Offensive WhatsApp and Facebook posts can land group administrators in jail

Getty Images

Think twice before becoming administrator of a group on WhatsApp or Facebook as one is liable for prosecution if any rumour or fake news is circulated on it. Social media platforms allow a person to create a group on which members can share views, photographs or videos. Concerns have been raised about social media misuse as fake news, morphed photographs and disturbing videos with fabricated local narratives can easily be circulated that can trigger tension and even communal rift in an area.

In a joint order issued by District Magistrate Yogeshwar Ram Mishra and Senior Superintendent of Police Nitin Tiwari, it has been made clear that any factually incorrect, rumour or misleading information on a social media group could result in an FIR against the group administrator. “There are several groups on social media which are named on news groups and also groups with other names which are propagating news and information which is not authentic. These are being forwarded without cross checking,” it said.

Considering this issue, directives are being issued to social media groups, WhatsApp and Facebook group administrators and members, the order said. There are over 200 million WhatsApp users in India. It directed that social media group administrators should be ready to bear the responsibility and ownership of the groups. The administrator must include only those members who are personally known to him or her. If any statement is made by a group member which is fake, can cause religious disharmony, or rumour, the group admin must deny it on the group and remove the member from the group, the order said.

“In the event of inaction from the group admin, he or she will be considered guilty and action will be taken against the group admin,” it said. Such a post must also be reported to the nearest police station so that action can be taken against the member under the law, it said. The order, issued yesterday, says while freedom of expression on social media is important, it also comes with a responsibility. Varanasi is the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The administration has directed that no statement or post which can hurt religious sentiments should be forwarded to any other group or person else legal action will be taken. It also directs that case under cyber crime law, Information Technology Act and IPC will be filed in case of violation of these guidelines. The order also makes it clear that orders of the Supreme Court and various high courts will be considered while initiating action. It needs to be seen how Varanasi police which is facing severe staff crunch implements such an order as WhatsApp and social media are not limited to the boundaries of the district.

Publish date: April 21, 2017 8:43 am| Modified date: April 21, 2017 8:51 am

Facebook has shut down about 30,000 fake accounts in France to combat fake news

Image: Reuters

Facebook Inc said on Thursday it suspended 30,000 accounts in France as the social network giant steps up efforts to stop the spread of fake news, misinformation and spam. The move, which comes 10 days before the first round of a hotly contested French presidential election, is among the most aggressive yet by Facebook to move against accounts that violate its terms of service, rather than simply respond to complaints.

Facebook is under intense pressure in Europe as governments across the continent threaten new laws and fines unless the company moves quickly to remove extremist propaganda or other content that violates local laws. The pressure on social media sites including Twitter, Google’s YouTube and Facebook has intensified in the run-up to the elections in France and Germany.

Facebook already has a program in France to use outside fact-checkers to combat fake news in users’ feeds. Also on Thursday, Facebook took out full-page ads in Germany’s best-selling newspapers to educate readers on how to spot fake news. U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election last year in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Officials say a similar campaign is under way in Europe to promote right-wing, nationalist parties and undermine the European Union.

In a blog post, Facebook said it was acting against 30,000 fake accounts in France. It said its priority was to remove suspect accounts with high volumes of posting activity and the biggest audiences. Two people familiar with Facebook’s process said the company had strengthened its formula for detecting deceptive accounts being run by automated means. As an example, the new process considers accounts that have smaller circles of friends and that therefore had been less of a priority previously.

A key motivator was the need to get tougher on misinformation ahead of the French elections, the people said, although the move also targets accounts that generated spam for financial gain. “We’ve made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook security team manager, wrote in an official blog post.

The company is using automated pattern-recognition to identify repeated posting of the same content and increases in messaging. Thursday’s action follows other moves by Facebook to make it easier for users to report potential fraud and hoaxes.

Reuters

Publish date: April 14, 2017 1:20 pm| Modified date: April 14, 2017 1:20 pm

Facebook is building a better Snapchat than Snapchat, and that’s very disturbing

Getty Images

Facebook is big. With almost 2 billion users, it’s the largest social media platform in the world. Each of its social media properties are also massive in their own right. Instagram boasts of 600 million active users, Messenger just crossed the 1.2 billion mark and WhatsApp has more than 1 billion users.

By any measure, Facebook is the largest, most successful social media company on the planet. That still doesn’t stop Facebook from copying its competitors when it runs out of ideas, however. In fact, this might very well be the secret to Facebook’s continuing success.

Take Snapchat for instance; an app for sharing ephemeral images and photos caught the attention of the younger audience that Facebook wanted but couldn’t net. Facebook’s solution to the problem? Outright plagiarism. The social media giant has been copying Snapchat’s features with utter disregard for any sense of propriety, and it’s been doing this very successfully for years.

Getty Images

Snapchat Stories is a feature that allowed users to share chains of content that can be viewed in a 24-hour period. This was introduced in 2014 and proved to be the most popular feature on Snapchat, some might even call it a defining feature today.

Facebook blatantly copied Stories and implemented it across almost all its properties, including Messenger and Instagram. Better yet, we’ve now learnt that Instagram Stories on Instagram is actually more popular than Snapchat Stories on Snapchat. With 200 million daily active users on Instagram Stories, Snapchat in comparison manages about 160 million daily active users.

Taking things a step further, Facebook has introduced a number of tools to improve Stories. This includes selfie stickers, pinned stickers, video Stories, more geo-stickers, etc.

This is all well and good, and I’m not debating the morality or business ethics of the issue, but I do wonder if Facebook has a real plan. It’s easy to copy something that’s already proven to be successful, especially if you have the means to improve upon it; the iPhone and its innumerable Chinese clones is testament to that.

Getty Images

However, while Facebook not only copied the feature, it also tried to implement it everywhere without regard for the audience the feature is targeting. What’s the point of having Stories on Facebook, Instagram as well as Messenger? Doesn’t Facebook know where it’ll work best?

Facebook is behaving like a chef has this great new sauce that he wants everyone to try, but he doesn’t know which dish it’ll go with. Rather than making the effort to figure it out, he adds the sauce in everything and hopes to sort it out later based on feedback.

That’s not an indication of a chef who knows his trade, is it? Taking this analogy a step further: If the best restaurant in the world thrives on stolen recipes, what happens when there are no more recipes to steal?

One does have to feel sorry for Snapchat. While Snapchat is busy innovating, Zuckerberg is busy peddling his manifesto on building global communities and working on newer advertising techniques. And when Facebook just casually steals all of Snapchat’s hard work, what can Snapchat do but grit its teeth and move on?

More importantly, once Snapchat dies, who will Facebook rip-off next?

Publish date: April 14, 2017 11:42 am| Modified date: April 14, 2017 12:46 pm

Facebook failed to remove offensive posts, despite its moderators being informed: Reports

Image: Reuters

Facebook failed to remove dozens of instances of extremist and child pornography even after the social network’s moderators were directly informed of the potentially illegal content, an investigation by The Times showed on Thursday.

Using a fake profile set up last month, a Times journalist found images and videos glorifying Islamic State and recent deadly attacks in London and Egypt, along with graphic images of child abuse, and asked site moderators to remove them.

Facebook moderators removed some of reported images but left untouched pro-jihadist posts praising recent attacks and calling for new ones. The company appeared to take action only after The Times identified itself as reporting a story on the matter.

Failure to remove content which is illegal under British law after company officials have been notified of its existence could expose Facebook to criminal prosecution for its role in encouraging the publication and distribution of such imagery.

The social media giant faces new laws in countries around the world to force it to move faster to combat illegal content but it has struggled to keep pace as illicit posts can reappear as fast as they are identified and taken down.

A Facebook spokesman said the company had now removed all the images identified by the Times as potentially illegal, acknowledging that they “violate our policies and have no place on Facebook”.

“We are sorry that this occurred,” Facebook Vice President of Operations Justin Osofsky said in a statement. “It is clear that we can do better, and we’ll continue to work hard to live up to the high standards people rightly expect of Facebook.”

A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police called for individuals to report extremist content to it via an online form. It declined to comment on whether it was investigating if Facebook failed to act when notified of the illegal content.

“Where material breaches UK terrorism laws, the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) will, where possible, seek the removal of the content by working with the relevant internet hosting company,” the spokesman said.

Reuters

Publish date: April 14, 2017 11:27 am| Modified date: April 14, 2017 11:27 am

Facebook: About 1.2 billion users actively use Messenger to stay in touch

Image Credit: Facebook

Over 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger every month globally to stay in touch with the people and businesses that matter to them the most. In the last few months, Facebook has added group video calling, a powerful and fast camera – preloaded with stickers, masks, frames, effects and the ability to share photos and videos to your Day, making it easy and fun to share what’s happening in your life, moment by moment.

“I keep on hearing powerful stories about how our product is becoming a more important part of your daily lives. So from all of us here at Messenger, a heartfelt thank you to all of you for giving us a chance to build something good and more meaningful for you,” said David Marcus, Vice President, Messaging Products, Facebook, in a post on Wednesday.

The company has also launched Mentions and Reactions to make group conversations on Messenger fun and engaging. Last month, Facebook Messenger added a new feature Live Location that lets you share – for an hour within a private direct or group message thread – your real-time location on a map.

Publish date: April 14, 2017 11:07 am| Modified date: April 14, 2017 11:07 am

Facebook Messenger introduces group payments: Are payments in messaging apps the next big thing?

Representative image: AP

After introducing peer-to-peer in its Messenger app, Facebook today introduced group payments in Messenger. The service basically lets you send or receive payments from group members conveniently using the Messenger app, which is a great idea considering that most conversations and decisions happen in a messaging app.

For a service that started back in 2015, it hasn’t picked up even though Facebook is a worldwide service. However, with more apps jumping on to the mobile payments bandwagon, is this the future for messaging apps? WeChat’s WeChat Pay success story could have the answer.

Facebook Messenger’s payment service has plenty of connections that go way back. In March 2015, Facebook introduced its peer-to-peer payment service for the US market. Users could use debit cards from US banks and send money to friends using the popular messaging app.

In the same month at F8, a Facebook developers’ conference, Facebook also announced that it would start letting users interact with businesses on its social network. With Messenger now announced as a platform the possibilities were indeed limitless because users would also be able to open compatible third-party apps inside messenger.

Move to April 2016, and Facebook introduced its bot platform with an API to build chat bots that would interact with users.  And with group payments introduced today, it all adds up to what appears be the next big thing with messaging services — payments.

But two years later, Messenger may have many users, but its payments front has yet to pick up pace. And there are reasons for this. For starters, the service only works with debit cards issued by US banks. Users also have to live in the United States as the services are not available outside the US.

It’s all about how it’s done

While sending money via the messaging app is effective, it literally is way behind WeChat, its competitor from the Far East.

WeChat takes a different approach to the same. Its payment service is called WeChat Pay and you can not only send payments to friends and family, but even use the service to pay for daily items at retailers and even book a taxi.

The back end is run by Tencent (parent company) and supports a long list of both credit and debit cards in payments. More importantly, it even works with cards opened in the US and Canada (billing address needed).

As tested out by Tech in Asia, you can literally head into popular stores and buy everything from clothing to groceries. As reported by Reuters, Tencent charged its users 0.01 percent per transaction back in 2016. Tencent through its WeChat payments was expected to make twice as much as PayPal processed in a year.

Line Pay is another messaging app that took off in 2014. Similar to WeChat, the messaging app Line (that comes from Japan), allows for payments not just between users but even to other services. More importantly, Line Pay is available globally, unlike WeChat which is only available in China. Line also allows businesses to connect to customers using its Line@ app.

Everyone’s looking at payments

Truecaller, a popular crowd-sourced call filtering app, received a major update, one that also included a new Flash Messaging section and Truecaller Pay. The call filtering service that is now also a messaging service embraces Digital India and allows for cashless payments, allowing millions of users in the country to make a payment by either using their UPI ID or a mobile number registered with BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money).

The service however does not work via its messaging app, but, like WeChat, can be used to do more than just peer-to peer payments.

WhatsApp too is said to be working on a digital payment system that will once again use UPI. The messaging service is looking to hire an expert in Aadhaar, UPI and Bhim and is expected to launch a payments interfaced in 6 month’s time.

Owned by Facebook, WhatsApp’s reach will be far wider and will give a boost to digital transactions, provided it is implemented in the right manner. Hopefully it doesn’t repeat Facebook’s mistakes with Messenger.

Payments from mobile messaging apps are picking up pace. And with little to show in terms of features, they might as well turn into payment systems that could help boost their app usage.

Publish date: April 12, 2017 2:11 pm| Modified date: April 12, 2017 2:11 pm

Facebook is working with Mozilla, Wikipedia, academics to make News Integrity Initiative

Image: Reuters

To ensure the news that internet users get is not fake, Facebook is leading a consortium that is pouring $14 million into the creation of a News Integrity Initiative. Apart from academics and non-profits, Mozilla and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are also part of the consortium.

The News Integrity Initiative aims to develop tools that will help people be sensitive towards stories they read online. “The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism will administer the initiative and will spearhead new literacy and aim to increase trust in journalism around the world,” a news release on the website of CUNY Graduate School of Journalism said.

After US President Donald Trump was declared winning candidate in 2016 presidential elections, Facebook came under severe criticism for promoting and breeding fake news on its platform. To fight the fake news and rebuild its credibility, the networking giant announced a number of projects and users to identify and weed out fake stories.

“The initiative will address the problems of misinformation, disinformation and the opportunities the internet provides to inform the public conversation in new ways,” Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in a statement.

Publish date: April 5, 2017 12:42 pm| Modified date: April 5, 2017 1:14 pm

WhatsApp is preparing to launch a UPI-based digital payment service this year: Report

Getty Images

WhatsApp is reportedly working on a digital payment system using UPI. The service is expected to launch this year.

The report was published on The Ken and we haven’t yet been able to independently confirm the report. If the report is to be believed, however, WhatsApp is hiring someone to head a digital transaction business in India, someone with expertise in Aadhaar, UPI and Bhim. The report suggests that the WhatsApp-based peer-to-peer payment system will launch in about 6 months’ time.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp is among the largest digital communication platforms in India and is ubiquitous. With over 200 million users aboard the platform, digital transactions can only get a boost from such a move.

However, one must never forget that this is Facebook we’re talking about. Given the company’s incessant demands for user data, it’s quite possible that details of your transactions will be sent to Facebook for analysis, helping them to better target ads.

Regardless, yet another digital payment platform will be welcome, if only because WhatsApp’s popularity might eliminate the need to use some of the other, less popular apps. It’s also good to hear that WhatsApp is working on integrating Bhim and UPI rather than developing a payment service of its own.

Publish date: April 4, 2017 10:46 am| Modified date: April 4, 2017 10:46 am

Facebook is testing a second news feed with ‘Rocket’ icon; show users content that may interest them

Image: Reuters

Social networking giant Facebook recently added a new icon – that of a rocket – on selected users’ home screens without any hint about what to do with it or what it means, said a media report on Tuesday. On clicking on the rocket, it leads the user to an altered version of the News Feed while the traditional one also exists alongside it.

“The test was a way of trying out a complementary feed of popular articles, video and photos customised for each person based on content that might be interesting to them,” the Independent quoted a Facebook spokesperson as saying. “It was intended as a way of giving people an easy way to explore new content they haven’t connected with yet,” the spokesperson added.

The rocket icon is appearing for selected users on iOS and Android at the bottom of the app’s view. Facebook often secretly tests out potential new features on a selected number of users and the button appears to be part of such a test. “Many of those features don’t make it to the public version of the app and this might never be seen by normal users,” the report added. The icon appears to be similar to Instagram’s ‘Explore tab’ which shows posts that the company’s algorithms have determined to be relevant to users’ interests.

Publish date: April 4, 2017 5:13 pm| Modified date: April 4, 2017 5:27 pm

Snapchat introduces ‘Search’ option to lets users search content they’ve posted on the app

A woman wears Snapchat Spectacles on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Image: Reuters/Brendan McDermid.

Few days after Facebook got a Snapchat-like “Stories” update that lets users add effects to their photos and videos, Snap Inc has introduced a “Search” option that would give users power to search through the content they posted on its app.

Snapchat will enable users to search for photos and videos known as “Snaps” posted to the “Our Story” option on the app, by creating new “Stories” using machine learning technology, the company said in a blog post on Friday.

For instance, users can use the search feature to find “Snaps” related to events such as local basketball games and topics such as puppies.

The search feature, which was rolled out in some cities on Friday, is an addition to curated “Stories,” where public “Snaps” about major events like Wimbledon or the Coachella music festival already appear.

First introduced by Snapchat, “Our Story” feature is a slideshow of user content that disappears after 24 hours.

Earlier this week, social media giant Facebook gave its users access to the new Facebook Camera feature in its app that lets them add effects to their photos and videos.

Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp already got “Stories” update before Facebook rolled it out to its users.

After this update, the Facebook users could now share their content to a Snapchat clone called ‘Facebook Stories’ that appears above News Feed on mobile and works similar to Instagram’s 24-hour slideshows.

Publish date: April 2, 2017 10:41 am| Modified date: April 2, 2017 10:41 am

Fake Facebook post costs woman $500,000 in penalties

A judge in North Carolina has ordered a woman to pay $500,000 for writing a Facebook post falsely accusing her former friend of killing her son.

According to a report in Telegraph.co.uk, Jacquelyn Hammond from Asheville wrote on Facebook, in 2015, of Davyne Dial: “I didn’t get drunk and kill my kid.”

But Dial who claimed to have nothing to do with her son’s death sued Hammond for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

Dial and Hammond’s friendship had broken down after the failed attempt to work together on the radio station.

“There are no filters on social media to say whatever you think behind the safety of your screen. She had made other untrue statements through the years, but when this happened, it was very painful,” said Dial.

The announcement delivered last month awarded Dial $250,000 in actual damages and $250,000 in punitive damages, for a total judgment of $500,000.

“I think people today don’t recognise the importance of their words,” said Missy Owen, a lawyer in North Carolina, adding that people should learn from Hammond’s mistake.

“Just because it is very easy to get your words out there does not mean you should. You can get in trouble anytime you make a false statement about someone else that damages their character or reputation.”

Publish date: April 1, 2017 1:00 pm| Modified date: April 1, 2017 1:00 pm

×