The number of active users of Facebook (those people who have logged onto the site in the previous month) has reached a historic high of 2.45 billion. To put this in some context, approximately 32% of the global population now use the social media platform, and the trend line of participation is still going up. Read the rest of this entry »
What you don’t know can’t hurt you: this seems to be the current approach for responding to disinformation by public regulators across the world. Nobody is able to say with any degree of certainty what is actually going on. Read the rest of this entry »
Online misinformation works, or so it would seem. One of the more interesting statistics from the 2019 UK general election was that 88% of advertisements posted on social media by the Conservative Party pushed figures that had already been deemed misleading by the UK’s leading fact-checking organisation, Full Fact. And, of course, the Conservatives won the election by a comfortable margin. Read the rest of this entry »
Sites you visit, applications you use and services you take all have privacy policies – but what are they and why are they important, despite many people just check boxing them? Read the rest of this entry »
At his Wednesday 20 November 2019 address to the National Press Club, Attorney-General Christian Porter said the federal government is pursuing “immediate” defamation law reform. The announcement seemed a bit odd, as defamation is a subject for state and territory governments to legislate on. A NSW-led law reform process has been ongoing for years. Read the rest of this entry »
In my earlier post on the demise of the UK’s current age-verification plans for online porn – and what that might mean for Ireland’s proposed Digital Safety Commissioner, I noted that long-standing Irish Government policy is to establish such a Commissioner, and that the current timetable is that it is intended to bring forward the necessary legislation before the end of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
The Cambridge Analytica scandal of March 2018 changed the status of Facebook forever. The revelation that a political consultancy had illicitly gained access to the data of millions of Facebook users forced the company to change its approach to privacy, including its rules and algorithms. Read the rest of this entry »
The approach of a rare December election in the UK has many campaigners feeling chills. What misery awaits them on the dark, cold streets as they try to convince voters to support their party? My preliminary research reveals that the women who bid for political office over the next six weeks have more to worry about than sore feet and aggressive dogs. Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter has announced that it is banning paid-for political adverts, just as the UK enters a general election, saying that the reach of political messages “should be earned, not bought”. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg recently took the unusual step of visiting lawmakers in Washington, including President Donald Trump in the White House. The reason? Congress’s anti-trust sub-committee has started demanding documents from Facebook and other big tech firms. It’s part of the committee’s investigation into whether dominant tech firms are acting anti-competitively. And Zuckerberg’s trip suggests the company is worried. Read the rest of this entry »
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