Cyberculture agenda: Google Program to Deradicalize Jihadis then to be used for Right-Wing American Extremists…Twitter Emojis for 2016 Paralympic Games

A Google-incubated program that has been targeting potential ISIS members with deradicalizing content will soon be used to target violent right-wing extremists in North America, a designer of the program said at an event at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday.

The 2016 Summer Olympic Games may be history, but Twitter hasn’t packed up and left Rio de Janeiro yet: The 2016 Paralympic Games begin Wednesday.

Twitter launched a series of hashtag-triggered emojis for the Games, and they are available in seven languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.

Refreshing our Transparency Report for copyright removals

Back in 2012, as a part of our continuing effort to increase transparency around the flow of information online, we began disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content.

The report hasn’t changed much since 2012 and was getting a little rusty. So today, we’re releasing a new version of the report that makes it easier for you to understand the data:

Anthem vice president of communications Kristin Binns became the latest to try her hand at leading communications at Twitter, joining the social network as senior director of communications.

Kurt Wagner of Re/code reported on the hire, and Binns confirmed the news inresponding to a tweet from chief marketing officer Leslie Berland, to whom she will report.


Photo Map, one of my favorite features on Instagram, is getting the ax. The feature allowed you to to check out all the pictures shared by a user in various locations around the globe, with thumbnails representing the photos on a map. Instagram confirmed to Mashable that it was indeed killing Photo Map, having begun disabling the feature for some users last week. It said in a statement, “Photo Map was not widely used, so we’ve decided to remove the feature and focus on other priorities.” You might still be able to see your own Photo Map by visiting your…

Repeat After Me: Humans Run the Internet, Not Algorithms

With the Facebook Trending mess, people are arguing over whether humans or algorithms should run Facebook. But that makes no sense.

So how does Facebook’s Trending algorithm actually work? Very few, if any, people outside of 1 Hacker Way really know, but over at Quartz, reporters Dave Gershgorn and Mike Murphy have tried to piece it together.

Facebook last week said it was changing its Trending feature by eliminating the short sentences that described each story. Instead, Trending now just features broad topics surfaced by the algorithm. (On Thursday morning, Van Morrison — it’s his birthday — and Brown Eyed Girls — the South Korean band, not the Van Morrison song — were trending on my Facebook.)

Mere hours after Facebook announced that its Trending section would become more algorithmically controlled, users noticed that the social network was surfacing a fake news story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

Few would argue that, in theory, the sharp increase in mobile access hasn’t been a good thing for individuals and society as a whole. A more connected public is a more informed one, and increased mobile penetration means more people are able to connect more often than ever before.

Internet activists today (30 August) hailed the announcement by EU regulators of new rules to prevent telecoms companies from slowing down some internet traffic as a historic achievement.

Belling the trolls: free expression, online abuse and gender

Freedom of expression is fundamentally about power: about who gets to speak or express themselves and on what terms and platforms.

Lawyers protest against JNU student union president,Kanhaiya Kumar, arrested and accused of sedition, February, 2016. Manish Swarup/Press Association. All rights reserved. The things you learn from search engines. I’d always attributed this iconic quote to the French philosopher Voltaire: “I wholly disapprove of what you say, and will defend to the death your right to say it.” And then, idly googling the exact phrasing, I discover that this profoundly expansive ‘Voltairean principle’ did not spring from Voltaire’s lips at all. No, this quote is by hisbiographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who sometimes wrote under the ‘male’ pseudonym SG Tallentyre.

Machine learning just got more human with Google’s RankBrain


One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. – Nathan Bateman in Ex Machina Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a $15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can…

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