pushing teenage girls who even briefly engage with fitness-related images towards a flood of weight-loss content, according to new research which aimed to recreate the experience of being a child on social networks.

Researchers adopting “mystery shopper” techniques set up a series of Instagram profiles mirroring real children and followed the same accounts as the volunteer teenagers. They then began liking a handful of posts to see how quickly the network’s algorithm pushed potentially damaging material into the site’s “explore” tab, which highlights material that the social network thinks a user might like.

US surgeon general: Covid misinformation ‘spreading like wildfire’ on social media

Posted on July 18, 2021 by Admin

Vivek Murthy: rise seen ‘among the unvaccinated in particular’
Biden administration renews attack on Facebook

Joe Biden’s administration renewed its assault on social media companies spreading Covid-19 misinformation on Sunday, as new infections continued to surge across the entire US.

Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general who has accused companies including Facebook of “poisoning information” about coronavirus vaccines, said they were not doing enough to check the online proliferation of false claims.

Social networks’ anti-racism policies belied by users’ experience

Posted on July 14, 2021 by Admin

Analysis: Twitter, Facebook and others condemn hateful speech, so why is it so easy to find on their sites?

The world’s biggest social networks say racism isn’t welcome on their platforms, but a combination of poor enforcement and weak rules have allowed hate to flourish.

In the hours after England’s loss to Italy in the European Football Championship, both Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, issued statements condemning the swelling racist abuse.

G7 plan ‘will slash UK tax revenue from US tech firms’ say experts

Posted on June 8, 2021 by Admin

Global tax changes could mean Treasury loses £230m digital services tax receipts from Google, Amazon, Facebook and eBay

Experts have warned that US tech companies, including Google, Amazon and Facebook, could pay less tax in the UK and several other big economies under global reforms agreed at the weekend by the G7.

In a key stumbling block emerging days after the landmark deal, research from the TaxWatch campaign group indicates that the UK Treasury stands to lose about £230m from the taxes paid each year by four of the big US tech firms.

Facebook to suspend Trump’s account for two years

Posted on June 4, 2021 by Admin

Decision follows oversight board recommendation over ex-president’s post on Capitol attack

Facebook is suspending Donald Trump’s account for two years, the company has announced in a highly anticipated decision that follows months of debate over the former president’s future on social media.

“Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, said in a statement on Friday.

Gadgets have stopped working together, and it’s becoming an issue

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Admin

Our reliance on technology means ever more devices and apps and ever less interoperability – and the ubiquity of Apple hasn’t helped

In 2001, if you listened to digital music, you did it with a large folder of MP3 files. How you acquired them is probably best left between you and a priest, but you may have ripped them from a CD, downloaded them from a file sharing service, or bought them from one of a few nascent download sites.

Whichever option you picked, you’d play them on your computer with a program built for the task. And if you were lucky enough to have an early standalone MP3 player, it was probably made by another company again.

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.

Hillary Clinton: ‘There has to be a global reckoning with disinformation’

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Admin

The former secretary of state warns of the danger to democracy of lies flourishing online – and says big tech’s wings must be clipped

Her bid for the White House was engulfed by a tidal wave of fabricated news and false conspiracy theories. Now Hillary Clinton is calling for a “global reckoning” with disinformation that includes reining in the power of big tech.

The former secretary of state and first lady warns that the breakdown of a shared truth, and the divisiveness that surely follows, poses a danger to democracy at a moment when China is selling the conceit that autocracy works.