Commentary: What the world would lose with the demise of Twitter

International organisations and government agencies have invested significant resources in using Twitter and have come to rely on the platform, says a researcher.

In Twitter's 15 years of existence, the platform has become the predominant communication channel for political and
government leaders, businesses, brands celebrities and news media. (Photo: AFP/File/EMMANUEL DUNAND)

Anjana Susarla

22 Nov 2022 

EAST LANSING, Michigan: What do a cybersecurity researcher building a system to generate alerts for detecting security threats and vulnerabilities, a wildfire watcher who tracks the spread of forest fires, and public health professionals trying to predict enrolment in health insurance exchanges have in common?

They all rely on analysing data from Twitter.

What’s fuelling China’s new online nationalists

By YUAN YANG

JULY 01, 2021


Last summer, a friend of mine told me that she found China’s biggest social media platform Weibo was becoming “unusable” for feminists and liberals such as her. Tempers were so heated, Bao told me, that disagreements easily became personal pile-ons.

After a friend became the centre of a social media storm, she posted a message: “We’re all just blades of grass, what’s the point of fighting with each other?”

Bao ended up becoming the next target.

At the time, we put it down to Covid-19, which, across the world, left people stuck at home, bored and anxious. They were just venting.

But a year on, Chinese nationalist sentiment is even greater online. It used to be outsiders, a United States politician criticising the government for instance, who received the worst of the attacks from bloggers.

Now insiders bear the brunt.

The Big Read: What’s the big deal with data privacy? Thorny, complex issues confront citizens and governments

By NG JUN SEN

January 16, 2021

• The issue of data privacy has come under the spotlight, with debates triggered by the police’s use of TraceTogether data and the privacy policy changes of WhatsApp
• Besides your name, age, gender, education and employment, data companies know what vehicle you own, the size of your home, your socioeconomic status, the websites you visit, your tendency to default on loans, and even your health problems
• The enormous use of personal data by corporates and governments have become part and parcel of today’s connected society and quality of life, but also risks being misused or falling into the wrong hands
• Data privacy law differs from country to country. Experts say Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act is not designed to ensure data privacy as its chief aim, but was conceived to achieve a narrower goal of protecting personal user data
• The onus is also on the individual to keep asking questions about their personal data and not simply sign away their privacy, experts added

SINGAPORE — When messaging app WhatsApp’s new privacy policy sparked a global exodus from its services, Mr Darren Chin’s company — a local tech firm — decreed that its entire staff was to cease using the Facebook-owned platform for work.

“We’ve all been using WhatsApp for many years, but the company’s top management decided to ban it and we cannot say no,” said Mr Chin, 52.

“Everyone in the tech chat groups in my company switched to Signal, so I did so as well. I agree with the decision too: Data privacy is important to me,” the IT operations specialist told TODAY — ironically in an interview conducted over Facebook at his request.

Signal, as well as Telegram, are rival encrypted messaging apps that have surged in popularity amid the fiasco as an alternative to WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has since come forward to clarify that its new terms will not allow its parent company to access the app users' messages, and delayed its February deadline for users to accept the terms. But the new policy will still allow WhatsApp to share more information with Facebook and roll out advertising and e-commerce.

Around the same time, a similar controversy unfolded involving Singapore’s contact-tracing system TraceTogether, after Singaporeans found out earlier this month that their Bluetooth proximity data could be used for criminal investigations.

This led some users to switch off their apps or leave their tokens at home, despite the fact that such data is critical in fighting the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, TODAY previously reported.

Govts must lead fight against foreign interference, cannot rely on tech firms: Shanmugam

By Kenneth Cheng

Singapore wants to work with technology companies to fight foreign influence in national affairs, Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam said on Wednesday (Sept 25).

25 September, 2019

SINGAPORE — Governments must lead the fight against foreign interference in national affairs and cannot look to technology companies to solve the problem, Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said on Wednesday (Sept 25).

“Governments have to lead from the front and we need to ensure we have the right tools to fight this,” Mr Shanmugam, who is also Law Minister, said at a conference on foreign-interference tactics and countermeasures.

All you need to know about Singapore’s proposed fake news law

By Asyraf Kamil

iStock photo

02 April, 2019

TODAY

SINGAPORE — After two years spent studying the threat of fake news, the Republic is taking things a step further with the introduction of sweeping new laws that will, among other things, give Government ministers broad powers to quickly stop the dissemination of online falsehoods and punish those who create and spread them.

These new laws, which will come under a new Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill, were tabled in Parliament on Monday (April 1).

How to protect yourself (and your friends) on Facebook

By Brian X. Chen

A Facebook sign is displayed at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in the US. Photo: Reuters

20 March, 2018

NEW YORK ― Revelations that a voter-profiling that worked on US President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign harvested private information from 50 million Facebook profiles has many people wondering: What, if anything, they can do to protect their data connected to the social network?

Here’s the harsh truth: Not much, short of ceasing to browse the web entirely or deleting your Facebook account.

Commentary: Deactivate Facebook? Your online privacy depends also on your friends’ data habits

By Vincent Mitchell,
and Andrew Stephen
and Bernadette Kamleitner

31 Mar 2018

The silver lining to the Cambridge Analytica case is that more people are recognising that we pay for online services with not only our own privacy, but that of our friends, family and colleagues, say three observers.

The scary truth that Cambridge Analytica understands

By Ishaan Tharoor

March 22 2018




Cambridge Analytica, a London-based data firm that sold its services to political campaigns, has been thrust into the spotlight this week thanks to a number of startling exposés. Undercover footage, along with testimony and evidence provided by a former employee-turned-whistleblower, offered a glimpse of the company's shadowy dealings around the world. It secretly harvested the data of tens of millions of Facebook users and may have engaged in all sorts of offline skulduggery, including bribes and sexual blackmail, to help clients win elections.

Why hackers failed to sway the French vote for president

Rachel Donadio

May 9, 2017

PARIS — French readers awoke Monday to headlines about its young president-elect, Emmanuel Macron, and his decisive defeat of the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.


What they did not find were details of the “massive” hacking attack on the Macron campaign that was announced late Friday night.


The hacking occurred just before the start of a 44-hour ban on campaigning and broadcast media coverage of the election, lifted only when the final polling stations closed Sunday night, and some Macron supporters initially feared that his inability to respond could be devastating on the eve of voting.


News of the hacking lit up social media, especially in the United States, where the attack echoed one on the Democratic National Committee last year, and where far-right activists have joined together to spread extremist messages in Europe.


But in France, the leak did not get much traction. It certainly did not appear to give an edge to Le Pen, who won 33.9 per cent to Macron’s 66.1 per cent on Sunday. The hacking operation was met, instead, with silence, disdain and even scorn. Why?


Are we becoming slaves to computer algorithms?

JOHN THORNHILL

MARCH 8, 2017

As an experiment, Mr Tunde Olanrewaju messed around one day with the Wikipedia entry of his employer, McKinsey. He edited the page to say that he had founded the consultancy firm.

A friend took a screenshot to preserve the revised record. Within minutes, Mr Olanrewaju received an email from Wikipedia saying that his edit had been rejected and that the true founder’s name had been restored.

Almost certainly, one of Wikipedia’s computer bots that police the site’s 40 million articles had spotted, checked and corrected his entry. It is reassuring to know that an army of such clever algorithms is patrolling the frontline of truthfulness — and can outsmart a senior partner in McKinsey’s digital practice.

Americans — especially but not exclusively Trump voters — believe crazy, wrong things

By Catherine Rampell

Washington Post, December 28 2016

Many Americans believe a lot of dumb, crazy, destructive, provably wrong stuff. Lately this is especially (though not exclusively) true of Donald Trump voters, according to a new survey.

The survey, from the Economist/YouGov, was conducted in mid-December, and it finds that willingness to believe a given conspiracy theory is (surprise!) strongly related to whether that conspiracy theory supports one’s political preferences.

Remember Pizzagate? That’s the bizarre theory that Hillary Clinton was helping run a child sex slave ring out of a D.C. pizza joint, as allegedly proven by code words in hacked Democratic emails.

Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news

By Christopher Ingraham
December 7 2016

This week, a North Carolina man took an AR-15 rifle into DC's Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant to "self-investigate" a fake internet conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and a child sex ring.

It's the latest example of the impact that "fake news" -- untrue or wildly misleading stories masquerading as fact, usually to appeal to a particular worldview -- is having on the real world.

Numerous reports have highlighted how fake news creators began targeting conservative readers after finding them receptive to stories that reinforced their existing worldview. As one fake news creator told NPR, "We've tried to do [fake news with] liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

A Buzzfeed analysis found that three main conservative Facebook pages were roughly twice as likely as three leading liberal Facebook pages to publish fake or misleading information.

Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.

By Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox and Peter Hermann

December 6 2016

What was finally real was Edgar Welch, driving from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint.

What was real was Welch — a father, former firefighter and sometime movie actor who was drawn to dark mysteries he found on the Internet — terrifying customers and workers with his ­assault-style rifle as he searched Comet Ping Pong, police said. He found no hidden children, no secret chambers, no evidence of a child sex ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place.

What was false were the rumors he had read, stories that crisscrossed the globe about a charming little pizza place that features ping-pong tables in its back room.

The story of Pizzagate is about what is fake and what is real. It’s a tale of a scandal that never was, and of a fear that has spread through channels that did not even exist until recently.

Pizzagate — the belief that code words and satanic symbols point to a sordid underground along an ordinary retail strip in the nation’s capital — is possible only because science has produced the most powerful tools ever invented to find and disseminate information.

When reality bites in a 'post-truth' world

Thinking Aloud


Warren Fernandez
Editor

NOV 27, 2016

Spread of fake news, shorter attention span and lack of engagement leave young vulnerable to being misled online

It used to be that black was black, and white was white.

Then came fifty shades of grey.

Next, someone insisted that it was actually a deep blue, or perhaps a murky green.

Beyond a point, it began to seem that the colour was whatever you said it was, provided you shouted loud enough or repeated it over and again. Eventually, people might believe you.

This, we are told, is the new "post-truth" world, where things are not always what they seem, and you neither have to mean what you say nor say what you mean.

In this new world, politicians have been busy reassuring the President-elect of the United States Donald Trump that no one really thought he would do as he pledged on the stump, and fewer still would mind if he simply forgot what he had said during the campaign.

The reason for this is simple: The alternative of him doing as he promised is just too scary to contemplate, so isn't it better if we let it slide, and all just get along?

That way, we might conclude that climate change is not a "hoax invented by China", as Mr Trump once claimed, and instead "keep an open mind, to study the issue very hard", as he now purports.

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

By Craig Timberg 

November 24

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.

“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

For the ‘new yellow journalists,’ opportunity comes in clicks and bucks

Terrence McCoy
November 20 2016

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Fewer than 2,000 readers are on his website when Paris Wade, 26, awakens from a nap, reaches for his laptop and thinks he needs to, as he puts it, “feed” his audience. “Man, no one is covering this TPP thing,” he says after seeing an article suggesting that President Obama wants to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he leaves office. Wade, a modern-day digital opportunist, sees an opportunity. He begins typing a story.

“CAN’T TRUST OBAMA,” he writes as the headline, then pauses. His audience hates Obama and loves President-elect Donald Trump, and he wants to capture that disgust and cast it as a drama between good and evil. He resumes typing: “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back… .”

Ten minutes and nearly 200 words later, he is done with a story that is all opinion, innuendo and rumor. He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, LibertyWritersNews.com, and then pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of page views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” Then he looks at a nearby monitor that shows the site’s analytics, and watches as the readers pour in.

Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’

By Caitlin Dewey
November 17, 2016

What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common? For starters, they’re all make-believe — and invented by the same man.

Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he’s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. “South Park” lawsuit last year.

But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump’s son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner’s faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google.

In light of concerns that stories like Horner’s may have affected the presidential election, and in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets, Intersect called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news. This transcript has been edited for clarity, length and — ahem — bad language.

Why do people hate people who defend Singapore?

And by "people" I mean "Singaporeans". 

And by "Singaporeans", I mean small-minded, pretentious, ideologues full of their own sense of superiority who happened to be Singapore Citizens.

First, let's hear what Theodore has to say. Then note his parting note at the end.

But before I forget, thank you Mr Shawcross for your sharing. I agree with you, Singapore is an amazing country. Not perfect, but it has got most of the things right. 

And the things that are "wrong" about Singapore, most of them are "First World Problems". 

Like not being able to get Pokemon Go!

News Reaction: Harambe or #GorillaLifeMattersYourOpinionDoesn't

So a toddler squeezed himself through the barriers, and fell 15 feet (approx) into the moat of the gorilla enclosure of the Cincinnati Zoo. A male gorilla rushed to see what had intruded his compound and found the boy, sitting in the water. He came into contact with the boy. Some who looked at the video (in full or more likely partially) decided that the gorilla was just being friendly, and even protective.

Others who saw the gorilla, disturbed or agitated by the screaming crowd, grab the boy by a leg and first drag him through the water to another spot in the moat, before taking the boy further away (not sure from the video posted on line), decided that the gorilla was a danger to the boy, whether intentionally or accidentally. That is, even if the gorilla meant the boy no harm, his rough handling of the boy, might just injure the boy, perhaps fatally.

The Cincinnati Zoo assessed the situation and decided that the risk to the boy was too great, and the only reasonable course of action was to shoot the gorilla. Tranquillisers were out of the question as a) they took too long to work, and b), the proper dosage would be an educated guess, and c) even if the dose was correct in a normal situation, an agitated gorilla would present uncertainty in estimating the dosage. Moreover, the shock of a tranquilliser dart hitting the gorilla may cause the already agitated gorilla to respond unpredictably.

So the zoo that have spent months and perhaps years looking after the gorilla, and who had plans for Harambe in their breeding programme, decided that the most reasonable course was to shoot the gorilla.

And the internet got outraged.

Beastly behaviour on the Internet

Ong Hwee Hwee
Deputy Digital Editor

JUN 5, 2016

From animals to algorithms, social media had plenty to raise a ruckus over

MAN OR MACHINE: DOES IT MATTER WHO DECIDES WHAT'S TRENDING?

A curious topic has been trending on the Internet: What determines what's trending on Facebook?

The popular understanding is that a set of complex, top-secret algorithms acts as the invisible hand which draws up the influential list of trending topics appearing on the pages of its 1.6 billion users.

But it has emerged over the past weeks that there is in fact a team of men and women - known internally as news curators - behind the invisible hand.

The issue is still a talking point but the debate has shifted from who decides what's trending to what it says about what we read online, and how it shapes our views.

First, a quick recap of the saga.