Almost four in 10 millennials spend more time on their smartphones than they do engaging with people in real life.
Mavis Wong/The Conversation
As we all become mini publishers, we are losing the interactivity that fosters meaningful and healthy social interaction.
Sign displaying the #metoo and #timesup message at the Women’s March in San Francisco in January, 2018.
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Social media is a great tool for activists campaigning for social justice. But if it is not used with caution it can end up working against them.
Scientists: your social media platforms need you!
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Scientists have never been more needed to challenge division, misinformation and harassment online.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
Croatia lost to France but has won unprecedented public exposure.
Evacuating Corpus Christi, Texas ahead of Hurricane Bret in 1999.
FEMA
Many factors can influence people to evacuate or stay in place when disasters threaten. New research using Facebook posts suggests that people with broad social networks are more apt to move.
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Fans are shifting their consumption of the World Cup online.
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The broader nature of today’s pro-choice movements show that a specific injustice can be a vehicle for highlighting wider social inequalities.
How could we put the same strategy used by Cambridge Analytica to better use?
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Something good could come from the Cambridge Analytica scandal if we used the same data to fix society, rather than profit from it.
The transformative nature of our move to a data-driven economy and society means that any data strategy will have long-lasting effects. That’s why the Canadian government needs to ask the right questions to the right people in its ongoing national consultations.
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The Canadian government is right to hold public consultations on digital and data transformation given how profoundly it affects society at large. But the scope is far too narrow.
Does the Internet bring people together or isolate them?
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Trust is the keystone of the entire Internet system: without it more connection and therefore more commerce. How to restore it?
Platforms for radicalisation?
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Companies, such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft are working together to take down terrorist propaganda.
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Twitter posts and messages on WhatsApp can come back to haunt you, even years later.
YouTube/Harlem Spartans
West London group 1011 music group have been banned from making music without police permission.
Shallow hype?
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The news media routinely ‘beats up’ shark stories in search of clicks and profits, according to focus groups and surveys of social media posts.
Children play between tents at a Turkish Red Crescent camp in Syria, May 2018.
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Social media can act as the engine room for public engagement with refugees, allowing people to move beyond ‘I should do something’ to ‘I will take action’.
People who share potential misinformation on Twitter (in purple) rarely get to see corrections or fact-checking (in orange).
Shao et al.
Information on social media can be misleading because of biases in three places – the brain, society and algorithms. Scholars are developing ways to identify and display the effects of these biases.
Enough?
EPA/Erdem Sahin
A snap poll intended to boost the Turkish president’s power has stirred up online opposition to his increasing authoritarianism.
Young people are especially careful about expressing political view on social media.
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It may be because we’re early adopters and know the risks of social media, but a new study has found Australians are particularly careful about expressing political views online.
There are a number of reasons why you can’t get away from your screen.
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There is a reason why you can’t put your phone down: digital addiction. And technology is designed to keep you hooked.
It can be complicated to teach a computer to detect harassment and threats.
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It could seem attractive to try to teach computers to detect harassment, threats and abusive language. But it’s much more difficult than it might appear.