Tag: social media

The WHO is monitoring online conversations and emotions, using “social listening” to change COVID narratives

The World Health Organization is collaborating with an analytics company to scan people’s social media conversations for “coronavirus misinformation;” something the WHO calls “social listening.”

The global health organization says that it’s not only fighting the pandemic but also the conversations people are having about it.

According to the WHO, there’s an “infodemic” – an overload and spread of misleading information, so much so that it decided that to tackle misinformation, it needs to employ various tools, including social listening, with machine learning monitoring.

“Countering fake news or rumors is actually only responding or mitigating when it’s too late,” said Tim Nguyen, a technology expert helping the WHO’s unit titled Information Network for Epidemics (EPI-WIN). “What we’ve put in place in the beginning of the pandemic is what we call a social listening approach.”

The company has been creepily scanning more than 1.6 million social media posts each week to monitor online conversation. It then uses machine learning to classify information into four topics; cause, illness, interventions, and treatments. The WHO’s aim is to learn the coronavirus topics that are gaining popularity so that it can then create its own content to counteract and attempt to change the narrative.

The WHO’s “social listening” goes beyond analyzing people’s conversations for content, it also tries to analyze their emotions. Through language analytics, the technology detects emotions such as sadness, acceptance, denial, and anxiety. With such insights, the WHO hopes to come up with effective strategies to adjust coronavirus narratives.

“What we’ve learned now, after two and a half months of doing this kind of analysis, is that there are recurring themes and topics that are coming back over and over again,” Nguyen explained. “What that means to us is that we need to re-push information at different times. People may not understand it the first time when we push it, but when the questions and issues come up later, it means it’s time to push it out again.”

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Twitter Suspends Account Of Chinese Scientist Who Published Paper Alleging Covid Was Created In Wuhan Lab

On Sunday afternoon we asked how long before the twitter account of the “rogue” Chinese virologist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who yesterday “shocked” the world of establishment scientists and other China sycophants, by publishing a “smoking gun” scientific paper demonstrating that the Covid-19 virus was manmade, is “silenced.”

We now have the answer: less than two days. A cursory check of Dr Yan’s twitter page reveals that the account has been suspended as of this moment.

The suspension took place shortly after Dr Yan had accumulated roughly 60,000 followers in less than 48 hours.

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Facebook says it’ll REMOVE all posts alleging Oregon fires ‘were started by certain groups’

Facebook has announced that it will be wiping messages alleging that wildfires, which have been sweeping through Oregon, might be the work of certain groups after the FBI brushed off reports of arson as “conspiracy theories.”

“We are removing false claims that the wildfires in Oregon were started by certain groups,” Andy Stone, policy communications manager at Facebook, tweeted late on Saturday.

Defending what is effectively an act of censorship by the social media giant, Stone noted that speculation suggesting the blazes have been ignited by extremists are forcing law enforcement to “divert resources from fighting the fires and protecting the public.”

This is consistent with our past efforts to remove content that could lead to imminent harm given the possible risk to human life as the fires rage on

The move comes as multiple wildfires are tearing through Oregon, closing in on Portland, the center of the Black Lives Matter protests, which have been marred by vandalism and arson.

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Explore the Tweets They Didn’t Want You to See

Politwoops tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including people currently in office and candidates for office. If you think we’re missing someone, please email us with their name, state, political party, office they hold or are seeking and, of course, their Twitter handle.

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Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists

Titania was not the only victim. The Babylon Bee, a US satire site, was also temporarily locked out, though it has since been restored. Other satirical accounts – Jarvis Dupont, Guy Verhoftwat, Tolerance Police, Liberal Larry and Sir Lefty Farr-Right QC – all remain suspended. Sir Lefty revealed on Parler that the only reason given for his suspension was ‘platform manipulation and dissemination of spam’.

All the accounts did was make fun of wokeness. But it seems virtue-signalling Silicon Valley nerds can’t take a joke. Apparently, this kind of comedy needs to be silenced.

Ironically, Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists is a complete vindication of their work. In banning those who make fun of wokeness and criticise its censoriousness, Twitter has made it even clearer how authoritarian that wokeness is.

It has also shown wokeness to be totally humourless. Silicon Valley nerds need to lighten up.

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