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Category Archives: Social Media

Florida braces for lawsuits over law banning kids from social media

Ars Technica: “On Monday, Florida became the first state to ban kids under 14 from social media without parental permission. It appears likely that the law—considered one of the most restrictive in the US—will face significant legal challenges, however, before taking effect on January 1. Under HB 3, apps like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok would… Continue Reading

8 charts on technology use around the world

“While internet use is nearly ubiquitous in many countries, not everyone is online. Divides still exist on technology usage between people in some advanced economies and those in some emerging economies, according to Pew Research Center data from 27 countries in 2022 and 2023. Smartphone ownership and social media use also vary around the world.… Continue Reading

What We Know About You: Welcome to the Surveillance State

Via LLRX – What We Know About You: Welcome to the Surveillance State – Kevin Novak begins his article with a reference to a report in The Wall Street Journal that caught his attention. Commercial data brokers are selling their third-party data to the government. If you’re an optimist, you would think this could be… Continue Reading

TikTokSpreads Misinformation 20 Percent of the Time and Is Banned in China

NewsGuard Reality Check: “The debate in Washington about what to do about TikTok is not about hypothetical harms. NewsGuard research over the years has shone a harsh light on TikTok as a misinformation superspreader. In one report, NewsGuard analysts mimicked how TikTok users interact with the video platform by analyzing 540 TikTok results based on… Continue Reading

Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent

Ars Technica: “Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users’ consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week. “Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data,” Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog.… Continue Reading

VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis

Google: “We propose VLOGGER, a method for text and audio-driven talking human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion based architecture that augments text-to-image models with both… Continue Reading

Fact-opinion differentiation

Misinformation Review – paper by Matthew Mettler & Jeffery J. Mondak: “Statements of fact can be proved or disproved with objective evidence, whereas statements of opinion depend on personal values and preferences. Distinguishing between these types of statements contributes to information competence. Conversely, failure at fact-opinion differentiation potentially brings resistance to corrections of misinformation and… Continue Reading