Governments all over the world are increasing the use of online tools (in many incidence inspired by model used by China). This is done to tighten their grip on power and suppress dissent, a study by human rights watchdog found last week. The yearly Freedom House research of 65 nations found worldwide Internet freedom dropped for the 8th successive year in 2018, in the middle of a rise in what the group dubbed as “digital authoritarianism.”
The report (dubbed as “Freedom on the Net 2018”) found online disinformation and propaganda have more and more “poisoned” the digital realm, while the unbridled compilation of personal info is infringing on privacy. “Democracies are grappling in the digital epoch, while China is exporting its model of surveillance and censorship to regulate information both outside and inside its borders,” claimed president of Freedom House, Michael Abramowitz. “This pattern causes a danger to the open Internet and endangers prospects for better democracy all over the world.”
On a related note, researchers earlier designed a new method that can locate nasty personal assaults on social media by cyber bullies and alert network administrators or parents when the abuse has taken place. The method designed by scientists in the U.S. at the University of Colorado Boulder, employs 5 times less computing resources in comparison to current tools.
That is competent enough to observe a network the size of Instagram, claimed an associate professor at UC Boulder, Richard Han, to the media in an interview. “The action of the social media players to false news has lately begun to uptick, although it took serious consequences to get to that point. The response requires being just as sturdy for cyber bullying,” claimed Han. The group also launched a free Android application dubbed as BullyAlert that permits parents to get alerts when their children are the target on Instagram for bullying.