Tech billionaire Elon Musk has become the first person to reach 200 million followers on X, the social media platform he acquired in October 2022 for $44 billion. Musk, the owner of X, now leads in followers ahead of former US President Barack Obama, who has 131.9 million, and football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, with 113.2 million followers as of October 3.
Other celebrities in the top five include singer Justin Bieber, with 110.3 million followers, and Rihanna, who ranks fifth with 108.4 million. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently crossed the 100 million mark.
Musk recently revealed that X has over 600 million monthly active users (MAUs) and around 300 million daily active users (DAUs). However, there have been reports suggesting that a significant number of Musk’s followers may be inactive or fake accounts, though no official statement has been made regarding these claims.
According to Musk, X has evolved into “the group chat for Earth,” with global users driving its traffic. He has expressed ambitions of transforming X into an “everything app,” enabling users to share media, make payments, and engage in various other activities.
Despite this growth in users, X faces financial challenges. Earlier this week, Fidelity, a global investment firm, cut the value of its stake in X by 78.7%, implying that the platform’s current value is around $9.4 billion, significantly lower than the original $44 billion purchase price. Neither X nor Musk has commented on this valuation report.
Elon Musk is bent upon squeezing Twitter assets as he has placed hundreds of items from its San Francisco headquarters up for auction online, including the bird statue and other office assets.
In December 2022, after Musk revealed that Twitter spends $13 million a year on food service, and now the company said it will be selling at least 265 kitchen appliances online, and the bidding will start at just $25.
Wild to see the Twitter office on auction. Board room tables, phone booths, chairs, monitors… even the Twitter bird statue. Great memories from a different era. https://t.co/kLOx69ZbeIpic.twitter.com/BFfvFy6Pg4
The auction is online on the Heritage Global Partners’ website, the company administering the auction. Even, the company’s neon Twitter Bird light electrical display is currently priced at $22,500 with just under 10 hours left to bid.
A 190 cm planter in the shape of an @ symbol is already fetching $8,000. Moreover, the blue bird statue is currently priced at $20,500.
The auctions also include some of the kitchen appliances, including several high-end La Marzocco espresso machines and a fizzy drink fountain complete with an ice dispenser.
Twitter
The microblogging platform is also offloading a pair of Herman Miller coffee tables, which currently cost $2,200.
Last week, Musk, who failed to pay the rent for Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, asked its remaining staff in Singapore to stop coming to the office and work remotely as the company has reportedly failed to pay the monthly rent.
Twitter has been sued as it failed to pay $136,250 rent for its office space in San Francisco. Now, the company is planning to shed its co-working spaces in Delhi and Mumbai after Bengaluru and Singapore offices.
At least 16 people have been killed after an aircraft carrying 72 people crashed about 200km from Kathmandu in Nepal.
The twin-engine ATR 72 aircraft by Yeti Airlines took off for Pokhara on Sunday morning with 72 passengers, including two infants, four crew members and 10 foreign nationals, said airline spokesman Sudarshan Bartaula.
#WATCH | A passenger aircraft crashed at Pokhara International Airport in Nepal today. 68 passengers and four crew members were onboard at the time of crash. Details awaited. pic.twitter.com/DBDbTtTxNc
“We expect to recover more bodies,” army spokesman Krishna Bhandari told Reuters. Local TV channels showed thick black smoke billowing from the crash site as rescue workers rushed to the scene.
“Responders have already reached there and trying to douse the fire. All agencies are now focused on first dousing the fire and rescuing the passengers,” local official Gurudutta Dhakal said.
Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal posted on Twitter, “I am deeply saddened by the sad and tragic accident of Yeti Airlines ANC ATR 72 which was flying from Kathmandu to Pokhara with passengers,” and later called an emergency cabinet meeting.
“I sincerely appeal to the security personnel, all agencies of the Nepal government and the general public to start an effective rescue,” he said.
In May, a plane owned by Tara Air crashed less than 20 minutes after taking off from Pokhara, headed to Jomsom – a trekking destination in Mustang district bordering Tibet.
In 2018, another US-Bangla passenger plane from Bangladesh crashed on landing in Kathmandu, killing 49 of the 71 people on board.
Elon Musk-owned Twitter is reportedly vacating its co-working spaces in Delhi and Mumbai after having already done so in Bengaluru.
Already 150 of the company’s employees who work at the WeWork facility in Mumbai’s BKC, and 80 at The Executive Centre in Delhi’s Qutub area are asked to do so, reports said.
IANS, quoting sources, reported that the company has also given up co-working spaces in Bengaluru, indicating that this was due to global changes within the company.
Twitter
Earlier this week, Musk, who failed to pay the rent for Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, asked its remaining staff in Singapore to work remotely as the company is unable to pay the monthly rent.
Work From Home
According to reports, Twitter employees were informed about the decision via email, instructing them to leave the CapitaGreen building and work from home.
Casey Newton of Platformer said in a tweet on Thursday, “Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office – its Asia-Pacific headquarters – over nonpayment of rent”.
“Landlords walked employees out of the building,” he posted.
In the US, Twitter has been sued as it failed to pay $136,250 rent for its office space in San Francisco.
While social media platforms are the primary source of political information for a growing number of people, a majority of Twitter users do not follow either members of Congress, their president or news media, a new study suggests.
They are much more likely to follow Tom Hanks or Katie Perry than an elected official.
“Those users who do follow political accounts on Twitter, however, stick to insular online communities and mostly follow and share information from their political in-group,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, lead author and professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Amsterdam.
In other words, speaking to ongoing debates about so-called “echo chambers” on social media platforms, the small group of users who do follow political elites display clear political biases and engage with these elites in a very one-sided way.
The findings come after researchers from UC Davis and New York University analyzed four years’ worth of data from a sampling of 1.5 million Twitter users.
Twitter
Researchers concluded that even though the group of social media users who display political biases in their online behaviors is small, it is nevertheless consequential. These users are much more vocal, participatory and active online, thus amplifying the general perception of unprecedented polarization.
“In this project, we focus on national political elites due to their visibility and national-level influence on public opinion and the political process,” Wojcieszak said. Yet, despite the prominence and impact of presidents, congressmen, journalists, pundits and the news media, researchers found that only 40% of Twitter users follow one or more political “elites.” The remaining 60% follow no political actors at all.
“Given that we analyzed over 2,500 American political elite accounts including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, prominent pundits including Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity, and the most popular media outlets such as MSNBC and Fox News, the fact that only 23% of the representative sample of over 1.5 million users follow three of more of such elite accounts is revealing,” Wojcieszak said.
The authors found that those users who do follow politicians, pundits and news media follow their political in-group at much higher rates than out-group elites (around 90% vs. 10%) and share tweets from in-group elites overwhelmingly more frequently than out-group tweets (at about a 13:1 ratio). And when users share out-group tweets, they tend to add negative comments to these reshares, further reinforcing ideological biases online.
The research also reveals important ideological asymmetries: conservative users are roughly twice as likely as liberals to share in-group versus out-group content, as well as to add negative commentary to out-group shares.
Social Media/Photo:indiainternationaltimes
Surprising findings
“Overall, the majority of American Twitter users are not sufficiently interested in politics to follow even a single political or media elite from our list,” Wojcieszak said. Researchers wrote that they found this surprising, since it is generally believed that Twitter users are more politically engaged than the general population.
Given a growing radicalization in America, decreasing support for democratic norms, and rising support for political violence, concerns about political biases on social media platforms are valid, no matter how small the groups displaying those biases may be.
“At the same time,” Wojcieszak said, “we have to remember that these political biases are far removed from the everyday online behaviors of most politically disinterested Americans, who simply don’t care and prefer to immerse themselves in entertainment or sports. Our findings should help us all keep in perspective the concerns about the so-called ‘echo chambers’ online.”
Chinese rights activists overseas have said that they are concerned but unsurprised at recent allegations that an agent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was working at Twitter, saying such infiltration is part of Beijing’s global influence operation, media reports said.
The FBI informed Twitter of at least one Chinese agent among its employees, according to US Senator Chuck Grassley, while hacker and whistleblower Peiter Zatko said the company’s lax security sparked fears that personal data on Chinese users was being collected by authorities in China, RFA reported.
Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, levelled the allegations during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, detailing internal clashes between some who sought advertising revenue from China, and others who were concerned about doing business inside China amid rising geopolitical tensions, the report said.
“This was a big internal conundrum,” Zatko told the hearing, adding that Twitter appeared reluctant to turn away from China. “In a nutshell, if we were already in bed, it would be problematic if we lost that revenue stream,” he said.
Zatko said the FBI had told the company that China’s secret service, the Ministry of State Security, had an agent on the payroll, RFA reported.
A Twitter spokesperson said the microblogging platforms hiring process was independent of foreign influence, and that access to personal data was subject to stringent controls, adding that Zatko’s allegations were “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies.”
France-based commentator Wang Longmeng said the CCP has long targeted Western social media platforms to wage its overseas influence campaigns, and that some of the company’s regional executives have close ties to the CCP, including Kathy Chen, RFA reported.
Chen’s 2016 appointment as Twitter’s managing director for Greater China raised concerns in particular, as it emerged she had served as a software engineer in the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic missile force.
“Kathy Chen, who had a military background, joined [the company], then Fei-fei Li became an independent director,” Wang said. “The CCP’s infiltration of Western media is one of its key strategies.”
“It’s not surprising that the whistleblower revealed there are Chinese agents at Twitter, because there have been suspensions and deleted accounts, and yet Twitter still allows CCP diplomats to spread rumors and lies,” he said, RFA reported.
While China bans Twitter, Facebook and other US social media firms, government agencies and diplomats use the platforms to reach an international audience.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeted his predecessor Dr Manmohan Singh on his birthday on Sept 26, 2020, the Twitterati woke up to the need of the hour for an academic who changed the course of battered Indian economy from socialism to market-driven economy, albeit, gradually.
No wonder, #HappyBirthdayDrMMSingh trended on Twitter for about 15 hours, with over 150,000 tweets and the hashtag topped the chart as the economist turned 88. Reminiscent of what he said just ahead of the run-up to the 2014 general election, the praise for him was universal without any political undercurrents. “I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media, or for that matter, the Opposition parties in Parliament,” said Dr Manmohan Singh in January 2014.
Ironic but the country failed to see his selfless achievements for the country in a silent but graceful manner that rivals only a few prime ministers in history. Despite the brouhaha around his birthday online, he himself spent the day mourning the passing of Isher Judge Ahluwalia, an economist, author and wife of Montek Singh Ahluwalia who had helped him during his term as the former finance minister to initiate reforms that changed India forever.
Japan’s recognition
Soon after serving as finance minister, the coalition governments followed and he was pushed to sidelines. But not for some nations which have seen the mettle in such men of great vision and recognised them even when they were not in public glare.
Japan in 1997 conferred upon him the Nikkei Asia Prize meant for regional growth. Not many bothered why Japan woke up to honour him when he was Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha. But, Japan saw the future potential Prime Ministerial candidate in him that many failed to recognise in his own country. It came true seven years later in 2004 when he was chosen as Prime Minister.
Late Realisation
Here are some tweets which speak for themselves to depict his term in comparison to those before and after him:
“Those were the days when the Prime Minister focused on work, not on camera.”
“Happy birthday to a Prime Minister who gave 10.8% GDP growth, faced press conferences and knew the spelling of strength.”
“He spoke less but not lies.”
“He showed us the difference between talk and work.”
“The tragedy is you don’t know the value of a Dr Manmohan Singh until you get a Narendra Modi,”
Finally, Rahul Gandhi summed it up when he tweeted: “India feels the absence of a PM with the depth of Dr Manmohan Singh. His honesty, decency and dedication are a source of inspiration for us all. ”
His associate in the Congress and former finance minister P. Chidambaram even advocated the Bharat Ratna for Manmohan Singh but the truth is that he is above all those honours and awards. His commitment to work and bring change is what we need. And hopefully, Japan may recognise such personality again.
Researchers have developed a solution to a longstanding problem in the field of end-to-end encryption, a technique that ensures that only sender and recipient can read a message.
With current end-to-end encryption, if an attacker compromises a recipient’s device, they can then put themselves in a position to intercept, read and alter all future communications without sender or recipient ever knowing.
The new protocol, published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, forces attackers to leave evidence of any such activity and alerts users to take action.
Dr. Jiangshan Yu at the University of Luxembourg, Professor Mark Ryan at the University of Birmingham and Professor Cas Cremers at the University of Oxford, were motivated by the discovery of mass software vulnerabilities, such as the Heartbleed bug, that make the majority of devices vulnerable to compromise.
Dr Yu explained, “There are excellent end-to-end encryption services out there, but by definition they rely on your device itself remaining secure; once a device has been compromised there’s little we can do. That’s the problem we wanted to solve.”
Following Edward Snowden’s revelations about government mass surveillance, end-to-end encryption is now widely available through services such as Facebook’s WhatsApp. The approach uses pairs of cryptographic ‘keys’ for the sender to encrypt and the recipient to decrypt messages; anyone wanting to read your messages has to first hack into your phone to steal your latest keys. The attacker then performs a ‘Man-in-the-middle’ (MITM) attack, for example by taking control of your WIFI router to intercept your messages, and uses the stolen keys to impersonate you.
Current encryption protocols such as Signal used by WhatsApp make the most of the fact that a MITM attacker can only intercept messages sent via the compromised network. For example, as soon as you send a message via 3G rather than the compromised WiFi the attacker will no longer be able to act as an intermediary. They will lose track of the keys and be locked out of the conversation.
The solution, called DECIM (Detecting Endpoint Compromise in Messaging), addresses the question of what to do when the attacker is in a position to intercept all of your messages on a long-term basis. Both your Internet Service Provider and messaging service operator are in such positions – all your messages pass through their servers – so that if they obtained your keys, they would never be locked out of a conversation, and you would never know.
With DECIM, the recipient’s device automatically certifies new key pairs, storing the certificates in a tamper-resistant public ledger.
The team undertook a formal security analysis using a symbolic protocol verification tool, the ‘Tamarin prover’, which runs millions of possible attack situations, verifying DECIM’s capabilities. This is a rare step for a messaging protocol, and the same analysis for other protocols revealed several security flaws.
“There’s no silver bullet in the field of end-to-end encryption”, said Dr. Yu, “but we hope that our contribution can add an extra layer of security and help to level the playing field between users and attackers.”
Professor Mark Ryan, from the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, said, “Our Security and Privacy group tries to solve problems that are important to society. Given the prevalence of cyber-attacks on phones and laptops, we are proud of this work on detecting when encryption keys have become compromised. Next, we intend to apply for this work on detecting encryption key compromise to applications, for example in blockchain or in Internet-based voting.”
The use of social media is pervasive among young adults, but not all posted content is appropriate.
Now a new study by the University of Plymouth investigates why young adults might post content on social media that contains sexual or offensive material.
Led by Dr Claire White from the University’s School of Psychology, the study suggests that such risky social media posts are not just due to impulsivity, but might be a deliberate strategy to fit in with the wider social media culture that makes people believe ‘it’s the right thing to do’.
Existing studies show that impulsiveness is predictive of online risk taking behaviours, but this additional research with British and Italian young adults highlighted that high self-monitoring – or adapting behaviour in line with perceived social norms – was equally predictive of posting risky content, which Dr White says could mean young people think it’s the best way to behave.
To measure risky online self-presentation the research team, which also included PhD student Clara Cutello, Dr Michaela Gummerum and Professor Yaniv Hanoch from the School of Psychology, designed a risk exposure scale relating to potentially inappropriate images or texts, such as drug and alcohol use, sexual content, personal information, and offensive material. They also evaluated people’s level of self-monitoring and impulsivity.
Dr White said: “It’s counterintuitive really because it would be easy to assume that a high self-monitor would question their actions and adapt accordingly.
“But the results show that high self-monitors are just as likely to post risky content as those in the study who are more impulsive, which suggests they think it’s not only OK to be risky – and potentially offensive – but that it’s actually the right thing to do.
“The only notable difference between the nationalities was that British students were more likely to post comments and images related to their alcohol and drug use on social media, whereas their Italian counterparts were more likely to post offensive content and personal information.
“This difference shows that culture as a whole seems to play a part in what type of content is shared.
“But the fact that the behaviours predicting risky online choices are the same for both nationalities suggests there’s a wider social media culture that encourages this type of risk-taking behaviour.”
Are you more likely to use words like “happy” and “family” in your social media posts? Or do you use emotional and cognitive words like “angry” and “thinking?” The words you use may be a clue to your religious affiliation. A study of 12,815 U.S. and U.K. Facebook users finds use of positive emotion and social words is associated with religious affiliation whereas use of negative emotion and cognitive processes is more common for those who are not religious than those who are religious.
The work replicates Ritter et al.’s 2013 results on religious and nonreligious language use on Twitter and appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Researchers from the U.S., U.K., and Australia conducted the work.
Just as Ritter and colleagues discovered in 2013, “We also found that positive emotion and social words are associated with religious affiliation whereas negative emotion and cognitive processes are more associated with non-religious affiliation,” says David Yaden (University of Pennsylvania), lead author of the study.
And they found some additional insight; “non-religious individuals make more frequent mention of the body and of death” than religious people, says Yaden.
The researchers collected data from the MyPersonality application, which asked Facebook users to report their religious affiliation (among other things), and asks them for consent to allow researchers to analyze their written online posts and other self-reported information (Kosinski, Stillwell, Graepel, 2013). They ran two analyses, to see what words each group (religious vs. non-religious) used more than the other group.
The team conducted both a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” analysis. The top down approach, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), uses groupings chosen by researchers, and is useful in making sense of the data in terms of theory. The “bottom-up,” or Differential Language Analysis (DLA), approach allows an algorithm to group the words and can provide a more “transparent view” into the language.
Unsurprisingly, religious people used more religious words, like “devil,” “blessing,” and “praying” than do non-religious people. They also showed higher use of positive words like “love” and family and social words such as “mothers” and “we.” The non-religious individuals used words from the anger category, like “hate” more than did religious people. They also showed a higher use of words associated with negative emotion and cognitive processes such as “reasons.” Other areas where the nonreligious dominated: swear words (you can figure those out), bodies, including “heads” and “neck” and words related to death including “dead.”
The Role of Religion
While secularism is increasing in the west, “over 80% of the world’s population identifies with some type of religion – a trend that appears to be on the rise” write the authors. “Religion is associated with longer lives and well-being, but can also be associated with higher rates of obesity and racism.” For the researchers, understanding language use is part of the bigger picture of understanding how religious affiliation relates to these life outcomes.
Yaden and his colleagues do not know if the different linguistic behaviors between religious and non-religious people reflect the psychological states of those in the group, or if the language use reflects the social norms of being part of that group, or some combination of the two. They hope further research will offer more insights.
Originally Yaden and colleagues hoped to “compare different religious affiliations with one another. That is, how do Buddhists differ from Hindus? Christians from Muslims? Atheists from Agnostics?,” but they did not have enough specific data to conduct these analyses. “We hope to do so once a larger dataset becomes available to us,” says Yaden.
Researchers at Brigham Young University have learned that most users of popular messaging apps Facebook Messenger, What’sApp and Viber are leaving themselves exposed to fraud or other hacking because they don’t know about or aren’t using important security options.
“We wanted to understand how typical users are protecting their privacy,” said BYU computer science Ph.D. student Elham Vaziripour, who led the recent study. Short answer: they’re generally not.
Even though What’sApp and Viber encrypt messages by default, all three messaging apps also require what’s called an authentication ceremony to ensure true security. But because most users are unaware of the ceremony and its importance, “it is possible that a malicious third party or man-in-the middle attacker can eavesdrop on their conversations,” said Vaziripour, who was joined on the study by computer science professors Daniel Zappala and Kent Seamons and five other student researchers.
The authentication ceremony allows users to confirm the identify of their intended conversation partner, and makes sure no other person — even the company providing the messaging application — can intercept messages.
In the first phase of a two-phase experiment, the research team prompted study participants to share a credit card number with another participant. Participants were warned about potential threats and encouraged to make sure their messages were confidential. However, only 14 percent of users in this phase managed to successfully authenticate their recipient. Others opted for ad-hoc security measures like asking their partners for details about a shared experience.
In the second phase, participants were again asked to share a credit card number, but in this round researchers emphasized the importance of authentication ceremonies. With that prompting, 79 percent of users were able to successfully authenticate the other party.
Despite the drastic climb, however, researchers discovered another significant hurdle: participants averaged 11 minutes to authenticate their partners.
“Once we told people about the authentication ceremonies, most people could do it, but it was not simple, people were frustrated and it took them too long,” Zappala said.
Because most people don’t experience significant security problems, both professors agreed, it’s hard to make a case for them investing the time and effort to understand and use security features that applications offer. But because there’s always a risk in online communications, Seamons added, “we want to make it much easier to do and cut that time way down.”
The ultimate goal? “If we can perform the authentication ceremony behind the scenes for users automatically or effortlessly, we can address these problems without necessitating user education,” said Vaziripour.
This study is an extension of ongoing work on usable security in the two labs Seamons and Zappala run, funded in part by more than $1 million in recent grants from the National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security.
“Security researchers often build systems without finding out what people need and want,” said Seamons. “The goal in our labs is to design technology that’s simple and usable enough for anyone to use.”
The announcement of Election Commission of India on State Assembly Elections in five States on 4th January, 2017 has gone viral reaching 21 lakh people on social media within 24 hours, achieving widest possible outreach of information on the election schedules and other ECI guidelines for citizens.
The combined effort made by Press Information Bureau (PIB) and Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) to use Social Media (SM) Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, coupled with the live-streaming of it on YouTube channel, and on the Facebook Pages of PIB, MIB and Facebook India proved successful with tweets going LIVE.
The actual figures of the reach of the information on the ECI Press Conference as on 7:00 PM, on 4th January, 2017, showed a total of 22 tweets, 5 Facebook and 1 YouTube posts on Ministry of Information & Broadcasting platform. On Facebook, the 5 posts reached over 5.24 Lakh people, with 1,219 Likes and 140 Shares. The ECI press conference was also Live-streamed on Ministry’s Facebook page, which received 12,000 views and reached over 4.95 Lakh people.
Also, a total of 55,127 Impressions were achieved for the 22 tweets made from MIB handle and these were re-tweeted 1,448 times and 550 favourites were received. Further, the Live Stream of the ECI Press Conference on YouTube got 1,700 views.
Among PIB’s social media accounts, a total of 68 tweets and 10 Facebook posts were made on Assembly Election Schedule. The Facebook posts achieved a total reach of more than 29,700 people, 167 Likes and 46 Shares, while PIB’s tweets resulted in 6.5 lakh impressions (views), 4,140 retweets and 951 favourites. The live-streaming of the event on PIB’s Facebook page has reached 3.04 lakh people and fetched more than 800 views.
In addition to the above platforms, the ECI press conference was live streamed for the first time on two Facebook pages, namely Facebook India and Government, Politics and Non Profits, which collectively received a massive response with more than 1 Lakh video views and reached over 13 Lakh people on Facebook. The Facebook Live Stream received 6,400 likes and 624 shares. (Figures as on 7:00 PM, 4th January, 2017)
On Twitter, Top Trending Hashtags throughout the day were #ElectionCommission, #AssemblyElection, Manipur & Goa, 5 States, Phase2, Uttarakhand and Model Code of Conduct. The maximum potential reach was achieved on the hashtags #ElectionCommission and #AssemblyElection of about 21.2 crores and 20.1 crores of people respectively.
Web-based tech giants YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft (Skype & Bing) have decided to work together to stop extremist content from their websites by creating a common database. The firms have agreed to share ‘hashes’ or unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos of such content.
The hashtag on such content enables the peers to identify the content on their platforms and remove them in turn. "We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online," the companies said in a statement.
The firms have long resisted outside or government intervention on policing their sites but came together recently to do more to remove extremist content in view of recent militant attacks in Paris and other cities in the West. YouTube and Facebook have already begun to use such hashes to automatically remove such content.
Until now the practice was that mainly users have to flag content that violates terms of service and then human editors will review and delete such content found in violation of the guidelines or norms. Twitter alone suspended 235,000 accounts between February and August 2016.
The new database will come into operation in early 2017. The European Union has laready established an EU Internet Forum last year to remove such extremist content.
