Tag: Facebook

32 per cent of Smartphone users access Internet in the toilet – research

Research findings have revealed that 32 per cent of Smartphone users access news, and other content on the Internet in their bathroom/toilet.

Digital News Report 2017 published recently shows that over half (56%) of the population studied, use their devices in personal spaces, up substantially from the figure it published two years ago.

“Almost half of smartphone users (46%) access news in bed and 32% read or watch news stories when they are in the bathroom or toilet,” the research finding reveals.

“It is simply more convenient to pick up the device that is always with you, rather than seek out a computer or tablet in another room,” the authors of the report stated.

According to the report, across all countries surveyed, younger groups are much more likely to use social media and digital media as their main source of news, while older groups cling to the habits they grew up with (TV, radio, and print).

It reveals a third of 18-24s (33%) now say social media are their main source of news – that’s more than online news sites (31%) and more than TV news and printed newspapers put together (29%).

The report also revealed that the top ranking social network for news is Facebook with LinkedIn least used.

>>Read Top Messaging Applications

Despite the rise of aggregators, social media and search remain the most important gateways to online content, alongside traffic coming to websites and apps.

Video findings reveal that online news scouts consume more videos on social media than on video platforms and news websites.

In the face of rising concerns for fake news, the survey finds a big difference between the news media and social media in their ability to separate fact from fiction.

In countries like the US (38%/20%), Canada (51%/24%), and the UK (41%/18%), people are twice as likely to have faith in the news media. Only in Greece do more people trust social media (19%/28%) but this has more to do with the low opinion of the news media in general than the quality of information in their news feeds.

“The crisis over fake news could be the best thing that has happened to journalism – or the worst. It is certainly focusing minds and wallets. Next year’s chapter in this on-going story will be fascinating to watch,” the report stated.

Source

June 22, 2017
WhatsApp emerges major news distribution platform ahead of Facebook

Instant messaging service, WhatsApp has emerged as the major news distribution platform in news media ahead of Facebook Messenger.

This is according to Digital News Report 2017.

The report surveyed top messaging applications used for news, and found out WhatsApp leads the pack.

“We’ve been tracking the growth of WhatsApp for some time but its use for news has jumped significantly in the last year to 15 percent, with considerable country-based variation,” said the authors of the Digital News Report 2017.

The apps surveyed include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Viber, WeChat, Kakao Talk, and among others.

Over half of the survey respondents in Malaysia (51 percent) said they used WhatsApp for sharing or discussing news in a given week, as compared with just three percent in the US.

Besides Malaysia, the use of WhatsApp for news is starting to rival Facebook in a number of markets, including Brazil (46 percent), and Spain (32 percent).

The researchers found that the use of Facebook for news has dipped in most of the countries they surveyed.

This may just be a sign of market saturation, or it may relate to changes in Facebook algorithms in 2016, which prioritised friends and family communication over professional news content, according to the report.

The research, carried out by the Reuters Institute For The Study of Journalism, analysed data from 34 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia, besides Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The study involved responses from over 70,000 people.

Overall, around a quarter (23 percent) of the respondents said they now find, share, or discuss news using one or more of the messaging applications.

The researchers found that Viber is a popular choice in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, while a range of chat applications are used for news across Asia, including WeChat in Hong Kong (14 percent) and Malaysia (13 percent), Line in Taiwan (45 percent) and Japan (13 percent), while home-grown Kakao Talk (39 percent) is the top messaging app in South Korea.

At a time when the social media platforms are facing criticism for not doing enough to stop the spread of fake news, the report also revealed that only 24 percent of the respondents think social media do a good job in separating fact from fiction, compared to 40 percent for the news media.

Source

June 22, 2017
WhatsApp extends support for BlackBerry OS yet again

Back in February last year, WhatsApp announced that it will stop supporting versions of BlackBerry OS – including BlackBerry 10 – by the end of 2016.

That, however didn’t happen, and the date was pushed to June 30, 2017.

Now, the Facebook-owned service has confirmed that the support has been extended yet again till 31 December 2017 this time.

Aside from BlackBerry, support for Nokia S40 has also been extended.

“We will extend BlackBerry until the end of 2017. Nokia S40 longer supported until the end of 2018,” whatsappen.nl quotes WhatsApp co-founder, Brian Acton, as saying.

In fact, WhatsApp’s Blackberry client has started receiving a new update, with change-log clearly saying: changed client end-of-life date to December 31, 2017.

The app, however, will stop working on Nokia S60 devices after June 30 2017.

June 21, 2017
Court sends Grenfell Tower fire victim’s ‘brother’ to jail

Posting horrifying pictures of a Grenfell Tower victim on Facebook has landed a man in jail in Britain.

Omega Mwaikambo, 43, was sentenced to three months at Westminster Magistrates’ Court after he admitted to posting the pictures, The Independent reported.

According to the Scotland Yard, Mwaikambo was found guilty of malicious communications offences.

Mwaikambo was arrested after images were posted online of what appeared to be a partially covered body following the blaze in North Kensington, west London.

He pleaded guilty to two counts under the Communications Act.

He received six weeks in prison for each count, to run consecutively, making a total of 12 weeks (three months), the Scotland Yard said.

While the body of the man in the photographs is yet to be identified formally, one man told BBC News he believed the photo showed his brother, Mohammed, who was confirmed dead.

“This morning we saw a picture of his body on social media and the police didn’t know anything about this.

“This picture shouldn’t have been released on social media.

“The police are saying they couldn’t tell us anything until they have more information,” he was quoted as saying.

At least 58 people are missing and presumed dead in the Grenfell Tower disaster.

June 19, 2017
Terrorism raging high, Facebook offers combative insight

Facebook Inc on Thursday offered additional insight on its efforts to remove terrorism content, a response to political pressure in Europe to terrorists groups using the social network for propaganda and recruiting.

Facebook has ramped up use of artificial intelligence such as image matching and language understanding to identify and remove content quickly, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s director of global policy management, and Brian Fishman, counter-terrorism policy manager, explained in a blog post.

The world’s largest social media network, with 1.9 billion users, Facebook has not always been so open about its operations, and its statement was met with scepticism by some who have criticised US technology companies for moving slowly.

“We’ve known that extremist groups have been weaponising the Internet for years,” said Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College computer scientist who studies ways to stem extremist material online.

“So why, for years, have they been understaffing their moderation? Why, for years, have they been behind on innovation?” Farid asked. He called Facebook’s statement a public relations move in response to European governments.

Britain’s interior ministry welcomed Facebook’s efforts but said technology companies needed to go further.

“This includes the use of technical solutions so that terrorist content can be identified and removed before it is widely disseminated, and ultimately prevented from being uploaded in the first place,” a ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

Germany, France and Britain, countries where civilians have been killed and wounded in bombings and shootings by Islamist militants in recent years, have pressed Facebook and other providers of social media such as Google and Twitter to do more to remove militant content and hate speech.

Government officials have threatened to fine Facebook and strip the broad legal protections it enjoys against liability for the content posted by its users.

Facebook uses artificial intelligence for image matching that allows the company to see if a photo or video being uploaded matches a known photo or video from groups it has defined as terrorist, such as Islamic State, Al Qaeda and their affiliates, the company said in the blog post.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft last year created a common database of digital fingerprints automatically assigned to videos or photos of militant content to help each other identify the same content on their platforms.

Similarly, Facebook now analyses text that has already been removed for praising or supporting militant organisations to develop text-based signals for such propaganda.

“More than half the accounts we remove for terrorism are accounts we find ourselves; that is something that we want to let our community know so they understand we are really committed to making Facebook a hostile environment for terrorists,” Bickert said in a telephone interview.

Asked why Facebook was opening up now about policies that it had long declined to discuss, Bickert said recent attacks were naturally starting conversations among people about what they could do to stand up to militancy.

In addition, she said, “We’re talking about this because we are seeing this technology really start to become an important part of how we try to find this content.”

Facebook’s blog post on Thursday was the first in a planned series of announcements to address “hard questions” facing the company, Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy and communications, said in a statement. Other questions, he said, include: “Is social media good for democracy?”

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron launched a joint campaign to go after “terrorists and criminals” on the Internet and to root out radicalising material.

“Crucially, our campaign will also include exploring creating a legal liability for tech companies if they fail to take the necessary action to remove unacceptable content,” May said at a joint news conference.

Macron’s office declined to comment on Facebook’s statement on Thursday.

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June 16, 2017
Facebook gives GIF amazing 30th birthday bash

Happy birthday to the GIF!

The venerable file format turns 30 today, and Facebook is taking the opportunity to add a few GIF-related features to its service.

Users could already post GIFs in status updates, but from June 15th, you’ll now be able to add GIFs in Facebook comments, allowing you to search through and select from a list of relevant files right there in the social network’s interface.

Facebook is also using the day to salute the surprisingly resilient format, throwing what it calls a “GIF party,” and offering statistics on its existing GIF usage.

More than 13 billion GIFs were sent last year via Facebook Messenger, it says, after the company made the format usable on the chat service. The busiest day for GIFs was apparently January 1st this year, with more than 400 million sent, as hungover people across the globe let a short moving image do the legwork of expressing their friendship and love for them.

https://www.facebook.com/facebook/videos/10155918219781729/

More worryingly, Facebook is also using the day to re-open the fractious debate about GIF pronunciation – hard or soft G – with a poll for US-based users. It’s a decision that may turn friend against friend and tarnish what should otherwise be a happy day, but we may finally work out what the people want, no matter what the format’s creator says.

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June 16, 2017
Londoners slam Facebook after Grenfell Tower fire

Angry residents have slammed Facebook for activating its Safety Check for people who lived hours away from the Grenfell Tower fire.

After the massive fire broke out at the London apartment block, Facebook activated its Safety Check feature.

At least 12 people died when the London’s Grenfell Tower became engulfed in flames, with many people still unaccounted for.

And while Facebook’s Safety Check was a helpful way for those living in the apartment complex to tell friends and family they were able to escape the inferno, some Londoners have suggested the feature could use some fine tuning.

After a number of people who do not live in proximity to the tower were promoted by Facebook to mark themselves as safe, the social media platform was criticized for generating unnecessary concern for friends and relatives.

According to Facebook, the algorithm-based safety feature is activated if enough people in an affected area post about an incident, with people nearby prompted to use the service.

However, the Grenfell Tower incident is the just the latest example of the feature doing more harm then good.

Just weeks earlier the feature was criticised for making the terrorist attack at London Bridge seem bigger and more widespread than it actually was by having too large of a proximity for people to mark themselves as safe.

London local Aaron Balick explained he refused to mark himself as ‘safe’ following the terror attack, feeling it created an over-inflated sense of danger.

“From what I understood about last night’s event, my assumption was that my friends were probably OK. I hope that they would also assume that I was safe unless they heard otherwise,” he told The Independent.

“For events on the scale of last night, the Facebook Safety Check reverses this assumption. It creates an implicit supposition that we are not safe until we let people know that we are.

“It creates a culture of hyper-vigilance that undermines our capacity to feel relatively secure about our environment.”

After hearing these criticisms, Facebook said it was working to make the feature more accurate.

“We’re working to improve Safety Check so we’re better at prompting people in the affected area to mark themselves safe,” a spokesman told Mashable.

June 15, 2017
UK to fine Facebook, Google for terror content – Theresa May

Prime minister Theresa May has confirmed the UK will look to create a new ‘legal liability’ that could see Facebook, Google, Twitter and other leading tech firms fined if they don’t remove “unacceptable content” from their websites.

In a brief statement issued by the Prime Minister’s office, May says the UK has formed a partnership with France to “tackle online radicalisation”.

The statement says the two countries aim to take “much stronger action against tech companies that fail to remove unacceptable content”.

“The UK and France will work together to encourage corporations to do more and abide by their social responsibility to step up their efforts to remove harmful content from their networks, including exploring the possibility of creating a new legal liability for tech companies if they fail to remove unacceptable content,” May says.

The legal liability would include the potential for firms to be fined if they don’t remove questionable content.

May adds that the UK government will keep working with technology companies and wants to help them develop “tools” that can “identify and remove harmful material automatically”.

The announcement follows multiple suggestions from May and Conservative Party colleagues that “cyberspace” should be regulated.

In the build-up to the June snap general election and following both the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks, May said there should be no “safe space” for those planning terror attacks to talk online.

Read more>>

June 13, 2017
Facebook Live to get Closed Captions

In a bid to make Facebook accessible to all, the social networking giant has allowed publishers to include closed captions (one of a series of subtitles) in Facebook Live, helping people who are hearing impaired to experience live videos.

“By enabling publishers to include closed captions with their ‘Live’ broadcasts, we hope more people can now participate in the exciting moments that unfold on Live,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Now if your captioning settings are turned on, you will automatically see closed captions on Live broadcasts when they are available.

It is already possible to add captions to non-live videos when uploading them to Facebook Pages and publishers can use company’s speech recognition service to automatically generate captions for videos on their ‘Pages’.

To connect more people on Facebook Live, the company has announced a new feature that will let users go live with another friend for a collaborative broadcast.

Facebook also announced the ability for live-streaming users to start a direct message with one of their viewers so they can have a private chat during the broadcast.

June 7, 2017
Facebook founder, Zuckerberg meets Nigerian founder of secret Facebook group

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday received Nigeria’s Lola Omolola, founder of a secret Facebook group called Female in Nigeria (FIN).

TheNewsGuru reports that FIN was founded in 2015 by Omolola, a movement of women focused on building compassion and providing support for one another, with the goal of having up to 1000 members in the group.

However, the group exceeded its target as it recently hit one million members.

According to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page on Tuesday, he will be meeting with Lola and a few hundred of other top Facebook group admins in Chicago later in the month for the first ever Facebook Communities Summit.

“Over the past few weeks, I’ve been meeting group admins across the country that are building meaningful communities on Facebook and will be at the summit.

“Two years ago, she founded a secret Facebook group called Female IN, or FIN,’’ Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said FIN is “a no-judgment space where more than a million women come to talk about everything from marriage and sex to health issues and work problems’’

“It is helping to end the culture of silence that exists for women in some parts of the world.’’

He said for the past decade, Facebook had been focused on making the world more open and connected.

The Facebook founder expressed the willingness of the platform to continue to connect persons, adding that there was the need to do much more by bringing people closer together and build common understanding.

“One of the best ways to do that is by helping people build community, both in the physical world and online.

“I have written and talked about these themes throughout this year, especially in my community letter in February and at Harvard Commencement in May.

“The Chicago summit will be the next chapter and we’ll discuss more of what we’re building to empower community leaders to bring the world closer.

“I’m looking forward to meeting more admins like Lola and talking about how we can help them do even more to build community.

“I’ll share more info on the summit as we get closer, and I’ll stream the event live from my profile later this month.’’

TNG reports that members of FIN now meet in thousands in cities all around the world.

June 7, 2017