“About three-quarters (74%) of public posts about COVID-19 linked to news organizations, while just 1% linked to health and science sites. The COVID-19 outbreak has driven record traffic to news sites as most Americans have sought out information about the virus and its implications for society. Many have turned to social media to follow the… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
Facebook technology makes 3D models of people from photos
PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization – S. Saito, T. Simon, J. Saragih, H. Joo. CVPR 2020. [Paper] [Video] [Code] [Demo]: “Recent advances in image-based 3D human shape estimation have been driven by the significant improvement in representation power afforded by deep neural networks. Although current approaches have demonstrated the potential… Continue Reading
How Social Media Has Changed Civil Rights Protests
The New York Times – Social media allows us “to see a reality that has been entirely visible to some people and invisible to others – “…Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University and co-founder of the pioneering social network BlackPlanet.com, said social media was helping publicize police brutality and galvanizing public support for protesters’… Continue Reading
FB Claims Pivot from 2016 Election Tactics to one of user choice
Along with tens of millions of others [probably more but…] I was completely inundated with unsolicited, deeply unwelcome, mostly disgusting campaign ads in 2016. This Facebook blog post has a lot of ground to travel in a very short time to achieve any kind of user credibility: “…Starting this summer, we will put the Voting… Continue Reading
Study – Americans don’t trust content decisions made by social media giants
CNET: “Most Americans don’t trust social media companies to police the content on their platforms, according to a poll published Tuesday from Gallup and the Knight Foundation. The poll found that 80% of Americans don’t trust big tech companies to make the right decisions about what content appears on their sites and what should be… Continue Reading
Here Are the 96 U.S. Cities Where Protesters Were Tear-Gassed
The New York Times – The introduction to this article consists of still photos taken by a range of photographers at protests around the country. The photographs document the 96 U.S. cities where protesters were tear-gased by police: “…Tear gas has long been used to disperse crowds during protests and riots, both nationally and internationally,… Continue Reading
Facebook now says it won’t even try to block 2020 election disinformation
PCWorld – “Can you trust what you read on Facebook? No. And why not? Because Facebook has now explicitly said that it will obey an executive order from President Trump and will refuse to fact-check misinformation and disinformation as American heads into the 2020 election. In April 2017, Facebook published a white paper that acknowledged… Continue Reading
How to Clean Up Your Social Media Posts As Much as You Can
Wired – How to Clean Up Your Old Social Media Posts – “These tips will help you safely tidy up your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts—or give your profile a fresh start.” Wired UK – “…First off–everything you do on Instagram is tracked. Almost every online service you use collects information about your actions. Every… Continue Reading
OpenAI’s Text Generator Is Going Commercial
Wired – “Last spring, artificial intelligence research institute OpenAI said it had made software so good at generating text—including fake news articles—that it was too dangerous to release. That line in the sand was soon erased when two recent master’s grads recreated the software and OpenAI released the original, saying awareness of the risks had… Continue Reading
The Internet’s most important—and misunderstood—law, explained
Ars Technica – Section 230 is the legal foundation of social media, and it’s under attack.”…To understand Section 230, you have to understand how the law worked before Congress enacted it in 1996. At the time, the market for consumer online services was dominated by three companies: Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. Along with access to… Continue Reading
‘Morally Impossible’: Some Advertisers Take a Timeout From Facebook
The New York Times – “Ever since Mark Zuckerberg defended the platform’s hands-off policy toward posts by President Trump that contained misinformation or promoted violence, some companies are staying away…Unlike Twitter and Snap, which have toughened their stances against Mr. Trump’s online statements that contain misinformation or promote violence, Facebook has held firm on its… Continue Reading
How to Track the Tech That’s Tracking You Every Day
Gizmodo: “It’s easy to feel helpless right now. Cities across the country are seeing unarmed protesters maimed by police officers who enjoy both the full support of the current presidential administration and of the American legal system itself. Congress is, in 2020, debating whether to make lynching a federal hate crime. And there’s still a… Continue Reading
