Social Media Cheat Sheet (for brands) Trump's Twitter debate lead was 'swelled by bots' Image copyright Getty Images More than four times as many tweets were made by pro-Donald Trump bots in and around the first US presidential debate as the number made by those backing Hillary Clinton, a study found. The research indicates the Republican candidate would have enjoyed more support on Twitter even if the automated accounts had not been active. But it highlights that the software has the capacity to "manipulate public opinion" and "muddy political issues". The report has yet to be peer-reviewed. And one critic noted that it was impossible to be completely sure which accounts were real and which were "web robots". Image copyright Twitter Profuse tweeters The investigation was led by Prof Philip Howard, from the University of Oxford, and is part of a wider project exploring "computational propaganda".
It covered tweets posted on 26 September, the day of the debate, plus the three days afterwards, and relied on popular hashtags linked to the event. How to spot a bot Hashtags galore. Facebook, Twitter, And Breaking News’ Special Relationship - BuzzFeed News. Osborne warns of 'dangerous cocktail' of economic risks. Image copyright Getty Images The UK faces a "cocktail" of serious threats from a slowing global economy as 2016 begins, Chancellor George Osborne will warn. Mr Osborne will say this year is likely to be one of the toughest since the financial crisis. He told the BBC that far from "mission accomplished" on the economy, "2016 is the year of mission critical". His message is in stark contrast to the positive tone of his Autumn Statement, when he said the UK was "growing fast".
The chancellor told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the Autumn Statement had in fact put in place a four-year plan to restore the UK's public finances, make the economy more productive and businesses more competitive so they could create jobs. "It is precisely because we live in an uncertain world. The chancellor will lay out a number of risks the UK economy faces over the next 12 months.
People must not be "complacent" that the economy is fixed, he will say. People's racist Facebook comments are ending up on billboards near their homes. Racist commenters beware: Your words might show up in your own backyard. A new campaign in Brazil is plastering billboards with racist Facebook comments. The point is not to expose anyone but to educate people that their words have a real impact. The campaign, "Virtual racism, real consequences," is using the location tag from Facebook posts to find where the offenders live.
The group is then buying billboard space in their neighborhoods, but blurring out the names and photos of the commenters. (Racismo Virtual) The comment roughly translates to "I got home stinking of black people. " Behind the project is the Criola group, a nonprofit that works to defend the rights of black women in Brazil. The campaign was prompted after Brazilian journalist Maria Júlia Coutinho was targeted by racist Facebook comments online. The offensive comments range from telling her to "go f--- herself" to saying her nickname "Maju" made it clear she was from Africa. More From Business Insider. Lack of Twitter geotags can’t stop researchers from getting location. Three researchers from IBM have developed an algorithm that can predict a Twitter user's location without needing so much as a single geotag from them. According to the Arxiv paper on the subject, the location prediction comes largely from assessing the similarity of the content of a user's tweets to other users' tweets who do use geotags, which turns out to be a decent predictor.
While geotags are the most definitive location information a tweet can have, tweets can also have plenty more salient information: hashtags, FourSquare check-ins, or text references to certain cities or states, to name a few. The authors of the paper created their algorithm by analyzing the content of tweets that did have geotags and then searching for similarities in content in tweets without geotags to assess where they might have originated from.
Of a body of 1.5 million tweets, 90 percent were used to train the algorithm, and 10 percent were used to test it. The Lifecycle Of A Trend. As part of its ongoing Youth Culture Insights Series, Fuse Marketing is taking a look at how a trend is discovered, marketed, popularized, how it eventually reaches its demise. The series, which aims to educate those who wish to speak more effectively to teens and young adults, includes information on media behavior, social media, design, web strategy, the future concerns of millennials, and other relevant topics for marketers trying to reach this demographic. Here’s the latest update, following the path of the trend’s lifecycle: THE INSPIRATION – Be it a breakthrough in technology or a shift in our collective consciousness, a trend is born out of circumstance.
THE DISCOVERY – Early adoptors begin toying with and ultimately embracing an idea, product, or aesthetic. THE BRINK – Influencers pick up on the burgeoning trend and extol its “newness.” THE FEVER – The trend has caught fire and saturates the mainstream. Implications for Brands. The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things. Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn't make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource. There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation.
According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong. "One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation," says Dr. So rather than buying the latest iPhone or a new BMW, Gilovich suggests you'll get more happiness spending money on experiences like going to art exhibits, doing outdoor activities, learning a new skill, or traveling. [Top Photo: Justin Lewis/Getty Images] Viewpoint: Who are the people in the dark corners? - BBC News. There are many types of people who have been demonised in the age of social media - computer users who take refuge in anonymity to post extreme or offensive views. Jamie Bartlett wanted to talk to the people behind the masks.
My heart was pounding as I waited for Paul to arrive at the train station where we'd agreed to meet. I'd been communicating with him for some time, all via the internet. Paul was a vitriolic, aggressive neo-Nazi who spent his life online producing and sharing White Pride propaganda. He was one of several people that I spent much of the last year meeting while researching my book. We often hear in the news about these dangers of life online. Fifteen minutes late, a handsome, friendly and earnest young man rocked up - excited to meet Jamie "who I've seen off the telly". Was this really the digital iconoclast who earlier that day had been attacking and terrifying minorities from behind his sinister looking avatar?
Find out more Listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer. Trollbusters: This algorithm can predict if you're going to get banned | TechRadar. The way commenters write can be used to detect if they'll end up getting banned, according to US researchers working on troll-busting algorithms. A team from Cornell and Stanford Universities scanned the comment threads on three news sites - CNN, Breitbart and IGN - over the course of a year and a half.
That totalled up to 35 million comments, sent by almost two million users. 50,000 of those users went on to be banned from the sites. The researchers found that those banned users wrote in a different way to others. Their comments were generally harder to read and used fewer words that indicated positive emotion. They also behaved slightly differently in how they moved around the site - spending more time focused in individual threads than users who weren't banned. From that data, the researchers built a model that could guess with 80% accuracy whether or not a user would go on to be banned from the content of their first five posts. R.I.P. Blogging, Killed By Screenshorts. Late last year, Mat Honan wrote for Buzzfeed about “screenshorts”, a rising phenomenon on Twitter where people share their favorite quote of an article in a screenshot to avoid Twitter’s character count.
What’s most interesting about the rise of these screenshots on Twitter and other social media is that they’re actually killing traditional blogging in its entirety. The easiest place to look for this phenomenon is celebrities. Almost every celebrity under 40 that you can possibly think of has probably made a screenshort blog post. Researching this for just an hour reveals a staggering amount of famous people making incredibly formal statements… as a screenshot of the iOS notes app. It seems ridiculous, but it’s actually a thing. It’s not just celebrities, however, that have gone to screenshorts as their medium of choice to getting their thoughts online. Are screenshorts slowly killing blogging as we know it? Screenshorting is less formal and more raw than any blog post could ever be. Why is a Chinese takeaway box taking over election talk? - BBC News.
People wanting to follow the general election campaign on Twitter have been using the hashtags #GE2015 and #GE15 but as these have become popular, they've attracted the attention of spam advertisers. On Thursday, this image of a Chinese takeaway food box was the fourth most tweeted image under #GE2015. Which is somewhat strange because of the seriousness of the tag. The BBC and other news outlets are using the #GE2015 tag to share their reports, and politicians from all the major parties are using it to highlight coverage which is favourable to them. So, for example, Tristam Hunt used it to announce that Labour would offer guaranteed one-to-one careers advice, and this was re-tweeted around 100 times from different Labour backed accounts.
The Conservatives' Dr Liam Fox used it to highlight his comments about Britain's nuclear deterrent Trident, and this was retweeted three times. But those Twitter numbers are all less than the Chinese takeaway box, at least within the #GE2015 stream. Behind the online comments: the psychology of internet trolls | Media Network. Readers’ comments are an important, yet often overlooked, type of user-generated content.
And some readers are much more likely to post and read comments than others. Trolling, the act of posting disruptive or inflammatory comments online in order to provoke fellow readers, has been the focus of much recent attention. PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg), the world’s most popular YouTuber, recently decided to ban comments on his channel because of his inability to silence trolls. There are now fears that he may lose fans or migrate to another platform. A week before that, TV historian and Cambridge professor Mary Beard revealed that she had written a letter of recommendation for one of her trolls – a university student who insulted her and was subsequently exposed online.
Professor Beard reasoned that the student should not pay such a high price for “one moment of idiocy”, and that her reference would make up for the students’ reputational damage, which she helped inflict. Twitter advertisers can now target ads based on the apps a user has installed. Antisocial networks: how to avoid Facebook 'friends' and irritate people | Media | The Guardian. Think that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their ilk are out of control, and you would like to regain some of the privacy you once enjoyed? Help may be at hand in the form of "antisocial networking" – a clutch of new apps and websites designed to hide you from the seemingly irresistible march of technological intrusion.
Proudly billing itself as "the antisocial network", Cloak works by turning social media against itself, mining real-time geographical location data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare accounts to warn you if your "friends" are nearby. This enables you to take a different route and avoid meeting them. While it may be of particular use to cheating spouses, its creators insist that its purpose is broad: "Avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat, anyone you'd rather not run into," it says. Similar in function to Cloak is Split. Its creator, Udi Dagan, echoed Baker's assessment. . ■ "I recently came to the belief that my dad is a drug dealer.