Month: July 2023

WeChat: Why does Elon Musk want X to emulate China’s everything-app?

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By Peter Hoskins & Fan Wang

BBC News

Earlier this week Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X – another step in his plan to emulate Chinese mega app WeChat.

Mr Musk has long said that he wants to transform his social media firm, which he bought last year for $44bn (£34.4bn), into a much larger platform.

He has previously praised WeChat – a so-called “everything app” that combines chat, dating, payments and social media – and has said creating something “even close to that with Twitter… would be an immense success”.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66333633

Election disinformation campaigns targeted voters of color in 2020. Experts expect 2024 to be worse

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By CHRISTINE FERNANDO Updated 6:08 AM CEST, July 29, 2023

CHICAGO (AP) — Leading up to the 2020 election, Facebook ads targeting Latino and Asian American voters described Joe Biden as a communist. A local station claimed a Black Lives Matter co-founder practiced witchcraft. Doctored images showed dogs urinating on Donald Trump campaign posters.

None of these claims was true, but they scorched through social media sites that advocates say have fueled election misinformation in communities of color.

As the 2024 election approaches, community organizations are preparing for what they expect to be a worsening onslaught of disinformation targeting communities of color and immigrant communities. They say the tailored campaigns challenge assumptions of what kinds of voters are susceptible to election conspiracies and distrust in voting systems.

https://apnews.com/article/elections-voting-misinformation-race-immigration-712a5c5a9b72c1668b8c9b1eb6e0038a

Google what our chatbot tells you… says Google

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You need to add a widget, row, or prebuilt layout before you’ll see anything here. 🙂

Google is warning users not to fully trust Bard for reliability. The urgent advice is to reference and validate the answers Bard gives with the Google search engine. Users have found that Bard may give wrong answers or even totally makes up the answers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66303877

Google what our chatbot tells you… says Google

Tom Singleton, BBC news,28 jul 2023

Google says people should use its search engine to check whether information provided by its chatbot, Bard, is actually accurate.

Some have suggested chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT could “kill” traditional search, which is dominated by Google.

But users have found the information they provide can be wrong or even entirely made up.

Google’s UK boss Debbie Weinstein said Bard was “not really the place that you go to search for specific information”.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, she said Bard should be considered an “experiment” best suited for “collaboration around problem solving” and “creating new ideas”.

“We’re encouraging people to actually use Google as the search engine to actually reference information they found,” she said.

Wikipedia at 20: The encyclopedia in five articles

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Rory Cellan-Jones   BBC News
Technology correspondent
@BBCRoryCJ

On 15 January 2001, two American entrepreneurs – Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger – launched an online encyclopedia.

It was called Wikipedia. Despite much criticism early on about inaccuracies, it has gone on to be hugely successful. It is the 15th most popular destination on the web, is available in more than 300 languages and is maintained by a community of volunteer editors. At least, I think that is accurate – I found all those facts in the online encyclopedia’s own entry on Wikipedia. It is where everyone from students, to politicians to yes, journalists, turn for a quick briefing on any subject, although even Wikipedia says it should not be used as a primary source.

But here are five Wikipedia articles that tell the story of this phenomenon.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55667711