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WhatsApp Trends: Here's How Fake News, Videos go Viral

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If you are baffled at the speed at which jokes, videos and GIFs reach your WhatsApp account from groups or friends almost at the same time, remember that such posts are being planned and executed by teams sitting in some corner of the country to bombard the maximum number accounts at one go. 
 
With 160 million users in India, the Facebook-owned mobile messaging app has become a top choice among marketers, social influencers and certain groups to reach them via jokes, videos and GIFs whenever there is a breaking news, a major announcement, a tongue-in-cheek celebrity statement or even a festival, say experts. 
 
"WhatsApp is emerging as a highly susceptible channel for propaganda, misinformation, fake news as well as highly influenceable from the targeted marketing message or advertisement perspective, i.e., digital word-of-mouth," Neil Shah, Research Director (Devices & Ecosystems) at the market research firm Counterpoint Research, told IANS. 
In India, WhatsApp has the highest penetration among any "social-centric" web/app platform available on the nearly 260 million active smartphone users. 
 
"Several marketers are leveraging an infantry of smart or influential folks to develop and spread targeted and viral-natured content. I believe the viral messages developed and spread are not by a single source but many individuals and firms working on this behind the scenes," Shah added. 
 
There are ways to populate the sharing of such viral content but it can be defined in two parts -- content and objective. 
"While objectives and the purposes could be anything, one can easily relate these with driving mass awareness, creating social buzz, dragging public attention on political or public issues or making fun among friends or sharing memes or news," Anoop Mishra, one of the nation's leading social media experts, told IANS. 
 
Social media or digital marketing agencies work behind the content marketing strategies to make stories viral and shareable on WhatsApp. 
 
"Several FMCG companies, major political parties and politicians have their in-house sponsored team of social media warriors to generate and share such content or hashtags on various social media platforms," Mishra noted. 
According to Shah, among several social media platforms, WhatsApp has a clear edge because of its user-friendly approach which has put the platform in a strong (as well as vulnerable position) for flow of both good and bad news or information or any content across the platform. 
 
"Since the degree of separation among different WhatsApp users is theoretically lower, there is a high chance for any information to go viral faster than any other social media platform or even word-of-mouth," said Shah. 
 
With some 150 million active users in India, Facebook is the second-most used social media platform and can also act as a catalyst for proliferation of viral content due to a broader sharing and a greater engagement with the content. 
 
"However, Facebook is quite curated and controlled via an algorithm according to a person's social graph and Facebook's advertising engine and, hence, potentially less viral than Whatsapp," Shah pointed out. 
 
Facebook's third property, Instagram, is also quickly rising to become a popular platform from the perspective of social media influencers to drive rich content for marketers and mainly target millennials. 
 
Is there a revenue model in there for those making posts viral? "Absolutely, wherever there is a greater reach and high engagement for any platform, a potential revenue model certainly exists," Shah stated. 
 
Owing to its "no ads" DNA, WhatsApp has so far been resistant to a direct engagement-driven revenue model. However, with Facebook connecting WhatsApp to its social graph, it unlocks potential for Facebook to work with marketers who, in turn, work with influencers to build a robust value chain. 
 
"Right now with WhatsApp its much more unorganised and influencers are earning directly from the marketers without any Facebook or Whatsapp intervention, unlike the Facebook or Instagram platforms," Shah told IANS. 
 
According to Mishra, the content is being prepared by digital marketing agencies with some earning prospects. 
"But the reality is that more than 80 per cent of the images or videos shared among the WhatsApp groups are downloaded from websites without any personal revenue benefits excepts some blogging sites which are paying their members for posts, comments, likes or to share contentson linked social profiles," Mishra told IANS. 
 
On August 25, WhatsApp made extensive changes to its privacy policy, announcing it would and could share users' personal information, including their phone numbers, with its parent company Facebook -- a move that drew sharp criticism from privacy activists and the Delhi High Court in India. 
 
The move was touted as the first step towards monetising WhatsApp since Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in 2014. 
"Right now, WhatsApp is quite fragmented and unorganised compared to Facebook. We believe this will change fast as Facebook tries to indirectly monetise the power of WhatsApp as a 'content sharing and targeting' platform," Shah added.</div>

WhatsApp Trends: Here's How Fake News, Videos go Viral

If you are baffled at the speed at which jokes, videos and GIFs reach your WhatsApp account from groups or friends almost at the same t...

Is Facebook quietly adding computer art to make your photos incredible?

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Social networking giant Facebook and its photo and video-sharing app Instagram are reportedly set to quietly make your photos incredible by adding computer art to them. 
 
According to The Verge, it has been discovered that for every photo you upload to Facebook or Instagram, the company quietly makes an html page that replicates that photo using ASCII or text characters that lets you blow up your images to massive scale. 
 
Mathias Bynens, a web standards enthusiast from Belgium, noticed it and tweeted about it on Friday. "Take any Facebook/Instagram photo URL… Append '.txt' ? ASCII art … append '.html' ? colored ASCII art," he wrote in his tweet. 
 
If you add ".html" to the end of that URL of the photo, you will get the coloured ASCII version. Similarly, If you add ".txt" to the end of that URL, you will get a black-and-white version. 
 
"We have reached out to the company for the reasoning behind this hidden-but-cool 'feature' - there is probably some boring backend explanation," the report noted.</div>

Is Facebook quietly adding computer art to make your photos incredible?

Social networking giant Facebook and its photo and video-sharing app Instagram are reportedly set to quietly make your photos incredibl...

Apple wants to rebuild and sell its refurbished iPhones from China in India

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Many like us, do feel that Apple in a way is using India as a market to get rid of its older products. Older iPhones are re-launched and sold at unreasonable prices with hardware that is at times almost 5 years old. The problem with these older devices is not that they can be used for one or two years until they need to be discarded, but the fact they have to be discarded so early, leading to mounds of electronic waste in the country. 
 
According to a report in the Indian Express, Apple is trying to set up a factory to rebuild and sell its refurbished iPhones coming from China, in the country. The Cupertino giant had approached the government with a proposal a few years ago, but was quickly rejected for reasons related to e-waste by the Environment Ministry’s Technical Review Committee. 
 
Apple according to the new filing mentions that its refurbished devices should not be considered as “second hand” since the units that will be sold through official channels will be quality checked and also come with the standard one year warranty; something that is also available with a newer device. 
 
However, in its defense, Apple made it clear that its devices are good quality ones and it is the low-cost ones that the government needs to be worried about when it comes to e-waste. In the same filing, the San Francisco based company specified that it has plans to begin its refurbishing operations in low numbers, but that it would ramp up depending on the availability of units coming from China.</div>

Apple wants to rebuild and sell its refurbished iPhones from China in India

Many like us, do feel that Apple in a way is using India as a market to get rid of its older products. Older iPhones are re-launched and...

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WhatsApp Trends: Here's How Fake News, Videos go Viral

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