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Posted December 20, 2020 6:55 pm 2:59 Have one of these four symptoms? Get a COVID-19 test right away Have one of these four symptoms? Get a COVID-19 test right away Do you have questions about COVID-19 or British Columbia’s response to the pandemic?We want to hear them.On Monday, Global News reporter Richard Zussman will hold a Facebook Live interview with provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.Send us your questions for Dr. Henry, and we’ll do our best to get them to her. Trending Stories The interview will take place at 1 p.m. PT, and will be streamed on the Global BC Facebook page.Leave your questions as a comment on this story either here, or on our Facebook page. Story continues below advertisement 1:24 First three months of COVID-19 vaccinations in B.C. First three months of COVID-19 vaccinations in B.C. View link » © 2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Facebook petitioned the Irish Government last year to exclude it from criminal liability under proposed laws against hate speech and hate crime. In 2019, the Government ran a public consultation ahead of plans to draft more robust laws against incitement to hatred, particularly on the internet and social media. Facebook, one of 57 groups which responded to the consultation, submitted that any strengthened laws against internet hate speech must contain a “carve out” to protect “intermediaries” from being held responsible for content published on their platforms. A roadmap for the hate speech legislation, which was released by the Department of Justice on Thursday, recommends it become an offence to share hate speech on social media, if the intention is to incite hated. This would apply to sharing other’s posts on Facebook and retweeting items on Twitter. However, any company accused of hosting hateful material should be able to defend itself by showing that it has measures in place to prevent dissemination of hateful material and was complying with those measures at the time, the report states. The company should also show it was unaware and had no reason to suspect the content could incite hate. The Bill has yet to…

Home / Tech / News / Tech Wrap: Apple halts business with Wistron, Facebook bug and more Tech Wrap The week is over, and we’re almost done with 2020 but there’s still a lot happening everywhere and in the world of technology. We got to know about a Facebook bug that exposed Instagram users’ personal email IDs and birthdays. Another Google product is shutting down. Apple has decided to halt business with Wistron following the clash with workers at the manufacturing plant.We also got an idea of how much Samsung’s Galaxy S21 series could cost. Qualcomm’s new chipset Snapdragon 888 was also tested on benchmarking websites.Here’s everything that made news in tech today.Facebook bugThis bug discovered by security researcher Saugat Pokharel, exploited Facebook’s Business tool, a feature that is available to any Facebook account. Through an experimental upgrade, this bug allowed Facebook business account holders to get additional information about Instagram users they contacted. Facebook patched the bug after it was reported.Android Things shutdownGoogle is axing Android Things, a customised version of Android for smart home devices. The Android Things Console will stop supporting new projects on January 5, 2021. Google launched Android Things back in 2016, and while it…

Social media companies like Facebook and YouTube have ramped up their policies against coronavirus misinformation and banned false claims about Covid-19 vaccines. But as distribution of the vaccines begin, online accounts are exploiting loopholes in new policies and successfully sharing misleading claims that attempt to discourage vaccination. Throughout the pandemic, platforms have established and updated rules meant to curb false claims related to Covid-19. Between March and October, Facebook took down 12 million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram, and it added fact-checking labels to another 167 million posts. But the rollout of an authorized Covid-19 vaccine has forced social media companies to adapt again, changing their approach to both Covid-19 misinformation and longstanding anti-vaccination content. There are already plenty of examples of online content that sow doubt in Covid-19 vaccines. Posts that suggest vaccination is part of a government scheme and memes that imply that the vaccine comes with extreme side effects either aren’t being caught by the platforms or don’t appear to violate their rules. The platforms aren’t just contending with anti-vaccination communities. Conspiracy theorists, conservative groups, fringe outlets, and others are actively hyping concerns about vaccines, according to Yonder, a firm that’s advising companies involved in…

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With early voting underway in the hotly contested Georgia Senate runoffs and TV ads already blanketing the airwaves, Facebook decided it is a pretty good time to start up the old ad machine again. In a Tuesday blog post, the social media behemoth said that as of Wednesday, eligible advertisers would be allowed to place ads about the Jan. 5 races "in the state of Georgia only." That still allows for a lot of content, and money, to flow. Earlier this fall, Facebook announced a suspension of political ads as a way to fight election misinformation, after months of a deluge from candidates and interest groups up and down the ticket and across the country. Now the ads are back, with Georgia candidates and the interest groups that care about them flooding smartphones with talk of the dangers of socialism or the crucial nature of these twin elections. "Control of the U.S. Senate comes down to Georgia," says one new ad for Democrat Jon Ossoff. President Donald Trump, though on his way out of the White House, is hardly in the rearview in the ad sphere. "ALERT: We just printed 500 "TRUMP STILL MY PRESIDENT" stickers. Don’t wait, claim your…

The Klemmer family has released eight rap videos on Facebook since the pandemic began. (Bobby Klemmer)SOUTH LYON, Mich. – The Klemmer family has been making waves on Facebook with their original rap videos that they’ve been creating since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.Dad Bobby Klemmer’s oldest daughter, Sienna, was given a homework assignment in the spring using an online vocabulary tool that engages children through hip-hop.“One of the options was to write a rap,” said Klemmer. “When she mentioned it to me I said, ‘We’re totally doing this.’”After she wrote several raps for her class covering various academic topics, Klemmer said his other children started to become interested in writing and performing raps as well.In the beginning, the videos focused on being in quarantine. Klemmer said their tribute to healthcare workers was shared 500 times and had over 32,000 views.They also did one for Mother’s Day, one to celebrate teachers, a video to encourage people to vote, and, most recently, a Christmas rap.Klemmer and his wife both teach at Washtenaw Community College. Before that, he taught for 13 years at Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School.They have five children ages 18 months through 11 years. Their youngest, Eliza, was hospitalized…

An internal company-wide meeting at Facebook revealed some disturbing statements and projects from the social network this week. In addition to tone-deaf language, a Facebook product manager revealed a tool called “TL;DR” currently in development. It’s been suggested that this AI tool will summarize long form articles “and spit out bullet points so people don’t have to read the full piece.” Reading your articles for you Information about this meeting comes via Ryan Mac, senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News. Per his relay of the meeting, the TL;DR tool will decide which parts of articles are most important via artificial intelligence. This tool will also (apparently) work with voice assistant systems to parse articles and offer answers to contextual questions. In other words, Facebook’s computers will decide which bits of what articles are most important for you to read. While Twitter attempts to push people to actually READ the articles they share, Facebook’s aiming to shorten the reading to the bare minimum. Facebook compared to COVID vaccine “We all get the privilege of seeing the future, because we are making it,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. “We have to build responsibly to earn trust and the right to continue to…

Facebook is working to bring back the Instagram Lite app, months after it shut down the light version offering worldwide. The social conglomerate said on Wednesday that it is testing the revamped Instagram Lite app in India, where it hopes to “gain valuable insights” about the new offering before “a global rollout” of the app later. The revamped Instagram Lite app weighs less than 2MB and delivers a “fast, reliable, and responsive” experience of the social service. The Android app supports Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, but currently lacks a several core features of Instagram, including Reels, Shopping and IGTV. Facebook quietly discontinued the previous iteration of Instagram Lite earlier this year. In July, Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram, told TechCrunch that the company had identified some issues in the app and was working to resolve those. In September, a new Lite app was spotted in the wild, though Facebook did not acknowledge it. Lite apps are especially popular in emerging markets where most users don’t have access to high-end smartphones or fast and cheap mobile internet data. The Facebook Lite app, for instance, had about 40 million monthly active users in India…

Facebook has been trying to get a foothold in the news space for many years. Last year, the company launched a dedicated section on its site called Facebook News for users in the US. It also wants to expand this program to other countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India. But that’s not the only project the social network is working on in the news space. According to a report from BuzzFeed News, Facebook is testing an AI-powered tool called TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) to summarize news pieces, so you don’t even have to click through to read those articles. The report noted that the company showed off this tool in an internal meeting last night. It’s also planning to add features such as voice narration and an assistant to answer queries about an article. At the outset, this seems like a great idea — getting a short summary of an article you don’t have time to read, right. There are already some similar tools such as the AutoTLDR bot on Reddit. However, given Facebook‘s sketchy history with news and publishers, there are many ways this could go wrong. At best, the AI makes silly mistakes in parsing the article content, so you…