Facebook News feature launched in UK 

  • Facebook News, the social network’s dedicated section for news content, is launching in the UK
  • The UK is the second market to get Facebook News, which launched in the United States last year
  • Several major news publishers, including Channel 4, Sky News, and The Guardian have signed deals with Facebook to provide content
  • It comes as the tech industry’s relationship with the media comes under increased scrutiny.
  • For the full story, select here

Twitter will pilot letting users flag false news

  • Twitter is asking its users for help in combating fake news
  • It has announced a pilot that allows people to submit notes on tweets that may be false or misleading
  • The initiative, named ‘Birdwatch’, is being trialled among a small group in the US initially. The firm acknowledged the new system would have to be “resistant to manipulation attempts”
  • Companies like Twitter are looking at how they can better moderate their platforms
  • Twitter said on Monday: “We know this might be messy and have problems at times, but we believe this is a model worth trying”
  • For the full story, select here

Facebook users phone numbers for sale on Telegram

  • Someone has a database full of Facebook users’ phone numbers and is selling them using a Telegram bot, according to a report by Motherboard
  • The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a vulnerability in Facebook security that was fixed in 2019
  • With many databases, a large amount of technical skill is required to find any useful data
  • There often has to be an interaction between the person with the database and the person trying to get information out of it, as the database’s “owner” isn’t going to just give someone else all that valuable data, so making a Telegram bot solves both of these issues
  • A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet and can give the impression of a human
  • For the full story, select here

Poor white working-class young people being left behind 

  • Poor white youngsters in England’s former industrial towns and those living on the coast are among the most likely to miss out on university, warns the watchdog for fair access
  • “These are the people and places that have been left behind,” says Chris Millward of the Office for Students
  • The watchdog has used a new measure to see which groups are likely or not to go to university
  • MPs are investigating low attainment among white working-class pupils
  • The Office for Students has looked at overlapping factors – such as poverty, race, gender and where people live – which are indicators of whether someone is likely to go to university
  • For the full story, select here