politicodiary

  It is stunning but true- social media is becoming a tool to chronologize events. The human atrocities that have been committed in Ukraine will now be preserved through war records assembled from social media sources. Social media companies have therefore been asked to preserve war footages, notes, clips and posts. This includes Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube that have received notices from American politicians asking them to preserve content that could be used to prosecute war criminals. America is not letting Russia get away with murder. War crimes have been committed and there is no easy way to prove this but for evidence to be gathered and crime proven. Letters are said to have been sent by four senior Democrats who chair powerful committees in the House of Representatives relating to oversight, foreign affairs and national security. Not essentially legally binding, the pressure to take Russia to task remains high on agenda. One of the letter states, that gathering su...

Russian invasion is one thing, but the misleading information of fighter jets floating in the social media is another issue all together. All the world braces for impact economically, social media is doing rounds over old images of fighter jets that had been floating over the skyline, showing them off as current images. Both Facebook and Twitter are not proactively taking off such content that might be misleading and creating unrest amongst the general public. In the opening hours of the conflict since day before, several videos claiming to be the Russian air force operating over Ukraine were posted and went viral on social media. One clip, which has subsequently been deleted, shows a fighter jet flying over an urban area. It is accompanied by a caption which implies it was filmed in the current Ukraine conflict. Most of them are from previous conflicts of peaceful military exercises been carried off. Misinformation has been done to show Ukrainian response to a Russian attack m...

Strangely, influencers in social media are spreading fake news about the Covid-19 spread and this is influencing people’s minds against the vaccination. Fake news about Covid-19 vaccines has played a major role in preventing people from trusting the vaccine process can save their lives. Since the start of the pandemic, rumors and conspiracy theories have been rife, unsettling many people and making vaccination campaigns more difficult. Religious leaders are saying that vaccines can affect fertility, breastfeeding abilities or lead to death too. The WHO has found that the majority of fake news is spreading in North America, Australia, and Russia and elsewhere in Europe. From there, they also reach African social media channels. The global health body is fighting this kind of misinformation on the continent of 1.3 billion people. Since December 2020, the WHO has been working with 20 partners in Africa. They formed the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance, whose aim is to debunk dange...

The prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison has taken the bull by its horns, by challenging Facebook Inc to back the anti-troll defamation law. But there are chanced that Facebook will quit Australia at together. If this happens, then Morrison says that if the social media giant does so, over laws holding it liable for defamation on its platform, it shows that they have no interest in making the online world safe. The global social media companies have threatened to quit Australia early this year in a discussion over laws making them pay media outlets for content appearing on their websites. Australian government wants that global internet companies to share the identity of the people with anonymous accounts, in case there is a charge of defamation on such account by other person. The purpose is to bring the internet companies accountable for the content on their platforms. Failure to provide the required information, it must assume legal liability. The proposal is also to make soc...

The popular chatting application Whatsapp might land up using its user base under the new integration decision with its new parent company Facebook Social media is precariously becoming intrusive. The Whatsapp social interaction platform is going to lose its charm as it integrates itself with Facebook, threatening its userbase’s data privacy.   A lot of people are not clear what this means for the privacy of their chats on Whatsapp. While Whatsapp is making it clear that it does not intend to intrude into the privacy of people’s chats, the integration will have some kind of effect on the sense of privacy of the users. The new policy is a reflection of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s thought about the ‘interoperability’ of all his parent company’s entities. He stressed about this in 2019 when he expressed his vision of a cross-platform communication. This would spread across Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. However, this integration will also be helpful to Facebook from a com...