The Federal High Court on Thursday sentenced a prominent Ethiopian opposition politician to six years and six months for accusing the government of using disproportionate force against demonstrators.
Yonathan Tesfaye, a Former Public Relations Head of the Blue Party, one of the East African country’s main opposition parties was charged with stirring unrest and inciting terrorist acts.
He regularly posted statements on Facebook that criticised the government’s handling of protests which started in November 2015 in the Oromia region.
The Oromo people living in the region, which includes Addis Ababa, feel excluded from political and economic power.
The protests then spread elsewhere in the country.
Human rights groups said hundreds were killed during clashes and rioting which calmed down after the government imposed a state of emergency in October.
“The defendant has acted in a way that threatened the country’s political, economic and social fabric.
The sentencing came a day after journalist Getachew Shiferaw was found guilty of stirring “revolt.
“He faces a maximum of 10 years in jail,’’ the report quoted the charge sheet as saying.
Amnesty International said both Tesfaye and Shiferaw’s verdicts was “a further slap in the face for justice in Ethiopia.
It accused the authorities of using the judiciary to silence dissent.
Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard dropout and CEO of a company worth nearly $400 billion, will be getting a college degree more than a decade after leaving his classes behind.
The Facebook co-founder and chief executive left Harvard’s undergraduate computer science program in the fall of 2005 to devote himself full-time to building the young social network, which even then was seeing meteoric growth.
Now, 12 years later, Zuckerberg will be giving the commencement address to Harvard’s class of 2017 May 25th, and nabbing an honorary degree in the process.
The news was first announced March 7 in a post on Harvard’s website, according to The Verge.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership has profoundly altered the nature of social engagement worldwide. Few inventions in modern times can rival Facebook in its far-reaching impact on how people around the globe interact with one another,” The Verge quotes Harvard President Drew Faust as saying.
“And few individuals can rival Mark Zuckerberg in his drive to change our world through the innovative use of technology, as well as his commitment to advance science, enhance education, and expand opportunity through the pursuit of philanthropy,” the Harvard President added.
Yesterday, Zuckerberg took to his Facebook page to confirm the development.
“My dad took this video when I got accepted to Harvard. Next week I’m going back for commencement to get my degree,” Zuckerberg said.
“That was definitely not my plan. Although before I went to college, my mom bet me I’d drop out and my younger sister bet me she’d finish college before me. I bet them I’d get a degree. Now I suppose the cycle is complete,” the Facebook boss further stated in a reply to a comment on the Facebook post.
In another response, Zuckerberg revealed the commencement date to be Thursday 25 May 2017.
Zuckerberg is of course not the first big name in Silicon Valley to have dropped out and gone on to find success.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Oregon before starting his company with Steve Wozniak in 1976.
Bill Gates, a fellow Harvard dropout, also left school after just two years to co-found Microsoft with Paul Allen. Because of their shared history, Zuckerberg even made a slightly cringe-worthy video with Gates in which the younger entrepreneur asks the older, wiser Microsoft alum for tips on writing his commencement speech.
Gates gave a commencement speech to Harvard 10 years ago, which Zuckerberg watched from the crowd incidentally because his future wife, Priscilla Chan, was graduating that year.
European Union antitrust regulators on Thursday said they would fine Facebook 110 million euros (122.4 million dollars) for providing misleading information over its purchase of messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
Calling it a “proportionate and deterrent fine,” the European Commission, which acts as the EU’s competition watchdog, said Facebook had said it could not automatically match user accounts on its namesake platform and WhatsApp but two years later launched a service that did exactly that.
“The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook’s statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users’ identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility,” the Commission said.
The commission added that the fine would not reverse the Commission’s decision to clear the purchase of WhatsApp and was unrelated to separate investigations into data protection issues.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that Facebook was set to be fined.
Facebook has announced a series of News Feed tweaks to further decrease the reach and prevalence of clickbait on its social network.
This is coming after a substantial News Feed update last year that restricted the spread of clickbait and punished publishers who primarily use the tactic to trick users into tapping on a link.
Now, Facebook says it will target clickbait on an individual post level and not just by analyzing the bulk posts of a page. It will also look at two distinct signals: whether a headline “withholds information or if it exaggerates information separately.”
“People tell us they don’t like stories that are misleading, sensational or spammy,” writes Facebook engineers Arun Babu, Annie Liu, and Jordan Zhang in a blog post posted today.
“That includes clickbait headlines that are designed to get attention and lure visitors into clicking on a link.
“In an effort to support an informed community, we’re always working to determine what stories might have clickbait headlines so we can show them less often,” the blog post read.
The company is also going to begin fighting clickbait in foreign languages, and not just on the English language version of its service.
Facebook says its new effort is an improved one because it looks at clickbait-detecting signals separately instead of trying to determine if a post or page is guilty of a number of joint factors. It does this similarly to how email spam filters, by identifying hundreds of thousands of examples of this manually by having a human team consider “if the headline exaggerates the details of a story, and separately if the headline withholds information”.
It then automates this process across the entire social network by looking for commonly used phrases that match the clickbait criteria.
Facebook says most pages don’t engage in this kind of activity, and so won’t see any change in post reach or referral traffic. But those that do should see a noticeable decrease in activity.
This move, though it does echo the News Feed tweak from last year, is part of more recent and broader effort from Facebook to clean up its social network.
In the wake of the contentious US election last year and the explosion of fake news, spam, and misinformation campaigns, Facebook is grappling with just how far reaching its influence is and how little control it exerts over bad actors on its platform.
So, in addition to its ongoing fight against fake news, Facebook has pledged to combat government-led “information operations,” which are state-affiliated campaigns to sow disinformation and spread propaganda.
It also announced earlier this month that it would reduce the prevalence of spam and links to sites with terrible ad experiences.
Ensuring that right persons are added in a Facebook Group, Facebook has rolled out a screening feature that allows admins to set up three questions for people requesting to join the Group.
This allows admins to screen the potential member and make sure the added member does not troll or spam the Group, TechCrunch reported on Friday.
“Screening new membership requests requires time and legwork for admins – particularly for groups built around focused passions or purpose. For these groups, admins typically have specific criteria they require before admitting new members.
“Establishing these open-ended questions enables them to more quickly review and approve member requests; in turn, people seeking communities of support or shared interest can more quickly connect with others,” the report quoted a Facebook spokesperson as saying.
Potential members can answer the questions in up to 250 characters each that can be seen by admins and moderators only, and will not be posted on the Group.
“Users who hit ‘Join’ on a Group with a questionnaire will be asked to fill it out immediately, while those invited to join will get a notification linked to the form. Applicants can edit their answers until they’re reviewed,” the report noted.
The new update gives more control to the Group admins, who can select the questions and decide whom to add in the Group – something that can lead to productive discussions.
“One of the things that we’ve seen in online communities, also including offline communities, is that having an engaged and talented leader is one of the key things for making a strong community… but right now our Groups product hasn’t really been built to facilitate the leaders,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook had said in February.
Facebook is holding its first Communities Summit for Group admins in Chicago in June.
It is expected that more updates related to Groups would be rolled out that might define specific roles and permissions of moderators and admins.
The Police has warned Facebook users against sharing missing children posts online, as they “may be putting a life at risk”.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said that it can be dangerous to share missing children posts on social media which feature information and or images of missing children, because they may not be lost.
Putting missing children posts on Facebook “may be putting a life at risk”
“The children may actually be hiding for their own safety,” the RCMP stressed on its Facebook page.
“For example, a parent who has been forbidden any access to their children through a court order might put their children’s photos on Facebook and claim them as missing.
“The other parent and child may be in hiding for their own protection,” it continued.
It further stated that “By sharing these photos, you may be putting a life at risk”.
The RCMP went on to urge the public to check the source of any image being shared.
If the image did not originate from a confirmed Police source or from a reputable media outlet showing that officers are actively searching, the post is “likely not legitimate”.
Highlighting how social media users can believe that they are helping children when they share such posts, people left comments underneath the post expressing their shock and thanking the RCMP.
“I never thought of that; I will be doing more research from now on. Thanks for sharing,” wrote one Facebook user.
The Minister of Communication, Mr Adebayo Shittu, has described the Internet as a resourceful tool that could be employed to transform Nigeria’s education sector and contribute to economic transformation of the continent.
Minister of Communications, Mr. Adebayo Shittu.
Shittu stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Kigali on Friday.
He was commenting on a report of a new study on internet released at the African Regional Internet and Development Dialogue in Kigali by the Internet Society.
The minister, who commended the study, stressed that internet was not only the future of education but of other sectors such as commerce, transportation, health, governance among others.
Shittu said Nigeria was putting in place mechanism to take its rightful place on the continent and world’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
He said that the present administration had invested and still investing in the development of ICT and had also created favourable environment to attract investors to the sector.
The study, which results were released in Kigali, showed that internet offers an opportunity for addressing the learning needs of diverse groups in Africa.
This, it stated, included the bulk of learners that are currently out of school.
The study titled: “Internet for Education in Africa,” stated that a blended learning environment that leverages internet could potentially help connect education to work and improve the skills that allow youths to access employment.
“It could also help empower lifelong learners, and importantly, support women, girls and disabled people to participate in learning without space, time and other cultural and social barriers.”
It described blended learning as an education system that combines online digital media with traditional classroom methods.
“The participation in the global economy is now dependent on 21st century skills, which includes the ability to navigate in the digital world.
‘‘Progress in countries like India, China and South Korea shows that connectivity serves as a foundation for access to information economy jobs and advancing innovations,” it stated.
The study shows that in Africa, using internet for learning is a real possibility.
It added that more than a quarter of the African population (334 million) has access to internet, the majority of which are young people.
According to the study, there are 147 million Facebook users in Africa as of June 2016.
It, however, noted that such access to internet and use of social media had not been harnessed systematically to advance education and learning at individual and institutional levels.
The study said there was hope that internet and ICT can transform the education landscape in Africa, but that there are still challenges blocking internet use in education in Africa.
These, it stated, included limited literacy and skills that are needed to participate in the Internet economy and lack of infrastructure to host and exchange locally available content.
Others, it stated, are inadequate supportive infrastructure such as electricity, and high taxes on ICT hardware and software, among others.
Dr Lishan Adam, one of the lead researchers behind the study, said it was also part of reviewing the position of Africa in global education commitments.
“As internet is growing, educational challenges are advancing and normally the two are not supposed to be intersecting.
‘‘What we are trying to do is to look at where we are in terms of providing access to quality education, which is in line with the global education commitments under Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
‘‘The education targets of the SDGs, among others aim to ensure universal pre-primary, primary and secondary education, achieve gender equity among learners, ensure disabled learners attain equal education, and foster youth employability,” he said.
To achieve this, Adam stated that improved connectivity in the region and the vast learning resources that are available over the internet are useful.
According to him, while access to mobile broadband has increased in urban areas, last-mile connectivity remains a challenge.
‘‘With about half of the population more than 25kilometres from the nearest fiber connection, broadband connection in rural areas remains very low.
‘‘With over 70 per cent of the population living in rural areas, the majority who need internet the most, such as rural schools, do not have it,” he said.
A study by researchers at Vrije University in Amsterdam has linked the use of Facebook to hedonic addiction.
With people spending more time glued to their phones, social media is quickly becoming addictive, the new study warned.
The worrying study found that the mere sight of the Facebook logo is now enough to get some people craving time online, according to Daily Mail, that first reported the result of the study online.
The findings illustrate just how obsessed people are becoming with social media, and could help to develop a social media rehabilitation programme.
The research claims the site is just as addictive as chocolate or nicotine.
Researchers from Vrije University in Amsterdam studied the online habits of 200 people, and found that showing frequent Facebook users the site’s logo sparked spontaneous pleasurable reactions – which made it difficult for them to resist.
Social media has been found to be more addictive than drinking or smoking – with doctors warning it can endanger mental health.
Now, it has been illustrated just how obsessed people can become with the mere sight of the logo sparking immediate “hedonic reactions”.
In the study, participants were asked to rate a series of images as pleasant or unpleasant after being shown either the Facebook logo or a neutral cue.
The results showed that frequent social media users reacted more positively to the images that followed the Facebook logo.
But it did not affect the responses of the less frequent users.
A second study replicated the first, but added another dimension – measuring Facebook cravings among the participants.
This included questions such as “I want to use Facebook right now,” “I would love if it was possible to use Facebook right now,” or “I don’t need Facebook at the moment”.
Results showed that there was a direct link between the level of their cravings and their earlier reaction to the Facebook logo.
Dr Guido van Koningsbruggen, who led the study, said “Frequent Facebook users showed more favourable affective reactions in response to Facebook cues compared to control cues.
“Less-frequent Facebook users’ affective reactions did not differ between Facebook and control cues.
“These results support our hypothesis that exposure to social media cues triggers spontaneous hedonic reactions in frequent social media users”.
The findings are consistent with the idea that social media users have strong and positive reactions to media content.
Dr Koningsburggen added that “Given that cravings reflect one of the aspects of problematic or unregulated media use and have been associated with a preference for immediately rewarding behaviour when tempted, we speculate that the observed spontaneous hedonic reactions to social media cues might also be associated with people’s failures to resist social media temptations”.
The researchers believe that their findings could be used to develop a social media rehabilitation programme.
Dr Brenda Wienderhold, who also worked on the study, said “Understanding hedonic reactions, both psychological and physiological, to social media cues can help us to develop more effective treatment and prevention protocols”.
Facebook is planning to intensify its crackdown on so-called clickbait websites, saying it will begin giving lower prominence to links that lead to pages full of deceptive or annoying advertisements.
The downgrade of the links was expected to take effect beginning on Wednesday on News Feed, the home page of Facebook where people go to see posts from friends and family.
Facebook said it wanted to downplay links that people post to websites that have a disproportionate volume of ads relative to content, or that have deceptive or sexually suggestive ads along the lines of “5 Tips to be Amazing in Bed” or “1 Crazy Tip to Lose Weight Overnight!”
Links to websites with pop-up ads or full-screen ads also would be downplayed, it said.
People scrolling through their News Feed are often disappointed when they click on such links and do not find valuable information, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s Vice President of ads and business platform, said in an interview.
“People don’t want to see this stuff,” he said, adding: “We’re just trying to figure out how to find it and rank it further down News Feed when possible”.
Facebook uses a computer algorithm to determine which posts people see first from friends and family, and it frequently refines the algorithm to keep up with spam or other concerns.
The company said in August it was adjusting the algorithm to downplay news stories with clickbait-style headlines, a style of headline that intentionally withholds information or misleads people to get them to click on them.
In December, facing criticism that hoaxes and fake news stories spread too easily on Facebook in the run-up to the US presidential election on November 8, the company made it easier for people to report those kinds of posts.
Facebook, the world’s largest social media network with 1.9 billion monthly users, has enormous power with its algorithms to potentially drive traffic to media publishers or stymie it.
The company said it reviewed hundreds of thousands of websites linked to/from Facebook to identify those with little substance but lots of disruptive or shocking ads.
Bosworth declined to name any websites Facebook wants to target. He said only publishers of spam needed to worry about seeing less traffic, and other publishers could see their traffic go up.
“This is a small number of the worst of the worst,” he said.
In a bid to overcome language barriers, social networking giant Facebook has announced a new machine learning translation method, claiming it to be nine times faster than other competitors.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been already in place at Facebook for automatically translating status updates to other languages, but the company is making a transition from lab to app, The Verge reported on Tuesday.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
“We’re currently talking with a product team to make this work in a Facebook environment. There are differences when moving from academic data to real environments in terms of language. The academic data is news-type data; while conversation on Facebook is much more colloquial,” the report quoted Facebook’s AI engineer David Grangier as saying.
The new machine learning translation technique has not been implemented yet and exists as a research as of now. But Facebook has said that it will likely happen further down the line.
“Usually, AI-powered translation relies on what are called recurrent neural networks (RNNs), whereas this new research leverages convolutional neural networks (CNNs) instead,” Facebook’s AI engineers explained.
RNNs analyse date sequentially, working left to right through a sentence in order to translate it word by word while CNNs look at difference aspects of data simultaneously – a style of computation that is much better and faster.
“So translating with CNNs means tackling the problem more holistically and examining the higher-level structure of sentences. The [CNNs] build a logical structure, a bit like linguistics, on top of the text,” said Michael Auli, another Facebook AI engineer.
Facebook noted that the AI community were willing to improve upon the commonly used RNNs for translation – a method that has devoured tremendous efforts already.
“The short answer is that people just hadn’t invested as much time in this, and we came up with some new developments that made it work better,” Grangier added.
