Many people wanted to virtually join the protest.
Andrew Cullen/Reuters
While online action alone can’t solve a problem, it can be a very useful tool to mobilize people and focus attention on a crucial issue.
What do you mean, risk-taker?
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Facebook has banned insurance firm Admiral from using its data but research suggests it could predict if you’re a risk taker.
Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com
I like you, but won’t ‘like’ you.
Digital media has feasted off Donald Trump’s lies.
Nick Lehr/The Conversation via Shutterstock
Lies, Twitter bots and sensation reign in the era of for-profit digital media.
Journalists with the skills to dig into social media can discover connections between key players in complex, often global stories.
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From a social media post that cracked open a decades-old abuse scandal in the UK and Australia, through to tracking asylum seekers, social media can be vital in breaking investigative news stories.
Enterprise social networking is designed to boost collaboration.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Only a small percentage of people actually contribute to online social discussions.
The death of privacy and the erosion of the personal sphere is an internet meme, often attributed to social media.
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Social media does not eradicate the line between personal or private. Instead, it shifts the line in ways that require thought rather than unreflexive condemnation or celebration.
Showing your voting support with a button can be more powerful on Facebook.
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Facebook has already proved it can increase the number of people who vote in elections. But what if it tries to influence how they vote?
News delivery via social media is based on a business model that exploits our need for self-validation.
Reuters/Dado Ruvic
Changes in news media distribution and the impartiality of news sources provide good reason to be concerned. However, digital inequality is not the way to understand or measure it.
Alberto Estevez/EPA
We shouldn’t scoff at the Facebook founder’s goal of eradicating disease.
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Making decisions about what people do and don’t read is the traditional role of an editor, no matter what Facebook claims.
EPA/Cornelius Poppe
The social media site must be free to make its own editorial decisions – right or wrong.
(Microsoft) Windows to the soul?
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Attempts to model your web experience led to fears of an echo chamber effect, but rather than reinforcing your sense of self, the process might be altering it.
What’s not to like?
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Companies seem obsessed these days with getting you to ‘like’ them. But what does that really mean?
Google employees may be getting a free lunch, but not its customers.
Erin Siegal/Reuters
Unlike their counterparts in Europe, U.S. antitrust regulators and courts have tended to view ‘free’ products as outside their purview for enforcement.
However powerful technologies may seem, choices are made by people – not the machines they invent.
Legnan Koula/EPA
Very few organisations in the field of civic technology are choosing the right tools for the job.
Kaponia Aliaksei/Shutterstock
Psychological distress among teenage girls has risen by 4% in the past decade.
Rally for electoral reform in Malaysia 2015.
Bersih 2.0
Social media can be an effective tool in mobilising people for social change, as demonstrated by the Bersih movement in Malaysia.
Say goodbye to this old set up.
from www.shutterstock.com
Television is dead; long live the Olympics.
What face do you see?
Shutterstock/Zurijeta
There’s a concern that images posted on social media run the risk of disrupting the accurate identification of people allegedly involved in a crime.