#In that case if you watch the video in Facebook as some kind of RE-upload or smth

[https-b0nb0n]

Amy having a lot of Sonic plushies is canon in the Sonicure RE-VAMP AU (Since the DokiDoki Sonicure video)

Context:

[onisiondrama]

I know I have a “no drama about others” rule on this blog, but I really need to vent.

I’ve been watching commentary channels’ reviews on the first episode of the Onision: IRL documentary hoping for an actual review of the show. They all keep bashing it, not because of the overall information it is spreading or the impact it will have on viewers who never heard of Onision. Instead they bash it on background politics and hyper focus on the times the show over inflates Chris Hansen’s involvement.

Of course the show is going to suck up to Chris Hansen. He’s the one that pitched the show. He’s the household name. He probably brought in a lot of new viewers to the show and app just by being in the promotional material for the show.

I watched the first episode thinking it was going to be a complete garbage fire, but it wasn’t. Chris Hansen wasn’t in it as much as I thought he was going to be. Yes, the doc exaggerated his involvement and his impact on the “Onision story”, but commentary Youtubers are literally doing the same right now about themselves and each other. They complain Discovery and Hansen took all their hard research and work and didn’t credit or pay them... when Youtubers get their research off of other people’s work without credit. The backbone of Onision archives and research are done by people who do it for free. Forums, blogs, etc. The last time I remember a Youtuber actually digging and making a new discovery about Onision was when SomeGuy827 exposed Sicesca in 2010. Other than that, all major finding that come to mind from over the years have been mainly exposed by KF, LC, and blogs.

As someone who has spent 9 years running a blog and wiki on Onision for free and never expected credit or pay when people make content off of my research and work, the commentary channels come off as extremely out of touch, ignorant, and entitled. Information and research does not belong to you. Once you put your work out there, anyone can use the information you share. Anyone can use clips of your videos for free under Fair Use. Do Youtubers credit every article, book, wiki page, archive, documentary, etc when they research a topic and make a video on it? Those were all researched and put together by actual living people. No? That’s the norm. Same with TV. Also, I highly doubt the research team for the documentary just watched commentary Youtube videos all day. They were probably digging through the Wayback Machine, archive channels that re-upload Onision’s deleted videos, and police reports. To me it seems they actually got most of their information from Onision’s videos.

Commentary channels are extremely ignorant on the history of “anti-Onision” (for lack of a better term) channels and sites. They act like Repzion was the lone ranger, carrying the weight and research of Onision on his shoulders for 9 years when he was actually one of many small Youtube channels that spoke out against Onision back in the day. He’s just the only one that still has a sizable audience and a majority of his Onision content still on Youtube.

Commentary channels were not the main source of information against Onision for a long, long time. That only happened in the last few years. Facebook pages, Tumblr blogs, KF, LC were each at some point the #1 source for people to find out about Onision’s abuse and the main place they would visit for the latest information about him. Just because critical or informational videos about him now get hundreds of thousands to millions of views does not mean that was always the case or that Youtubers were the ones that finally exposed everything.

To me this should really boil down to is the documentary helpful to victims and the overall narrative of Onision? So far, I believe it is not hurting. People thinking Chris Hansen had more of an impact than he really did does not hurt the victims, it does not hurt the “story” of Onision. It’s such a petty thing to focus on. Yeah, it sucks the small guys get overlooked and don’t get credit, but there are more important things at stake. I am kind of annoyed that commentary channels are discouraging their audience from giving the doc a chance over something pretty much irrelevant to the overall importance of the Onision situation. It’s disappointing their reviews just focus on money and Hansen.

(I want to clarify that the doc claims they are not going to use any of the stories from the victims who didn’t want to participate. So far, they have kept their word. It seems they will only use Shiloh’s personal story about him and in a future episode they will talk about Kai. That was a huge concern of mine going into the show and I am relieved they will leave those women out of it.)

Edit: That last paragraph aged poorly.

🤡 <- me for believing the doc wouldn’t share their stories

[optimisticvibeworld]

What's In It For You...

Excitement!

Good News is Here!

Sisterhood Ohana announces ‘Wétū’ as our Alternative Home Model

Using passion-based architecture our Spiritual Temple design uses free wooden pallets salvage material

Join our environmental advocacy project ‘One Living Green’ as we deliver zero-waste Alternative Homes.

Sisterhood Ohana is teaming up with LoveLiving Wellness to provide an online Truth Within workbook for exploring passion-based architecture to produce your dream come true… 'Design By Heart'.

Once the ‘Design By Heart’ of your Alternative Home is complete and ready for land Sisterhood Hana has announced 'Built With Confidence'.

Sisterhood Ohana is teaming up with Wisdom of Elders’ business incubator, courtesy of the Julie Ellen Robbins Foundation, to provide the empowerment to a select group of Single Mothers… ‘Built With Confidence’.

We hope you stay tuned with our online Sisterhood Ohana Community Events calendar. All events are free and open to all people.

Currently, we are distributing Sisterhood Ohana brochures as invitations to Alternative Housing Community Conversation at Ka’apau Library on possibly Aloha Friday 11 May. Nice and close to Mother’s Day, so all you Single Mothers come on out for a Friday evening and learn what our voice together sounds like. Sign up for our Newsletter and stay tuned for our upcoming Press Release.

Following our event and announcements we are off to build our first project, ‘Wétū’ the Optimistic Vibe Basecamp. Currently under discussion, we are looking at possibly start building ‘Wétū’ the Optimistic Vibe Basecamp at 'Lorna's Garden' in Lapahoehoe.

Next step is to announce to HGTV our proposal presentation for Sisterhood Ohana’s weekly television show ‘Alternative Homes Hawai’i’. To show HGTV our stuff we are hosting a free workshop to the public at Lorna’s Garden to participate in a live demonstration of dismantling wooden pallets without tolls and free how-to construct lessons in building a scaled model of ‘Wétū’ the Optimistic Vibe Basecamp on a trailer pulled by our adorable VW Camper, HOKU.

Other workshops we are including in our series range from hearing from local Alternative Home professional, alternative living enthusiasts, and following each week the building of our Farm To Table Organic Garden and Farm To Table Café design videos and blogs.

Sisterhood Ohana will quickly become the Alternative Home lifestyle experts on HGTV! Stay tuned as we produce our first episode of ‘Alternative Homes Hawai’i’.

Become a Member and enjoy the behind the scene features and benefits of Education For The People. Should you love wellness as much as we do you will really enjoy Meditation For The People. Should music be your thing, toss off your slippahs and join us down the beach for Music For The People.

Business Incubator is purpose behind Julie Ellen Robbins Foundation

Takes some organizing, we are an amazing team of passion hard at work pulling together the tasks, budgets, and schedule to lift ‘Wisdom of Elders’ off the ground. Thanks to the efforts of Jeanne Rasmussen and Dr. Cliff Robbins, President & Chair of the Julie Ellen Robbins Foundation.

As many of you might know, Jeanne Rasmussen is the first member of Sisterhood Ohana to experience the joy of ‘Design By Heart’ passion-based architecture. By exploring her Truth Within with the aid of LoveLiving Wellness online workbook, Jeanne discovered what she needed for her spiritual temple to include to bring her passion to life.

Should you desire to learn more about ‘Wétū’ and the ‘Design By Heart, Built With Confidence’ offered by Sisterhood Ohana please sign up here.

With an introduction by the University of Hawai’i Small Business Development Center in Hilo, we have partnered with Carbonario CPA as our financial management team. And for the very important people we serve, for our employees we have selected ProService Hawai’i as the best in the state to bring full employee benefits to life for us.

Sisterhood Ohana is proud to offer Alternative Homes Hawai’i’ On The Job training. As part of the business incubator that Julie Ellen Robbins Foundation serves, Single Mothers will be provided a Certificate Program as a benefit of their employment from the business incubator.

The Certificate Program is more than just a job, it’s a One Hand Up experience. We are currently interviewing human resource enthusiasts to hire the help we need with our online One Hand Up workbook. The candidate chosen will create brochure for 'Awakening Your Truth Within', define and offfer LoveLiving Awakening Certification Training Program, and publish LoveLiving Truth Within workbook for Employees.

The first Certificate Program project will be to build a scaled model of Jeanne's ‘Wétū’ on Hoku’s trailer. With action from employees building Jeanne’s scaled model we can create ‘Wisdom of Elders' ‘Wétū’ on Land Trust options for ‘Garden In Paradise’.

We are super excited for the land trust ‘ Garden In Paradise’ will be providing Sisterhood Ohana a location to prove the business incubator concept. Then it’s off to the politicians, Tim Richards, Cindy Evans, Russell Rudermen, and the amazing Jen Ruggles, as we discuss 20 acres of state-owned land for Sisterhood Ohana to expand the function of Dr. Cliff Robbins business incubator.

 Help Wanted, $15/hour plus Full Employee Benefits

Help us lift Julie Ellen Robbins Foundation by announcing via a presentation to HGTV that Garden In Paradise is a business incubator proving the concept of Self-Reliance. Invite each of the 1,700+ OV Facebook friends, 1,500+ LinkedIn friends, plus existing social marketing friends (Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, etc). From this that become our Friend we send them a video inviting them to join us in spreading the word… Each Task/Blog described above will be uploaded as daily social media to Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr, and re-directed to Post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Crowdfund

Marketing/Sales Manager prepare individual press releases for Alternative Homes Hawai’i, and ‘Hoku’ VW Camper.

a.       ALL social marketing goes through Patreon for crowdfunding purposes.

b.       To reach our overall Crowdfunding goal each Employee invited to participate in our weekly Newsletter will issue a variety of blog/social marketing campaigns.

c.        Deliver weekly blogs on the following Crowdfunding campaigns:

1.       Kickstarter

2.       We Fund

3.       Seed Invest

4.       Crowd Funder

5.       Microventures

6.       IndieGoGo

7.       Sellaband

8.       EmployeeShare

9.       Go Fund Me

 Social Marketing

The Sales/Marketing Lead will collect each Friday blogs from each Team Member describing an inspiring and uplifting part of their project. Social Marketer will create Newsletter and distribute to each Newsletter member, and each Like/Comment friend:

a)    Newsletter

i)      Issue a weekly Newsletter utilizing a collection of social media from the week’s Postings of Daily Vibe Updates.

b)    Host Weekly Contest

i)      ‘Did Ya Know?’ is a playful engagement whereby we issue an inspiring suggestion each day via Twitter, such as:

ii)     ‘Did Ya Know?’: Adventurously explore a new Gift, follow a hidden passion, allow creativity to lead you, just get started, no expectations

iii)   ‘Did Ya Know?’: Giving is the greatest reward we will ever receive. Give a surprise compliment, watch what comes back, you will receive.

iv)   Issue daily Twitter connecting each of the following platforms to ‘Did Ya Know’;  Alternative Homes Hawai’i, Seven Teachings, LoveLiving, Wisdom of Elders, Ted Talks

v)    Make a contest of the daily engagement by awarding a ‘Did Ya Know?’ T-shirt on each Aloha Friday to the member of our audience that replied to our Twitter with the most inspiring comment of the past week.

c)    Build a Ground Swell

i)      Strength in numbers, show a large and diverse following by giving away ‘Did Ya Know?’ T-shirts (?) to each person we interview for film documentary footage. The questions asked during the interview are strategically arranged so the answer is suitable for social marketing of our message.

d)    Inspire Audience

i)      Inspire those of our Audience coming to Hawai’i for HOKU to joins us before they leave the Mainland by social marketing our video tour guide.

ii)     Inspire those of our Audience not coming to Hawai’i (yet) to follow us like a television show by regularly scheduling the release of our HOKU tour guides as part of a series they can follow our adventures in Hawai’i with stunning photos, exciting stories, and interesting people.

e)    Load up Volunteers with HOKU daily online events with 'View from HOKU':

(1)  People feel happiness from sharing wonderful montages of our social architecture vision because it makes people feel nurtured

(2)  Wisdom of Elders is among many other things, the way we talk and write about Seven Teachings as our voice to be heard

(3)  Honor Ancient Elders by the example 'View From HOKU' sets, very kind, beautiful, and different in a very great way because we touch people’s heart and soul

(4)  Free-spirited HOKU beach lifestyle suits the personality of our audience

(5)  HOKU beach adventures, him wearing cowboy hat, her wearing sarong

(6)  Be all that Optimistic Vibe stands for by posting daily passion-based 'Awakening Your Truth Within' Teachings from 'View from HOKU'

(7)  Be fearless, passion-based (makes it exciting to look forward to a new lifestyle), self-actualization (unlike anything our audience has come across), generous giving lightning rod, positive force, publish videos of pro-environment position

(8)  Publish Music For The People as ‘Awakening’, music and lyrics, and photo's with the colorful guitar and ukulele case, music with songs of very personal lyrics

(9)  Publish passion-based metaphors that are refreshingly unique and different

(10)                 Share an optimistic vision and creativity that is inspiring with wisdom, words, and ideas that are comforting, especially a fabulous day in paradise with HOKU

(11)                 HOKU travels island, action, not words, our optimism and spirit, a breath of fresh air

(12)                 Plein Aire, Meditation & Music, island art, and writing, very prolific, colorful music, text, and movement to highlight our Awakening message from the many wonderful sources of inspiration in your life, churn out quite a bit of different works, we color outside the lines, a lot

(13)                 Inspire audience to love the way we think, as wisdom, power, strength, makes people want to Awaken

(14)                 Tour Guides show the cool passion-based people in Hawai’i that people are glad to meet, people feel happiness

(15)                 HOKU delivers the gorgeous day the island brings to your Awakening

(16)                 HOKU makes it so people can see why OV Team is drawn to Hawai'i

(17)                 People feel they are Awakening to have cool people in Hawai'i in their Ohana that people are glad to meet, people feel happiness

(18)                 HOKU is a spiritual being, HOKU's spirituality is loved by our audience, it represents trust in fate, karma, and synchronicity in our Awakening, seen as the amazing gift we are, truly an angel of Awakening to others

(19)                 It is nice what RJC writes in his journal about Awakening with ‘Just Be Happy’ through RJC’s connection to David

(20)                 People see HOKU with others as excellent team work

(21)                 HOKU delivers the gorgeous day the island brings to our audience's Awakening

(22)                 HOKU makes it so people can see why OV Team is drawn to LoveLiving

(23)                 People feel happiness from HOKU sharing messages, it makes people feel they are Awakening

(24)                 HOKU inspires passion-based alternative lifestyle based on Awakening Your Truth Within with Garden In Paradise’s co-living international approach

(25)                 People are drawn to OV Team's kindness and energy

 Public Relations

Marketing/Sales Manager manages media and press responsibilities:

What makes us newsworthy?

Contact Editors for lead business story

Press Release for HGTV appearance

Develop series of Press Releases

Schedule weekly Press Release

What are other large volume media opportunities are available for us to reach via Internet?

List of Newspaper Contacts

What are other large volume media opportunities are available for us to reach via Radio?

What are other large volume media opportunities are available for us to reach via Magazines?

List of Local Access Television Contacts

What are other large volume media opportunities are available for us to reach via Honolulu TV?

Contact Honolulu television

Press Release

Marketing/Sales Manager works with creative agency producing HGTV presentation and develop a series of press releases on the entire product line and service.

Prepare press releases for each new service introduction and participation in an event, and music performance.

[yeonchi]

2019 In Review

This year marked the start (or rather, a continuation) of my transition into society. It kind of sounds weird when I put it that way, but the truth is that I have much to learn about how society works and that despite all my time on the Internet, I’m gonna have to face up to reality sooner or later. I’ve never really created a name for myself outside of my anime posts, English dub rants, or even my work on preserving the Sea Princesses series, but I still hope to continue posting online at times.

Where previous reviews were released on New Year’s Eve, this year’s review will be released a bit earlier for reasons that I’ll elaborate on in this post. Let’s begin after the break.

Sea Princesses

2019 has been a big year for Sea Princesses. During the first half of the year, I worked on transcribing the episodes and writing plot details for the wiki, since not a lot of work was put into them since the other admin, Liggliluff, joined the wiki in 2015 and gave provision for them. In the second half of the year, I renovated the character pages, adding infoboxes and story involvement (highlights for the major characters) to them. I also created pages for the (named) animals that appeared in the series. Since the wiki is pretty much complete at this point with the addition of transcripts and episode plots, any further work on the wiki from me (in regards to the animated series) is up to whether I feel like doing any.

After six months of seeing no further uploads on the Mr Bean and Friends channel, I caved and decided to shell out some money on a premium account to download the Amazon Prime episodes someone had uploaded to a website. Six months after that, I found that someone had downloaded the episodes themselves and uploaded them to KimCartoon. I know this was way after everything I had done, but better late than never, I suppose. The sad thing was that a few weeks after that, someone reached out to me on the Lost Media Archive saying that they had ripped some of the episodes from ABC iView and put a link to their MEGA folder on 4chan /trash/ and not /co/, which led to me not realising it until he told me about it. Regardless, the split English episodes and Spanish Disney Channel raws are still in my cloud drive folder.

While working on the transcripts for the wiki, I also wrote a review of the series. After watching it, I found that there were quite a few disappointments here and there, but the series wasn’t as bad as I had remembered it. Also, from July to October this year, artist Princess Rainbow Channel did some amazing fanart of each character in the series (including background characters) that trumps everything I had seen before and possibly after. Feel free to check it out here along with my reaction and her response.

Public opinion of the series depends on where you are; in Brazil, people are still bringing it up in their childhood memories on Twitter (usually in response to the question “what were some cartoons you remember from when you were young”), while in Australia, you barely get anyone talking about the series and even if you did, quite a few of them would be people trashing it. I’d seen a couple of Americans who had apparently seen the series as well; aside from the Latin American Spanish version, I have no idea which channel the English version was broadcast or where, otherwise I’d have known by now.

So like I said, the wiki is pretty much complete in terms of the TV series. As for the Princesas do Mar books, I am hoping to cover them in the long term when I have the money and capacity to do so. If you want information about them now, then I’m hoping that someone (mostly from Brazil) will be kind enough to provide transcripts and/or snapshots of them. There won’t be anything about the books on the wiki (with the exception of Marcela and the titles of the books) until I get that information, whether it be from a kind volunteer or by myself, so the entire thing’s pretty much on hold until then.

One thing I realised - the author, Fabio Yabu, recently published the first volume of the Combo Rangers graphic novel for free on WEBTOON. No doubt about it, Sea Princesses would have been more popular if it had received as much love as Combo Rangers. Maybe it’s time that Yabu showed some love to the series after nearly a decade since the last Princesas do Mar book published by Panda Books - I wouldn’t mind seeing rereleases, a graphic novel, ebooks or a compendium of the ten books published by Panda Books (those are the titles that I’m hoping to focus on for the wiki, everything else is irrelevant). With my current situation right now, if I can’t get transcripts or screenshots, then I’d be more happy to spend my money buying ebooks than printed books from Brazil.

Doctor Who

Right at the start of the month, the release date for Doctor Who Series 12 was announced to be on New Year’s Day with subsequent episodes to air on Sundays. Like with Series 11, I’ll be continuing the Thirteenth Doctor reviews after the episode airs. The prelude post will come out later with more details. In fact, it’s because of this that I decided to release this post earlier instead of on New Year’s Eve. That’s pretty much the only reason.

English Dubbed Game News and English dub rants

In case you guys missed it, I’m fully moving on from talking about English dubbed games. I don’t know if anyone ever saw this coming since the end of the feud a couple of years back, but I guess my promise to stand tall back at the end of 2017 must sound ironic now.

As I explained back in September, I’ve lost interest in video games altogether and had conflicting thoughts on how to deal with the occasional toxic comments on my pages. I didn’t mention this back then, but in case you were wondering, no, all the Vic Mignogna stuff did not play a factor in my decision. I’ve never been a fan of him so I don’t care and to be fair, innocent or guilty, he is really only one voice actor. In terms of Koei Tecmo games, he only voiced two characters in Dynasty Warriors 7 and 8 (Jia Xu/Xiahou Ba) along with two characters in Samurai Warriors 3 (Mitsuhide Akechi/Yoshimoto Imagawa), which, I should remind you, never made it onto a Warriors Orochi game. If Koei Tecmo wanted to replace him when the allegations came out, they would have done it already. Ironically however, they did just that with Dynasty Warriors 9, but with the whole cast because of the voice actor strike.

Speaking of the voice actor strike, I’ve noticed something that I never did back when I was writing the rants; a lot of voice actors are part of SAG-AFTRA and I’ve deduced that Japanese game companies are being cheap and cutting corners in localisation (specifically, dubbing) because they don’t want to hire union actors because of the cost (presumably). Additionally, I’ve also read that union actors can’t openly do non-union work, which leads to them being uncredited officially. I know I’ve supported the union during the voice actor strike, but I can’t help but think that I should have criticised them at some point during my rants because their rules for union actors kind of play a factor in this whole debacle of video game dubbing.

I’ve suggested crowdfunding as a way to raise funds to hire (union) voice actors, but in recent years, I’ve seen them go the way of Western game companies and put out season passes and neverending DLC packs. Anyone who defends game companies for being cheap and not dubbing their games has no right to complain about them being greedy in other areas. I kind of saw it coming myself, which didn’t come as a surprise to me. As far as I’ve heard, there aren’t any loot boxes or pay-to-win gimmicks in Japanese games, so I guess I’m still relieved.

As for my opinion on all of this or Japanese game companies, including Koei Tecmo, they haven’t changed much, although I’ve become more and more apathetic towards them given my declining interest in video games. Much as I hate to admit, I’ve gotten back into playing older Warriors games I still have for nostalgia and because I was bored and wanted to procrastinate. This shows that regardless of my thoughts, I’m still grateful towards Koei Tecmo for the games that inspired me in certain aspects of my life.

I’m going to burn a few bridges here and say some fuck yous to a few groups. First of all is a big fuck you to the haters, namely the dub haters, sub purists and opinion-neutrals (that much is obvious). Next up is a fuck you to Japanese game companies for being cheap in localisation (and by extension, even cheaper in DLCs), then a smaller, belated and ironic fuck you to voice actor unions like SAG-AFTRA for making the rules that lead to Japanese game companies being cheap in the first place and enabling them to keep doing it. Finally, a really ironic fuck you goes to my fans and all other fans of English dubbing - the fact that nobody else had made something like EDGN by this point, let alone before I found and joined the page, is really telling of what little you do to promote dub advocacy, let alone not being aware that things like said page or #NoDubNoBuy exist or supporting them by liking or sharing my posts.

Anyway, the current plan is to finish posting whatever games I’ve got in the backlog before New Year’s Eve and then unpublish the page sometime after. I’m not going to delete the page out of respect to its creator, who despite still being an admin on the page, has never posted anything since I joined it. The games list will be kept up through this link for reference. Despite the fuck you I just gave my fans (particularly the 230-so followers on EDGN), I want to thank everyone for the support you gave over the years and invite you to continue following me on my Facebook and Tumblr pages.

The state of social media

I felt that I should address something given YouTube’s new measures regarding COPPA, not forgetting that they literally said that they have no obligation to host content. At the start of last year’s review, I stated that there was always something that managed to affect my Internet life in stupid ways. I haven’t been affected directly this year, but YouTube’s measures have led me to think about what would happen if Facebook were to follow suit, particularly because Tumblr already banned NSFW content at the end of last year and Twitter looks like it’s about to follow suit themselves.

Sure enough, YouTube suddenly updated their harassment policy, which resulted in the Leafy Content Cop being removed as a result of retroactive enforcement. I’ve got nothing much to say about this except that it just proves what we’ve been suspecting all along. To be honest, around the time of the NSFW ban on Tumblr, I was kind of expecting that the parody I did would get flagged ironically, but I guess it never got near the radar, not that there would be any justifiable grounds for it.

Anyone who celebrates censorship or deplatforming with the same argument that “private companies can do whatever they want” should really look at themselves in the mirror because if any of this has proved anything, it’s that anyone can be censored or deplatformed with or without reason whether they’re following the rules or not. You’re all just sitting ducks and you don’t even know it even though you play by their rules in the hope that you won’t be next.

On a more lighter note, I wonder if I should use paragraph gaps instead of horizontal rules in future posts, given that Tumblr removed functionality for the latter in the rich text editor. Sure, I could manually add them in the HTML editor, but it would mean that they would disappear when I switched back to the rich text editor, regardless of whether I saved or not, and it would absolutely kill me to put them back in the exact same spots when I’ve changed something there.

In regards to Hong Kong

Back in August, I made a post about how I nearly got deplatformed from Facebook by the guy behind the feud because of what I said in my repostings of Hong Kong news. I really want to look back and laugh at it now not only because him doing so made him look like a pro-Beijing supporter, but because a pro-Beijing politician he scapegoated as a dub hater in a parody post to evade my criticism of him as such lost his seat in the district council to a pro-democracy newcomer.

In that post, I admitted that I did use some racial slurs in some of my repostings. Given the escalating violence (on both sides, police and protesters) since the start of the protests in June, I’m just gonna come right out and say it - if I could use one word to describe it and the negative reaction from those against the protesters (around the world), it would be the hard-r n-word. I used that word against said pro-Beijing politician because like many other people, I don’t think he’s a good person in any way. He’s advocated violence against pro-democracy supporters, has suspected links to the triads and commended old men in white shirts attacking people in black shirts at a train station following a protest some distance away. If that third thing doesn’t remind you of white (shirt) supremacy, then I don’t know what will. Let’s not forget that at the time, I reposted some news about him not being admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales, making him a “fake lawyer n-word”.

In case there are people who disagree with my (former) use of the slur, I want to acknowledge something here. I know I’m using the slur towards Chinese people instead of its historical target, namely people of African origin, but if it helps move the focus away from the latter, then so be it. If I could find another (preferably stronger) word to describe it, then I would, but at this point, I should be lucky that I’m able to control my anger and not use the actual word itself. If you don’t like how I used the n-word at all, then fuck you, you missed the point, but of course, you’re free to leave.

I don’t want to talk about the finer details or criticisms of any party involved in the protests, but I’m quite amazed with the pro-democracy protesters’ motto of not splitting their movement, not condemning the violence from the radical side and not ratting anyone out. In my interpretation, the radical protesters know that their so-called “violence” is illegal, but the other protesters can’t condemn them because words have barely had any effect on the government and they know that the radical protesters are the only people who have a chance of making the government cave into their demands or expose the true sides of Hong Kong and China’s governments to the international community, because their failure to do so five years ago was because they failed to keep their movement together. I probably don’t know as much about this compared to Hong Kong locals or immigrants, but I wager that at least some of my interpretation is spot on.

Two years ago, I said on my personal Facebook page, “I hope that the future of Hong Kong and its politics will improve for the benefit of the people, especially the younger generations, given everything that has happened up to now”. I know it may seem ironic right now, but I believe that the future will continue to improve for the better, but if it turns to the worst, then I hope that due justice may be served.

At the start of this post, I said that I was undergoing a transition into society. I’ll be finishing my university course and graduating at the end of next year, so at this point, I’m currently out looking for work. A lot of people make it look easy, but in truth, it’s been quite excruciating for me; because of some government benefit thing I signed up for, I have a quota of job applications that I need to send per month. It sounds easy, but after a while, it becomes so hard when you look at a job you think you’ll like and realise that you don’t have the necessary skills or experience for it. All I can say for myself is that I’ll keep praying for guidance and hope that I can find something that fits with my timetable, at least until I graduate.

See you all on the other side in 2020.

[martin9395]

Perks of Live Streaming Cooking Food Abilities on Social Network Operatings Systems

Perks of Live Streaming Cooking Food Abilities on Social Network Operatings Systems

 Real-time streaming occasions makes it possible for various individuals coming from all around the planet link as well as view an occasion going on in genuine opportunity. In latest opportunities even more and also even more streaming systems have actually developed creating it feasible for additional as well as even more folks to receive included in Live streaming at little bit of or even no price. https://livemotgp.stream/

 The increase of real-time transmitting has actually opened up a brand-new outpost for cooking food reveals to discover. Below are actually some of the advantages of Live Streaming Cooking Skills on Social Media:

 Develop Real Time Engagement

 When streaming preparing food abilities on social media, you possess the benefit of being actually capable to communicate straight along with your reader. In The Course Of a lot of Live Streaming food preparation series, there is actually commonly a review area that makes it possible for the target market create commentaries, and also payments while the training class are actually going on unlike in only publishing a video recording online.

 A lot more Focus

 Online streaming food preparation skill-sets offers a kind of necessity to the visitor. A blink as well as you can miss out on an essential particular stated due to the gourmet chef, a little bit of interruption as well as you might overlook when the gourmet chef invested his 'Secret Ingredient'. Many people watching cooking online flow usually tend to become a lot more concentrated as well as much less interruption vulnerable, this produces it simpler to pass all over all relevant information cooperated the online video to the reader

 Actual Time Monitoring

 A lot of Streaming systems permit you to keep track of involvement, there is actually normally an area that provides you details regarding the amount of folks are actually viewing that real-time flow during that time and also whether there is actually a boost in visitors or even a reduction. When you are actually Live streaming occasions having the capacity to observe viewers motions can easily aid provide far better understandings in to target market practices.

 Leveraging on Multiple Platforms

 Some years back, if you wished to relay an online program on numerous networks simultaneously, you will possess needed to pay out a bunch of cash to acquire that performed. Along with the advancement of Live Streaming on Social Media, you can easily today flow your food preparation capabilities on several systems as well as get to a much larger quantity of individuals than you will possess if you had actually streamed on only one system Motogp Stream.

 There has actually been actually a huge boost in the amount of Chef's, Cooks as well as also average folks that have actually required to social media sites to present their cooking food capabilities, the advantages are actually several as well as cost the rate paid for to become capable to get to such lots of people.

 Exactly How Can You Live Stream Your Events on Social Media Platforms

 A lot of the systems offered are actually significantly including making use of different social networking sites systems for immediate real-time streaming all over numerous systems. You are actually speaking about relaying all over Facebook stay, YouTube Live, Twitter stay and also Periscope. That may be performed by utilizing online transmitting systems and also reside streaming tools.

 The form of celebration to become streamed on systems are going to rely on what you like. You can easily display a food preparation competitors, a songs gig, a training treatment, a celebration as well as also a wedding event, which is actually quickly developing in recognition. Naturally, as currently mentioned, there are actually an amount of systems like Live televison broadcasting to Facebook, Go Live Broadcast as well as various other social networking sites systems including Twitter as well as YouTube as well as Periscope Motogp Stream.

 Social networking site websites like Facebook Live are actually progressively being actually favored as a system for going real-time due to the big amount of folks that utilize all of them. Social network websites customers according to the current studies of 2017 are actually suggested to become regarding 2.46 billion around the world. That is actually a significant variety of possible customers for your celebration or perhaps possible assistants.

 One factor is actually that by means of creating your activity reside, one can easily be actually capable to commit along with participants. These participants are actually the ones that are actually not able to go to the real-time celebration in individual however can easily enjoy it by means of the streaming solution.

 Real-time streaming is actually one of the largest technologies that have actually happened coming from the usage of the web. The explanation is actually that there are actually several benefits affiliated along with online video streaming system and also stay video recording streaming solutions.

 Demands for Going Live Using These Services:

 Naturally, besides determining your real-time streaming platform/application and also enrolling, you should possess the following:

 - A high-performance computer/smartphone

- A reputable web link

- A web cam or even electronic camera along with a video recording squeeze tool just in case you are actually utilizing a tool

 As units may be acquired, or even you may make use of the systems which possess several plannings - essential, exceptional or even company plannings. There are actually some systems that give cost-free tests, typically for a duration commonly 1 month. The major negative aspect along with free of cost tests is actually that they are actually confined in regards to attributes as well as features as well as hence you might be actually confined when transmitting.

 Online streaming your activity

 After understanding the relevance, means offered for online streaming and also the needs required, all is actually left behind is actually the activity on its own which is actually straightforward. When you possess a real-time streaming unit, the initial action is actually to link your tool to any type of video recording resource or even to the electronic camera.

 Utilizing Facebook Live Stream Service

 Facebook would certainly at that point ask for accessibility to your electronic camera if is actually the very first opportunity. Any kind of subsequential accessibility to the electronic camera will definitely be actually automated when one is actually to reside flow.

 You might opt for to reside show to your buddies or even community. No one likes awkward themself, you may rely on the real-time streaming for this.

 Along with your mobile phone tool or even personal computer along with an electronic camera, you go to the updates feed on the Facebook application to reside flow. One more choice for real-time streaming is actually by means of your profile page.

 4. Explain your real-time show. Offer it a memorable headline.

 5. Opt for a site, or even a task as well as tag buddies.

 6. Prior to going "Go Live", you have to put together your cam in the ideal direction/view. After establishing the cam, and also Going Live, you can easily at that point communicate along with your visitors.

 7. When carried out, click on "coating". There is actually the choice of uploading the video recording for people to become capable to see it also after the transmitting has actually completed.

 8. Spare your video clip for potential usage; tweaking and also re-watching.

 Find out about The Live Streaming Services for Event Producers

 Fashions are actually opponents to specialists in any sort of industry given that they usually ordinary imagination and also deliver additional two-way very subjective scenery. The foes additionally "attack" the occasion coordinator occupation due to the fact that this occupation is actually therefore depending on individual connections that it is actually specifically susceptible to unjustified presumptions.

 A number of today's activity organisers are actually fairly aware of online streaming, some of one of the most preferred but extremely misconstrued brand-new occasion procedures Motogp Stream. There are actually some fallacies going about in advertising online creating it stayed clear of through some people (although they actually require it).

 There go to minimum 5 fallacies concerning online televison broadcasting that you ought to recognize as well as stay away from!

 Online streaming is actually just dedicated to big activities merely

 This is actually an ignorance just how a team of folks assume that real-time televison broadcasting as well as streaming solutions are actually merely appropriate for large celebrations that enticed no lower than numerous real-time flow programs. This system is actually ideal for building little occasions without must tap the services of a range of typical devices that may be extremely costly.

 Streaming real-time technique has a tendency to minimize the existence of straight site visitors

 This is actually a 2nd misconception based upon a notion that folks will certainly not invest funds if they may expect free of cost. Certainly, this is actually certainly not accurate given that based upon some questionnaires, approximately 30 per-cent of individuals that view online flows of an occasion are going to participate in the exact same occasion straight on the upcoming event. This is actually likewise confirmed due to the simple fact that Live Streaming to Facebook has actually enhanced dramatically in 2014.

 Is this industry costly?

 This is actually merely certainly not accurate as much more social networks systems are actually turning up where they can easily sustain online streaming completely free. The absolute most well-known system nowadays is actually Facebook Live.

 These companies are actually certainly not quite fascinating!

 Obviously this violates several polls that claim individuals usually tend to view online flows as opposed to viewing audios coming from the exact same program.

 After the activity your online video will certainly fade away promptly

 You may still utilize your video clip when your celebration is actually comprehensive. You may take the whole audio and also recycle it.

 What perform occasion manufacturers actually need to have when they relay real-time video recording flows?

 The developers need to have a system that may raise the amount of readers as a lot as feasible and also along with the minimum required development expense feasible. In the method of creating online streaming they additionally possess to think about numerous elements one of which is actually the price.

 What they require to take into consideration prior to opting for an absolute best real-time streaming system?

 CDN: CDN means Content Delivery Network. A CDN enables you to rise to numerous target markets, certainly not restricted to your nation of house.

 Consumer assistance: It is actually most ideal to select that may give advice 24 hrs a time and also 7 times a full week. You carry out certainly not recognize when you will certainly possess concerns.

 In thinking about a greatest online televison broadcasting solution, one needs to have to think about material surveillance, transmission capacity prices, money making & analytics, great consumer assistance and also top-tier CDN.

 Transmission capacity prices: Bandwidth expenses may be very pricey as well as considering that certainly not every system uses the very same expense, you must be actually careful in opting for depending on to your economic potential.

 Information surveillance: Want to stay flow your occasions safely and securely? The material safety and security protects against the misuse of your streaming video recording.

 Money making & analytics: This is actually incredibly valuable if your streaming video recording is really utilized for business objectives.

 Coming from the above illustrations our company may recognize that online streaming is actually unavoidable in modern-day advertising and marketing and also our experts require to take into consideration the above guidelines prior to choosing to tap the services of an online streaming solution.

[theactualrealatticus]

What Can You Get From A Healthy Online Community?

   Yesterday, I found a local Facebook group for my area called "Anytown Plant Growers and Garden" and decided to join the page. I Posted about the Thai Basil plant I've got that didn't look like the rest of them. Spoiler alert. I think its just a genetic mutation that causes an unequal distribution of a pigment called Anthocyanin. Anyway, a woman commented and asked where I had found the seeds in Anytown. I couldn't remember, so instead of sending this poor woman on a wild goose chase, I just told her to private message me if she'd like to take one. All I asked in return was for any old growing containers, or soil, or even plant cuttings from her garden as a trade. She Agreed and came by with her husband to pick them up. It was pretty cool to go from a stranger on the internet in the comments section to a friendly smile and thanks from both sides. That got me thinking. Had I found a healthy internet community? From a keystroke to handshake. Well... The awkward mention of shaking hands (COVID-19).

   What is a "healthy" online community? It seems like its a dumpster fire even in cat videos comments on Youtube. On Facebook, everyone's wall looks like what a 16 and a half-year-old would get for a tattoo of it tattoos for 16 and a half-year-olds were legal. And HOLY SMOKES, that Twitter comment section will get your ass fired from your REAL job after a good night of drinking alone and a phone battery that just won't quit till you seal the deal with that tweet button. So where the fuck is a guy or gal supposed to go? The answer is simple. Just look for it. It is out there man. I once heard that there is more content uploaded to Youtube in just 3 months than the entire history of American television broadcasting content. That's fucking bananas if true, and I had to have heard that over 8 years ago, so imagine what it is today! Start by searching on whatever social media platform you want. I'm a fan of Facebook groups. They have a Facebook Group to suit almost any kind of niche market. I'm talking "Anytown County Model Railroad Builders and Destress Painters Using Burnt Auburn", to "The United Front of International Horse Cosplayers...Anonymous". Or something like that. If YOU like it, so does some other nerd. Just keep digging. If you're living in rural Anytown, find the nearest population and search there. And if you still can't find shit? Start one dummy! Facebook groups are easy-peasy. Try to set up a meet up with other folks from your area that are into the same podcast. Or rally behind a particular horror movie you love. Or some activity! Yoga, hiking, workouts, cars, skateboards, or even yes! Planting and Gardening. See how we've come full circle here? AS LONG AS YOU DO IT SAFELY.

   Avoid using your phone number and email. Meet in public, and don't go alone. Don't give out your address or ANY other personal information about yourself. Use whatever your preferred social media platform's private communication so there's a record of your communication. And ALWAYS tell someone you know and trust the 5 W's. Who are you going to meet? What will you be doing there? Where are you going to meet? When will you return? And finally, What should they do if they cant get a hold of you or you don't come back? The internet can be a VERY dangerous place for someone not paying attention. There are legitimate preditors out there that want to hurt or scam you. But I tend to believe that if you follow the above instructions to the letter, your odds of becoming a victim are pretty low. At the end of the day, Going from Keystroke to handshake may not be your thing, but I tend to think it's borderline magical.

   Even though I was talking shit about the comment sections before, the people you read in there aren't like most of us. Most of the time it's just the loudest, or dumbest that comment. It's always heartbreaking watching someone try to be a voice of reason only to get shit on by both sides of the commenters. The truth is, if you're looking for healthy wholesomeness on the internet, it's out there. But I have to tell you the truth about it.

   It is always clunky and awkward meeting up at first. I'm sure what I described above with that plant transaction seemed clean. But it wasn't. First off, she didn't message me until about 8:30 PM the night before the meeting. Everything was civil and cool until she asked when would be a good time. Due to the current COVID-19 situation, I'm available pretty much ANYTIME. And that's what I said. Anytime. That's when she mentioned that she "Or more likely my husband will meet you at your convenience. IMMEDIATELY I thought to myself that I should have been more clear about how I had meant "anytime...during the day" and now she probably thinks I'm trying to get her to come here tonight and alone or something! This could be my self-consciousness talking, but the way she said it made me feel kinda icky. I tried to defuse the situation with another half-joke, half overthinking the whole thing by saying "No Problem. I'll send you some detailed pictures so you can tell your husband which ones you want. You know, in case he doesn't have as good of an eye as yourself!" Keep in mind, this lady has a profile picture of a close-up bowl of stir fry. I have no idea wtf this lady looks like, her age, nothing. I just wanted to see if I could get the internet equivalent of "trail magic" going on. Help someone out and get a cool plant out of it. Anyway, Re-reading the message, I realized how flirty it could have come off. I felt like a real jughead. I sent the photo the next day and didn't hear back. Fuck. I blew it being awkward. Then at around dinner time I get a message. We're "5 minutes out". After I had taken them around back to see all the plants, we all started jiving. "Where you from? How long have you been in Anytown? Oh, we just love it there. Your Elephant ear looks great!." It was Awesome. It ended with her inviting me over this weekend to take a look in their garden to take some cuttings from all kinds of cool plants. I was glad she didn't bring something small. I showed her my garden and helped her out, and she wants to do the same now. WOW! But if shes a person with good intentions and I'm a person with good intentions, why is meeting a stranger from the internet such an awkward event?

   I think it because we are social creatures. We are practically purpose-built to communicate. Read body language. Looking at the other person in the eye to see if they like what you have to say. Body language and facial expressions have been watered down do a few emoji and a hand full of .gifs. The WAY you say things makes a difference. The inflection in your voice places emphasis on where you intend to. All of that is lost in direct written communication. People weren't meant to communicate through 1's and 0's. People are supposed to communicate through nuance, body language, and with eyes and mouths. When that woman, whose name is Diana by the way, left, it felt like the entire situation had gone over so perfectly. I think the genuinely warm smiles at the end took over my entire memory of the event. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a thriving "Healthy Internet Community" out there for you. But don't mistake that for the real thing. The internet is humanity's greatest accomplishment. Allowing Knowledge to flow into places where it simply could not before. Either through politics or poverty. Allowing the oppressed to be heard. And allowing us to rally and get something done with numbers and in real life. The internet can't change our lives. It's just a tool to we can use to influence action in reality. Or just help out some lady named Diana that hates the taste of previously frozen Thai Basil.

[successbusinesonline-blog]

AdsCrisp Review

Over piece of supporters and specialists agree with the course by which that the video showing is a basic issue really to support the best ROI. So there is no deficiency that administrators need to crush changing over video sorts of development to make entirely approaches, pay speedier.

In any case, making a high staggering video enhancements is obviously not a key endeavor, especially for any person who have no dedication, no idea how to make ones going start at now.

In that limit, today I have to show to you a glimmering new, one-quit thinking structure called AdsCrisp which makes it direct for you to get video degrees of ground for 7 biggest long range better than anything ordinary correspondence oversees in just 3 key advances. It is beat with multi use systems to cover any business quality.

Since you have started to be charmed, for what reason don't you separate my AdsCrisp Review to know more nuances?

AdsCrisp Review-Overview

Shipper:

Saurabh Bhatnagar et al

Thing:

AdsCrisp

Dispatch Date:

2019-Apr-20

Dispatch Time:

11:00 EDT

Inspiration driving limitation:

All Levels

Front-End Price:

$ 47

Quality:

Electronic life

Arrangements:

Especially guarantee

Accreditation:

30 days unhindered endorsing

What Is AdsCrisp?

AdsCrisp is a spic and range, in all cases see creation contraption which makes it major for you to make fulfilling, five star video invigorates inside and out that truly matters 60 seconds for top 37 possible video sees states of all of top 7 no frailty comprehended satisfying correspondence destinations like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest, Linkedin and Twitter.

Feature Details

Today in my AdsCrisp Review, I have to exhibit key piece of AdsCrisp

· AdsCrisp interfaces with you to make pleasingly video upgrades for 7 biggest online life stages (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest, Linkedin and Twitter) in just 3 phases.

· Total Cloud-Based App – It draws in you to work from wherever on the planet

· Cloud-Based Video Storage – You can don't battle to download your own one of a kind create sublime remarkable striking video sorts of headway wherever at whatever point

· Newbie-fulfilling Dashboard

· It is beat with appeared to-change over, confounding improvement positions. In that limit, you will all around likely rapidly make video upgrades that bring minute focal focus interests

· Every Possible 37 Video Ads Placements included

· Use Your Own Brand Colors-It is key for you to re-attempt messages and change establishment shade of video structures in just 1 click.

· Generate retargeting customers related to video plugs. It draws in you to retarget get-together of individuals who start pulling in with your video advance

· Add swipe up, buy truly, download or some other recommendation to make a move wherever as you need.

· It keeps running with an essential library of in excess of 100 music to exhibit changing over impact in your degrees of headway

· Upload your own special uncommon excursion confusing easy to-process music tracks in your watches

· You will wrap up being the EXCLUSIVE part. In like way, you can watch live video sees working from everything considered watched publicizing expert.

· Run Ads to Messenger Ads – This vital part makes it fantastically direct for you to improve your own unique rise evident division list without spending extra effort

· It is beat with more than 100 World's Top Ads Screenshots eBook

· for the length of the day, dependably Call or Email Support

In what purpose of restriction Might It Work?

I believe that the course toward using AdsCrisp is crucial for everyone even youngsters to use.

Stage 1: Select stage and advancement position

AdsCrisp connects with you to see the decision to pick the online life where you have to run the improvement. Starting there forward, you can rapidly pick the condition where you will run the improvement

Stage 2: Get your own one of a kind excellent extraordinary create rising amazing most venerated plans from its speculative of high-changing over headway positions.

Stage 3: Play Around and Render

You can tie your thing's photographs, plot, welcome to make a move, brand shades, scattering music tracks from major music library. Starting now and into the not hard to achieve, you can rapidly zone the business in fitting around 60 seconds.

Seeing something direct is the best way to deal with oversee manage control see something that is hard to see, isn't that so? A little while later you can take a gander at it AdsCrisp Quick Demo Video in its official site with the inspiration driving chart the opportunity to demand of how to use it yourself since it is an abundance of it can do to be showed up in my AdsCrisp Review. Snap

Who Should Use It?

Without a doubt, AdsCrisp Review is encouraged especially for all who are filling in as Product Launchers, Social Media Marketers, Business Owners, Service Providers, Affiliates, SEO pushing manager, MMO and that is just a hint of something capably detectable.

Upsides and bothers

Directors

· 100% Cloud-Based App

· An essential library of Stunning Ad Templates

· Create find in 3 essential advances

· Instant ROI

· Commercial Rights Included

· Converting Ads in just 3 ticks

· Easy-to-diest Music Tracks

· all through each and every day Call or Email Support

· Cloud-Based Video Storage

· Reasonable Price

· Run Ads to Messenger Ads

Cons

I have not found any weight related abundancy of AdsCrisp yet.

Customer experience

In my AdsCrisp Review today, I have to express that AdsCrisp is a focal structure. Really I am on a very basic level awed by a lot of features you have could download on a focal at any rate confusing UI.

I consider this contraption is one-stop structure that gives you veritable results. In the wake of eating up $20,000 in latest 4 months on Facebook Ads, I have to express that Video Ads are an earnest truth for each electronic life appearing at make colossal accomplishment.

Since video advancing has changed the course by which everyone makes on the web and AdsCrisp is the must-have instrument that will request that you develop your business' remuneration and supported viewpoint.

Appraisal and Price

Is AdsCrisp great and what you are keeping for? I believe you will fathom the best reaction certainly following to looking AdsCrisp Review, isn't that so? This is the last time I state about how epic it is.

With AdsCrisp, you will no ifs ands or buts make high-changing over video degrees of advancement in not more than minutes, in that limit, if you are an online business visionary or an electronic actuating virtuoso, I very help you out it an undertaking to buy AdsCrisp.

AdsCrisp costs you $47 for the lifetime get to. It is such a methodology! Regardless, you need to go. After dispatch time, the cost will go up to $97.

On an amazingly fundamental estimation, I believe that everything in my AdsCrisp Review can push you to you settle on incredible position getting decision. I am envisioning your succeeding. Appreciative to you for looking study enterprisingly. See you in my next overview!

[viralnewstime]

Facebook has given another update on measures it took and what more it’s doing in the wake of the livestreamed video of a gun massacre by a far right terrorist who killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Earlier this week the company said the video of the slayings had been viewed less than 200 times during the livestream broadcast itself, and about about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook — with the stream not reported to Facebook until 12 minutes after it had ended.

None of the users who watched the killings unfold on the company’s platform in real-time apparently reported the stream to the company, according to the company.

It also previously said it removed 1.5 million versions of the video from its site in the first 24 hours after the livestream, with 1.2M of those caught at the point of upload — meaning it failed to stop 300,000 uploads at that point. Though as we pointed out in our earlier report those stats are cherrypicked — and only represent the videos Facebook identified. We found other versions of the video still circulating on its platform 12 hours later.

In the wake of the livestreamed terror attack, Facebook has continued to face calls from world leaders to do more to make sure such content cannot be distributed by its platform.

The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern told media yesterday that the video “should not be distributed, available, able to be viewed”, dubbing it: “Horrendous.”

She confirmed Facebook had been in contact with her government but emphasized that in her view the company has not done enough.

She also later told the New Zealand parliament: “We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman.”

We asked Facebook for a response to Ardern’s call for online content platforms to accept publisher-level responsibility for the content they distribute. Its spokesman avoided the question — pointing instead to its latest piece of crisis PR which it titles: “A Further Update on New Zealand Terrorist Attack”.

Here it writes that “people are looking to understand how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the terrorist attack”, saying it therefore “wanted to provide additional information from our review into how our products were used and how we can improve going forward”, before going on to reiterate many of the details it has previously put out.

Including that the massacre video was quickly shared to the 8chan message board by a user posting a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. This was prior to Facebook itself being alerted to the video being broadcast on its platform.

It goes on to imply 8chan was a hub for broader sharing of the video — claiming that: “Forensic identifiers on many of the videos later circulated, such as a bookmarks toolbar visible in a screen recording, match the content posted to 8chan.”

So it’s clearly trying to make sure it’s not singled out by political leaders seek policy responses to the challenge posed by online hate and terrorist content.

Further details it chooses to dwell on in the update is how the AIs it uses to aid the human content review process of flagged Facebook Live streams are in fact tuned to “detect and prioritize videos that are likely to contain suicidal or harmful acts” — with the AI pushing such videos to the top of human moderators’ content heaps, above all the other stuff they also need to look at.

Clearly “harmful acts” were involved in the New Zealand terrorist attack. Yet Facebook’s AI was unable to detected a massacre unfolding in real time. A mass killing involving an automatic weapon slipped right under the robot’s radar.

Facebook explains this by saying it’s because it does not have the training data to create an algorithm that understands it’s looking at mass murder unfolding in real time.

It also implies the task of training an AI to catch such a horrific scenario is exacerbated by the proliferation of videos of first person shooter videogames on online content platforms.

It writes: “[T]his particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems. To achieve that we will need to provide our systems with large volumes of data of this specific kind of content, something which is difficult as these events are thankfully rare. Another challenge is to automatically discern this content from visually similar, innocuous content – for example if thousands of videos from live-streamed video games are flagged by our systems, our reviewers could miss the important real-world videos where we could alert first responders to get help on the ground.”

The videogame element is a chilling detail to consider.

It suggests that a harmful real-life act that mimics a violent video game might just blend into the background, as far as AI moderation systems are concerned; invisible in a sea of innocuous, virtually violent content churned out by gamers. (Which in turn makes you wonder whether the Internet-steeped killer in Christchurch knew — or suspected — that filming the attack from a videogame-esque first person shooter perspective might offer a workaround to dupe Facebook’s imperfect AI watchdogs.)

Facebook post is doubly emphatic that AI is “not perfect” and is “never going to be perfect”.

“People will continue to be part of the equation, whether it’s the people on our team who review content, or people who use our services and report content to us,” it writes, reiterating yet again that it has ~30,000 people working in “safety and security”, about half of whom are doing the sweating hideous toil of content review.

This is, as we’ve said many times before, a fantastically tiny number of human moderators given the vast scale of content continually uploaded to Facebook’s 2.2BN+ user platform.

Moderating Facebook remains a hopeless task because so few humans are doing it.

Moreover AI can’t really help. (Later in the blog post Facebook also writes vaguely that there are “millions” of livestreams broadcast on its platform every day, saying that’s why adding a short broadcast delay — such as TV stations do — wouldn’t at all help catch inappropriate real-time content.)

At the same time Facebook’s update makes it clear how much its ‘safety and security’ systems rely on unpaid humans too: Aka Facebook users taking the time and mind to report harmful content.

Some might say that’s an excellent argument for a social media tax.

The fact Facebook did not get a single report of the Christchurch massacre livestream while the terrorist attack unfolded meant the content was not prioritized for “accelerated review” by its systems, which it explains prioritize reports attached to videos that are still being streamed — because “if there is real-world harm we have a better chance to alert first responders and try to get help on the ground”.

Though it also says it expanded its acceleration logic last year to “also cover videos that were very recently live, in the past few hours”.

But again it did so with a focus on suicide prevention — meaning the Christchurch video would only have been flagged for acceleration review in the hours after the stream ended if it had been reported as suicide content.

So the ‘problem’ is that Facebook’s systems don’t prioritize mass murder.

“In [the first] report, and a number of subsequent reports, the video was reported for reasons other than suicide and as such it was handled according to different procedures,” it writes, adding it’s “learning from this” and “re-examining our reporting logic and experiences for both live and recently live videos in order to expand the categories that would get to accelerated review”.

No shit.

Facebook also discusses its failure to stop versions of the massacre video from resurfacing on its platform, having been — as it tells it — “so effective” at preventing the spread of propaganda from terrorist organizations like ISIS with the use of image and video matching tech.

It claims  its tech was outfoxed in this case by “bad actors” creating many different edited versions of the video to try to thwart filters, as well as by the various ways “a broader set of people distributed the video and unintentionally made it harder to match copies”.

So, essentially, the ‘virality’ of the awful event created too many versions of the video for Facebook’s matching tech to cope.

“Some people may have seen the video on a computer or TV, filmed that with a phone and sent it to a friend. Still others may have watched the video on their computer, recorded their screen and passed that on. Websites and pages, eager to get attention from people seeking out the video, re-cut and re-recorded the video into various formats,” it writes, in what reads like another attempt to spread blame for the amplification role that its 2.2BN+ user platform plays.

In all Facebook says it found and blocked more than 800 visually-distinct variants of the video that were circulating on its platform.

It reveals it resorted to using audio matching technology to try to detect videos that had been visually altered but had the same soundtrack. And again claims it’s trying to learn and come up with better techniques for blocking content that’s being re-shared widely by individuals as well as being rebroadcast by mainstream media. So any kind of major news event, basically.

In a section on next steps Facebook says improving its matching technology to prevent the spread of inappropriate viral videos being spread is its priority.

But audio matching clearly won’t help if malicious re-sharers just both re-edit the visuals and switch the soundtrack too in future.

It also concedes it needs to be able to react faster “to this kind of content on a live streamed video” — though it has no firm fixes to offer there either, saying only that it will explore “whether and how AI can be used for these cases, and how to get to user reports faster”.

Another priority it claims among its “next steps” is fighting “hate speech of all kinds on our platform”, saying this includes more than 200 white supremacist organizations globally “whose content we are removing through proactive detection technology”.

It’s glossing over plenty of criticism on that front too though — including research that suggests banned far right hate preachers are easily able to evade detection on its platform. Plus its own foot-dragging on shutting down far right extremists. (Facebook only finally banned one infamous UK far right activist last month, for example.)

In its last PR sop, Facebook says it’s committed to expanding its industry collaboration to tackle hate speech via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which formed in 2017 as platforms were being squeezed by politicians to scrub ISIS content — in a collective attempt to stave off tighter regulation.

“We are experimenting with sharing URLs systematically rather than just content hashes, are working to address the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online, and intend to refine and improve our ability to collaborate in a crisis,” Facebook writes now, offering more vague experiments as politicians call for content responsibility.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2JtzEq1

[sheminecrafts]

Facebook’s AI couldn’t spot mass murder

Facebook has given another update on measures it took and what more it’s doing in the wake of the livestreamed video of a gun massacre by a far right terrorist who killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Earlier this week the company said the video of the slayings had been viewed less than 200 times during the livestream broadcast itself, and about about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook — with the stream not reported to Facebook until 12 minutes after it had ended.

None of the users who watched the killings unfold on the company’s platform in real-time apparently reported the stream to the company, according to the company.

It also previously said it removed 1.5 million versions of the video from its site in the first 24 hours after the livestream, with 1.2M of those caught at the point of upload — meaning it failed to stop 300,000 uploads at that point. Though as we pointed out in our earlier report those stats are cherrypicked — and only represent the videos Facebook identified. We found other versions of the video still circulating on its platform 12 hours later.

In the wake of the livestreamed terror attack, Facebook has continued to face calls from world leaders to do more to make sure such content cannot be distributed by its platform.

The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern told media yesterday that the video “should not be distributed, available, able to be viewed”, dubbing it: “Horrendous.”

She confirmed Facebook had been in contact with her government but emphasized that in her view the company has not done enough.

She also later told the New Zealand parliament: “We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman.”

We asked Facebook for a response to Ardern’s call for online content platforms to accept publisher-level responsibility for the content they distribute. Its spokesman avoided the question — pointing instead to its latest piece of crisis PR which it titles: “A Further Update on New Zealand Terrorist Attack”.

Here it writes that “people are looking to understand how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the terrorist attack”, saying it therefore “wanted to provide additional information from our review into how our products were used and how we can improve going forward”, before going on to reiterate many of the details it has previously put out.

Including that the massacre video was quickly shared to the 8chan message board by a user posting a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. This was prior to Facebook itself being alerted to the video being broadcast on its platform.

It goes on to imply 8chan was a hub for broader sharing of the video — claiming that: “Forensic identifiers on many of the videos later circulated, such as a bookmarks toolbar visible in a screen recording, match the content posted to 8chan.”

So it’s clearly trying to make sure it’s not singled out by political leaders seek policy responses to the challenge posed by online hate and terrorist content.

Further details it chooses to dwell on in the update is how the AIs it uses to aid the human content review process of flagged Facebook Live streams are in fact tuned to “detect and prioritize videos that are likely to contain suicidal or harmful acts” — with the AI pushing such videos to the top of human moderators’ content heaps, above all the other stuff they also need to look at.

Clearly “harmful acts” were involved in the New Zealand terrorist attack. Yet Facebook’s AI was unable to detected a massacre unfolding in real time. A mass killing involving an automatic weapon slipped right under the robot’s radar.

Facebook explains this by saying it’s because it does not have the training data to create an algorithm that understands it’s looking at mass murder unfolding in real time.

It also implies the task of training an AI to catch such a horrific scenario is exacerbated by the proliferation of videos of first person shooter videogames on online content platforms.

It writes: “[T]his particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems. To achieve that we will need to provide our systems with large volumes of data of this specific kind of content, something which is difficult as these events are thankfully rare. Another challenge is to automatically discern this content from visually similar, innocuous content – for example if thousands of videos from live-streamed video games are flagged by our systems, our reviewers could miss the important real-world videos where we could alert first responders to get help on the ground.”

The videogame element is a chilling detail to consider.

It suggests that a harmful real-life act that mimics a violent video game might just blend into the background, as far as AI moderation systems are concerned; invisible in a sea of innocuous, virtually violent content churned out by gamers. (Which in turn makes you wonder whether the Internet-steeped killer in Christchurch knew — or suspected — that filming the attack from a videogame-esque first person shooter perspective might offer a workaround to dupe Facebook’s imperfect AI watchdogs.)

Facebook post is doubly emphatic that AI is “not perfect” and is “never going to be perfect”.

“People will continue to be part of the equation, whether it’s the people on our team who review content, or people who use our services and report content to us,” it writes, reiterating yet again that it has ~30,000 people working in “safety and security”, about half of whom are doing the sweating hideous toil of content review.

This is, as we’ve said many times before, a fantastically tiny number of human moderators given the vast scale of content continually uploaded to Facebook’s 2.2BN+ user platform.

Moderating Facebook remains a hopeless task because so few humans are doing it.

Moreover AI can’t really help. (Later in the blog post Facebook also writes vaguely that there are “millions” of livestreams broadcast on its platform every day, saying that’s why adding a short broadcast delay — such as TV stations do — wouldn’t at all help catch inappropriate real-time content.)

At the same time Facebook’s update makes it clear how much its ‘safety and security’ systems rely on unpaid humans too: Aka Facebook users taking the time and mind to report harmful content.

Some might say that’s an excellent argument for a social media tax.

The fact Facebook did not get a single report of the Christchurch massacre livestream while the terrorist attack unfolded meant the content was not prioritized for “accelerated review” by its systems, which it explains prioritize reports attached to videos that are still being streamed — because “if there is real-world harm we have a better chance to alert first responders and try to get help on the ground”.

Though it also says it expanded its acceleration logic last year to “also cover videos that were very recently live, in the past few hours”.

But again it did so with a focus on suicide prevention — meaning the Christchurch video would only have been flagged for acceleration review in the hours after the stream ended if it had been reported as suicide content.

So the ‘problem’ is that Facebook’s systems don’t prioritize mass murder.

“In [the first] report, and a number of subsequent reports, the video was reported for reasons other than suicide and as such it was handled according to different procedures,” it writes, adding it’s “learning from this” and “re-examining our reporting logic and experiences for both live and recently live videos in order to expand the categories that would get to accelerated review”.

No shit.

Facebook also discusses its failure to stop versions of the massacre video from resurfacing on its platform, having been — as it tells it — “so effective” at preventing the spread of propaganda from terrorist organizations like ISIS with the use of image and video matching tech.

It claims  its tech was outfoxed in this case by “bad actors” creating many different edited versions of the video to try to thwart filters, as well as by the various ways “a broader set of people distributed the video and unintentionally made it harder to match copies”.

So, essentially, the ‘virality’ of the awful event created too many versions of the video for Facebook’s matching tech to cope.

“Some people may have seen the video on a computer or TV, filmed that with a phone and sent it to a friend. Still others may have watched the video on their computer, recorded their screen and passed that on. Websites and pages, eager to get attention from people seeking out the video, re-cut and re-recorded the video into various formats,” it writes, in what reads like another attempt to spread blame for the amplification role that its 2.2BN+ user platform plays.

In all Facebook says it found and blocked more than 800 visually-distinct variants of the video that were circulating on its platform.

It reveals it resorted to using audio matching technology to try to detect videos that had been visually altered but had the same soundtrack. And again claims it’s trying to learn and come up with better techniques for blocking content that’s being re-shared widely by individuals as well as being rebroadcast by mainstream media. So any kind of major news event, basically.

In a section on next steps Facebook says improving its matching technology to prevent the spread of inappropriate viral videos being spread is its priority.

But audio matching clearly won’t help if malicious re-sharers just both re-edit the visuals and switch the soundtrack too in future.

It also concedes it needs to be able to react faster “to this kind of content on a live streamed video” — though it has no firm fixes to offer there either, saying only that it will explore “whether and how AI can be used for these cases, and how to get to user reports faster”.

Another priority it claims among its “next steps” is fighting “hate speech of all kinds on our platform”, saying this includes more than 200 white supremacist organizations globally “whose content we are removing through proactive detection technology”.

It’s glossing over plenty of criticism on that front too though — including research that suggests banned far right hate preachers are easily able to evade detection on its platform. Plus its own foot-dragging on shutting down far right extremists. (Facebook only finally banned one infamous UK far right activist last month, for example.)

In its last PR sop, Facebook says it’s committed to expanding its industry collaboration to tackle hate speech via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which formed in 2017 as platforms were being squeezed by politicians to scrub ISIS content — in a collective attempt to stave off tighter regulation.

“We are experimenting with sharing URLs systematically rather than just content hashes, are working to address the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online, and intend to refine and improve our ability to collaborate in a crisis,” Facebook writes now, offering more vague experiments as politicians call for content responsibility.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2Fn6XWq via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

Facebook has given another update on measures it took and what more it’s doing in the wake of the livestreamed video of a gun massacre by a far right terrorist who killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Earlier this week the company said the video of the slayings had been viewed less than 200 times during the livestream broadcast itself, and about about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook — with the stream not reported to Facebook until 12 minutes after it had ended.

None of the users who watched the killings unfold on the company’s platform in real-time apparently reported the stream to the company, according to the company.

It also previously said it removed 1.5 million versions of the video from its site in the first 24 hours after the livestream, with 1.2M of those caught at the point of upload — meaning it failed to stop 300,000 uploads at that point. Though as we pointed out in our earlier report those stats are cherrypicked — and only represent the videos Facebook identified. We found other versions of the video still circulating on its platform 12 hours later.

In the wake of the livestreamed terror attack, Facebook has continued to face calls from world leaders to do more to make sure such content cannot be distributed by its platform.

The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern told media yesterday that the video “should not be distributed, available, able to be viewed”, dubbing it: “Horrendous.”

She confirmed Facebook had been in contact with her government but emphasized that in her view the company has not done enough.

She also later told the New Zealand parliament: “We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman.”

We asked Facebook for a response to Ardern’s call for online content platforms to accept publisher-level responsibility for the content they distribute. Its spokesman avoided the question — pointing instead to its latest piece of crisis PR which it titles: “A Further Update on New Zealand Terrorist Attack”.

Here it writes that “people are looking to understand how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the terrorist attack”, saying it therefore “wanted to provide additional information from our review into how our products were used and how we can improve going forward”, before going on to reiterate many of the details it has previously put out.

Including that the massacre video was quickly shared to the 8chan message board by a user posting a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. This was prior to Facebook itself being alerted to the video being broadcast on its platform.

It goes on to imply 8chan was a hub for broader sharing of the video — claiming that: “Forensic identifiers on many of the videos later circulated, such as a bookmarks toolbar visible in a screen recording, match the content posted to 8chan.”

So it’s clearly trying to make sure it’s not singled out by political leaders seek policy responses to the challenge posed by online hate and terrorist content.

Further details it chooses to dwell on in the update is how the AIs it uses to aid the human content review process of flagged Facebook Live streams are in fact tuned to “detect and prioritize videos that are likely to contain suicidal or harmful acts” — with the AI pushing such videos to the top of human moderators’ content heaps, above all the other stuff they also need to look at.

Clearly “harmful acts” were involved in the New Zealand terrorist attack. Yet Facebook’s AI was unable to detected a massacre unfolding in real time. A mass killing involving an automatic weapon slipped right under the robot’s radar.

Facebook explains this by saying it’s because it does not have the training data to create an algorithm that understands it’s looking at mass murder unfolding in real time.

It also implies the task of training an AI to catch such a horrific scenario is exacerbated by the proliferation of videos of first person shooter videogames on online content platforms.

It writes: “[T]his particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems. To achieve that we will need to provide our systems with large volumes of data of this specific kind of content, something which is difficult as these events are thankfully rare. Another challenge is to automatically discern this content from visually similar, innocuous content – for example if thousands of videos from live-streamed video games are flagged by our systems, our reviewers could miss the important real-world videos where we could alert first responders to get help on the ground.”

The videogame element is a chilling detail to consider.

It suggests that a harmful real-life act that mimics a violent video game might just blend into the background, as far as AI moderation systems are concerned; invisible in a sea of innocuous, virtually violent content churned out by gamers. (Which in turn makes you wonder whether the Internet-steeped killer in Christchurch knew — or suspected — that filming the attack from a videogame-esque first person shooter perspective might offer a workaround to dupe Facebook’s imperfect AI watchdogs.)

Facebook post is doubly emphatic that AI is “not perfect” and is “never going to be perfect”.

“People will continue to be part of the equation, whether it’s the people on our team who review content, or people who use our services and report content to us,” it writes, reiterating yet again that it has ~30,000 people working in “safety and security”, about half of whom are doing the sweating hideous toil of content review.

This is, as we’ve said many times before, a fantastically tiny number of human moderators given the vast scale of content continually uploaded to Facebook’s 2.2BN+ user platform.

Moderating Facebook remains a hopeless task because so few humans are doing it.

Moreover AI can’t really help. (Later in the blog post Facebook also writes vaguely that there are “millions” of livestreams broadcast on its platform every day, saying that’s why adding a short broadcast delay — such as TV stations do — wouldn’t at all help catch inappropriate real-time content.)

At the same time Facebook’s update makes it clear how much its ‘safety and security’ systems rely on unpaid humans too: Aka Facebook users taking the time and mind to report harmful content.

Some might say that’s an excellent argument for a social media tax.

The fact Facebook did not get a single report of the Christchurch massacre livestream while the terrorist attack unfolded meant the content was not prioritized for “accelerated review” by its systems, which it explains prioritize reports attached to videos that are still being streamed — because “if there is real-world harm we have a better chance to alert first responders and try to get help on the ground”.

Though it also says it expanded its acceleration logic last year to “also cover videos that were very recently live, in the past few hours”.

But again it did so with a focus on suicide prevention — meaning the Christchurch video would only have been flagged for acceleration review in the hours after the stream ended if it had been reported as suicide content.

So the ‘problem’ is that Facebook’s systems don’t prioritize mass murder.

“In [the first] report, and a number of subsequent reports, the video was reported for reasons other than suicide and as such it was handled according to different procedures,” it writes, adding it’s “learning from this” and “re-examining our reporting logic and experiences for both live and recently live videos in order to expand the categories that would get to accelerated review”.

No shit.

Facebook also discusses its failure to stop versions of the massacre video from resurfacing on its platform, having been — as it tells it — “so effective” at preventing the spread of propaganda from terrorist organizations like ISIS with the use of image and video matching tech.

It claims  its tech was outfoxed in this case by “bad actors” creating many different edited versions of the video to try to thwart filters, as well as by the various ways “a broader set of people distributed the video and unintentionally made it harder to match copies”.

So, essentially, the ‘virality’ of the awful event created too many versions of the video for Facebook’s matching tech to cope.

“Some people may have seen the video on a computer or TV, filmed that with a phone and sent it to a friend. Still others may have watched the video on their computer, recorded their screen and passed that on. Websites and pages, eager to get attention from people seeking out the video, re-cut and re-recorded the video into various formats,” it writes, in what reads like another attempt to spread blame for the amplification role that its 2.2BN+ user platform plays.

In all Facebook says it found and blocked more than 800 visually-distinct variants of the video that were circulating on its platform.

It reveals it resorted to using audio matching technology to try to detect videos that had been visually altered but had the same soundtrack. And again claims it’s trying to learn and come up with better techniques for blocking content that’s being re-shared widely by individuals as well as being rebroadcast by mainstream media. So any kind of major news event, basically.

In a section on next steps Facebook says improving its matching technology to prevent the spread of inappropriate viral videos being spread is its priority.

But audio matching clearly won’t help if malicious re-sharers just both re-edit the visuals and switch the soundtrack too in future.

It also concedes it needs to be able to react faster “to this kind of content on a live streamed video” — though it has no firm fixes to offer there either, saying only that it will explore “whether and how AI can be used for these cases, and how to get to user reports faster”.

Another priority it claims among its “next steps” is fighting “hate speech of all kinds on our platform”, saying this includes more than 200 white supremacist organizations globally “whose content we are removing through proactive detection technology”.

It’s glossing over plenty of criticism on that front too though — including research that suggests banned far right hate preachers are easily able to evade detection on its platform. Plus its own foot-dragging on shutting down far right extremists. (Facebook only finally banned one infamous UK far right activist last month, for example.)

In its last PR sop, Facebook says it’s committed to expanding its industry collaboration to tackle hate speech via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which formed in 2017 as platforms were being squeezed by politicians to scrub ISIS content — in a collective attempt to stave off tighter regulation.

“We are experimenting with sharing URLs systematically rather than just content hashes, are working to address the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online, and intend to refine and improve our ability to collaborate in a crisis,” Facebook writes now, offering more vague experiments as politicians call for content responsibility.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2JtzEq1 Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[toomanysinks]

Facebook’s AI couldn’t spot mass murder

Facebook has given another update on measures it took and what more it’s doing in the wake of the livestreamed video of a gun massacre by a far right terrorist who killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Earlier this week the company said the video of the slayings had been viewed less than 200 times during the livestream broadcast itself, and about about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook — with the stream not reported to Facebook until 12 minutes after it had ended.

None of the users who watched the killings unfold on the company’s platform in real-time apparently reported the stream to the company, according to the company.

It also previously said it removed 1.5 million versions of the video from its site in the first 24 hours after the livestream, with 1.2M of those caught at the point of upload — meaning it failed to stop 300,000 uploads at that point. Though as we pointed out in our earlier report those stats are cherrypicked — and only represent the videos Facebook identified. We found other versions of the video still circulating on its platform 12 hours later.

In the wake of the livestreamed terror attack, Facebook has continued to face calls from world leaders to do more to make sure such content cannot be distributed by its platform.

The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern told media yesterday that the video “should not be distributed, available, able to be viewed”, dubbing it: “Horrendous.”

She confirmed Facebook had been in contact with her government but emphasized that in her view the company has not done enough.

She also later told the New Zealand parliament: “We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman.”

We asked Facebook for a response to Ardern’s call for online content platforms to accept publisher-level responsibility for the content they distribute. Its spokesman avoided the question — pointing instead to its latest piece of crisis PR which it titles: “A Further Update on New Zealand Terrorist Attack”.

Here it writes that “people are looking to understand how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the terrorist attack”, saying it therefore “wanted to provide additional information from our review into how our products were used and how we can improve going forward”, before going on to reiterate many of the details it has previously put out.

Including that the massacre video was quickly shared to the 8chan message board by a user posting a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. This was prior to Facebook itself being alerted to the video being broadcast on its platform.

It goes on to imply 8chan was a hub for broader sharing of the video — claiming that: “Forensic identifiers on many of the videos later circulated, such as a bookmarks toolbar visible in a screen recording, match the content posted to 8chan.”

So it’s clearly trying to make sure it’s not singled out by political leaders seek policy responses to the challenge posed by online hate and terrorist content.

Further details it chooses to dwell on in the update is how the AIs it uses to aid the human content review process of flagged Facebook Live streams are in fact tuned to “detect and prioritize videos that are likely to contain suicidal or harmful acts” — with the AI pushing such videos to the top of human moderators’ content heaps, above all the other stuff they also need to look at.

Clearly “harmful acts” were involved in the New Zealand terrorist attack. Yet Facebook’s AI was unable to detected a massacre unfolding in real time. A mass killing involving an automatic weapon slipped right under the robot’s radar.

Facebook explains this by saying it’s because it does not have the training data to create an algorithm that understands it’s looking at mass murder unfolding in real time.

It also implies the task of training an AI to catch such a horrific scenario is exacerbated by the proliferation of videos of first person shooter videogames on online content platforms.

It writes: “[T]his particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems. To achieve that we will need to provide our systems with large volumes of data of this specific kind of content, something which is difficult as these events are thankfully rare. Another challenge is to automatically discern this content from visually similar, innocuous content – for example if thousands of videos from live-streamed video games are flagged by our systems, our reviewers could miss the important real-world videos where we could alert first responders to get help on the ground.”

The videogame element is a chilling detail to consider.

It suggests that a harmful real-life act that mimics a violent video game might just blend into the background, as far as AI moderation systems are concerned; invisible in a sea of innocuous, virtually violent content churned out by gamers. (Which in turn makes you wonder whether the Internet-steeped killer in Christchurch knew — or suspected — that filming the attack from a videogame-esque first person shooter perspective might offer a workaround to dupe Facebook’s imperfect AI watchdogs.)

Facebook post is doubly emphatic that AI is “not perfect” and is “never going to be perfect”.

“People will continue to be part of the equation, whether it’s the people on our team who review content, or people who use our services and report content to us,” it writes, reiterating yet again that it has ~30,000 people working in “safety and security”, about half of whom are doing the sweating hideous toil of content review.

This is, as we’ve said many times before, a fantastically tiny number of human moderators given the vast scale of content continually uploaded to Facebook’s 2.2BN+ user platform.

Moderating Facebook remains a hopeless task because so few humans are doing it.

Moreover AI can’t really help. (Later in the blog post Facebook also writes vaguely that there are “millions” of livestreams broadcast on its platform every day, saying that’s why adding a short broadcast delay — such as TV stations do — wouldn’t at all help catch inappropriate real-time content.)

At the same time Facebook’s update makes it clear how much its ‘safety and security’ systems rely on unpaid humans too: Aka Facebook users taking the time and mind to report harmful content.

Some might say that’s an excellent argument for a social media tax.

The fact Facebook did not get a single report of the Christchurch massacre livestream while the terrorist attack unfolded meant the content was not prioritized for “accelerated review” by its systems, which it explains prioritize reports attached to videos that are still being streamed — because “if there is real-world harm we have a better chance to alert first responders and try to get help on the ground”.

Though it also says it expanded its acceleration logic last year to “also cover videos that were very recently live, in the past few hours”.

But again it did so with a focus on suicide prevention — meaning the Christchurch video would only have been flagged for acceleration review in the hours after the stream ended if it had been reported as suicide content.

So the ‘problem’ is that Facebook’s systems don’t prioritize mass murder.

“In [the first] report, and a number of subsequent reports, the video was reported for reasons other than suicide and as such it was handled according to different procedures,” it writes, adding it’s “learning from this” and “re-examining our reporting logic and experiences for both live and recently live videos in order to expand the categories that would get to accelerated review”.

No shit.

Facebook also discusses its failure to stop versions of the massacre video from resurfacing on its platform, having been — as it tells it — “so effective” at preventing the spread of propaganda from terrorist organizations like ISIS with the use of image and video matching tech.

It claims  its tech was outfoxed in this case by “bad actors” creating many different edited versions of the video to try to thwart filters, as well as by the various ways “a broader set of people distributed the video and unintentionally made it harder to match copies”.

So, essentially, the ‘virality’ of the awful event created too many versions of the video for Facebook’s matching tech to cope.

“Some people may have seen the video on a computer or TV, filmed that with a phone and sent it to a friend. Still others may have watched the video on their computer, recorded their screen and passed that on. Websites and pages, eager to get attention from people seeking out the video, re-cut and re-recorded the video into various formats,” it writes, in what reads like another attempt to spread blame for the amplification role that its 2.2BN+ user platform plays.

In all Facebook says it found and blocked more than 800 visually-distinct variants of the video that were circulating on its platform.

It reveals it resorted to using audio matching technology to try to detect videos that had been visually altered but had the same soundtrack. And again claims it’s trying to learn and come up with better techniques for blocking content that’s being re-shared widely by individuals as well as being rebroadcast by mainstream media. So any kind of major news event, basically.

In a section on next steps Facebook says improving its matching technology to prevent the spread of inappropriate viral videos being spread is its priority.

But audio matching clearly won’t help if malicious re-sharers just both re-edit the visuals and switch the soundtrack too in future.

It also concedes it needs to be able to react faster “to this kind of content on a live streamed video” — though it has no firm fixes to offer there either, saying only that it will explore “whether and how AI can be used for these cases, and how to get to user reports faster”.

Another priority it claims among its “next steps” is fighting “hate speech of all kinds on our platform”, saying this includes more than 200 white supremacist organizations globally “whose content we are removing through proactive detection technology”.

It’s glossing over plenty of criticism on that front too though — including research that suggests banned far right hate preachers are easily able to evade detection on its platform. Plus its own foot-dragging on shutting down far right extremists. (Facebook only finally banned one infamous UK far right activist last month, for example.)

In its last PR sop, Facebook says it’s committed to expanding its industry collaboration to tackle hate speech via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which formed in 2017 as platforms were being squeezed by politicians to scrub ISIS content — in a collective attempt to stave off tighter regulation.

“We are experimenting with sharing URLs systematically rather than just content hashes, are working to address the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online, and intend to refine and improve our ability to collaborate in a crisis,” Facebook writes now, offering more vague experiments as politicians call for content responsibility.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/21/facebooks-ai-couldnt-spot-mass-murder/

[fmservers]

Facebook’s AI couldn’t spot mass murder

Facebook has given another update on measures it took and what more it’s doing in the wake of the livestreamed video of a gun massacre by a far right terrorist who killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Earlier this week the company said the video of the slayings had been viewed less than 200 times during the livestream broadcast itself, and about about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook — with the stream not reported to Facebook until 12 minutes after it had ended.

None of the users who watched the killings unfold on the company’s platform in real-time apparently reported the stream to the company, according to the company.

It also previously said it removed 1.5 million versions of the video from its site in the first 24 hours after the livestream, with 1.2M of those caught at the point of upload — meaning it failed to stop 300,000 uploads at that point. Though as we pointed out in our earlier report those stats are cherrypicked — and only represent the videos Facebook identified. We found other versions of the video still circulating on its platform 12 hours later.

In the wake of the livestreamed terror attack, Facebook has continued to face calls from world leaders to do more to make sure such content cannot be distributed by its platform.

The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern told media yesterday that the video “should not be distributed, available, able to be viewed”, dubbing it: “Horrendous.”

She confirmed Facebook had been in contact with her government but emphasized that in her view the company has not done enough.

She also later told the New Zealand parliament: “We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman.”

We asked Facebook for a response to Ardern’s call for online content platforms to accept publisher-level responsibility for the content they distribute. Its spokesman avoided the question — pointing instead to its latest piece of crisis PR which it titles: “A Further Update on New Zealand Terrorist Attack”.

Here it writes that “people are looking to understand how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the terrorist attack”, saying it therefore “wanted to provide additional information from our review into how our products were used and how we can improve going forward”, before going on to reiterate many of the details it has previously put out.

Including that the massacre video was quickly shared to the 8chan message board by a user posting a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. This was prior to Facebook itself being alerted to the video being broadcast on its platform.

It goes on to imply 8chan was a hub for broader sharing of the video — claiming that: “Forensic identifiers on many of the videos later circulated, such as a bookmarks toolbar visible in a screen recording, match the content posted to 8chan.”

So it’s clearly trying to make sure it’s not singled out by political leaders seek policy responses to the challenge posed by online hate and terrorist content.

Further details it chooses to dwell on in the update is how the AIs it uses to aid the human content review process of flagged Facebook Live streams are in fact tuned to “detect and prioritize videos that are likely to contain suicidal or harmful acts” — with the AI pushing such videos to the top of human moderators’ content heaps, above all the other stuff they also need to look at.

Clearly “harmful acts” were involved in the New Zealand terrorist attack. Yet Facebook’s AI was unable to detected a massacre unfolding in real time. A mass killing involving an automatic weapon slipped right under the robot’s radar.

Facebook explains this by saying it’s because it does not have the training data to create an algorithm that understands it’s looking at mass murder unfolding in real time.

It also implies the task of training an AI to catch such a horrific scenario is exacerbated by the proliferation of videos of first person shooter videogames on online content platforms.

It writes: “[T]his particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems. To achieve that we will need to provide our systems with large volumes of data of this specific kind of content, something which is difficult as these events are thankfully rare. Another challenge is to automatically discern this content from visually similar, innocuous content – for example if thousands of videos from live-streamed video games are flagged by our systems, our reviewers could miss the important real-world videos where we could alert first responders to get help on the ground.”

The videogame element is a chilling detail to consider.

It suggests that a harmful real-life act that mimics a violent video game might just blend into the background, as far as AI moderation systems are concerned; invisible in a sea of innocuous, virtually violent content churned out by gamers. (Which in turn makes you wonder whether the Internet-steeped killer in Christchurch knew — or suspected — that filming the attack from a videogame-esque first person shooter perspective might offer a workaround to dupe Facebook’s imperfect AI watchdogs.)

Facebook post is doubly emphatic that AI is “not perfect” and is “never going to be perfect”.

“People will continue to be part of the equation, whether it’s the people on our team who review content, or people who use our services and report content to us,” it writes, reiterating yet again that it has ~30,000 people working in “safety and security”, about half of whom are doing the sweating hideous toil of content review.

This is, as we’ve said many times before, a fantastically tiny number of human moderators given the vast scale of content continually uploaded to Facebook’s 2.2BN+ user platform.

Moderating Facebook remains a hopeless task because so few humans are doing it.

Moreover AI can’t really help. (Later in the blog post Facebook also writes vaguely that there are “millions” of livestreams broadcast on its platform every day, saying that’s why adding a short broadcast delay — such as TV stations do — wouldn’t at all help catch inappropriate real-time content.)

At the same time Facebook’s update makes it clear how much its ‘safety and security’ systems rely on unpaid humans too: Aka Facebook users taking the time and mind to report harmful content.

Some might say that’s an excellent argument for a social media tax.

The fact Facebook did not get a single report of the Christchurch massacre livestream while the terrorist attack unfolded meant the content was not prioritized for “accelerated review” by its systems, which it explains prioritize reports attached to videos that are still being streamed — because “if there is real-world harm we have a better chance to alert first responders and try to get help on the ground”.

Though it also says it expanded its acceleration logic last year to “also cover videos that were very recently live, in the past few hours”.

But again it did so with a focus on suicide prevention — meaning the Christchurch video would only have been flagged for acceleration review in the hours after the stream ended if it had been reported as suicide content.

So the ‘problem’ is that Facebook’s systems don’t prioritize mass murder.

“In [the first] report, and a number of subsequent reports, the video was reported for reasons other than suicide and as such it was handled according to different procedures,” it writes, adding it’s “learning from this” and “re-examining our reporting logic and experiences for both live and recently live videos in order to expand the categories that would get to accelerated review”.

No shit.

Facebook also discusses its failure to stop versions of the massacre video from resurfacing on its platform, having been — as it tells it — “so effective” at preventing the spread of propaganda from terrorist organizations like ISIS with the use of image and video matching tech.

It claims  its tech was outfoxed in this case by “bad actors” creating many different edited versions of the video to try to thwart filters, as well as by the various ways “a broader set of people distributed the video and unintentionally made it harder to match copies”.

So, essentially, the ‘virality’ of the awful event created too many versions of the video for Facebook’s matching tech to cope.

“Some people may have seen the video on a computer or TV, filmed that with a phone and sent it to a friend. Still others may have watched the video on their computer, recorded their screen and passed that on. Websites and pages, eager to get attention from people seeking out the video, re-cut and re-recorded the video into various formats,” it writes, in what reads like another attempt to spread blame for the amplification role that its 2.2BN+ user platform plays.

In all Facebook says it found and blocked more than 800 visually-distinct variants of the video that were circulating on its platform.

It reveals it resorted to using audio matching technology to try to detect videos that had been visually altered but had the same soundtrack. And again claims it’s trying to learn and come up with better techniques for blocking content that’s being re-shared widely by individuals as well as being rebroadcast by mainstream media. So any kind of major news event, basically.

In a section on next steps Facebook says improving its matching technology to prevent the spread of inappropriate viral videos being spread is its priority.

But audio matching clearly won’t help if malicious re-sharers just both re-edit the visuals and switch the soundtrack too in future.

It also concedes it needs to be able to react faster “to this kind of content on a live streamed video” — though it has no firm fixes to offer there either, saying only that it will explore “whether and how AI can be used for these cases, and how to get to user reports faster”.

Another priority it claims among its “next steps” is fighting “hate speech of all kinds on our platform”, saying this includes more than 200 white supremacist organizations globally “whose content we are removing through proactive detection technology”.

It’s glossing over plenty of criticism on that front too though — including research that suggests banned far right hate preachers are easily able to evade detection on its platform. Plus its own foot-dragging on shutting down far right extremists. (Facebook only finally banned one infamous UK far right activist last month, for example.)

In its last PR sop, Facebook says it’s committed to expanding its industry collaboration to tackle hate speech via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which formed in 2017 as platforms were being squeezed by politicians to scrub ISIS content — in a collective attempt to stave off tighter regulation.

“We are experimenting with sharing URLs systematically rather than just content hashes, are working to address the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online, and intend to refine and improve our ability to collaborate in a crisis,” Facebook writes now, offering more vague experiments as politicians call for content responsibility.

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

[suzannemcappsca]

Brexit Negotiated? Online Dispute Resolution will be more than an alternative

Charlie Irvine

In this blog I discuss the rise of ODR (online dispute resolution). I review recent developments including a live, online Brexit negotiation, which point to a mainstream future. I conclude that ODR will become an integral part of the justice system.

When Frank Sander coined the term ‘Alternative Dispute Resolution’ his relatively modest proposal placed the courts at the centre of the legal firmament. The new ‘multi-door courthouse’ might be orbited by mediation or arbitration but it remained a courthouse. People had to attend, with or without lawyers, to get justice, or at least a result. Other ADR processes were just that: alternatives. So when I first came across ODR (online dispute resolution) I rather unthinkingly saw it as an alternative to an alternative, useful for the small percentage of mediators and clients blessed with ‘techno joy’ (an Eddie Izzard term) and decent broadband.

I stand corrected. Over two days last June at the ‘Online Dispute Resolution: Justice Re-Imagined’ conference in Liverpool (see http://www.odrconference.com) my mind was truly blown. It seems clear that ODR will leapfrog ADR and become, not just an alternative, but an integral part of the justice system. Some developments are incremental and simply sensible; others are exponential and seem the stuff of fantasy.

A few examples

At the incremental end of ODR are online court systems and digital mediation platforms. Online technologies process matters faster and more conveniently. Why shouldn’t consumers file their court actions whenever and wherever they choose? Why should they produce written documents when online forms guide us through all kinds of everyday transactions?

In England and Wales the Traffic Appeals Tribunal’s Fast Online Appeals Management System, run from a small office in Cheshire, deals with parking disputes from over 300 local authorities. An intuitive, comprehensible portal enables people to upload and annotate photographs and state their case.

For personal injury claims of £1,000 to £25,000 Claims Portal manages the whole claim process online, providing a “safe and secure electronic means of communication”.

Turning to the USA, Paul Embley of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) raised a chuckle with a quote on courts’ usual approach to innovation: “yesterday’s technology tomorrow” (Tom Clarke). He outlined a wave of ODR initiatives across various states, predicting that soon ODR with be the “primary door” for entry into the courts. But ODR’s impact will extend far beyond convenient filing: see the “Courts Disrupted” report (in which Paul had a hand).

Digital Disruption

Digital disruption is not a new idea. We are all familiar with the tsunami of change unleashed by Amazon, Uber and their likes. Almost overnight these entrepreneur/innovators wrought radical transformation, not just for their competitors (see the rash of UK “Death of the High Street” headlines) but for whole societies. The idea of “going Christmas shopping” has probably changed for ever. We go instead to our laptops and smartphones using another digital disrupter, Google, to find the world’s best prices. And how many of us glance fondly at the little video-game of a taxi on the way, thinking back to the olden days (a couple of years ago) when you couldn’t find a cab at any price?

The US report explains that digital disruptors tend to improve one or more of the following: cost, customer experience and ‘platform’ (“a unique digital space where providers and consumers can find each other easily and effectively”). New platforms combining improved price and a better experience are particularly effective because they can be scaled up at almost no cost, creating demand where none existed. The more users, the better they work – think of eBay or Facebook. Traditional courts, on the other hand, “work more slowly and less effectively when more people use them, opening the way for dramatic disruption.” Among the most significant sources of disruption is ODR.

Courts are vulnerable precisely because of their strengths, providing individualised, accurate and justifiable decisions, rendered in real-time by a cast of highly trained professionals, in imposing, expensive public buildings. But they are increasingly beyond the reach of the majority of individuals or even businesses. Following the logic of other disruptors it is only a matter of time before technology entrepreneurs create a new offering that sweeps away much of the old.

Big Data

Moving to the exponential end of ODR we find the worlds of big data and artificial intelligence. Big data has already altered the landscape in areas like marketing and healthcare. Why not the courts? If 100,000 people complain about a company in 10,000 local courts around the world it barely registers. But if a single platform can instantly harness those data the consequences may be very different. This is one of the principles behind British platform Resolver. Resolver has already dealt with 3 million consumer complaints, exploiting a blend of traditional and novel approaches. The traditional part consists of guidance and template letters that enable consumers to raise proceedings, supplementing but not supplanting the courts. More novel, however, is its understanding of the power of reputation and willingness to publish its data, the ‘Resolver League Table‘ becoming an annual beauty contest of the companies who resolve complaints most effectively. And sleeping giant Google is beginning to harness its massive data resource in the interest of justice reform – see Measures for Justice and related projects.

AI (And Brexit re-imagined)

Artificial intelligence is probably the frontier at which ODR provokes the most alarm. The idea that algorithms can be trusted with justice decisions sounds either horrifying or fantastical. So perhaps the conference’s most astounding moment was watching an AI system, SmartSettle, negotiate Brexit. This may raise a wry smile from British and European readers given Brexit’s enduring non-negotiability. To be accurate, this demonstration showed AI improving, rather than replacing, human decision-making.

First the algorithm was provided with large amounts of data on 10 major headings, from fisheries to the Irish border, with the most advantageous outcome producing the highest score. Then each side negotiated internally (often the hardest part) to produce its ‘ideal world’ position, and a very high score. Unsurprisingly neither ideal world was acceptable to the other, so there followed a series of trades. The beauty of the platform was its ability to show negotiators the impact of each trade at a glance, not only on their own side BUT ON THE OTHER. So in minutes each side can map out the BATNA and WATNA (courtesy Fisher, Ury and Patton) for itself and its counterpart. All of this helps negotiators reach the ‘pareto-optimal frontier’ – where each side benefits as much as possible without harming the other. And in a final piece-de-resistance the algorithm took the final negotiated deal and improved it – at the push of a button, both side’s scores increased!

Where does it leave humans?

Of course AI can’t yet do politics. In the real world, wherever that is, negotiations collapse over issues immune to logic and trade-offs. However, this demo provided a glimpse of ODR’s potential to support informed decision-making. Digital disruptors work by doing things better. If they don’t improve matters for their users, they don’t work and they don’t disrupt.

A few years ago I heard Richard Susskind, a prophet of digital disruption, explain the implications of Moore’s law. Moore’s law holds that computer processing power will double every two years. So if we wait long enough technology tends to catch up with great ideas, no matter how impractical they may once have seemed. Skype has been around for a while, but the rise of smartphones and tablets has placed video-phones within the reach of the majority. And so with ODR. Improved technology may render the term ‘online’ redundant and ‘online dispute resolution’ will become simply ‘dispute resolution.’

And where does it leave mediators? Not yet redundant, I’d guess. Challenges there are, though. The mediation profession is dominated by the middle-aged, if not elderly, a demographic that finds change tricky. Just because something didn’t work yesterday doesn’t mean it won’t work tomorrow. And just because I didn’t learn how to mediate or negotiate online doesn’t mean the next generation won’t. I’m laying down the gauntlet to myself as much as anyone else, to adapt and innovate and ensure that ADR doesn’t become a quaint historical episode on the road to ODR.

More from our authors:

EU Mediation Law Handbook: Regulatory Robustness Ratings for Mediation Regimes by Nadja Alexander, Sabine Walsh, Martin Svatos (eds.) € 195 Essays on Mediation: Dealing with Disputes in the 21st Century by Ian Macduff (ed.) € 160.00

from Updates By Suzanne http://mediationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2018/12/16/odr-will-be-more-than-an-alternative/

[lindyhunt]

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need, Explained

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Wednesday.

Allow us to introduce "Unriddled" -- the HubSpot Marketing Blog's mid-week digest of the tech news you need to know.

This week, we've got stories from Google, Amazon, Instagram, and more. So when the volume of stories of these has you asking, "Hold up. What just happened?" we're here to break it down.

It's tech news: explained.

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need

1. Finally: An iMessage Extension for the Google iOS App

Google announced this week that the iOS Google app will now support an iMessage extension: the horizontal list of icons that allows users to integrate app functionalities with messages sent from iOS devices.

The integration, which is currently only available in the U.S., allows users to share locations, general search results, GIF images, videos, and local business listings in messages -- even to those who don't use iOS devices.

In addition to those capabilities, the new integration with iOS also allows users to drag-and-drop text, images, and links between the Google app and others, like iMessage or Notes.

For example, according to the official announcement, to share something like an article you're reading on the Google app, all you have to do is tap and hold the link to drag it into iMessage -- though our team had trouble getting that function to work properly.

It's a move among what some might describe as a contentious relationship between Google and Apple, with the two often appearing to one-up each other with product releases and announcements. The integration is a welcome feature for iOS users, and for those who are watching the competition between Google and Amazon play out in a less-than-user friendly way -- more on that in a bit.

2. Google Has Sold Zagat

Google's 2011 purchase of Zagat, the legacy restaurant review guide, was one of the search engine giant's first forays into the realm of local businesses and the ratings of them.

Yesterday, it was announced that Google would be selling Zagat to The Infatuation, an online restaurant review site that, in a sense of irony, has claimed that it will bring back the print editions of Zagat guides -- which were discontinued last year.

It's a move that practically indicates that Google has grown out of a need for a separately-branded restaurant review system, as its own version seems to have taken shape on Google Maps and Google for Business listings.

When users tap on a restaurant listing on Google Maps, for example, they can read reviews left by other Google users, and see third-party reviews and list rankings that were pulled into the business listing.

Google originally purchased Zagat for $151 million. The purchase price for The Infatuation has not been disclosed.

3. Instagram Could Soon Be Unveiling Its Own Portrait Mode

For those who did not care to spend upwards of $800 for a mobile device with built-in "portrait mode," take heart: Instagram may soon be unveiling its own feature with the same capabilities.

As first reported by TechCrunch, Instagram could be launching an in-app Portrait Mode imminently -- which means that even if you didn't opt for the phone that's equipped with Portrait Mode for selfies, Instagram can provide similar technology for you.

But it's not exactly new. According to these reports, the setting has actually existed within Instagram's code for some time, and was discovered when a member of the TechCrunch team was picking apart the app's APK (which stands for Android Application Package: essentially an .exe file, but for Android devices).

Source: TechCrunch

What's not clear is how users can execute this feature now, before (and if) it's officially released. But it's a nod to a trend on behalf of many social media networks that emphasize a native content experience -- one that allows users to capture, share, and engage with content without leaving that particular channel.

This move could be headed in that direction -- allowing users to capture portrait-quality photos and selfies within Instagram, and without having to re-upload them to the app after taking them on their respective device cameras.

4.Reddit Admits It Was Used to Spread Election-Related Propaganda

In a public letter penned by CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit admitted to learning that Russian propaganda was shared by "thousands" of users on its network during the 2016 U.S. presidential election -- most of them unknowingly.

While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google have continued to face scrutiny for the weaponization of their own networks to spread misinformation, Huffman wrote that Reddit's involvement wasn't so much about ads. Rather, it was about (largely American) users sharing this type of content -- "content from accounts we suspect are of Russian origin or content linking directly to known propaganda domains" -- without realizing where it originated. That's also the case when Reddit users share content of the same nature that was originally posted on Twitter -- the kind of issue that Huffman described as "indirect propaganda ... the most complex."

Using the example of Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which is now known to be of Russian origin, he explained that tweets from that account "were amplified by thousands of Reddit users."

Huffman concluded the letter by noting that Reddit would be "cooperating with congressional inquiries," though the nature of those inquiries is not immediately clear.

As of writing this post, Reddit has not been publicly asked to testify before any congressional committees, or submit any materials and evidence.

The full text of Huffman's letter follows.

In response to recent reports about the integrity of Reddit, I’d like to share our thinking. from r/announcements

5. Amazon Isn't Going to Sell Nest Products Anymore

Last week, when Amazon announced its acquisition of Ring -- which manufactures things like connected doorbells and in-home cameras -- many felt a storm coming. Amazon would be entering the smart home realm, and other players in the market would likely experience a ripple effect.

Among them would be Google, the parent company of Nest: a smart home company that produces, among other things, connected doorbells, in-home cameras, thermostats, outdoor cameras, and smoke detectors. Not long after the Ring acquisition was announced, Amazon claimed it would no longer carry or sell Nest products.

It's a power play by Amazon that has been described as "dumb" and "anti-consumer," and has some wondering if it violates antitrust laws, though that seems unlikely to most an anti-regulation administration.

But attempts to edge out competition is not exactly a new move for Amazon, as it continues to foray (often by way of acquisition) into a growing number of new sectors, like grocery, healthcare, and now smart home. But it's not the first, either, as Google has previously taken similar actions, like disallowing YouTube videos from playing on certain Amazon devices.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out search-wise, given Google's origins as a search engine. Currently, Google includes listings from Amazon in its shopping results on the SERP -- but considering recent events, it won't come as a particularly big surprise if that changes.

Other News You May Have Missed

What You Missed Last Month in Google. Being that it's a shorter month, February seems to have flown by. A lot happened in the world of tech, much of the news coming from Google. We’ve put together another list of the major highlights. Read More »

You Can Apply for Jobs on Facebook Now. Facebook announced a new feature that will allow Facebook business Pages to post jobs and manage applications on its platform. In more than 40 countries, administrators will be able to create job listings directly from their Pages, where they'll appear throughout Facebook like any other post or ad would: the Page itself, followers' News Feeds, and Marketplace -- as well as Facebook's new "Jobs" dashboard. Read More »

Facebook Ended Its Explore Feed Experiment. Back in October, Facebook introduced a new initiative to put Page content in a separate feed from content within a user's personal network. It was one of the first efforts from Facebook to shift its emphasis from advertisers to users -- and it would live under what the social media channel called the Explore Feed. Facebook ended that initiative -- which Head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, called "a trial response to consistent feedback" in the official announcement. Read More »

A Disaster Waiting to Happen? Businesses Could Send You Ads on Messenger. In November 2017, Facebook began internally testing Messenger Broadcast: a service for businesses that allows them to send marketing content to users, without building a bot. Last week, the social media platform announced that Messenger Broadcast would be available for testing to select Page administrators in the U.S., Mexico, and Thailand. Read More »

If You Think Twitter Is Unhealthy, You Can Now Apply to Study It. In a series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the social network would be enlisting the help of outside experts to determine the relative health of Twitter. This likely comes as a result of users who increasingly engage in negative, often hateful conversation on the platform. Read More »

That’s all for today. Until next week, feel free to weigh in on Twitter to ask me your tech news questions, or to let me know what kind of news you'd like us to cover.

[weuniversallyanchorbouquet-blog]

How to Allow Them To Make some Money With video Hosting Site's Video Marketing

Now if perhaps you do you want to buy traffic by using YouTube, the at first thing which experts claim you develop to conduct is which will upload this videos. I will know this kind of sounds obvious, but your business would quite possibly be surprised because of the plethora of visitors who try not to do which. Buy Instagram Followers don't bother to do a little something! Youtube nearly As A friendly Medium take a around so do a brand new little tad of perform it's magic on months that them to feel like it, as well as because of it, their internet corporation goes at the bottom of. Its YouTube marketing / promoting service focues on buy instagram video views as well as funnel subscribers. As they offer the ability for you to include shifting upward to 10,000 buy instagram video views a 25 days. The biggest positive aspect of buy a instagram media player views happens to be on Aol look listings. Videos utilizing more from 10,000 sees can position in the exact top three main results for major look terms in relation to YouTube. As a result YouTube could be described as the levels 2 check engine on the inside the international behind Google, this effortlessly cause biggest traffic and customer changes. The direct subscribers is often another critical component behind the Hi5 look formula as properly as may want to push every one of videos originally from a direct up for the Yt search men's tour. The major routine is without question earning objects and consuming them towards prizes. Points, or "PTZ" as most people are known as called, become earned when answering regular questions, visiting in daily, referring friends, watching videos, and looking. Utilizing visual Marketing for Example Why and / Or How realized most most typically associated with these processes pretty lifeless. The videos, where an individual can generate the on the whole points, single appeal on to a compact group having to do with music and as a result movie people. Referring associates is difficult; you it's best not to get another referral link, they must have give your entire family and address that can put at their technique. Shopping, favor the footage section, besides appeals to help a skinny group because of interests. Anybody can draw on your PTZ to wipe out the expense of the good item, nor you also can pay all price to be earn considerably PTZ through the sequence. One attached to the inquiries that 're often positioned when per person renders the final choice to buy instagram views is who seem to they properly be added an extra very conveniently to a site and that will search unnatural. All the way through order for you to increase your new online reputation, the cell phone number of Instagram followers a have are advised to be level of in an absolute more normal way. Instagram presents managed to be its most collateralized platform in share photographs and video tutorials. It carries the breathing taking portraits that one has secured about often the services, pills and in its entirety company. Is considered to be has seemed the place for that this faster and therefore easier ways to attracting the tremendous of attention. For it photo sharing application, getting this done only spent them 5 months up to establish single million fans and simply just a 30 after where it they happened to be able for rack " up " another k. How could this future you would ask? This is what is considering the fact that they maintained a product that guys want. Where you really would like a elementary comparison, Instagram was ready to stand up good deal more users unlike Twitter and / or maybe Facebook available at about the very same season in distinct companies track records. The part of attaining your goal that Instagram was competent to can do in a short period time propelled them towards best the application status on the inside the Pear store. Some of the immense usage of some app offered them a trustworthy magnet to make venture capitalists that unfortunately pouring thousands and thousands . of us bucks into the actual company. Every professional and knowledgeable YouTuber may aware in the region of fact regarding first twenty four hours enjoy very most critical role you can find superior exposure throughout the this given time period. consequently, their own essential relating to us towards take most complete benefit with this the moment duration. If your write blog posts and articles and really provide human beings with extremely content, in that case , your articles will use read and in addition also should be agreed to in all the majority with cases through the topic directory sites. Remember that a majority of these submit directory sites provide an important special marketplace for authors to assure more themselves together with their online websites. When you'll follow the following 3rd type for no cost website traffic, you consistently wait until finallyl the "About the Author" box through order to promote your site.

[martechadvisor-blog]

6 Essential Elements of Successful Video Content

Megan James, Content Strategist, MGID shares her knowledge on how to make videos which will make your brand a success

You already know that video marketing is important, but if you’re new to the game then it can be confusing to know what kind of content to produce. Regardless of industry, successful video content usually has one or more characteristics in common. If you know what people want out of video content ahead of time, then you can be strategic about crafting a campaign that hits the mark with its intended audience.

With that in mind, here are six characteristics of video content that work.

Engaging

The best video content hooks its viewers right from the start and retains their interest the whole way through. To increase engagement and reduce viewer drop-off, keep the following tips in mind:

Ensure your videos are user-friendly: Fast loading times, clear resolutions, helpful annotations or subheads, and mobile friendliness are crucial to a good user experience.

Don’t use a misleading title or image: No one likes clicking on a video thumbnail only to be served completely unrelated content. While gimmicky tactics may generate more clicks, the high bounce rates and negative viewer feedback aren��t worth it in the long run.

Don’t annoy your viewers: An obnoxious or patronizing tone of voice, music that drowns out the narrator, and irrelevant rambling can trigger a viewer’s back-button reflex.

Consider going live: There’s just something more exciting about live content. On Facebook, for instance, people spend three times longer watching live videos than content that is no longer live.

Entertaining

Most of us are all too familiar with the feeling of self-loathing that accompanies hours spent bingeing on silly videos. Pranks, fail compilations, funny animals – the stream of suggested content is never ending.

The fact is, people love to be entertained. And you can use this to your advantage to spice up otherwise-boring content, like company culture videos and product advertisements.

Think you’re not funny enough to pull it off? Often, you just need a good angle.

For instance, Bad Lip Reading took a simple concept – ridiculous voiceovers applied to TV actors and political figures – and used it as the basis for an entire channel’s worth of entertaining videos, like this parody of Inauguration Day:

Visually Appealing

With the abundance of easy-to-use and awe-inducing video creation tools available today, anyone can be a producer.

Check out these visually appealing video formats to help you generate some ideas for your own content:

Stop motion

Time lapse

Animation

Cinemagraph

Video scribing

Slideshow

Don’t underestimate the impact a great soundtrack can have on your creative production.To license music for your videos, browse production libraries like Audio Jungle and Killer Tracks.

Educational

**Educational content establishes your brand as an authority and builds loyalty with your audience**– after all, most people feel a natural sense of gratitude towards businesses that provide real solutions to their problems. 65 percent of people are visual learners, making video a prime channel for serving educational content.

Educational video content comes in many forms:

How-to videos

Interviews

Events coverage

Behind-the-scenes footage

Product reviews

Case studies

Q&As

Infographic videos

Vlogs

Webinars

To get started creating your own tutorials, get your hands on a video editing tool like Adobe Premiere Elements, iMovie, or the free HitFilm Express. You may also need software for screen casting: Camtasia, ScreenFlow, and Snagit are popular choices for both Windows and Mac users.

When brainstorming topic ideas for your educational content, consider re-purposing top-performing blog posts to save time and resources. You can also check out similar topics on YouTube to see whether they’ve already been done and how well they performed.

**To drive up viewer engagement, publish your content at regular intervals**. Moz’s ongoing and immensely successful Whiteboard Friday series is a testimony to the power of consistency in video marketing

Motivational

Widespread sharing among social media users of quote images, entrepreneurial pep talks, and inspirational hashtags is proof of the popularity of motivational content – especially on visual-heavy platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Video is an especially effective medium for this type of content, because it uses powerful imagery to influence your audience’s emotions while helping them visualize their goals.

Motivational video content can be used to:

Get people enthusiastic about using your products or services

Generate excitement before a launch

Drive shares and expand your reach on social media

GoPro is a classic example of how to use motivational content to market a product-and their video content is created by product users themselves!

How did GoPro influence its community of fans to upload thousands of new videos per day, all featuring the GoPro video camera in a multitude of ways? It’s simple: GoPro videos are plain inspiring.

Shareable

People share content for a variety of reasons: to influence others’ perception of them, entertain friends, or recommend a useful resource to their customer base.

If going viral is your goal, try these tips for creating share-worthy video campaigns:

Host a user-generated video contest on social media

Create a video response to an event or another trending video

Curate a collection of other videos clips and produce a round-up video (for example, a “Best of” theme)

Getting started with video marketing doesn’t have to be intimidating. Consistency is more important than quantity, so pick an angle that resonates with your audience and commit to producing quality content

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor