Sonos pulling out ads from Facebook and donating money to rights activists

The fallout continues from Facebook's involvement in enabling Cambridge Analytics to illegally mine data from millions of Facebook users without their consent, possibly violating various privacy agreements. Facebook is scrambling to respond while it is being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and other privacy commissions in other countries. Meanwhile a strong #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining ground among users and is even backed by the founder of messaging app WhatsApp, which was bough by Facebook in 2014. Up to 3,000 brands are threatening to pull investment in Facebook.

Sonos has announced that it will halt advertising with Facebook as a result of the investigations into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. 

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EU-backed Chrome plugin debunks fake videos

Telling what’s real from what isn’t is a bit challenging these days. Thankfully, some people are trying to set things right for us. One of the latest technological attempts to rid us of fake news is a new Google Chrome plugin made by EU-backed InVID. This Fake Video News Debunker does as its name suggests. The tool will help out fact-checking journalists and truth-seekers of the original context of a particular clip. All you need to do is put in the URL of the YouTube or Facebook video in the Analysis tab and let it do the work. The plugin will pull up general information about the clip like time, location, and description, among others. You’ll even get an option to do reverse image searches and Twitter video search. It even has more in-depth features including a Keyframe tab, Thumbnails tab, Magnifier lens tab, Search tab, Forensic tab, and Metadata tab.

The clip above shows how the plugin works. It’s currently in beta version but it might be worth trying it out now, especially for the information it can provide. InVID has gotten funding from EU’s Horizon 2020 programme for projects like this. They’ve already launched other services that check credibility of videos and organizations and even copyright tools.

Source: The Next Web

Twitter reportedly tries out tool to flag fake news

The fight against fake news is something social networks have to contend with. Facebook is taking a lot of fire for this but Twitter isn’t without this issue, too, add on the abuse against women and minorities on the service. But Twitter seems to be doing something about it. Or at least they’re working on it. Sources have told the Washington Post that Twitter has a prototype feature that lets you flag tweets that contain fake news and harmful content.

There aren’t solid plans on whether this tool will be released but the idea behind it is that users will get a flag option in the drop-down menu that appears with tweets. And while Twitter won’t commit to an official launch of the feature, it’s something the service really needs. As TNW points out, the number of Twitter bots that are on the service have the capability to spread fake news quickly and rapidly.

Source: 9to5 Google