Instagram rolls out ‘Personal Fundraisers’ to support small businesses
In response to the economic fallout caused by Covid-19, Instagram has released a crowdfunding feature to keep small businesses afloat. Instagram pumping out updates has become one of the constants of 2020, but the latest feature is far from just another quirky AR addition. Parent company Facebook has already played host...
Current in Social
Twitter suffers massive bitcoin security breach
Accounts of huge companies and celebrities including Barack Obama and Apple have been compromised in the biggest Twitter hack ever. Over 300,000 verified Twitter accounts have been temporarily blocked from posting any content due to a huge, widespread cyber-attack by a bitcoin scammer. These users include huge international companies such...
Is TikTok really an elaborate façade for Chinese spyware?
Cyber-experts are claiming that 2020’s number one app is a shady front for Chinese spyware and mass censorship. Suggestions that ByteDance’s ‘innocuous’ short-bite video app TikTok has all the makings of a totalitarian plot hatched by the Chinese government are looking more plausible by the day. Suffice to say, people are freaked. Months of bad...
Chinese face-tracking tech bans foreigners from live streaming
A global inquest into TikTok has done little to deter China from pushing stricter censorship on its own soil. Official documents from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance have confirmed rumours that the viral video app is constantly running facial recognition technology to monitor and censor content on Douyin – China’s version...
Reddit must persist with alt-right purge despite ‘free speech’ concerns
Media efforts to combat hate is pressuring user-based platforms like Reddit and MeWe to follow suit, and rightly so. Since the 18th century we have used boycotting as a political weapon for good. In 1791 some 300,000 people abstained from buying any goods produced by slaves in the West Indies, demonstrating...
TikTok dedicated to promoting Black creators following accusations of racism
The hugely popular video-sharing platform has introduced a 'creator diversity council' after receiving criticism for suppressing non-white content with its complex algorithms. After a string of controversies about racial equality on the app, TikTok has formally apologised to its Black users. The company, which recently came under fire for appearing...
Gen Z are mocking millennials online
If you’re over 25 and you’ve been using the phrase ‘OK boomer’ online, you’re about to have a reality check. The generational wars have truly begun, people. No longer are we simply aiming our tweets at dismissive and judgemental boomers, we’re now attacking each other in what can only be described as a social media civil war. Well, kind of. Over the last few weeks, Gen Zers have begun to...
Mixer ends Ninja and Shroud contracts as Facebook partnership beckons
Microsoft is showing the door to its key Mixer streamers, but will its ballsy plot pay off in the long term? As we predicted back in January, 2020 is fast becoming the year for streaming services to really show their mettle. Whether it’s having a captive audience to target in lockdown, the nigh-on quarter increase in engagement for the likes of Twitch, record spikes in monthly
BLM protesters weaponising memes against police
The weaponisation of memes is nothing new, but taking on anti-racism has to be its biggest and most significant engagement to date. Digital natives Gen Z are constantly shifting the parameters of political demonstration and discourse to include online spaces. Now a part of our everyday vernacular, memes are used to make light of serious subjects, to highlight hypocrisies or irony within current affairs, and generally to cause a bit of...
Online dating during lockdown- can love thrive while we’re apart?
Lockdown has accelerated the transition of online dating apps to purely online hangout spaces. Should this trend continue beyond quarantine? If modern communication falls broadly into two categories – the online and the offline – then where do we place online dating? Pre-COVID, it occupied some strange liminal place between the two, with the majority of conversations never traversing the digital despite the fact that this was, for most people,...
