Fake news: Facebook is rolling out new tools to identify and report stories

Image: Which.co.uk

By tech2 News Staff /  16 Dec 2016 , 10:13

Facebook has announced the rollout of new tools that will help the company fight the menace of ‘Fake News.’ This comes right after the company came under fire from US President Barak Obama and governments across the world to accountability for the inaccurate or fake news that is shared on the platform.

Facebook has pointed out that the tools will allow users to quickly report any fake news story using the ‘Report’ feature already present for the posts on Facebook. The company has added a new “It’s a fake news story” in the options and allows the users to mark the story as Fake and message the person who posted the story to notify about the story. Apart from relying on crowdsourcing to report the potential ‘Fake news stories,’ the company has also announced a partnership with third-party fact-checking companies.

Facebook detailed that it is working with five companies about the fact-checking organisations which include ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Snopes and Politifact as reported by The Guardian. All the third-party fact-checking websites are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles.  If a news story is pointed out as inaccurate, the post will include “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers” providing a link to the article refuting the original news article.

One interesting thing to note is that both the features, Third-Party Fact Checkers and Crowd-sourcing to report articles do not work in isolation. The news articles are sent to the face checking websites after the original article has been reported as ‘Fake Story’ by sufficient amount of users. People sharing the disputed articles will get a warning sign informing them about the disputed status of the article.

According to the company, the ‘Disputed’ articles will figure lower on the newsfeed and the publisher or the person who posted the article can not promote the article. The company announced that it had removed the ability to spoof domain names to stop confusion caused by such domains.

Twitter is expanding mute options, making reporting easier, and sensitising staff to take on abuse

Image Credits: REUTERS

By tech2 News Staff /  16 Nov 2016 , 16:11

Twitter is making changes to combat instances of online abuse. Twitter claims to have noticed a sharp rise in the instances of abuse, bullying and harassment. The constant trolling prevents people from being exposed to all perspectives of an issue, reduces engagement with the social media platform, and is a threat to human dignity.

Earlier this year, The Cincinnati Zoo deleted its Twitter account after facing continuous abuse. The account was flooded with memes and petitions, following the killing of a gorilla, Harambe, to save a three year old boy who had crawled into the enclosure.

The Freedom on the Net 2016 report studied instances of online abuse in India, and found that most of the harassment was targeted against women. The affected women would not respond to the harassment at all, or react by reducing their participation on social media platforms. Users did not know of the law enforcement mechanisms to protect them from abuse, and were not aware of the mechanisms provided by the site to combat such abuse.

Twitter is taking some concrete steps to combat the harassment. The mute button, which so far prevented users from seeing Tweets by muted accounts in their timelines has been expanded considerably. Users will now be able to mute notifications as well, including notifications from individual accounts, keywords, phrases and conversations. This was a much demanded feature from Twitter.

Twitter is also apparently rolling out a more comprehensive system for reporting Tweets that attacks anyone over the basis of race, religion, gender, age, nationality or ethnicity. Twitter did not provide details on how the new system would be implemented.

The support teams have been retrained with new policies. The support teams have recieved special lectures on cultural and historical  contexts for hateful abuse. There is an ongoing refresher program for employees. There are new tools and mechanisms to better deal with reported offenders.

Twitter mentions in the blog post that this is just a few of the many steps, and that it will continue to learn from and adapt to new situations, to continuously improve the way it tackles online abuse.

Report: Tech sector growing, but IT is hemorrhaging jobs

CompTIA's September jobs report reveals some grim statistics for IT pros: 142,000 jobs were lost last month. Tech sector growth slowed as well, but positions were still created rather than lost.

By Brandon Vigliarolo | October 11, 2016, 9:14 AM PST

It's not the best time to be an IT professional. Budgets are getting tight, cloud computing is making jobs more difficult, and now CompTIA reports that September was bleeding IT jobs at an alarming rate.

The CompTIA IT Employment Tracker for October reveals some interesting ups and downs. Before we dive in let's talk specifics: The report uses IT sector employment and IT occupation employment as two distinct terms.

IT occupation employment is clear: CompTIA uses this term to refer to anyone doing actual IT work. Programmers, CXOs, help desk techs, and network engineers are all in IT occupation employment.


The IT sector, on the other hand, is everyone involved in the tech world. Only 44 percent of IT sector jobs are IT occupations: The rest are marketing, finance, HR, and other positions.

The IT sector is growing according to CompTIA. IT occupations, on the other hand, are not.
Where the losses are

IT occupations across all industries faced a serious drop in September, with 142,000 jobs disappearing. That wipes away half of the job gains from August, when 205,000 IT occupation jobs were added.

The one upside to the news is the year-to-date numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is where CompTIA pulled data for the report. Job losses have been numerous but there's still been an overall gain of 17,000 positions since January.


CompTIA's report isn't specific about the particular jobs that were lost in

Malware downloaded every 81 seconds, says new Check Point security report

A new report from Check Point claims that the average day in an enterprise organization is rife with malware and malicious applications.

By Conner Forrest | September 20, 2016, 7:22 AM PST

A new report, released by security company Check Point on Tuesday, claims that some form of known malware is downloaded every 81 seconds in an enterprise organization. The report also highlights other alarming cybercrime behavior that occurs in businesses every day.

Data was collected from more that 1,100 security "checkups" that were performed by Check Point for companies around the world. According to the report, that data was

FBI probes hacks targeting phones of Democratic Party officials: Report

The FBI is investigating suspected attempts to hack mobile phones used by Democratic Party officials as recently as the past month, four people with direct knowledge of the attack and the investigation told Reuters.

The revelation underscores the widening scope of the U.S. criminal inquiry into cyber attacks on Democratic Party organizations, including the presidential campaign of its candidate, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

U.S. officials have said they believe those attacks were