Umpf / Blog / Friday Social: Children’s Social Rights, End of the Vine is Nigh, and Wendy’s Trolling

Friday Social: Children’s Social Rights, End of the Vine is Nigh, and Wendy’s Trolling

    Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days.  Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf / @GrittAlessandra

    The End is Nigh for Vine

    It’s time: Vine will officially shut down for good this month (17 January).

    Vine has updated its website FAQs to announce that the Vine app will become Vine Camera, which lets you make 6.5 second looping videos and easily post them to Twitter. There’s no in-app social aspects, like the current iteration of the app.

    The website will become an archive of Vines created through the app, and users can connect their Vine and Twitter accounts so that followers can re-find them. Read more here.

    Facebook Adds Automatic Subtitling

    Facebook is beginning to more widely roll out its auto-subtitling tool, which it began introducing in October 2016. Some Facebook TechCrunchPages, including TechCrunch (who reported on the tool), have begun seeing the new feature this week.

    The free tool uses voice recognition software and makes it easy to edit the suggested captions. As it’s been reported that the majority of videos are played without sound on Facebook, the new feature should prove useful – and popular among Facebook users that regularly accidentally broadcast the sounds of puppy and kitten-related videos to a bus-full of Leeds commuters…

    Wendy’s Takes Twitter Trolling In Stride

    American fast food chain Wendy’s has a reputation for being (or attempting to be…) down with the kids via its Twitter account…

    This week it made the news for its response to a Twitter troll who had beef with Wendy’s beef (screenshots via Twitter user @Fraxtil):

    The screenshots have been retweeted more than 33,000 times, and the aforementioned troll has since deleted his account. Days later, Wendy’s was under fire for accidentally tweeting and quickly deleting the racist Pepe the Frog meme, so it’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the world of square hamburgers:

    Time Spent on Social Increasing

    A new report has shed light on how long people spend on social media, revealing that teens spend up to nine hours each day using social platforms and that 60% of all social media is accessed via a mobile device.

    An inforgraphic, created by MediaKix, has been published showing stats including the time spent on social media in a lifetime – five years and four months. By comparison, we only spend three years and five months eating and drinking.

    View the infographic in full:

    Commissioner Calls for Better Social Understanding

    Anne Longfield OBE, Children’s Commissioner for England, is calling upon social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to do more to protect children’s rights online after it was estimated that close to half of all eight to 11-year-olds in England have signed up to terms and conditions allowing access to their personal data, without understanding what this means.

    Longfield says: “Children spend half their leisure time online. The internet is an incredible force for good but it is wholly irresponsible to let them roam in a world for which they are ill-prepared, which is subject to limited regulation and which is controlled by a small number of powerful organisations. It is critical that children are educated better so that they can enjoy the opportunities provided by the internet whilst minimising the well-known risks.

    “It is also vital that children understand what they agree to when joining social media platforms, that their privacy is better protected, and they can have content posted about them removed quickly should they wish to.”

    Read the full report here.