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The Week That Was: Social Media (03/08/18)

3rd August 2018

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Whatsapp confirms a big new update

Whatsapp has just confirmed that it’s adding a new way to chat on the app.  The popular messaging service says that billions of users will be able to use a new group video call feature.  This feature enables up to four people to chat at the same time within the app with each person appearing on the screen simultaneously.  In a post on their blog, WhatsApp said: “our users spend over 2 billion minutes on calls per day”. It’s great to see Whatsapp innovate and fight for top space in the messaging service domain.

Facebook and Instagram want you to stop being so addicted to social media

Facebook and Instagram have announced some new tools to help tech lovers beat their addiction and to try and stop consumers from spending so much time comparing themselves to other people’s suspiciously perfect-looking lives. The tools will include a graph that breaks down when users go on the sites and will monitor how long they spend online. You will also be able to set-up time limits and receive alerts when that time is up.  This is worth paying attention to in response to the shocking rise that we are seeing in technology addiction.

Is social media making us less compassionate?

In this week’s ‘long-read’ from the Guardian, Elisa Gabbert examines if social media and the 24-hour news cycle are leading us to experience ‘compassion fatigue’ – a term used to describe the effects of stress from caregiving, such as emotional changes or harmful sleep patterns. As we experience more and more of the world’s problems as a global collective, always switched on, do we risk exacerbating ourselves?

LinkedIn faces criticism over implicit bias claim

A LinkedIn user searching for marketing work has accused LinkedIn of fostering an environment subjecting people of colour to implicit bias. After creating two identical profiles with different names and images (one of a woman of colour, one of a white man) Kameshia Washington found that the white male profile received 21 responses to 30 applications, while the female profile only had 4 responses to the same amount of applications. LinkedIn has yet to comment.

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