Weekly Comms News Round Up 20/11/2013
Emergency services and government agencies are now able to send push notifications and text messages to their followers through the Twitter Alerts service, which launched in the UK and Ireland on Monday. In other news, internet search engines Microsoft and Google have agreed to block search results for child abuse while Facebook has allowed beheading videos to return to the social media channel. Read these and other comms news highlights from the past week curated via @CisionUK.
Twitter’s emergency alerts service launched in UK and Ireland by @danielt_johnson via The Telegraph
Twitter’s system of emergency alerts, which the company says can help spread critical information when other lines of communication are down, has been launched in the UK and Ireland.
57 UK and Ireland organisations including the UK’s 47 police forces, the London Fire Brigade, the Mayor of London’s office, the Foreign Office and the Environment Agency have all signed up to the service which launched on 18th November.
Google & Microsoft announce child porn clampdown by John Glenday via The Drum
Two of the internet’s biggest search giants; Google and Microsoft, have announced measures to impede the dissemination of child abuse images online following a campaign by prime minister David Cameron.
The move will see as many as 100,000 search terms return no results containing illegal material and will also trigger on screen alerts that such content breaks the law.
Facebook defends allowing beheadings footage to continue by @JustParkinson via The BBC News
Facebook will continue to allow users to show footage of beheadings as long as it is posted in “the right context”, MPs have heard.
The social network site has been criticised for allowing such images to be shown, amid warnings they could cause psychological damage. But Facebook’s UK and Ireland policy director Simon Milner said the footage could expose human rights abuses. There would also be “more prior warnings” on content, he added.
LinkedIn’s new Showcase Pages allow companies to highlight specific products and projects by @anthonyha via TechCrunch
LinkedIn is announcing a new feature called a Showcase Page that will allow businesses on the professional networking site to target the fans of a specific product or brand.
David Thacker, the company’s vice president of marketing solutions products, said that when companies with a number of different products are trying to discuss all of them from a single page, it can become “a little bit overwhelming” for followers who aren’t necessarily interested in all of that content.
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