Month: November 2018

Iim Fahima Jachja cannot operate a vehicle and relies on a driver to get around the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, but that did not stop her from putting road safety at the heart of her women's empowerment startup. Since launching in late 2016, Queenrides has attracted 200,000 members to join its website. Aside from reading articles about lifestyle and financial management, members can also gather in person for workshops covering topics like sexual health and family planning. But road safety has been a focus from the beginning said, Jachja, a mother of two. "When you are safe on the road, you can be the best you want to be," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Jakarta. Road deaths are high in Indonesia, according to the transport ministry, which…

Facebook on Monday said a human rights report it commissioned on its presence in Myanmar showed it had not done enough to prevent its social network from being used to incite violence. The report by San Francisco-based nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) recommended that Facebook more strictly enforce its content policies, increase engagement with both Myanmar officials and civil society groups and regularly release additional data about its progress in the country. "The report concludes that, prior to this year, we weren't doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence. We agree that we can and should do more," Alex Warofka, a Facebook product policy manager, said in a blog post. BSR also warned that Facebook must be prepared to…

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, appealed on Monday for companies and governments not to leave behind half of the world population yet to have internet access, which includes billions of women and girls. Berners-Lee told the opening of the Europe's largest technology conference that everyone had assumed his breakthrough in 1989, that connected humanity to technology, would lead to good things - and it had for a while. But he said the internet was "coming of age" and going awry, with fake news and issues with privacy, hate speech and political polarization, as well as a growing digital divide between those in richer and poorer countries. He called on companies and governments to join a "contract for the web" by next May in order…

As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Tuesday, the election will also be a referendum on Facebook. In recent months, the social networking giant has beefed up scrutiny of what is posted on its site, looking for fake accounts, misinformation and hate speech, while encouraging people to go on Facebook to express their views. “A lot of the work of content moderation for us begins with our company mission, which is to build community and bring the world closer together,” Peter Stern, who works on product policy stakeholder engagement at Facebook, said at a recent event at St. John’s University in New York City. Facebook wants people to feel safe when they visit the site, Stern said. To that end, it is on track to hire 20,000 people…

As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Nov. 6, all eyes are on how Facebook is grappling with giving people a platform to speak but also keeping misinformation in check. Michelle Quinn reports from San Francisco. ...

We've all heard about how surveillance robots can scope out an area before police or rescue personnel head into a potentially dangerous situation. But some K-9 officers in the U.S. states of Oregon and Wisconsin are getting great help from camera equipped dogs. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

Twitter Inc. deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in Tuesday's U.S. election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.  "We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter," a Twitter spokesman said in an email. The removals took place in late September and early October.  Twitter removed more than 10,000 accounts, according to three sources familiar with the Democrats' effort. The number is modest, considering that Twitter has previously deleted millions of accounts it determined were responsible for spreading misinformation in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  Yet the removals represent an early win for a fledgling effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, a party group that supports Democrats running for the U.S. House of Representatives.  2016 experience The DCCC launched the…

San Francisco Google employees joined a worldwide company walkout Thursday in protest of what they are calling the mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations. Deana Mitchell reports. ...

A website popular with racists that was used by the man charged in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre was shut down within hours of the slaughter, but it hardly mattered: Anti-Semites and racists who hang out in such havens just moved to other online forums. On Wednesday, four days after 11 people were fatally shot in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, anonymous posters on another website popular with white supremacists, Stormfront, claimed the bloodshed at Tree of Life synagogue was an elaborate fake staged by actors. The site's operator, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, said traffic has increased about 45 percent since the shooting. The anti-Semitic rhetoric was just as bad on another site popular with white supremacists, The Daily Stormer, where a headline said: "Just go,…

It was a protest that went around the globe.  From Singapore to Dublin, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Pryor, Oklahoma, Google employees walked out of their offices to protest the internet search giant's handling of sexual discrimination cases, and express their frustration with its workplace culture.    WATCH: Google Silicon Valley Employees Join a Worldwide Protest In San Francisco, where Google has several offices, hundreds of workers congregated at a plaza where they gave speeches and held signs. One read: "I reported and he got promoted." The unusual protest — tech companies are not unionized and typically keep strife about personnel matters behind closed doors — riveted Silicon Valley, which has struggled in recent years over the treatment of women in the industry. Resignation, severance The Google protest was spurred by a New York Times story that…

China is exporting its methods of strict internet controls to governments around the world that are employing them to stifle dissent and free flow of information, and tighten their grip on power, according to U.S.-based Freedom House. In an annual report issued Wednesday, the rights watchdog said global internet freedom had declined for the eighth consecutive year in 2018, with democratic governance under threat from what it called "digital authoritarianism."   Freedom House says Beijing has held sessions on managing online content with 36 of the 65 countries tracked in the report, and provided internet monitoring equipment to governments of many of those nations.  The group also says many governments have passed or proposed new laws restricting internet information and access in the name of fighting "fake news." The report…

Hundreds of Google employees left their offices Thursday as part of a worldwide walkout protest of the company's handling of sexual harassment cases and its workplace culture. More than a thousand workers and contractors reportedly gathered outside of Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters. Hundreds more, most of them women, also launched protests outside nearly two dozen global company offices. "We are a small part of a massive movement that has been growing for a long time," organizers said in an article published in the online magazine The Cut. "We are inspired by everyone from the women in fast food who led an action against sexual harassment to the thousands of women in the #metoo movement who have been the beginning of the end for this type of abuse." The walkouts…

Governments around the world are increasing control over use of the internet and social media, according to the latest report by the Freedom House organization. In 2017, officials in many countries accused dissidents of spreading fake news as a pretext to silence them. Online propaganda and uncontrolled harvesting of personal data have permeated the internet in the past year. A Freedom House expert told VOA these trends are a major threat to democracy. Zlatica Hoke has this story. ...