Brian Krebs: What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?. “Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.”

NEW RESOURCES

Deutsche Welle: Refugees in Germany tell their stories in ‘Archive of Refuge’. “In the video, 19 women and 23 men — four of whom belong to the LGBTQ community — tell about fleeing their native countries to Germany, some of them arriving when the country was still divided into West and East Germany. They are from 28 countries in Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East or Eastern Europe.”

Vietnam+: HCM City’s museums launch online exhibitions. “Ho Chi Minh City’s museums are offering online exhibitions and virtual tours as part of their effort to develop business amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Teaching with Google Arts & Culture. “Whether it’s taking art selfies, playing puzzle parties with friends, or diving into richly documented resources about US Black History or Inventions and Discoveries in history, Google Arts & Culture has been a valuable learning companion to people of all ages and backgrounds. And today, we are releasing a new Teacher Guide – a dedicated resource for educators to make learning with Arts & Culture and using the platform in class easier than ever.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Tools to Discover the Best Twitter Threads, Reddit Comments, and Discussions. “Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms on the internet have given anyone and everyone a soapbox. In this constant barrage of voices, it’s hard to sift the grain from the chaff. However, a few tools and people are doing this for you, especially for Twitter threads and Reddit posts and discussions.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: The original voice of Siri is now advocating for a more accessible web. “Even if you’re not familiar with the name Susan Bennett, you’d likely recognize her voice. As the original Siri, Bennett became a dependable presence in many iPhone users’ lives, responding to various inquiries and fulfilling spoken commands. Her voice work has also been helpful to smartphone users with disabilities, she says.”

The Guardian: ‘The kids loved it’: using digital delivery to bring our archive to life. “In the Guardian’s Bicentenary year, the GNM Archive and The Guardian Foundation Education Centre (now Behind the Headlines) collaborated on a project to bring the history of the paper into classrooms across the country.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

MarketWatch: As Facebook faces fire, U.S. laws protecting kids online languish behind Europe . “The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, was passed in 1998 — when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was 14 and still six years away from creating the social network. COPPA requires the Federal Trade Commission to issue and enforce regulations concerning children’s online personal information, but little has changed in the law since smartphone apps like Facebook and Instagram changed the way humans interact with the internet.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew. “Facebook is in trouble. Not financial trouble, or legal trouble, or even senators-yelling-at-Mark-Zuckerberg trouble. What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out.”

Washington Post: Opinion: It’s time to stand up to Facebook. “The courts may address whether Facebook overstepped existing laws, but it is up to Congress and the White House to decide if it is time to remove social media’s legal exemption from liability for posts on its platform. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act specifies, ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’ The question now is: If the companies are unable or unwilling to stop churning disinformation and hate in service of profits, why should they get this legal free ride?” Good afternoon, Internet…

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