This Woman Has The Same Name As Donald Trump's Least Favorite Senator And It's A Nightmare

This is Elizabeth Warren.

She's a US Senator from Massachusetts who tweets regularly from her @SenWarren account.

This is also Elizabeth Warren.

She is a self-described “dreamer. builder. discoverer.” who tweets regularly from her @ElizabethWarren account.

The Internet, because it&039;s the Internet, regularly sends tweets meant for @SenWarren to @ElizabethWarren.

Some are very nice!

But many tweets to @ElizabethWarren are, well, exceptionally mean.

Note: It&039;s not cool to like your own tweets, Mr J.

Note: It&039;s “you&039;re the disgrace&033;” not “your the disgrace&033;”

Even The View got it wrong&033;

How does @ElizabethWarren respond? With a cool head and calm demeanor our politics so often lack.

Inception

Quelle: <a href="This Woman Has The Same Name As Donald Trump&039;s Least Favorite Senator And It&039;s A Nightmare“>BuzzFeed

This Fancy Chromebook Has a Touchscreen, Stylus, And A Price You Can Actually Afford

Google goes after Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Apple’s iPad Pro with its new premium Samsung Chromebook Pro and Plus laptop-tablet hybrids.

It’s a laptop&#033; It’s a tablet&033; It has a stylus&033; You can fold it backwards&033; You can draw on it&033; The Samsung Chromebook Pro and Plus aren’t your kid brother’s classroom Chromebooks. Google is adding new premium options to its low-cost laptop line: two Samsung-branded hybrid computer-tablets (what gadget p33ps call “convertibles”) with styluses built-in.

The devices are clearly aimed at customers who are interested in Microsoft&#039;s Surface Pro (between $699-$1,049) or Apple&039;s iPad Pro tablets ($599-$929), but who aren’t keen on those products’ hefty price tags. The Chromebook Pro is now Google’s most high-end Chromebook offering — and it costs just $549, while the Chromebook Plus is priced at $449.

What’s unique about the devices aren’t just that they’re ~fancier~ than Chromebooks past – it’s that the laptops can run Android apps for phones and tablets. All of them. Google is hoping that opening its Chromebooks to the over two million touchscreen-friendly games and mobile apps available in its Play Store will give its lightweight laptops even more of an edge over other devices.

I’ve been letting my MacBook Air collect dust for two weeks while testing out a pre-production version of the new Chromebook Pro, the faster and more powerful of the two. It&039;s available at the end of April with no specific release date set. I found the Pro to be impressively versatile. It was sufficient at most of my work computer tasks (namely messaging my boss, writing reviews like this one, and reading articles). The other bells and whistles, like the stylus and touchscreen, were non-essential, but worked well when I needed them.

Samsung / Buzzfeed News

If you’re already familiar, just jump to the next section.

Chromebooks are breathtakingly cheap computers. I once bought two mascaras and a foundation at Sephora and it was more expensive than the cheapest Chromebook you can get at Best Buy.

But you get what you pay for. They’re simple machines that can handle a lot of things, like responding to email, scrolling through Facebook, watching YouTube videos, streaming Netflix, word processing, and reading articles. Chromebooks need a strong Wi-Fi connection, and, while you can still use Google Docs, watch some Netflix shows, and listen to Spotify offline, there’s isn’t a ton of functionality for people who don’t have access to reliable Internet.

Chromebooks are the conceptual opposite of Android phones, which have, historically, been more appealing to tinkerers and gadget geeks. Chromebooks, on the other hand, are grab-and-go machines designed for people who know how to surf the web, but don’t consider themselves techies.

The laptops are dead simple. To start using one, all you need is a Google account. The devices are less susceptible to malware than others, and benefit from automatic security updates every six weeks. They’re a good fit for a lot of people. Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in 2016, with over half of that market going to the education sector. Over 20 million students now use Chromebooks in classrooms worldwide.

But they’re not for everyone.

Processors typically aren’t very good in Chromebooks. Gamers and extreme multi-taskers will find that the computers become slow and unusable under a heavy load. People who prefer to optimize their digital workspace with apps like F.lux and BetterSnapTool might find the cookie cutter Chrome environment too limiting. Lastly, and most importantly, Chromebooks can’t do most photo and video editing. You can do lightweight stuff (adjust brightness, draw on photos, and add filters, etc.) but Chromebooks can’t run Photoshop CC or Premiere CC.

First of all, the new Samsung Chromebook Pro can do this:

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="This Fancy Chromebook Has a Touchscreen, Stylus, And A Price You Can Actually Afford“>BuzzFeed

President Trump Is Shaming Nordstrom On Twitter, Facebook, And Instagram

President Donald Trump, unhappy his daughter Ivanka&#039;s fashion line was dropped by Nordstrom, lashed out Wednesday at the retailer on Twitter. And on Facebook. And on Instagram.

The multi-platform targeting of an American department store is new territory as far as US presidents go, but not entirely out of the ordinary for Trump, who has often used his social media accounts to fire away at those he believes wronged him.

“My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by Nordstrom,” the president tweeted. “She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing&#033; Terrible&033;”

Instagram: @realdonaldtrump

View Video ›

Facebook: DonaldTrump

After posting the initial tweet on his @realDonaldTrump account, Trump reposted the language to Instagram and Facebook, and retweeted it from the @POTUS account, leading some to question if it was ethical for a sitting president to pressure a family business partner.

Trump has used his Instagram to attack opponents in the past, including Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. While some imagined Trump might change his approach to social media once he took the presidency, there appears to be no change in his early days in the White House.

Instagram: @realdonaldtrump

Instagram: @realdonaldtrump

Trump is bringing a proven political social media strategy to bear on corporations with whom he&039;s displeased. Only now, instead of Jeb and Hillary, it&039;s Nordstrom and others.

Nordstrom, for its part, tweeted that the decision to drop Ivanka Trump&039;s fashion line was due to “business results.”

Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended Trump&039;s attacks at his press briefing today.

Quelle: <a href="President Trump Is Shaming Nordstrom On Twitter, Facebook, And Instagram“>BuzzFeed

Everything You Need To Know About Google's New Smartwatches

Android Wear 2.0, the platform’s first big update since 2014, starts rolling out to supported devices this week.

Whaddya know&#033; Google still makes smartwatches. After nearly three years of incremental software updates to a small fleet of wearable devices, Android Wear 2.0 is finally available on two new watches – the LG Watch Style and LG Watch Sport – designed specifically for the refined software. Existing, supported watches, like the Moto 360 2 and ASUS ZenWatch 2, will be able to download 2.0 in the coming weeks.

You might be wondering: Why is Google continuing to invest resources in wearables, a D-list gadget category that it isn’t doing so hot right now? Operations at Kickstarter darling Pebble shut down in December 2016, and the company folded into Fitbit, which recently cut between 5% to 10% of its workforce after disappointing holiday sales. Intel-owned Basis had to recall its devices when they began overheating and melting their own chargers. Jawbone is reportedly winding down its fitness-focused wearables business. Even the number of smartwatches sold by the industry’s two leading manufacturers, Samsung (with 800,000 watches) and Apple (with 5.2 million), pale in comparison those companies’ smartphone sales (77.5 and 78.3 million, respectively, in the last quarter of 2016 alone). Furthermore, compared to Samsung and Apple, Google has struggled to gain traction in the smartwatch category.

Well, Google, it seems, wants its core suite of software services available in as many form factors as possible, from smart speakers to routers. There are many ways one can “google” something and, if smartwatches are your thing, the wrist is another place where you can do just that. Google&#039;s hardware is merely a vessel for its software – and Android Wear is no different.

The new Android watches designed in partnership with LG were clearly made to prioritize Google’s software, and don’t have some of the more premium hardware features that its competitors do, like the Samsung Gear S3’s multi-day battery life or the Apple Watch Series 2’s swim-proofness. The new update most notably includes access to Google Assistant, the “smart” voice-activated personal assistant that can send messages, set reminders, or make restaurant reservations. It’s also compatible with Android Pay, a mobile tap-and-go payment platform.

In my week of testing the first Android watches slated to ship with 2.0, I found that, while the new update will most likely satisfy longtime Android Wear loyalists, if you’re not sold on smartwatches, the LG Watch Sport and Style aren’t going to be the ones that convince you otherwise. Here are some of my first impressions:

Google / BuzzFeed News

Look at how big this damn thing is.

This is the size of the LG Watch Sport on my wrist. It is Not Good. The watch is 14.2 mm thick, which may not sound like a lot, but it is, especially when you’re trying to jam it through a fitted sweater.

The Sport version of the watch has cellular LTE data, built-in GPS, NFC for mobile payments, a heart rate sensor, and a battery to support all of those energy-draining technologies crammed underneath its 1.38-inch diameter display. It’s water resistant in up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes, which is good for running in the rain, but wouldn’t survive a swim. The device feels heavy too, like a metal paperweight strapped to your wrist, though those with thicker, stronger forearms might disagree. Those 89.4 grams start to feel like a burden after all-day wear.

The slimmer, more lightweight Style is more my speed, but it doesn’t have any of the features I mentioned above. It’s essentially a step counter with a display for apps, notifications, and Google Assistant.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Android Wear has the best tiny typing experience for wearables, period.

You’d think that replying to messages, Slacks, and emails on a watch would be a typo nightmare, but Android’s new on-watch keyboard is anything but. You can swipe your finger over the mini keyboard or peck each letter, and Google will employ machine learning to figure out what you’re trying to say.

There are also a number of “smart” replies, generated by Google based on the contents of your message, that you can choose from. For example, for an email requesting a meeting, the watch suggested “OK, let me get back to you” as an automatic response, along with “I agree,” “Nice,” and the smiley face emoji.

You can also respond purely with emoji, by choosing them from a long list or attempting to draw one. And by draw, I mean, scribble the “Pinterest fail” version of a thumbs up and Google’s algorithms are smart enough to understand what you intended.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

During my briefing with Google, two product managers explained that this feature was introduced so you can easily switch between your “work” watch face and your “home” watch face. But it’s not super clear that, like, anybody wants or needs that??

View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="Everything You Need To Know About Google&039;s New Smartwatches“>BuzzFeed

Here's Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

It’s safe to say White House press secretary Sean Spicer is having a bad week. To put the mayo on his turd sandwich, last night, people discovered his account on Venmo and started sending him bogus payment requests with trolling messages.

The wave of trolling was kicked off when the celebrity gossip podcast Who? Weekly tweeted that Spicer could be found on Venmo after a listener tipped them off. This isn’t the first time the podcast has looked for C-list celebs on the payment app – they found Bella Thorne and Tiffany Trump [full disclosure: I am a friend of the hosts and made one of its theme songs]. A few hours after Spicer’s Venmo was trolled, people found Kellyanne Conway’s account and did the same. This is all meant to be relatively harmless fun; only a real killjoy wouldn’t see the appeal of the weirdness of finding celebrities on a highly plebeian money app. It’s funny to find celebrities on Venmo precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to be there, and it’s the kind of app that we use for unglamorous and petty things like splitting cab fare or drinks.

A bunch of extraneous Venmo requests are probably the least of Spicer&#039;s concerns at the moment (BuzzFeed News confirmed the account was his by matching his phone number). However, The ability to use Venmo to harass someone with bogus payment requests should strike you as somewhat alarming.

Here’s why.

1) Venmo is convenient precisely because it’s so easy to find your friends on it, just by phone number, email, or by name. The privacy settings allow you to make the details of your payments private, but there’s no option to keep your account completely hidden from search. If you’re on there, people can find you by just your name.

This level of privacy setting is akin to what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter offer – you can make the details of your account private, but not the fact that you HAVE an account. But on those platforms, you can prevent randos from sending you messages or even trying to add you.

Part of what makes Venmo fun is the fact that it layers elements of a social network on top of a regular payments app: You can look at the feed of your friends’ payments and see who they’re interacting with. If you really want to be weird, you can even comment on their payments. Tilt your head and squint, and Venmo is a social network that happens to do payments. And where there’s a social network, there’s trolls.

2) Venmo sends you a text message and push notification for payments and requests. It’s possible to turn these off deep in the Settings, but it’s likely many people leave these on – I have them left on. This means Sean Spicer’s phone was probably blowing up late into the night while people sent him pennies.

The text message that Venmo sends you for a payment or request contains the message from the transaction. Here’s what this means: Let’s say you want to say “go jump in a lake” to Sean Spicer. You could tweet at him, but let’s be real: At best he’ll probably just quickly glance it while scrolling through his mentions. And in the context of Twitter, it’s nothing. You, the average citizen, don’t have much ability to directly get the attention of one of the people at the tight inner circle to the President. But if you merely search his name on Venmo, you can send a payment request, and blammo&#033; you sent a message via a text directly to his personal cell phone. And while you can block people, you have to do it one by one (according to some reports, Spicer was receiving hundreds of these messages).

3) While you can reject requests for payments, you cannot reject someone sending you money. Which… in the case of a government official like Sean Spicer, is kind of weird. Spicer has no way of stopping me from sending him $100,000 and writing it “Trump payola, per our conversation” in the message. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me from dropping off a bag of cash at his doorstep either, but that might not be public or easy. For non-celebs, it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios in which sending someone money could be a form of harassment – a weapon to be used in a financial grudge between exes, friends, or business people.

4) It works as an ad hoc reverse cellphone lookup. You can’t see a person’s phone number from their profile, but you can match up a phone number to a profile. Let’s say you have an anonymous cell phone number, and you want to find out who it belongs to. You can’t search by the phone number in Venmo, but if you complete a payment or request, it reveals the name attached to the number. Same with matching a name to an email address.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to search for people by email or phone, but that option can be turned off. In Venmo, there’s no option to turn this search off, or make it so that your number can’t be used to find you. Reporters need to match cell phones to names all the time, so this is a great tool for us — or perhaps just for anyone who sees their partner texting a stranger’s number and wants to find out who it is.

5) You can’t make your “friends” list private, which you can do on Facebook. This matters in cases like Spicer’s: For example, one of BuzzFeed’s politics reporters was able to help verify that the account actually belonged to the press secretary by glancing through his friends list and seeing names of Washington insiders.

Here’s where Venmo significantly differs from social networks: being “friends” on Venmo with Spicer doesn’t mean he’s friendly with someone, it means they may have a financial connection. That matters for Sean Spicer; it matters for the rest of us, too.

A spokesperson for Venmo said that privacy for users is one of their highest priorities, and pointed me to a list of customizable privacy settings that control how your transactions will show up to other people. While the tools to make your payments private are there, this doesn’t significantly address what’s happening to Sean Spicer (his payments are all private).

“This doesn’t happen a lot. This is a new thing for Venmo to think about,” a company spokesperson told me. They were indeed very aware of what was happening with Mr. Spicer today from the news, but declined to tell me if any direct actions had been taken, citing user privacy.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled“>BuzzFeed

Here's Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

It’s safe to say White House press secretary Sean Spicer is having a bad week. To put the mayo on his turd sandwich, last night, people discovered his account on Venmo and started sending him bogus payment requests with trolling messages.

The wave of trolling was kicked off when the celebrity gossip podcast Who? Weekly tweeted that Spicer could be found on Venmo after a listener tipped them off. This isn’t the first time the podcast has looked for C-list celebs on the payment app – they found Bella Thorne and Tiffany Trump [full disclosure: I am a friend of the hosts and made one of its theme songs]. A few hours after Spicer’s Venmo was trolled, people found Kellyanne Conway’s account and did the same. This is all meant to be relatively harmless fun; only a real killjoy wouldn’t see the appeal of the weirdness of finding celebrities on a highly plebeian money app. It’s funny to find celebrities on Venmo precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to be there, and it’s the kind of app that we use for unglamorous and petty things like splitting cab fare or drinks.

A bunch of extraneous Venmo requests are probably the least of Spicer&#039;s concerns at the moment (BuzzFeed News confirmed the account was his by matching his phone number). However, The ability to use Venmo to harass someone with bogus payment requests should strike you as somewhat alarming.

Here’s why.

1) Venmo is convenient precisely because it’s so easy to find your friends on it, just by phone number, email, or by name. The privacy settings allow you to make the details of your payments private, but there’s no option to keep your account completely hidden from search. If you’re on there, people can find you by just your name.

This level of privacy setting is akin to what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter offer – you can make the details of your account private, but not the fact that you HAVE an account. But on those platforms, you can prevent randos from sending you messages or even trying to add you.

Part of what makes Venmo fun is the fact that it layers elements of a social network on top of a regular payments app: You can look at the feed of your friends’ payments and see who they’re interacting with. If you really want to be weird, you can even comment on their payments. Tilt your head and squint, and Venmo is a social network that happens to do payments. And where there’s a social network, there’s trolls.

2) Venmo sends you a text message and push notification for payments and requests. It’s possible to turn these off deep in the Settings, but it’s likely many people leave these on – I have them left on. This means Sean Spicer’s phone was probably blowing up late into the night while people sent him pennies.

The text message that Venmo sends you for a payment or request contains the message from the transaction. Here’s what this means: Let’s say you want to say “go jump in a lake” to Sean Spicer. You could tweet at him, but let’s be real: At best he’ll probably just quickly glance it while scrolling through his mentions. And in the context of Twitter, it’s nothing. You, the average citizen, don’t have much ability to directly get the attention of one of the people at the tight inner circle to the President. But if you merely search his name on Venmo, you can send a payment request, and blammo&#033; you sent a message via a text directly to his personal cell phone. And while you can block people, you have to do it one by one (according to some reports, Spicer was receiving hundreds of these messages).

3) While you can reject requests for payments, you cannot reject someone sending you money. Which… in the case of a government official like Sean Spicer, is kind of weird. Spicer has no way of stopping me from sending him $100,000 and writing it “Trump payola, per our conversation” in the message. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me from dropping off a bag of cash at his doorstep either, but that might not be public or easy. For non-celebs, it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios in which sending someone money could be a form of harassment – a weapon to be used in a financial grudge between exes, friends, or business people.

4) It works as an ad hoc reverse cellphone lookup. You can’t see a person’s phone number from their profile, but you can match up a phone number to a profile. Let’s say you have an anonymous cell phone number, and you want to find out who it belongs to. You can’t search by the phone number in Venmo, but if you complete a payment or request, it reveals the name attached to the number. Same with matching a name to an email address.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to search for people by email or phone, but that option can be turned off. In Venmo, there’s no option to turn this search off, or make it so that your number can’t be used to find you. Reporters need to match cell phones to names all the time, so this is a great tool for us — or perhaps just for anyone who sees their partner texting a stranger’s number and wants to find out who it is.

5) You can’t make your “friends” list private, which you can do on Facebook. This matters in cases like Spicer’s: For example, one of BuzzFeed’s politics reporters was able to help verify that the account actually belonged to the press secretary by glancing through his friends list and seeing names of Washington insiders.

Here’s where Venmo significantly differs from social networks: being “friends” on Venmo with Spicer doesn’t mean he’s friendly with someone, it means they may have a financial connection. That matters for Sean Spicer; it matters for the rest of us, too.

A spokesperson for Venmo said that privacy for users is one of their highest priorities, and pointed me to a list of customizable privacy settings that control how your transactions will show up to other people. While the tools to make your payments private are there, this doesn’t significantly address what’s happening to Sean Spicer (his payments are all private).

“This doesn’t happen a lot. This is a new thing for Venmo to think about,” a company spokesperson told me. They were indeed very aware of what was happening with Mr. Spicer today from the news, but declined to tell me if any direct actions had been taken, citing user privacy.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled“>BuzzFeed

Here’s How To Make Your Facebook News Feed Less Miserable

A friendly PSA: you can block your slightly racist uncle without unfriending him.

It’s natural to want relief from the constant stream of online news, engagement announcements, baby updates, and the five-year-old memes your dad keeps posting. You may not be ready to unfriend your cousin who keeps sharing fake news (no, Vin Diesel is *not* relocating to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), or your slightly racist uncle But you can, at least, politely and — most importantly, discreetly — remove them (and/or the offending news site) from your news feed.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that you should block everyone who disagrees with you from your news feed. That would only intensify the filter bubble/echo chamber Facebook’s algorithms have already created on your behalf. But, every once in a while, it&#039;s nice to take a break. Here are a handful of simple ways to make your feed more manageable.

Loryn Brantz / BuzzFeed

If you don’t want to see posts from certain individuals.

You don’t have to deal with the dramz of unfriending them&#033; Click that downward arrow, select Unfollow [Person’s Name], and — BOOM&033; — they outta there. Forever. Until you follow them back. That’s it&033;

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

If you want to see more stuff from people and pages you actually like, generally.

The See First feature is the best way to tell Facebook what you actually want look at in your news feed. It’s also a great way to point the site’s algorithms to high-quality content from friends, public pages, and news organizations you trust.

From a desktop computer, you can mark someone as See First on their page, on the bottom right corner of their cover photo. On mobile, from their profile tap Following and then See First. You can mark a page (like BuzzFeed News’s or Beyoncé’s) by clicking on Following and then See First. You’re limited to 30 people or pages. And, no, they won’t be notified that you’re ~really into~ their posts.

Posts from those people or pages will appear first, before anything else in your News Feed. On desktop, manage these by going to your news feed and on the left column, hover your mouse over the ellipses next to News Feed and click Edit preferences, then Prioritize who to see first.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

On any post, tap the downward arrow, select Hide post. You should then see a small box after the hidden post is collapsed. Next, click See less from [Person’s Name].

View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="Here’s How To Make Your Facebook News Feed Less Miserable“>BuzzFeed

This Website Wants To Be The Snopes Of WhatsApp Hoaxes In India

Akash Iyer / Via BuzzFeed India

Shammas Oliyath has spent every lunch break for the last six months telling strangers all over India that a Gujarati woman didn’t really give birth to 11 babies at once, malicious Indian grocers aren’t really selling AIDS-laced fruits, Guinness hasn’t really declared Kannada the world’s oldest language, and the UNESCO certainly hasn’t named Narendra Modi as the world’s best Prime minister.

“It’s a social service,” he said. “I feel really good about clearing people’s misconceptions.”

Oliyath, a software engineer at IBM in Bengaluru, is the co-founder of Check4Spam.com, a website that focuses on fact-checking and busting viral hoaxes, urban myths, and political propaganda that are spreading on WhatsApp and rapidly becoming India’s own fake news crisis.

“We are hoping to become the Snopes of India,” Oliyath told BuzzFeed News, referring to the San Diego-based website that, in its 20-year history, has evolved from busting urban legends (Does a colony of alligators make its home in the New York City sewer system?) to fact-checking America’s 45th President himself. “We want to take the work Snopes has done and apply it in a very Indian context.”

“We want to take the work Snopes has done and apply it in a very Indian context.”

Doing that not only means debunking Indian hoaxes but also doing it on the very platform where they originate: WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned instant messenger is used by more than 160 million Indians and is by far the fastest way that misinformation spreads in the country. Last year, the Indian state turned off internet access in large swaths of the country to prevent WhatsApp rumor-mongering from inciting tensions.

Check4Spam provides a dedicated phone number for people to forward any hoaxes they receive directly over WhatsApp. On a typical day, this hoax-busting hotline gets between 60 and 70 forwards to fact-check.

Oliyath works methodically through each forward he gets, sending back links if the rumor in question has already been busted on his website, and trawling the web to verify new ones.

He usually skips the first few dozen pages of search results and starts searching from the back “because that’s often where the original real post or image on which something fake is based on exists.”

Often, he relies on what India’s mainstream press has already reported, but says that he will frequently double and triple check even traditional sources to prevent any inherent media biases from tainting his debunking.

“Sometimes, we’ll get a lot of a certain piece of fake news or a hoax, so we can actually tell which hoax is trending on WhatsApp on that day,” Oliyath said. “WhatsApp is a good barometer.”

“We can actually tell which hoax is trending on WhatsApp on that day.”

This ability to spot patterns in hoaxes is particularly useful. In the last few months, for instance, Oliyath has noticed a particular kind of hoax gaining popularity: fake promotional messages that promise free cellular data and voice minutes (including this gem where President Trump gives every Indian free mobile minutes) in exchange for clicking on a link or installing an app that inevitably turns out to be malware.

“I’m an English-speaking software engineer and I’m fairly savvy, so I can tell that things like these are fake,” said Oliyath. “But a lot of older people, early smartphone adopters, and people who don&#039;t read or speak English in India are often unable to tell that these promotions are fake and end up installing malware on their phones.”

Worse, Oliyath discovered that a significant number of his non English-speaking users often ended up mistaking his English debunk itself for a genuine promotion and ended up falling for it anyway. So now he writes “fake” in half a dozen Indian languages on these posts to make sure that users who don&039;t understand English know it&039;s a hoax.

Some rumors, like a recent one about buffalo-headed fish found in an Indian river, are fairly easy to bust: Oliyath ran the picture through a reverse image search and instantly found the original one (a regular fish, in case you&039;re wondering). “Most of these guys are pretty bad at Photoshop&#033;” he laughs.

Others are harder. Last year, when a WhatsApp forward about 275 job openings in Indian IT giant Wipro started doing the rounds, Oliyath had a Check4Spam volunteer call and email Wipro’s HR department to check if the news was true (it wasn’t).

“It’s a lot of legwork,” said Oliyath. “It’s tough to do it at scale.”

That’s the reason why Check4Spam recently started accepting debunks from volunteers over WhatsApp. “We allow anyone to volunteer,” said Oliyath. “But I do scrutinize volunteer-submitted debunks before posting them on the website.”

Oliyath said that the site currently receives half a million pageviews a month, driven largely by word of mouth (Snopes can get 2.5 million in a single day). Before Bal Krishan Birla, the site’s other co-founder came on board in July, Oliyath had been struggling to figure out a way to grow it. Birla, a serial entrepreneur and an SEO expert decided that staying topical was the key to growth.

When J Jayalalithaa, a prominent Indian politician, was admitted to a hospital in a critical condition in December, for instance, the duo stayed focused on debunking hoax messages and photographs about her death days before she actually passed away. “Once people receive a WhatsApp forward, they want to know whether it is true or not and they invariably end up looking it up on Google,” Birla told BuzzFeed News. “So SEO is important for us to grow.”

Birla lets Oliyath focus on the actual debunking and calls himself Check4Spam’s tech guy, focusing on keeping the website up and running. But he’s also drawing up a roadmap: he would eventually like to build a browser plugin to detect Indian fake news on the internet. And if WhatsApp ever lets third-party bots hook into it like Facebook Messenger, he thinks that building a fact-checking bot for India&039;s most popular instant messenger would be a terrific use case.

A fact-checking bot for India&039;s most popular instant messenger would be a terrific use case

For now, Check4Spam remains a labor of love. Both Birla and Oliyath said that they’re not looking for funding or revenue yet, mostly because their real jobs keep them busy, but might think about hiring one or two more fact-checkers to ease their load. The real motivation, they say, comes from the feedback they get.

“People are really overwhelmed when they actually send something over WhatsApp to our hotline and promptly receive a response,” said Oliyath. “I’ve had elderly strangers who are obviously new to WhatsApp thank me profusely for our service. Even if the website doesn’t grow or turn into anything significant, I’ll still bust hoaxes on WhatsApp for them.”

Want to verify a WhatsApp forward? Send it over to Check4Spam’s WhatsApp hotline at +919035067726.

Quelle: <a href="This Website Wants To Be The Snopes Of WhatsApp Hoaxes In India“>BuzzFeed

People Are Figuring Out How To Cheat Facebook To Spread Their Political Messages

You’ve probably noticed this in the last few weeks on Facebook. Maybe a friend of yours, maybe it’s even you. Someone particularly impassioned about politics, or perhaps someone who usually keeps quiet but has been moved to post all of a sudden. Perhaps the language of it doesn&#039;t not really seem like the way your friend usually talks.

It’s a text post, usually a pretty long one. It’s political – but more than just an opinion, a call to action. Maybe it’s instructions of how to call your local legislator, or maybe it’s just instructive in a vaguer sense of like “if you voted for [whoever], fuck off&#033;”

But the last line has an interesting twist: “COPY AND PASTE TO SHARE&033;”

Facebook, of course, has a way for you to share text statuses: the “Share” button. These people know that. They also know that Facebook’s newsfeed has an algorithm, and that algorithm is confusing and opaque. They know some things will get pushed to the top of their friends’ feeds, and some things won’t. The theory here is that a NEW text status, rather than a share of an existing one, will be shown more prominently.

There’s a practical design issue here too: A long text in shared post gets cut off – you have to click to “see more”. In a fresh post, more of the text shows up in your friends’ feeds.

I asked one of my Facebook friends why he was doing it. “[It] came down to how it looks when you share something that is just text on Facebook,” said Preston Olson, 40, of New Jersey. “It just shows only the first line or two. Then you have to click on it, it opens up a new page to get the full text. It’s annoying.” He had posted a long list of political actions since the Women’s March on Washington that he saw as positive (I saw other friends, completely unrelated to Olson, also copy and paste the same text).

People are revolting against the medium to get their message out. We’re starting to fight the tyranny of the feed, the sense that in a deluge of information that our friends see, our own voices won’t cut through.

This isn’t the first time this kind of attempt to game the algorithm has happened. You may have seen a life event update that your friend Got Married, and then in the description something like, “don’t worry, Mom, I’m not really married. I just wanted to tell you all about something very important to me….” People figured out that “life events” like changing your status to engaged or married is hugely prioritized in Facebook’s algorithm, and they used that instead of a text post to write their political screed. Others noticed that even if you didn’t do the full-on “life event” but just MENTIONED words like engaged, married, ring, baby, announcement that Facebook magically knew that this was probably a life event announcement that would be prioritized.

Via businessinsider.com

Losing our voices to the chaos of the feed is a fear to more than just the politically minded among us. Remember the great chaos this spring among C-list celebrities and social media stars when it was announced that Instagram was going to switch to an algorithmic feed? They all posted asking their followers to turn on notifications for their images so that they wouldn’t miss them. Can you imagine? Getting a notification alert on your phone each time a former contestant from The Bachelor posts to Instagram? Hell is truly within our reach.

So why are we seeing this “copy and paste, don’t share&033;” Facebook meme all of a sudden? Well, for one thing, it’s got a built-in call to action to share. That does actually help things go viral. But more than anything, the last two week have stirred some sort of political passion inside people who would normally never bother posting political messages. Innovation springs from need, and these people who have been pushed over the edge into the realm of political posting have invented something new: a way to trick Facebook into pushing their message into your face.

Unfortunately, for those who are allergic to political talk on social media and have been dealing with a full year now of watching relatives and high school friends arguing back and forth, this is just making 2017 worse.

Quelle: <a href="People Are Figuring Out How To Cheat Facebook To Spread Their Political Messages“>BuzzFeed