This Report Reveals Widespread Government Crackdowns on Twitter and Facebook

Certain governments around the world are prone to blocking or banning social media sites because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up informing citizens about their rights. Such social media sites can allow people to exchange information and communicate with each other in a way that authoritarian governments might not want, since it can make their power weaker than might have been the case otherwise.

Accessnow recently conducted a study that shed some light on which platforms ended up getting blocked the most. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Twitter and Facebook ended up being the most frequently targeted social media sites of all. They were both blocked thirteen times each over the course of 2022, largely due to their immense popularity among users around the globe.

Countries like China, Iran and Russia blocked both of these sites, and Turkey and Sri Lanka joined them as well due to the protests that were occurring in those countries caused by economic mismanagement. Myanmar and North Korea were also in this list, which just goes to show that countries that lack democratic norms are far more likely to try to ban Twitter and Facebook.

Instagram and WhatsApp were tied for second place, with each platform having been blocked at least ten times last year. They were followed by Google Services with nine bans, Telegram with eight, and the discreet messaging service Signal with a total of five bans.

TikTok also saw several bans, more specifically four. In spite of the fact that this is the case, America’s recent attempts to enact their own ban on the rapidly growing social media site might lead to a domino effect that would result in it getting blocked far more times by other countries that might want to follow suit.

The state of internet freedom is perilous right now. Steps must be taken to ensure access to social media sites, or at least prevent governments from enacting blanket bans that can restrict access among their citizens.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

New Survey Says US Consumers Don’t Understand Common Terms Users To Describe AI Products

Ever since we saw the makers of ChatGPT release the widely popular and revolutionary language model chatbot, the fascination of the general public toward AI models began to skyrocket. And that’s when we saw the private sector generate responses of that kind.

All types of firms arising from different sectors across the board were seen entering into a new kind of race that includes such technology and its various benefits. Did we reveal how the number of AI mentions in earning calls that were released for the quarter featured at a whopping frequency of 75%?

But with all the good, we forget to mention one basic thing. There’s a major issue in terms of firms marketing the ordeal in a boastful manner. It’s leaving a lot of people confused because the terminology is not something that a lot of people may relate to. And as you can imagine, that could be a problem.

The results come to us thanks to a new survey conducted by Morning Consult that proved how despite the huge frenzy linked to AI, many US consumers are not too sure what exactly some phrases mean and the fact that they’re being blown out every second is daunting.

A total of ten common marketing terms were outlined including Powered by AI and Includes AI. in addition to that, we saw the survey reveal how several firms provided support in terms of making use of AI produced spokesperson, online avatars, or social media influencers to better their marketing approach. And this was variable in terms of generation and gender too.

A whopping 46% of men and 52% of millennials claimed to show approval for the practice as compared to women who stood at 28% and baby boomers who stood at 20%.

So many Americans claim to be just so confused with the ordeal and don’t know what else to say about these buzzwords. They’re just used too commonly and that can be a problem. And it’s just younger men who are seemingly the most confident about the words used while the rest are just not sure anymore.

Meanwhile, the survey proved that the word AI Image Generation was the word having the greatest level of comprehension confidence in all demographic groups, other than Gen X and females.

Furthermore, words and phrases like AI-enhanced productivity and AI task automation turned out to be least understood in terms of demographics. Among those, Gen Z adults, males, and millennials produced the best results in terms of understanding the tested phrases.

On the other hand, the survey’s results show how respondents were split up in terms of supporting and opposing firms making use of AI spokespeople, avatars, and social media stars.

Are we really surprised at the results? Not really, and that’s because a lot of companies have previously spoken about how they feel at a certain level of discomfort in terms of AI. Therefore, they’re taking the needed steps to communicate the technical use through language that’s more familiar.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Bluesky and Mastodon are gearing up to face each other as rival apps

According to the App Figures' latest report, Mastodon and Bluesky are going head-to-head as both platforms intend to compete with each other. Mastodon made its debut seven years ago, in 2016. After a period of time, the stable release was finally rolled out globally on April 4, 2023. The platform became famous for running self-hosted social media services. The application is based on decentralized servers that can be joined according to anyone’s interests, and they can interact with other users.

Similarly, Bluesky, another decentralized social media app, has also entered the arena. The platform was initially announced four years ago, in 2019, and officially started hiring in 2021. Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive officer and cofounder of Twitter, was the one who created Bluesky as well. At the time of Musk’s takeover, it was announced that the platform would become independent and start working on its own.

Since its release, Bluesky has successfully managed to get 360K downloads from both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. Since the iOS version was released earlier, the App Store had the most downloads. However, it works only for those who have received an invitation from Bluesky users.

Once the invitation is accepted, users can see the similarities between Twitter and Bluesky. Not just the appearance, but even the features are quite similar, such as sharing media items, engaging with other people’s posts, and sharing them on a timeline. As compared to Bluesky’s 360K downloads, Mastodon was able to receive somewhere around 150K downloads in the same period of time.

Initially, it was believed that both Twitter and Bluesky would be facing each other as rivals; however, based on Twitter’s number of users, it is too early to compare the two social apps, while the downloading figure shows how Mastodon is going to give Bluesky a tough time.

After a long period of waiting, the App Store finally has something new that works in invite-only mode, just like Clubhouse, which became famous for hosting audio-only chat rooms in which users can talk about different topics.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Instagram Experiments With New Option To Assist Brands In Discovering Relevant UGC On The App

Instagram is busy carrying out new tests to try and provide brands with the chance to discover new UGC through its platform. They can then share this as an example to market their goods and services in-stream.

As seen in examples that were shared by one LinkedIn user, the feature has the app encouraging shop managers to include ‘Add user-generated content’ as a great addition to product listings that encourage people to purchase more.

When you click on such a prompt, the app’s system ends up highlighting posts that your specific brand might be tagged in. Therefore, you can associate that with other product listings.

As per a recent notice set out by the platform, users who tag the brand in such a post will allow the brand to ask for permission to feature such goods in the post. Hence, those users that tag the brand will appreciate the fact that your brand is interested in featuring its products in all of their posts. This will enable the content to appear on specific brand-owned locations like the shop on the app or the good’s own PDP.

Meanwhile, brands can then request direct tagging within any type of post where they might be mentioned. There are some exceptions like private accounts and when you have several products tagged at once or in cases where the user turns off the request for permission too.

This might be a great means to gain more UGC and really give brands a chance to take off from this platform. As far as firms seeing a lot of tags is concerned, it might be a huge factor in terms of promoting efforts.

For those that might not be aware, UGC really can affect purchasing behavior big time as more and more people are going to be trusting the experiences of others as compared to marketing campaigns that look too good to be true.

Let’s not forget how there are so many scams in the industry today with an equal number of misleading ads and marketing strategies that make it hard to trust anyone promoting anything now.

Therefore, in such a context, this serves a valuable purpose and fuels legitimacy. So we feel it’s definitely worth exploring and such prompts are now showing up to customized brand account managers on the app.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

WhatsApp Is Rolling Out Voice Message Transcripts For Its Users

WhatsApp users are in for a treat as the platform has opted to introduce voice message transcripts.

The news comes after an update was recently shared regarding how the platform was busy testing this feature out in beta. But that appears to have gone as per plan as a widespread rollout begins today.

This new endeavor provides users the chance to attain voice message content in certain situations where they cannot listen to a voice note. Instead, they end up providing a certain degree of flexibility and accessibility in terms of communication.

After having the newest version of the beta for iOS update installed, users claim they can finally have the feature which gets enabled through default settings. And in case you choose to opt out of it, you can always disable it by going to Settings, Chats, and finally to the Voice Message Transcripts.

The company says that this new rollout is secure through E2E encryption as the entire process of transcription begins on the user’s device with the help of language packs.

Therefore, the feature may only be up for grabs to a few users having the latest iOS version with them as this makes use of APIs thanks to iOS 16 which provides permission for apps to process voice messages through local means on a device. Hence, you don’t need to transfer it to external sources.

Similarly, this feature for voice notes also enables users to look for certain types of data found in a message. When voice notes get transcribed, this text would be indexed and that makes it searchable. Hence, if you’re on the lookout for certain kinds of data featuring long voice notes, or you can’t remember which one entails content you’re in search of, you can search for it through relevant keynotes or phrases through the search bar. This way, the transcription ends up getting highlighted in places where the text pops up in a message.

This type of operation can assist users in saving time and making it so much simpler to look up certain details inside a chat.

Moreover, the chance to transcribe such voice notes is up for grabs to some beta testers for now but don’t worry, it’s getting rolled out to others in the next few weeks so keep your eyes open.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Consumers Are Losing Up To 40% Of Their Broadband Speed Over Wi-Fi Connections, New Research Proves

A recent study is proving how consumers are losing up to 40% of their total broadband speed over Wi-Fi connections.

This research comes to us thanks to SamKnows who found a clear gap between incoming speed and speed received by clients on their devices. And the gap found was literally huge.

The company was seen recording a massive speed loss for mobile devices including mobiles and tablets where the figure stood at 40% as compared to 27% for both PCs and laptops.

Other than that, there was a clear drop off which gets higher as the connection speed in the home arguably grows faster. Those people having gigabit connections end up losing nearly half of the speed by the time it goes about reaching the Wi-Fi devices.

If you happen to be on connections that are more than a few hundred megabits, the odds of attaining those megabits all across your residence are quite small. This is unless you’re sorted with a really expensive router connection that has been sourced through third parties.

Even then, the odds of attaining nearly 400 to 500 megabits across your residence are truly quite small. The study also proved how much data seen through the RealSpeed product ended up measuring the speed received by the Wifi-devices as well as the router in the residence. This is used by consumers as well as broadband service providers so it gets to troubleshoot problems through people’s internet.

The study further revealed how there are so many different ways how such Wi-Fi devices cannot exploit the entire speed for internet connectivity.

Wi-Fi ends up losing speed at a faster pace as it roams far from routers. This is especially true when there happens to be many obstacles along the way like walls.

It was shown how mobile phones usually have smaller antennas for Wi-Fi than PCs or Laptops. This goes a long way into understanding how there is a huge drop in speeds and it’s less dramatic than devices. Meanwhile, interference gained from home can even affect performance to a further extent, the study mentioned.

And when you’ve got a range of other types of wireless devices at your residence and further congestion from neighbors along the way too, it could really harm the speed to a greater extent.

So what is the solution to such a problem? Well, it’s the emergency of Wi-Fi 7 equipment that could prevent the loss of broadband speed to a huge degree. This not only provides a huge bandwidth to play with than the usual predecessors, but it also entails advanced techniques for coding that work along the interference seen on wireless devices.

In this manner, they can benefit from a lot of speed that seems to be coming into a home. Similarly, it can make way for several connections through various Wi-Fi bands. Currently, devices tend to connect through several channels across several types of bands. This combines the entire traffic through these channels and provides a connection that’s faster and more reliable than those seen at home.

But with Wi-Fi 7 routines in place, these tend to emerge into the market and very few electronic devices have the chips in place that are compatible with them. Therefore, it’s definitely a slow process before consumers actually start to feel the benefit that this has for some time. It’s really true for those kinds of broadband providers that are usually slow to adopt different Wi-Fi standards across routers that distribute them.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

3 New Types of Malware Target Businesses Every 2 Minutes, New Report Reveals

Malicious actors have been upping the ante at a concerning rate, and recent reports indicate that there are three new types of malware targeting businesses every two minutes. This data comes from an analysis conducted by BlackBerry, and it points to the sorry state of cybersecurity around the world with all things having been considered and taken into account. The report also indicates that there has been a rise in new malware types as of late.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 60% of all malware attacks are targeting three main industries. These industries are finance, food retail as well as healthcare companies. Healthcare in particular has been beset by the worst malware attacks of all, which is dangerous because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up clogging up critical healthcare infrastructure.

Another thing that this report points towards is the increased prevalence of AI being used to conduct these attacks. AI can make malware easier to distribute than might have been the case otherwise since it can help malicious actors craft more believable attack campaigns. Deepfakes as well as AI chatbots are making things ever more challenging for those working in the cybersecurity industry, and unless something changes, things might get even worse from here on out.

Finally, the study revealed just how commonplace malware as a service has become. So called commodity malware can be purchased for a very low price, and in some cases it may even be free of charge.

This goes to show that cybersecurity experts as well as companies that are in possession of valuable and sensitive data need to be very vigilant lest things spiral out of control. It will be interesting to see what efforts are made to curtail the impact of malware, and we will have to wait for the rest of 2023 to play out in order to get any firm conclusions either way. All in all, cybersecurity is in a state of peril due to rising malware distribution.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World