France builds WhatsApp rival due to surveillance risk
O) WhatsApp and Telegram – a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron – are based in France, raising the risk of data breaches at servers outside the country. About 20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spokeswoman said, … Read …
Police catch criminal after spotting fingerprint in WhatsApp photo
Even on encrypted messaging platforms, be careful what you send. Police officers in South Wales were able to identify a drug dealer's fingerprints from an old WhatsApp photo, the BBC reports. The fingerprint helped secure 11 drug-trafficking convictions, which are believed to be the first convictions in … Read More
China’s version of Twitter reverses its decision to ban all gay content after online protests
On Friday, China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, banned all content containing homosexuality from its platform. But after a weekend full of online protests, Weibo has reversed its decision, clarifying that it's not targeting gay content anymore. Weibo wrote in a post on Monday, “This time, the cleanup of … Read …
Interactive Soompi Awards Show Immense Growth In K-Pop-Oriented Twitter Activity
There's no doubt that K-pop fans are a major force on social media, but Soompi's partnership with Twitter for several fan-oriented categories of their 2018 Awards reveals some insight into how rapidly interactive engagements by fans of Korean music have grown over the past year: the Korean pop … Read More
Kanye West Returns to Twitter in True Kanye Style
Kanye West returned to Twitter this weekend after a long social media hiatus and his deluge of tweets did not disappoint longtime fans of his notorious Twitter sprees. Never one at a loss for words or opinions, Kanye used his Twitter to emphatically sound off on everything from upcoming fashion …
‘Suspicious’ Groups Paid for Most of Facebook’s Politically Divisive Ads, Researchers Find
More than half of the sponsors of ads on Facebook that featured divisive political messages ahead of the 2016 presidential election have little or no public paper trails, according to a study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One-sixth of those ad buyers with little background … Read More
Facebook ad feature claims to predict user’s future behaviour
The product, named “loyalty prediction” by Facebook, is part of a suite of capabilities enabled by a machine learning-powered tool called FBLearner Flow. That tool was publicly introduced in 2016, but the advertising techniques it enables were only revealed in a pitch document leaked to the Intercept. Read More
The Problems Aren’t Over. Facebook Now Has to Deal With Its Declining Employee Morale
As Facebook deals with the public backlash of its latest data breach, a few of its employees have reportedly requested internal transfers and even left the company, says a New York Times report. The news comes in light of a recent scandal where data from 87 million users was inappropriately …
Other Agencies Could Learn from IRS Customer Service Efforts, Report Says
The IRS's customer service initiative–in the face of years of budgetary restrictions that have translated into reduced staffing–carries lessons that other … Further, IRS employees monitored social media sites, contact centers and field offices “to identify and fix issues before they became major problems. Read More
Ditching Social Media Is Not A Smart Move For Any Business
So will this move make a flood of other brands ditch social media? The short answer is 'no' and the longer answer is 'hell no'. A more considered response would seem sensible for increased customer service burden if nothing else. Keeping some main accounts and getting a better strategy that …