Media – IAM Network

July 5, 2020

Trump, Biden fight for supremacy on social media platforms

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WASHINGTON (AP) — On an average day, President Donald Trump sends about 14 posts to the 28 million Facebook followers of his campaign account. His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, delivers about half that many posts to an audience of just 2 million.

The numbers are similarly skewed in other spheres of the social media landscape.

On Twitter, Trump’s 82.4 million followers dwarf Biden’s 6.4 million. The president has spent years cultivating a ragtag digital “army” of meme makers and political influencers who retweet campaign messages hundreds of times daily. Trump is outspending Biden on Google and YouTube advertising by nearly 3 to 1.

As his reelection bid faces growing obstacles, his primacy in the dizzying digital world is one of his top advantages, giving him a massive platform to connect with supporters and push a message that ignores his vulnerabilities related to the pandemic, unemployment and race relations. Biden and his allies are now working feverishly to establish a social media force of their own.

For the first time, Biden outspent Trump on Facebook advertising in June, pouring twice as much money into the platform as the president. His campaign is recruiting Instagram supporters to hold virtual fundraisers. And it’s plotting ways to mobilize the …

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21 Savage aims to help kids with financial literacy during quarantine

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21 Savage attends the Tom Ford AW20 Show at Milk Studios on February 07, 2020 in Hollywood, California. The Atlanta rapper is expanding his mission to help underserved children during the pandemic. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
21 Savage is expanding his mission to help underserved children during the pandemic.
As a direct response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Grammy-award winning rapper announced he is launching a multi-tier expansion of his Juma Bank Account Financial Literacy program that offers financial resources nationwide.
He is making a $25,000 donation to the City of Atlanta’s #ATLStrong Covid-19 relief fund, established by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and is launching Bank Account At Home — a free online financial literacy resource through a partnership with mobile banking services provider Chime and education technology platform, EVERFI.
For the past two years, 21 Savage has partnered with award-winning national financial literacy nonprofit Juma for his youth-focused financial literacy program called Bank Account.
Prior to the pandemic, the program provided underserved youth with access to career counseling, job training, and job placement at sports and entertainment facilities including Mercedes Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena.
Most of the students have been out of work since March 11, after the pandemic forced stadium …

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July 5, 2020

Virus pushes Singapore politicians into social media square off

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Melissa Cheok and Faris Mokhtar, Bloomberg
Published

12:42 pm CDT, Sunday, July 5, 2020

The Merlion Statue stands in a near-empty Merlion Park in Singapore on May 20.
The Merlion Statue stands in a near-empty Merlion Park in Singapore on May 20.

Photo: Bloomberg Photo By Lauryn Ishak

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The Merlion Statue stands in a near-empty Merlion Park in Singapore on May 20.
The Merlion Statue stands in a near-empty Merlion Park in Singapore on May 20.

Photo: Bloomberg Photo By Lauryn Ishak

Virus pushes Singapore politicians into social media square off

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Packed rallies are out, along with their cheers and jeers. In comes the internet, with its memes and trolls.

The era of social distancing ushered in by the deadly coronavirus has forced Singapore’s political parties to face off online in the lead-up to a national election in less than a week.

“Compared to past elections, parties clearly are adopting a more experimental approach to sustain people’s interest and meet different needs,” said Carol Soon, senior research fellow and head of the society and culture department at the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore.

Though previous elections have increasingly seen political parties …

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July 5, 2020

Trump, Biden fight for superiority on social media

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Biden’s campaign is feverishly working to develop a social media force that can compete with President Trump’s well-established digital political influencers.

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July 5, 2020

Social media must add a do-not-track option for images of our faces

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Facial recognition systems are a powerful AI innovation that perfectly showcase The First Law of Technology: “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” On one hand, law-enforcement agencies claim that facial recognition helps to effectively fight crime and identify suspects. On the other hand, civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have long maintained that unchecked facial recognition capability in the hands of law-enforcement agencies enables mass surveillance and presents a unique threat to privacy.
Research has also shown that even mature facial recognition systems have significant racial and gender biases; that is, they tend to perform poorly when identifying women and people of color. In 2018, a researcher at MIT showed many top image classifiers misclassify lighter-skinned male faces with error rates of 0.8% but misclassify darker-skinned females with error rates as high as 34.7%. More recently, the ACLU of Michigan filed a complaint in what is believed to be the first known case in the United States of a wrongful arrest because of a false facial recognition match. These biases can make facial recognition technology particularly harmful in the context of law-enforcement.
One example that has received attention recently is “Depixelizer.”

VB Transform 2020 Online – …

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July 5, 2020

Grassroots activists must consider the personal costs of digital campaigns

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Widespread use of social media has made it easier to mobilize collective action, yet citizen activists struggle to navigate these digital tools and increasingly report feeling burned out. Our research on grassroots digital activism in Canada has revealed some of the strategies organizers employ when dealing with the technological, interactional and personal barriers of digital activism.

Read more:
Leading an online social movement requires offline work

People’s use of social media for activist purposes clashes with the commercial goals of these platforms. For example, as these platforms prioritize popular and recent content, activist messages have to be constantly updated and liked or shared in order to remain visible to wider audiences. This places the burden to adapt upon activists, who must make the best of these tools within the constraints set by the platforms’ algorithms.

Dilution or dissemination?

Social media can enhance activist communication at the cost of loss of control over the message. This matters in collective action, because a clearly communicated set of demands and complaints is essential to obtaining political recognition.

During the 2014 teachers’ strike in British Columbia, three parents came up with the idea of hosting playdates in front of the offices of members of …

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July 5, 2020

Social space: A roundup of all the GCC social media news in June – Gulf Business

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Fadi Khater, founder and managing partner of digital marketing agency Netizency, provides an overview of social media trends in the region

Fadi Khater
Sunday 05 July 2020 The top three most discussed topics were health, education, and electronics in that order, followed by entertainment, malls and retail, and automotive.Health discussions were mostly around Covid-19 and its pervasive impact in the societies of Gulf countries as well as fears of a second wave, new strains, and numerous mentions of conspiracy theories. The conversation, however, peaked around breakthroughs in the fight against the coronavirus. From the lifting of curfews and domestic travel bans in countries like Saudi Arabia, to the gradual return of the workforce in Kuwait and the opening up of public spaces, such as malls, in the UAE and Oman, the “new normal” is slowly settling in the GCC.Educational discussions prominently featured students making fun of online learning activities and joking about having cheated in their final exams. The conversation also revolved around schools’ and universities’ plans to return to campus for the next academic year, with educators and students discussing the merits of both online-only and mixed face-to-face and online teaching systems. Most students and teachers, despite their frustration …

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July 5, 2020

Fully online learning deliveries: ‘More of the same’ or a new pedagogy?

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The current global plague – COVID-19 – has accelerated teaching and learning across all the education sectors. The acceleration towards forms of online deliveries requires consideration.
Perhaps, teaching and learning or pedagogy might be classified into three modes of delivery:
face-to-face
mixed-mode or blended
fully/entirely online.
The three modes of delivery rely on digital technologies. The technologies such as Audacity, Collaborate, Padlet and Skype are merely tools to facilitate those involved in teaching and learning.
Perhaps, the more relevant question to ask is the transfer of courses/programmes from the traditional face-to-face mode to digital mode any different in how we teach and learn?
This article attempts to respond to this question using my experiences as a teacher and researcher. My teaching experiences include a fully online programme in research methodologies and face-to-face courses ranging from teacher education in post-compulsory and higher education sectors, Masters and Doctoral ones.
For the project, the related research question included: is the learning process from this online programme any different to face-to-face programmes?
A mixed-method of survey and interviews was employed in the project on online teaching of research methods.
Is fully online pedagogy different from a traditional one?
Perhaps, an illustration of the possible …

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July 5, 2020

5 Reasons Millennials Hate Your Bank’s Content Marketing

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Good financial content marketing is hot, but easily avoidable mistakes produce material that leaves younger generations cold and disengaged.

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July 5, 2020

Facebook makes education push in India

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Facebook, which reaches more users than any other international firm in India, has identified a new area of opportunity to further spread its tentacles in the world’s second largest internet market.
On Sunday, the social juggernaut announced it had partnered with the Central Board of Secondary Education, a government body that oversees education in private and public schools in India, to launch a certified curriculum on digital safety and online well-being, and augmented reality for students and educators.
Through these subjects, Facebook and CBSE aim to prepare secondary school students for current and emerging jobs, and help them develop skills to safely browse the internet, make “well informed choices,” and think about their mental health, they said.
Facebook said that it will provide these training in various phases. In the first phase, more than 10,000 teachers will be trained; in the second, they will coach 30,000 students. The three-week training on AR will cover fundamentals of the nascent technology, and ways to make use of Facebook’s Spark AR Studio to create augmented reality experiences.
“I encourage the teachers and students to apply for the programs commencing on July 6, 2020,” said Ramesh Pokhriyal, Union Minister of Human Resources Development, in a statement.
…

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