Twitter can be many things. A place to look at all the good dogs, Bront. A digital field for harvesting GIFs. A fine place to increase your blood pressure. A spot best used for harvesting news relevant to your interests. The trick is curating the folks that you follow in order to provide the experience you want. But don’t you feel like Twitter could be more? Twitter does.
Even in the wake of a recent mixed earning report and volatile stock prices, Netflix remains the media success story of the decade. The company, whose user base has grown rapidly, now boasts almost 150 million global subscribers.
‘Tis the time to be vigilant, because many a foe on the interwebs will try to spoil each weekly instalment of the last season of Game of Thrones.
The good news is Facebook has shut down white supremacists and hate speech. The bad news was that it happened after the live streaming of the horror Christchurch massacre in March. The even worse news is that Facebook’s notoriously lax policies around data privacy were confirmed when it was revealed that hundreds of millions of its users’ passwords were stored in an unencrypted plain text format.
After years of rejecting calls for increased regulatory oversight of Facebook, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now called for more cooperation with government in dealing with problems posed by internet platforms and emergent internet technologies.
Research into digital technologies indicates that phrases such as “word of mouth” or “keeping in touch” point to the importance of face-to-face conversation. Indeed, face-to-face conversation can strengthen social ties: with our neighbours, friends, work colleagues and other people we encounter during our day.
Facebook’s found a flaw in its systems that stored user passwords in plaintext. Which means you should change your password immediately.
Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest promise is that his social media conglomerate will become a “privacy-focused” one. By turns lauded and lambasted, this move does not quite address users’ primary problems with the company.
Zuckerberg aims to make private messages private and ephemeral – meaning Facebook can’t read our messages, and the data doesn’t stick around on the company’s servers for longer than necessary. His vision involves merging Facebook and the company’s other digital platforms – Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger – into a super app, similar to China’s WeChat.
We’ve gotten used to Facebook being rather terrible at anything like protecting user privacy, being transparent about … most things, or keeping its promises. So we could be forgiven for being skeptical of Mark Zuckerburg’s newest note to the internet, which claims that Facebook is looking towards a “privacy-focused” future for the social network.