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Political discussion on social media is often driven and manipulated by automated "bots," a university department claims. The word "bots" is a short form for "robot," and refers to online activity carried out using an automated program. The Oxford ... Internet Institute says it studied events in nine countries and found the bots played a role in every case. However, social media groups have questioned such studies saying they are often based on flawed research methods. The study looked at activity on Facebook and Twitter among users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany ... (view more)

Facebook says it will no longer accept advertisements that link to "low-quality" web pages. It's also going to reduce the likelihood that people see user-posted links to such pages. The system Facebook uses for identifying such pages will be ... automated but is based on guidelines developed from manually reviewing "hundreds of thousands" of pages that Facebook had linked to. After staff decided which of these sites were low quality, its computers looked through those pages to spot patterns of common characteristics. (Source: fb.com ) Toenail Fungus Unwelcome Facebook isn ... (view more)

Facebook is testing tools to make it easier to combat "fake news" posted to the site. It's using Germany as a test bed for the tools, which will include making it harder for scammers to make money from false stories. The term "fake news" came to ... prominence last year and has been applied to all sorts of types of writing, including opinionated pieces and legitimate articles with unintended factual errors. However, what Facebook is targeting is material that has the appearance of legitimate news reporting but is largely completely fictional and designed either to spread ... (view more)

Major changes to privacy laws in Europe could affect the way websites deliver advertising. The move is meant to protect user privacy, but critics claim it could make ads more annoying and intrusive. The proposed changes would affect websites used by ... people in European Union countries, but the regulatory impact could be so severe that sites find it easier to change their policies worldwide. According to European officials, the changes are designed to take existing rules that affect telecommunications companies and apply them equally to Internet companies. The main principle of the change is ... (view more)

Google has tweaked its search algorithm after discovering holocaust denial sites were topping the results for some queries. The incident may have highlighted a difference in the way Google and other search engines rank pages. The issue came to light ... when a newspaper reporter experimented with searches for the phrase "did the Holocaust happen" and discovered that the top result returned by Google was a site specifically dedicated to denying the Holocaust. Other journalists checked up potentially controversial queries and found unsettling top results, such as a search for "are ... (view more)

Google is to take harsher actions against sites that it determines house malware or attempt to steal user data. Repeat offenders will effectively be hidden from view from many users for 30 days. The changes are to Google's Safe Browsing feature, ... which vets sites for malicious content. The feature is built into the Chrome browser and made available for other online tools. It's also built-in to all the links from Google search results, regardless of the user's browser. When Google detects a site is potentially harmful, it won't take users directly to the page when they click on ... (view more)

A company accused of selling social media data to the police has been blocked from accessing some or all content from three major sites. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter made the move after complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.) ... According to the ACLU, Geofeedia markets its social media monitoring product to police forces as a way to monitor people who may be involved in protests. In one marketing message, a company representative specifically cited the use of the service during the high-profile unrest that followed the shooting of a man by police officers in Ferguson, ... (view more)

Lately we've been posting a lot of articles about websites and services that have been hacked . One of the primary recommendations we have also repeated is that users should use unique and hard-to-guess passwords for each site, as this will help to ... prevent any further breaches. The reasoning is that if user account data is stolen on one site ( Yahoo is a good example ), the same username and passwords may also be valid on other sites - but only if users are using the same account names, passwords or password hints. Unfortunately this is often the case, because using the same passwords on ... (view more)

North Korea has just 28 websites, an audit has revealed. It includes sites for education, travel and cookery. What information was already known about the secretive country showed that it has its own Intranet: a restricted, internal network that ... appears to be the only information accessible to the few North Koreans with access to computers. However, the country does have a few sites on the worldwide Internet, all with addresses ending in .kp in the same way that many Canadian sites often end in .ca. Until now, nobody was sure exactly how many such sites existed. Full Domains List Exposed Like ... (view more)

A hack of nearly 800,000 accounts on an adult entertainment site could be among the most embarrassing ever. The breach at "Brazzers" may expose some of the very personal tastes of the site's users. The stolen data doesn't come from the main Brazzers ... site, which sells access to videos the company has made itself. Instead, it comes from the site's discussion forum, where users can discuss the scenes on the site and talk about what they'd like to see in future videos. Passwords Stored Without Encryption The data is said to include 790,724 email addresses (not including ... (view more)