U.S. glassmaker Corning has become the dominant provider of glass covers for smartphones worldwide. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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Six months ago, Apple and Google introduced a new smartphone tool designed to notify people who might have been exposed to the coronavirus, without disclosing any personal information. But for the most part, Americans haven’t been all that interested.
Fewer than half of U.S. states and territories — 18 in total — have made such technology widely available. And according to a data analysis by The Associated Press, the vast majority of Americans in such locations haven’t activated the tool.
Data from 16 states, Guam and the District of Columbia shows that 8.1 million people had utilized the technology as of late November. That’s about one in 14 of the 110 million residents in those regions.
In theory, such apps could bolster one of the most difficult tasks in pandemic control: Tracing the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus in order to test and isolate them if necessary. In practice, however, widespread COVID-19 misinformation, the complexity of the technology, overwhelmed health workers needed to quickly confirm a diagnosis, and a general lack of awareness have all presented obstacles, experts and users say.
“There’s a lot of things working against it,” said Jessica Vitak, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. “Unfortunately, in the U.S., COVID has been politicized far more than in any other country. I think that’s affecting people’s willingness to use tools to track it.”
Charlotte, North Carolina, lawyer Evan Metaxatos was thrilled to learn in November about his state’s tracking app, called SlowCOVIDNC. He immediately downloaded it and got his parents and pregnant wife to follow suit.
But they’re still outliers in the state, which launched the app in September with little fanfare. Of roughly 10.5 million state residents, only 482,003 had installed it through the end of November.
“It won’t work great until everyone’s using it, but it’s better than nothing,” Metaxatos said.
Apple and Google co-created the primary technology behind such apps, which use Bluetooth wireless signals to anonymously detect when two phones have spent time in close proximity. If an app user tests positive for the virus, that person’s phone can trigger a notification to other people they’ve spent time near — without revealing names, locations, or any other identifying information.
In states such as Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland and Washington, as well as Washington, D.C., iPhone users don’t even have to download an app. In fact, Apple prompts users via pop-ups to activate the notification system by adjusting their phone settings.
In these states, adoption rates are notably higher. But even in the most successful state, Connecticut, only about a fifth of all residents have opted into this tracking. On Friday, Washington said that more than 1 million state residents — roughly 13% of its population — had activated the technology in its first four days.
Virginia’s COVIDWISE app launched on Aug. 5 and was the first to go live. Since then, fewer than one in ten residents have downloaded it, though the state estimates almost 20% of Virginians between the ages of 18 and 65 with a smartphone have done so. Delaware’s app downloads account for about 7% of the state’s population.
All other U.S. states analyzed have much lower adoption rates.
New York launched its app on Oct. 1. It recently surpassed 1 million downloads, which amounts to about 5% of the population. New Jersey and Pennsylvania have seen less use, with a 4% download rate.
Adoption is even lower in Wyoming, North Dakota, Michigan, Nevada and Alabama, with users representing only 1% to 3% of their state populations. The apps, which are free, can be found in Apple’s app store and the Google Play store for Android devices; they’re also typically available on state health-department websites.
Irish app developer NearForm says more than one-quarter of Ireland’s population uses its COVID-19 app. It’s been harder to get such traction in the four U.S. states where it’s built similar apps: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
In Ireland, “all sides of the political divide came together with a consistent message on this is what we need to do,” said Larry Breen, NearForm’s chief commercial officer. “That debate continues to rage on your side of the pond.”
Elsewhere in Europe, the uptake has been mixed. Germany and Britain have penetration rates similar to Ireland’s; in Finland the figure is 45%, according to data compiled by MIT Technology Review. In France, however, less than 4% of the population is using the official COVID app, which shuns the Apple-Google approach for a more intrusive data collection system that raised privacy concerns and technical issues.
Security experts praise the Apple-Google system for protecting users’ anonymity, but it’s been a tough sell for many people. American users say partisanship, privacy concerns and stigma surrounding COVID-19 have kept participation low. A lack of state and federal efforts to boost awareness hasn’t helped.
Neither have technological and bureaucratic issues.
Lee McFarland, a loan officer from Grand Forks, North Dakota, was eager to download his state’s Care19 Alert app but said he couldn’t push a “Notify Others” button after getting the virus in late October.
“If you test positive, a public health official will call and verify your code,” said a message on McFarland’s app. “This ensures that only verified positive COVID-19 people can send notifications.”
McFarland said he forgot to tell the health worker he had the app installed on his phone. He was unsuccessful in following up with the worker to get the needed code, and has since deleted the app.
Even when that process works, however, many North Dakotans don’t actually push the button to notify others.
Tim Brookins, CEO of app developer ProudCrowd, said 91 of North Dakota’s 14,000 active users had their “Notify Others” button enabled after the state confirmed them as positive. Of the 91 users, only 29 pushed the button, which prompted 50 notifications.
Still, many users say they’ll keep the app in hopes others will see its potential benefits.
“You can say that about just about anything that not enough people are doing this or that, but everybody that does something is helping,” said David Waechter, a general contractor from Lenoir, North Carolina. “I think that the United States could use a good strong dose of E pluribus unum and stop thinking about self and start thinking about our countrymen.”
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The Trump administration has chosen not to extend again an order requiring ByteDance, a Chinese company, to divest TikTok’s U.S. assets, but talks will continue over the video-sharing app’s fate, two sources briefed on the matter said.A Treasury Department representative said late Friday that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was “engaging with ByteDance to complete the divestment and other steps necessary to resolve the national security risks.”Last week, CFIUS granted TikTok parent ByteDance a one-week extension until Friday to shed TikTok’s U.S. assets.President Donald Trump’s August order gave the Justice Department the power to enforce the divestiture order once the deadline expired, but it was unclear when or how the government might seek to compel divestiture.Trump’s decisionTrump personally decided not to approve any additional extensions at a meeting of senior U.S. officials, according to a person briefed on the meeting. The government had previously issued a 15-day and seven-day extension of the initial 90-day deadline, which was November 12, on Trump’s order.The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while the White House did not comment. TikTok declined to comment.The Trump administration contends TikTok poses national security concerns because the personal data of U.S. users could be obtained by China’s government. TikTok, which has more than 100 million U.S. users, denies the allegation.FILE – Women wearing masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus chat as they pass by the headquarters of ByteDance, owners of TikTok, in Beijing, China, Aug. 7, 2020.Under pressure from the U.S. government, ByteDance has been in talks for months to finalize a deal with Walmart Inc. and Oracle Corp. to shift TikTok’s U.S. assets into a new entity aimed to satisfy the divestiture order.ByteDance made a new proposal aimed at addressing the U.S. government’s concerns, Reuters reported last week.ByteDance made the proposal after disclosing on November 10 that it submitted four prior proposals, including one in November, that sought to address U.S. concerns by “creating a new entity, wholly owned by Oracle, Walmart and existing U.S. investors in ByteDance, that would be responsible for handling TikTok’s U.S. user data and content moderation.”Preliminary dealIn September, TikTok announced it had a preliminary deal for Walmart and Oracle to take stakes in a new company to oversee U.S. operations. Trump said the deal had his blessing.On November 11, ByteDance filed a petition with a U.S. appeals court challenging the divestiture order and said it planned to file a request “to stay enforcement of the divestment order only if discussions reach an impasse and the government indicates an intent to take action to enforce the order.”ByteDance said the Trump order seeks “to compel the wholesale divestment of TikTok, a multibillion-dollar business built on technology developed by” ByteDance, “based on the government’s purported national security review of a 3-year-old transaction that involved a different business.”The Trump administration has been stymied in its efforts to restrict TikTok in the United States.A federal judge in Washington on September 27 blocked a ban on Apple Inc. and Alphabet’s Google offering TikTok for download in U.S. app stores, while another judge on October 30 blocked government restrictions scheduled to take effect November 12 that ByteDance said would have effectively barred TikTok from operating in the United States.A U.S. appeals court will hear arguments on the app store ban on December 14.
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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit Thursday saying social media giant Facebook was discriminating against U.S. workers and hiring cheaper foreign workers instead.Many of the temporary workers the DOJ accused Facebook of giving hiring preferences to were foreign workers with H-1B visas.H1-B visas allow U.S. companies to hire foreign workers in “specialty occupations.” Critics say companies, particularly in technology, exploit the visa program to hire foreigners for less money.The DOJ further alleged that Facebook “refused” to consider qualified U.S. workers for over 2,600 open jobs paying an average annual salary of $156,000.The move came after a two-year investigation into Facebook’s hiring practices, The New York Times reported.“Our message to workers is clear: If companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable,” Eric S. Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, told the Times. “Our message to all employers — including those in the technology sector — is clear: You cannot illegally prefer to recruit, consider or hire temporary visa holders over U.S. workers.””Facebook has been cooperating with the DOJ in its review of this issue,” company spokesman Daniel Roberts told Reuters. “And while we dispute the allegations in the complaint, we cannot comment further on pending litigation.”Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with a personal wealth of about $100 billion, has long advocated for immigrants to work in the tech sector, the Times reported. In 2013, he created Fwd.us, a nonprofit advocating steps to make it easier to hire immigrants for technology jobs, according to the Times.The DOJ case against Facebook is another problem for Silicon Valley, which has come under fire in recent years for antitrust violations, anticompetitive practices, privacy concerns and content that some find offensive.
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Facebook will begin removing false claims about COVID-19 vaccines from its social media platform, the company said Thursday, as part of an ongoing campaign to combat the spread of misinformation about them.“This is another way that we are applying our policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm,” Facebook said in a blog post.   The social media giant said it will begin removing information about the vaccines that has been discredited by public health experts in the coming weeks.  The decision, which also applies to Instagram, comes as the first COVID-19 vaccines are about to become available.Britain may start vaccinations within days after becoming the first country to give emergency authorization for a vaccine developed by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.Facebook has taken similar steps in recent months. The company removed 12 million posts with coronavirus misinformation from March to October, including a video post from President Donald Trump declaring that children are “virtually immune” to the coronavirus. Facebook has also banned ads discouraging vaccinations and promoted articles on an information center debunking misinformation about COVID-19.
 
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Twitter has enacted stricter content rules, adding to its list of prohibited conduct any language that “dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.”The social media company announced the update to its policy on Wednesday.Twitter said it would remove any offending posts that users report and would also work to detect content that violates its policies. Violators could have their accounts suspended.”Research shows that dehumanizing speech can lead to real-world harm, and we want to ensure that more people — globally — are protected,” the company said.The new rules are Twitter’s latest attempt to respond to abusive posters on its platform. In March, it prohibited tweets targeting people based on age, disability or disease, and in 2019 banned posts targeting a person’s religion or caste.
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The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed a $102 million contract with a Swiss start-up company to purchase a unique service: the first-ever removal of an item of space debris from orbit.
 
The company, ClearSpace SA, will capture part of a used rocket using what is described as a “tentacle,” and then dragging it down for reentry. The object to be removed from orbit is a so-called Vespa payload adapter that was used in 2013 to hold and then release a satellite. It weighs about 112 kilograms.
 
Experts have long warned that hundreds of thousands of pieces of space debris circling the planet — including an astronaut’s lost mirror — pose a threat to functioning satellites and even the International Space Station (ISS).
 
During a remote news conference regarding the contract late Tuesday, ESA Director General Jan Woerner said there are more than a million pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth. He said there have already been cases in which satellites and spacecraft have been hit by the debris.
 
The ESA says the deal with ClearSpace SA will lead to the “first active debris removal mission” in 2025, in which a custom-made spacecraft, known as the ClearSpace-1, will rendezvous with, capture and take down the Vespa payload adapter for reentry.
 
ClearSpace SA CEO Luc Piguet says the company hopes to expand such operations in the future to include multiple object removal, and even servicing and refueling spacecraft.  
 
“When we look toward the future, what we can see already today is that there’s more than 5,000 nonfunctional objects in orbit, which essentially are, if you want, clients that need some sort of service. And every year, we add 74 new objects to this list,” Piguet says.
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It might look like chicken. It might taste like chicken. But it doesn’t come from a chicken, it comes from a lab. For chicken lovers in Singapore, this lab-grown chicken will soon be available in nugget form as the country has given the OK for San Francisco-based startup Eat Just to sell the meat. It is the first regulatory approval for so-called clean meat, according to Reuters. “I would imagine what will happen is the U.S., Western Europe and others will see what Singapore has been able to do, the rigors of the framework that they put together. And I would imagine that they will try to use it as a template to put their own framework together,” said CEO Josh Tetrick in an interview with Reuters. FILE – CEO and founder of Eat Just Josh Tetrick sits on bags of plant protein at the Eat Just facility in Appleton, Minnesota, December 2019. (Eat Just, Inc./Handout via REUTERS)Cultured meat uses fat or muscle cells from an animal which are placed into a culture that nourishes the cells, causing them to grow, according to NBC News. The next step involves putting the cells into a bioreactor that further supports growth.  The industry is still in its early stages, and the products come with a big price tag. For example, in 2013, a cultured hamburger made by a Dutch startup cost $280,000 per patty, according to NBC News. Eat Just’s chicken is not nearly as expensive, with a price comparable to premium chicken, Tetrick told NBC. But for Singapore, which only produces about 10% of its own food, the investment in lab-grown meat could pay off in the long term. According to Reuters, there are more than 20 firms around the world exploring the lab-grown meat market, which Barclays bank says could be worth $140 million by 2029. It is unclear if Eat Just’s meat could be approved for sale in the U.S. For now, Eat Just is aiming small. The company told NBC News that when its chicken does finally go to market in Singapore, it will be at just one restaurant. 
 
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Facebook’s oversight board has announced the first cases it’s going to examine to determine if it will overturn the social media giant’s decisions to delete content. Created in October, the board’s apparent role will be to assess cases of Facebook and Instagram users who say their content was wrongly removed. “As the Board cannot hear every appeal, we are prioritizing cases that have the potential to affect lots of users around the world, are of critical importance to public discourse or raise important questions about Facebook’s policies,” the board said in a statement accompanying the announcement Tuesday. Of the first six cases the board will review, three involve so-called hate speech, a nudity case, a “dangerous individuals” case and a case about potential misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Reuters reports that since October, the board has received 20,000 cases for possible review. The COVID-19 case involved a post that was removed for “violence and incitement” because it was critical of France’s coronavirus strategy of “purportedly refusing authorization for use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin against COVID-19 but authorizing promotional mail for remdesivir.” “Facebook removed it for violating its policy on Violence and Incitement, and in its referral indicated to the Oversight Board that this case presents an example of the challenges faced when addressing the risk of offline harm that can be caused by misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic,” the case synopsis says. Hate speech casesHate speech cases include a post by former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, which said, “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” Facebook says it was hate speech, but the poster said it was posted to draw attention to Mahathir’s “horrible words.” Another alleged hate speech post is of “two well-known photos of a deceased child lying fully clothed on a beach at the water’s edge” accompanied by Burmese text asking why there has been “no retaliation against China for its treatment of Uighur Muslims, in contrast to the recent killings in France relating to cartoons,” according to the synopsis. The poster argued the content should not have been removed because it “meant to disagree with people who think the killer is right and to emphasize that human lives matter more than religious ideologies.” The third hate speech case involves the removal of content showing the destruction of churches in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. The poster said, “their intention was to demonstrate the destruction of cultural and religious monuments.” In a case Facebook says violated its nudity policy, a post about breast cancer prevention was removed for showing breasts. Another case is about the removal of an alleged quote attributed to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, which the poster said made a point about current politics. The 20-member board will be divided into five-member panels to which the cases will be assigned, according to USA Today. The board said it is seeking public comment on the cases through December 8. Then, the board has 90 days to decide about each case.   
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Facebook and Google are becoming “zones without human rights” in Vietnam, Amnesty International warned Tuesday, accusing the tech giants of helping to censor peaceful opposition and political freedom in the country. Amnesty warned that although they were “once the great hope for the rise of freedom of expression in the country, social media platforms are rapidly becoming areas without human rights.” Information Minister Nguyen Manh Hung said last month that tech companies were complying with demands to remove “bad news, propaganda against the party and the state” at a faster rate than ever before, according to state media. FILE – Vietnam’s then-acting Minister of Information and Communication Nguyen Manh Hung attends the World Economic Forum on ASEAN at the Convention Center in Hanoi, Vietnam, Sept. 12, 2018.The same article states that this year Facebook complied with 95% of government requests and YouTube, 90%. A Facebook spokesperson told AFP that the platform is working hard to defend freedom of expression around the world.  “Over the past few months, we have experienced additional pressure from the Vietnamese government to limit more content, however we will do our best to ensure that our services remain accessible, so that people can continue to express themselves,” he clarified. Google and the Vietnamese authorities did not respond to AFP’s requests. Communist Vietnam has long imprisoned its dissidents but has been criticized in recent years for targeting users of Facebook, a social network popular with activists in the country where independent media is banned. The social network admitted earlier this year that it was blocking content deemed illegal by the authorities, while its latest transparency report reveals an increase in six months of nearly 1,000% of content censored by order of the government. Amnesty International said in a report published Tuesday that it had collected the testimonies of 11 activists whose publications were banned by Facebook in Vietnam this year. The human rights organization also said that three other people have suffered similar censorship of their content on YouTube, owned by Google. One of them, Nguyen Van Trang, who fled an arrest warrant in Vietnam for his involvement in a pro-democracy group, said that Facebook had since May restricted the visibility of all its publications about Communist Party boss Nguyen Phu Trong and senior member Tran Quoc Vuong. Trang also said that some of his posts on controversial issues such as the land dispute have been made inaccessible by YouTube in Vietnam. Obstruction of ‘the progress of a nation’ “I am angry,” he told AFP. “For activists, these platforms play an important role in influencing people on progressive values like democracy, human rights, civil society.” “The compromise of Facebook and Google is not only to block information, but also to hamper the progress of a nation, where the inhabitants do not have many opportunities to participate in political activities,” he added. Vietnam is now the country that generates the most revenue for Facebook and Google in Southeast Asia, according to industry experts. More than 53 million people use Facebook in Vietnam, more than half of the population. The platform is also an important marketing tool for the local economy. 
 
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The government of the Solomon Islands has defended its plans to ban Facebook, insisting the move would preserve “national unity.” Ministers say the world’s largest social media platform has been “grossly abused.” But critics insist a ban is an attempt to shut down criticism of the government’s economic policies.Facebook helps connect the people of a tropical archipelago that stretches over more than 1,400 kilometers of the South Pacific.  
 
But the government believes the social media platform is being “grossly abused.” Officials in the capital, Honiara, are to discuss blocking Facebook with internet companies because of concerns about defamation and cyber bullying.
 
Authorities want to regulate users’ behavior to protect the community from “vile abusive language” online. Until new laws can be passed, there would be a temporary ban on Facebook.  
 
Minister of Communications Peter Shanel Agovaka told Radio New Zealand Pacific that tough regulations are needed.
 
“Coming with freedom of expression and freedom of the media is a lot of responsibility. You don’t just go out and say things out of the ordinary to your neighbors. It’s about using it wisely, communicate, share information and so on, and not to abuse people,” Agovaka said.
 
It is unclear, however, how a ban on Facebook would work.
 
Critics say the move would breach the constitutional rights of Solomon Islanders and attempt to shut down dissent. Opposition politicians call the proposals “pathetic,” while Amnesty International says any such ban would be a ‘brazen attack on human rights.”  
 
Facebook has said it was contacting authorities to discuss the plans.
 
Any ban would put the Pacific island nation alongside just four other countries where the social media platform is outlawed: China, Iran, North Korea and Syria.
 
The Solomon Islands is home to about 685,000 people. While the archipelago stretches across a vast area of ocean, its land mass is comparable to that of Albania.  
 
About 20% of the population has access to the internet.
 
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China successfully launched an unmanned spacecraft to the moon Monday to land, gather soil and rock samples, and return them to Earth.  If successful, it will be the first mission by any nation to retrieve samples from the lunar surface since the 1970s, and the third nation, after the United States and Russia, to retrieve such samples. The Chang’e 5 probe, named after the ancient Chinese goddess of the moon, will seek to collect material that can help scientists understand more about the moon’s origins and formation.  U.S. space agency NASA says the mission’s goal is to land in a previously unvisited area of the moon known as Oceanus Procellarum and operate for one lunar day, which lasts 14 earth days, and return a 2-kilogram sample of lunar soil, possibly from as deep as 2 meters.  Matt Siegler, a research scientist at the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute who is not part of the Chang’e 5 mission, told Reuters the area where the spacecraft is to land is 1 to 2 billion years old. “That is very young for the moon — most of our samples are 3.5 billion years old or more,” Siegler said in an email. “We want to find out what is special about these regions and why they remained warm longer than the rest of the moon,” Siegler added. The sample will travel to Earth in the return capsule and land in the Siziwang Banner grassland of the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia in China. During a brief government-organized visit to the launch center, reporters were taken to a place where they could see in the distance the Long March 5 rocket that carries the Chang’e 5 probe. The launch took place between 4:30 a.m. Beijing time Tuesday (2030 GMT Monday). The Reuters news service reports that China made its first lunar landing in 2013. In January 2019, the Chang’e 4 probe touched down on the far side of the moon, the first by any space probe. Within the next decade, China plans to establish a robotic base station to conduct unmanned exploration in the south polar region. 
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China is scheduled to launch an unmanned spacecraft to the moon Monday to land, gather soil and rock samples, and return them to Earth.  
 
If successful, it will be the first mission by any nation to retrieve samples from the lunar surface since the 1970s, and the third nation, after the United States and Russia, to retrieve such samples.
 
The Chang’e 5 probe, named after the ancient Chinese goddess of the moon, will seek to collect material that can help scientists understand more about the moon’s origins and formation.  
 
 U.S. space agency NASA, says the mission’s goal is to land in a previously unvisited area of the moon known as Oceanus Procellarum and operate for one lunar day, which lasts 14 earth days, and return a 2-kilogram sample of lunar soil, possibly from as deep as 2 meters.  
 
The sample will travel to Earth in the return capsule and land in the Siziwang Banner grassland of the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia in China.
 
During a brief government-organized visit to the launch center, reporters were taken to a place where they could see, in the distance, the Long March 5 rocket that carries the Chang’e 5 probe. The launch is expected to take place between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. (2000-2100 GMT) on November 24.
 
The Reuters news service reports China made its first lunar landing in 2013. In January 2019, the Chang’e 4 probe touched down on the far side of the moon, the first by any space probe. Within the next decade, China plans to establish a robotic base station to conduct unmanned exploration in the south polar region.
 
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Vietnam has threatened to shut down Facebook in the country if it does not bow to government pressure to censor more local political content on its platform, a senior official at the U.S. social media giant told Reuters.Facebook complied with a government request in April to significantly increase its censorship of “anti-state” posts for local users, but Vietnam asked the company again in August to step up its restrictions of critical posts, the official said.”We made an agreement in April. Facebook has upheld our end of the agreement, and we expected the government of Vietnam to do the same,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the subject.”They have come back to us and sought to get us to increase the volume of content that we’re restricting in Vietnam. We’ve told them no. That request came with some threats about what might happen if we didn’t.”The official said the threats included shutting down Facebook altogether in Vietnam, a major market for the social media company where it earns revenue of nearly $1 billion, according to two sources familiar with the numbers.Facebook has faced mounting pressure from governments over its content policies, including threats of new regulations and fines. But it has avoided a ban in all but the few places where it has never been allowed to operate, such as China.In Vietnam, despite sweeping economic reform and increasing openness to social change, the ruling Communist Party retains tight control of media and tolerates little opposition. The country ranks fifth from bottom in a global ranking of press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders.Vietnam’s foreign ministry said in response to questions from Reuters that Facebook should abide by local laws and cease “spreading information that violates traditional Vietnamese customs and infringes upon state interests.”A spokeswoman for Facebook said it had faced additional pressure from Vietnam to censor more content in recent months.In its biannual transparency report released on Friday, Facebook said it had restricted access to 834 items in Vietnam in the first six months of this year, following requests from the government of Vietnam to remove anti-state content.‘Clear responsibility’Facebook, which serves about 60 million users in Vietnam as the main platform for both e-commerce and expressions of political dissent is under constant government scrutiny.Reuters exclusively reported in April that Facebook’s local servers in Vietnam were taken offline early this year until it complied with the government’s demands.Facebook has long faced criticism from rights group for being too compliant with government censorship requests.”However, we will do everything we can to ensure that our services remain available so people can continue to express themselves,” the spokesperson said.Vietnam has tried to launch home-grown social media networks to compete with Facebook, but none has reached any meaningful level of popularity. The Facebook official said the company had not seen an exodus of Vietnamese users to the local platforms.The official said Facebook had been subject to a “14-month-long negative media campaign” in state-controlled Vietnamese press before arriving at the current impasse.Asked about Vietnam’s threat to shut down Facebook, rights group Amnesty International said the fact it had not yet been banned after defying the Vietnamese government’s threats showed that the company could do more to resist Hanoi’s demands.”Facebook has a clear responsibility to respect human rights wherever they operate in the world and Vietnam is no exception,” Ming Yu Hah, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for campaigns, said. “Facebook are prioritizing profits in Vietnam, and failing to respect human rights.”  
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As the deadly coronavirus continues to rage across the U.S. and around the world, people are turning to COVID-19-related apps to figure out their day-to-day risks. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
Producers: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum
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Would you give up nearly a decade of your life looking at your cellphone?Calculated by today’s usage, the average person spends a little over 76,500 hours – or 8.74 years – on a smartphone over a lifetime, according to a FILE – Marilu Rodriguez checks a news website on her smartphone before boarding a train home at the end of her workweek in Chicago, March 13, 2015.This widespread usage of smartphones has sparked worries among teens themselves, with 54% of U.S. teens saying they spend too much time on their phones. And 52% have also reported trying to take steps to reduce mobile phone use. A JAMA Network study found that only 5% of 59,397 U.S. high school students surveyed spent a balanced time sleeping and staying physically active while limiting screen time.Too much time on a phone has been linked to a number of physical and mental health risks.In a study of 3,826 adolescents, researchers found an association between social media and television use with symptoms of depression, according to JAMA Pediatrics.Increased screen time has also been linked with a higher risk of obesity and diabetes.
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Facing charges of censorship, the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook appeared before a hearing of U.S. lawmakers Tuesday to defend actions taken during the recent U.S. elections. Tina Trinh reports.Produced by: Matt Dibble   
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Twitter is launching tweets that disappear in 24 hours called “Fleets” globally, echoing social media sites like Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram that already have disappearing posts.The company says the ephemeral tweets, which it calls “fleets” because of their fleeting nature, are designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets.Fleets can’t be retweeted and they won’t have “likes.” People can respond to them, but the replies show up as direct messages to the original tweeter, not as a public response, turning any back-and-forth into a private conversation instead of a public discussion.Twitter tested the feature in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea, before rolling it out globally.Fleets are a “lower pressure” way to communicate “fleeting thoughts” as opposed to permanent tweets, Twitter executives Joshua Harris, design director, and Sam Haveson, product manager, said in a blog post.The news comes the same day Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  faced questions from a Senate Judiciary Committee about how they handled disinformation surrounding the presidential election. Both sites have stepped up action taken against disinformation. Zuckerberg and Dorsey promised lawmakers last month that they would aggressively guard their platforms from being manipulated by foreign governments or used to incite violence around the election results — and they followed through with high-profile steps that angered Trump and his supporters.The new “Fleets” feature is reminiscent of Instagram and Facebook “stories” and Snapchat’s snaps, which let users post short-lived photos and messages. Such features are increasingly popular with social media users looking for smaller groups and and more private chats.
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Facing charges of censorship, the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook appeared before a hearing of U.S. lawmakers Tuesday to defend actions taken during the recent U.S. elections. Tina Trinh reports.Produced by: Matt Dibble   
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The high-pitched whine of a mosquito is annoying, but scientists have developed an app that uses that sound to detect dangerous mosquitoes.Mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands of people each year by spreading microbes that cause diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever. But researcher Haripriya Vaidehi Narayanan says anyone with a cellphone can help tackle these diseases by using the Abuzz app to identify mosquitoes. “If they see a mosquito around us, they just open the phone, open up the app, point their phone towards the mosquito and hit the record button,” said Narayanan, who started working on the project as a graduate student at Stanford University. She’s now in the Department of Immunology at the University of California Los Angeles. “So then, when the mosquito flaps its wings and starts flying around, it makes that noise, that annoying buzzing noise … that noise is what gets recorded by the Abuzz app,” she added. Many mosquito-borne diseases don’t have cures or vaccines, so targeting mosquitoes is the best approach to controlling these diseases. “If we’re going to tackle diseases caused by mosquitoes like malaria or dengue, the most important step is to know where the mosquitoes are,” Narayanan said.Listening for answersTraditional mosquito monitoring can be time-consuming and expensive because it requires labor-intensive trapping and trained scientists to identify the tiny insects. There are around 3,500 different mosquito species, but only about 40 are dangerous to humans, according to Manu Prakash, professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and principal investigator of the project. “In your backyard, do you have a nuisance mosquito or do you have a potentially dangerous mosquito?” Prakash said.To answer that question, Prakash’s team decided to listen. When mosquitoes beat their wings up and down, they produce that distinctive buzzing sound. Every mosquito species makes a slightly different buzz. Users record as little as one or two seconds of a mosquito sound with the Abuzz app on their cellphone. The app compares this recording against a database and decides which species of mosquito it is most likely to be. Because the tool — any cellphone or smartphone — is already in billions of people’s pockets, the team says they’ll be able to monitor mosquitoes on a much larger scale than previously possible. “This is something that doesn’t require fancy smartphones, just the very bare minimum, basic cellphones are actually good enough,” Prakash said. Combining informationBy crowd-sourcing mosquito information from across the world, the app will build maps of where dangerous mosquitoes are found. This will help scientists and health authorities predict where disease outbreaks might occur and where to target mosquito control. Prakash believes this type of community engagement is key to tackling big problems like mosquito-borne disease. “The more number of people engage the better the tool gets. So, we’re very excited that if literally, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are recording mosquitoes every day especially, you know, around the world, it will create the kind of community that is needed,” Prakash said. The Abuzz app will be available to download for free in the next month or two. Another group of researchers at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom is developing a similar cellphone app — called Mozzwear — that identifies malaria mosquitoes by their sound. 
 
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The Trump administration granted ByteDance a 15-day extension of a divestiture order that had directed the Chinese company to sell its TikTok short video-sharing app by Thursday.TikTok first disclosed the extension earlier in a court filing, saying it now has until Nov. 27 to reach an agreement. Under pressure from the U.S. government, ByteDance has been in talks for a deal with Walmart Inc and Oracle Corp to shift TikTok’s U.S. assets into a new entity.The Treasury Department said on Friday the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) granted the 15-day extension to “provide the parties and the committee additional time to resolve this case in a manner that complies with the order.”ByteDance filed a petition Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging the Trump administration divestiture order.ByteDance said Tuesday that CFIUS seeks “to compel the wholesale divestment of TikTok, a multibillion-dollar business built on technology developed by” ByteDance and based on the government’s review of the Chinese company’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly.President Donald Trump in an Aug. 14 order had directed ByteDance to divest the app within 90 days.The Trump administration contends TikTok poses national security concerns, saying the personal data of U.S. users could be obtained by China’s government. TikTok, which has more than 100 million U.S. users, denies the allegations.Trump has said the Walmart-Oracle deal had his “blessing.”One big issue that has persisted is over the ownership structure of the new company, TikTok Global, which would own TikTok’s U.S. assets.In Tuesday’s court filing, ByteDance said it submitted a fourth proposal last Friday that contemplated addressing U.S. concerns “by creating a new entity, wholly owned by Oracle, Walmart and existing U.S. investors in ByteDance, that would be responsible for handling TikTok’s U.S. user data and content moderation.”Separate restrictions on TikTok from the U.S. Commerce Department have been blocked by federal courts, including transaction curbs scheduled to take effect on Thursday that TikTok warned could effectively ban the app’s use in the United States.A Commerce Department ban on Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google offering TikTok for download for new U.S. users that had been set to take effect on Sept. 27 has also been blocked.
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When Twitter started blocking President Donald Trump’s postings claiming widespread voter fraud, some cheered. Others started looking for the social media exits.
 
They found a new option at Parler.
 
Fed up with what they see as an anti-conservative bias by managers of the major social media platforms, Trump supporters are telling their followers on Twitter and Facebook to “Follow me on Parler.”
 
From the French word “to speak” or “to talk” but pronounced “PAR-lor,” the social media app is a lot like Twitter, with users posting messages and following topics searchable as hashtags.
 
Launched in 2018 in Nevada, Parler welcomed newcomers to “a non-biased, free speech social media focused on protecting user’s rights.”
 
Over the past year, conservative celebrities have flocked to Parler, a trend that has accelerated since the 2020 U.S. election. As Twitter and Facebook tried to tamp down misinformation about the election, more than 4 million accounts were launched on the app within days, the company says.   
 
Among Parler users are Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Fox News host Sean Hannity.  
 
Posts on Parler are called “parlays.” One on Thursday, under the hashtag #StoptheSteal, said “Shocker Pro Marxist Pope Francis congratulates Crooked Joe!”
“To parlay is to have a discussion bridging the differences,” said Amy Peikoff, Parler’s chief policy officer. “Coming to an understanding between two different viewpoints, and this is the sort of discussion that we want to foster on Parler.”
 
Previous alternatives to Facebook and Twitter have popped up in the U.S. claiming to be true bastions of free speech. Gab, which became a haven for neo-Nazis, was booted from the app stores of Apple and Google because it didn’t take down hate speech.
 
But the popularity of Parler – and other right-wing sites such as MeWe and Rumble, a video site – comes amid growing pressure on social media firms to do more to monitor their sites, particularly addressing misinformation about voting and the election results.  
 
Twitter, Facebook and to a lesser extent Google, the owner of YouTube, have put labels on tweets, posts and videos that claim election fraud. In some cases, they stopped the content from being shared and spreading.
 Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 11 MB480p | 15 MB540p | 19 MB720p | 32 MB1080p | 66 MBOriginal | 255 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioMuch of the conversation on Parler echoes Trump’s unsupported claim that the November 3 election was stolen by Democrats through massive voter fraud.  #StoptheSteal is a top hashtag for those who claim without proof that former Vice President Joe Biden, the projected winner of the 2020 presidential race, stole the election.
 
Last week, Facebook took down a Stop the Steal group that had gained more than 300,000 users in 24 hours. Facebook said it stopped the group because it was trying to incite violence.
   
“The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” a Facebook spokesman told The New York Times.
 
Parler users have also crossed that line at times: An Arkansas police chief used the site to urge violence against Democrats he claimed were preventing Trump’s reelection. When the posts appeared in news stories, his public account was removed and he was forced to resign.  
   
While the Parler algorithm does not promote posts to keep users engaged, the company says it is serious about its commitment to free speech and does not block extremist content.  
   
“The fact that we don’t block out the content from various extremists does not mean that our goal is to further all of those views,” said Parler’s Peikoff. “What we are planning to do is give the widest freedom possible so that people can have a full discussion.”  
   
For years, the leading social media companies have been criticized for their finely tuned algorithms designed to boost users’ time spent on the sites. That has led to some users receiving a stream of increasingly extremist content on their feeds, according to Michael Karanicolas, the Wikimedia fellow at the Yale School of Law.
   
The rise of Parler, he said, “potentially suggests that if platforms do try and steer people away from these echo chambers and steer people away from what they want, the people will just migrate elsewhere.”
 
There is one potential customer that Parler has not yet managed to attract: Trump, himself.
 
While @TeamTrump, Trump’s reelection campaign, is on the site with 2 million followers, the president isn’t on Parler, yet.
 
With nearly 89 million followers on Twitter, Trump is still tweeting, even as Twitter has been putting warning labels on more of his tweets.
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