As authorities crack down on selfies and social media, the underlying causes of conflict and potential to use social media to bring about positive social change are overlooked.
Protesters from the MDC-Alliance march in Harare demanding electoral reforms.
EPA-EFE/Aaron Ufumeli
Three trends suggest people in less developed nations – who are coming online in greater numbers – use and trust the internet very differently those in more developed economies.
Almost four in 10 millennials spend more time on their smartphones than they do engaging with people in real life.
Mavis Wong/The Conversation
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.
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.
(Shutterstock)
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?
Rawpixel/Unsplash
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.