Orlando shooting relatives sue social media giants Image copyright Daniel Munoz/Getty The families of three men who were killed in the Orlando nightclub massacre have filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) alleging that the firms provided "material support" to the so-called Islamic State. In their lawsuit, relatives of Juan Ramon Guerrero Tevin Crosby, Javier Jorge-Reyes and Juan Ramon Guerrrero, assert that the user-generated platforms aided in the radicalisation of gunman Omar Mateen. Mateen pledged allegiance to IS before he attacked Pulse, a gay nightclub in June - 49 people were killed, in what has been described as the worst mass shooting in recent US history. "Without Defendants Twitter, Facebook, and Google (YouTube), the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible," the lawsuit, which was filed in the Eastern District of Michigan, states. Image copyright Gerardo Mora/Getty Images "These cases are about behaviour modification.
100 Women 2016: How women are winning online Image copyright Change.org Women are more likely to be successful with online campaigns than men, according to one international petition site. Change.org has found that although men start more petitions, women 'win' their campaigns 14% more often than men do. Men are 38% more likely to start a petition, despite 57% of the users on Change.org being women. However, women achieve one-and-a-half more signatures on their petitions than men do. Why do women win more than men? Change.org is one of many digital petition sites now online, including the UK Parliament site which launched last year. Jen Dulski is in charge of running change.org, which calls itself "the world's platform for change", and its community of 150 million people. It is on this site that the 2013 campaign to get a woman on British banknotes claimed victory, and a current campaign to erect a Suffragette's statue in London's Parliament Square has drawn the commitment of the city's Mayor, Sadiq Khan. Image copyright change.org 1.
How innocent photos of children have been exploited on Twitter Image copyright iStock Despite attempts by social networks to clamp down on child porn, some Twitter users have been swapping illegal images and have used tweets to sexualise otherwise innocent photos. They begin as innocuous selfies or pictures taken by friends or family members. But in the eyes of a small cohort of warped Twitter users, they become something else entirely. "The pictures are usually young girls in their school uniform or a swimsuit," says Joseph Cox, a freelance journalist writing for Motherboard, part of Vice News. "Some have been taken by the girls themselves. Cox's investigation into this underground world started with a search of one hashtag which threw up one of the otherwise innocent-looking photos. "Users were asking to trade pictures of similar aged girls and they were commenting on her appearance and how attractive they found her," he says. The pictures themselves are not pornographic but Twitter's guidelines are clear: child sexual exploitation isn't tolerated.
Facebook fake news: Zuckerberg details plans to combat problem Image copyright Reuters Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has outlined plans for how he hopes to combat fake news on the site. Facebook became mired in controversy after some users complained fake news changed the outcome of the US election. Mr Zuckerberg posted details of several projects to "take misinformation seriously", including methods for stronger detection and verification. He previously responded to criticism of fake news on Facebook by saying over 99% of its content was "authentic". 'I write fake news that gets shared on Facebook' Can you spot the fake stories? In his post, billionaire Mr Zuckerberg said: "We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously." But he said the problems were "complex, both technically and philosophically." Analysis- Dave Lee, North America technology reporter What Facebook's challenges over fake news reveal, I think, is that we're in completely uncharted territory. Read more: Zuckerberg is a politician now
Facebook fake news row: Mark Zuckerberg is a politician now Image copyright Getty Images I’ve long suspected that Mark Zuckerberg, who often refers to himself as the “leader” of Facebook, has dreams of high office. This week, a taster of what that might be like has been knocking at his door in the wake of the US election result. While Donald Trump’s visit to the White House was an apparently sobering experience about the level of responsibility he’d soon inherit, Zuckerberg has had a brutal political awakening of his own. Facebook’s “fake news” crisis has had the normally stoic 32-year-old visibly irritated, and that’s because for the first time he is being treated like a politician, rather than just a tech CEO. With that comes distrust and anger, not to mention disloyalty in the Facebook ranks and what for him must be the growing realisation that it’s impossible to please everyone. Whether Zuckerberg was right to say fake news had little impact is largely irrelevant. Checks and balances Kirkpatrick first laid out the context. The accountability gap
Children see 'worrying' amount of hate speech online Image copyright Thinkstock One in three internet users between the ages of 12 and 15 say they saw "hate speech" online in the past year, according to Ofcom's latest survey of children's media habits. It is the first time the UK regulator has posed a question about the topic in its annual study. The NSPCC charity said the finding was "very worrying", adding such posts should not be tolerated. The report also indicates children are spending more hours a week on the net. And it suggests that many of the children are too trusting in Google. More than a quarter of eight-to-15s who used a search engine said that if the US firm listed a link then they believed its contents could be relied on. Ofcom said most of these children had mistakenly assumed that the results were chosen by some kind of authoritative figure who had hand selected accurate pages. Hateful media The report was based on interviews carried out with 2,059 families between April and June. Sabine: Romilly: Rise of vloggers
BBC World Service announces biggest expansion 'since the 1940s' The BBC World Service will launch 11 new language services as part of its biggest expansion "since the 1940s", the corporation has announced. The expansion is a result of the funding boost announced by the UK government last year. The new languages will be Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Gujarati, Igbo, Korean, Marathi, Pidgin, Punjabi, Telugu, Tigrinya, and Yoruba. The first new services are expected to launch in 2017. "This is a historic day for the BBC, as we announce the biggest expansion of the World Service since the 1940s," said BBC director general Tony Hall. "The BBC World Service is a jewel in the crown - for the BBC and for Britain. "As we move towards our centenary, my vision is of a confident, outward-looking BBC which brings the best of our independent, impartial journalism and world-class entertainment to half a billion people around the world. "Today is a key step towards that aim." Other expansion plans include: Image copyright PA
The rise and rise of fake news Image copyright iStock The deliberate making up of news stories to fool or entertain is nothing new. But the arrival of social media has meant real and fictional stories are now presented in such a similar way that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart. While the internet has enabled the sharing of knowledge in ways that previous generations could only have dreamed of, it has also provided ample proof of Winston Churchill's line that "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on". So with research suggesting an increasing proportion of US adults are getting their news from social media, it's likely that more and more of us are seeing - and believing - information that is not just inaccurate, but totally made up. There are hundreds of fake news websites out there, from those which deliberately imitate real life newspapers, to government propaganda sites, and even those which tread the line between satire and plain misinformation.
Five pictures that show how social media can be a minefield Social media can be fraught with risks for women in conservative societies. Pictures that a woman in the West would post without a second thought might, in parts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, be extremely controversial. Here five BBC reporters - all women - explain how the photographs below would be perceived in their countries. Cuddling up Image copyright ? Alma Hassoun (Syria): Pictures of couples cuddling up in public do not usually appear on Facebook. From what I see on my Facebook feed, I have noticed that the more official the relationship, the more likely such a picture is to be posted. But just like all other societies, Syria is very diverse. Dancing at a wedding Amber Shamsi (Pakistan): Some years ago, a mobile-phone video surfaced on the internet of four women sitting on a floor of what looked like a small mud hut, clapping and singing. The video was from a village in a remote mountainous region in Pakistan's north-west. Status: In a relationship Duck face
Italy's Tiziana: Tragedy of a woman destroyed by viral sex videos It probably took no more than a few seconds for Tiziana Cantone to begin the sequence of events that led to her suicide. In April 2015, the 31-year-old from Mugnano, on the outskirts of Naples, sent a series of sex videos to five people via WhatsApp. The recipients included her boyfriend Sergio Di Palo, with whom she had an unstable relationship. The videos showed her performing sex acts with a number of unidentified men. "She was beautiful but fragile," remembers Teresa Petrosino, a friend for 15 years. The videos were soon shared and uploaded to several adult websites. "You're making a video?" The words suggested an uninhibited young woman, who enjoyed being filmed during sex. But Italians did more than watch. No-one seemed to worry what the subject herself might think as she seemed so pleased about it. But this was a profound misunderstanding. Image copyright Alamy "People confuse being an uninhibited person with wanting to go viral," says social commentator Selvaggia Lucarelli. In Italy:
Sex, honour, shame and blackmail in an online world A BBC investigation has found that thousands of young women in conservative societies across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are being shamed or blackmailed with private and sometimes sexually explicit images. Daniel Silas Adamson looks at how smartphones and social media are colliding head-on with traditional notions of honour and shame. In 2009 an 18-year-old Egyptian girl, Ghadeer Ahmed, sent a video clip to her boyfriend's phone. The clip showed Ghadeer dancing at the house of a female friend. There was nothing pornographic about it, but she was wearing a revealing dress and dancing without any inhibition. Three years later, in an act of revenge after their relationship had ended, the boyfriend posted the video to YouTube. But in the years since she had sent the video, Ghadeer had also taken part in the Egyptian revolution, taken off her hijab, and started to speak out about the rights of women. #ShameOnline But it goes beyond blackmail. Read Ghadeer's story in full
A guided tour of the cybercrime underground One of the strange features of cybercrime is how much of it is public. A quick search will turn up forums and sites where stolen goods, credit cards and data are openly traded. But a glance into those places may not give you much idea about what is going on. "Everyone can join as long as you speak Russian," said Anton, a malware researcher at security firm Sentinel One, who has inhabited this underground world for more than 20 years. "By Russian I mean the USSR, so there is Ukrainians, there is Kazakhstan, there is Belarus. The Romanians are doing all the dirty work like spam and maintenance so they are not really involved in developing malware," he said. Those vibrant underground marketplaces have a long history and Anton adds that he tracks the malware makers to gain insights into what they might do next. "I was there from the very early stages," Anton told the BBC. "Instead it was many channels where hackers exchanged information and exploits and kind of stuff like that," he said.
Future - Does globalization mean we will become one culture? Stroll into your local Starbucks and you will find yourself part of a cultural experiment on a scale never seen before on this planet. In less than half a century, the coffee chain has grown from a single outlet in Seattle to nearly 20,000 shops in around 60 countries. Each year, its near identical stores serve cups of near identical coffee in near identical cups to hundreds of thousands of people. Of course, it is not just Starbucks. To get at this question, I argue that we need to understand what I call our unique ‘capacity for culture’. Take the axe as an example. Life savers In more recent history, this ‘cumulative cultural adaptation’ that our capacity for culture grants has been accelerated by the rise of archiving technology. Chimpanzees, for example, are renowned for their “tool use” and we think this is evidence of their intelligence. Not so for humans. Of course, this nepotism is not just a positive force. ‘One world’ ‘Bumpy road’
Broadband must be affordable for poor, say councils Image copyright Thinkstock The poorest people in society should be given financial help to pay for fast broadband, a body representing councils in England and Wales has said. The Local Government Association is calling on the government to include a social tariff in its universal service obligation for broadband. The subsidy would give low-income families a basic service of at least 10Mbps, it said. According to an LGA report, one in four adults lacks basic online skills. Shop online The body does not specify what price should be set for affordable broadband but points to an existing scheme offered by BT. BT offers a £9.95 per month broadband and telephone service to people who receive income support, jobseeker's allowance or other benefits. The LGA wants to see all other providers offering similar schemes but does not specify whether the government should also contribute. The USO forms the cornerstone of the Digital Economy Bill, currently making its way through Parliament. Competitive market