The Andhra Pradesh government on Saturday said the situation was "normal" in RR Venkatapuram village, where a styrene vapour leak from the LG Polymers plant claimed 12 lives and left over 300 people hospitalized with various ailments.

This fall’s top ten list cover a variety of bible studies on Revelation. Each curriculum gives you resources to lead a group study, but is also perfect as your own personal study.

The U.K.s new special cyber operations unit, 6 Division (6 Div), will move beyond the typical cyber capabilities within the military sphere into full-blown social media "information warfare." And here the primary adversary is Russia, which has turned the dark art of peddling fake news and political propaganda across major social media platforms into a national security strategy.

Much of the work of the new unit will be relatively traditional signals activities—jamming and intercepting enemy comms, supporting the field world of allied intelligence agencies.

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In India Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have agreed to follow the "voluntary code of ethics" in all future elections, including the upcoming Maharashtra and Haryana assembly polls, the Election Commission said on Thursday.

The code, which was derived to act against paid advertisements that violate norms set by the Election Commission, came into force on March 20 in the last Lok Sabha polls.

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Predicting the future of social media is always fun.

Emerging platforms, secured patents, new tactics and demographic shifts are just a few things to consider when making a prediction.

So, what is next with social media as we look ahead to 2020? Here are four big predictions on the future of social media in 2020.

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How have the rise of social media and spread of misinformation changed the news media landscape?

As a major election year nears and the public questions the role of Facebook in combating misinformation, Andrew Pergam, director of governance and strategic initiatives at Facebook, gave a glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes at the social media company during a symposium at the University of Utah on Friday.

Misinformation is one of the companys most pressing and scrutinized issues, he said. We are under an immense amount of pressure to do more to tackle viral information more quickly.

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Gig workers who are totally localized (caterers, electricians, painters, plumbers, wedding planners, etc.) often discount the value of using social media for their marketing. Why? Because these platforms are at least national, if not international and what would be a use for a local business?

Indeed, localized SEO and local advertising can drive you a steady stream of traffic and revenue. But you should not discount social media as a good tool for your marketing. Here are five actionable social media marketing tips for local contractors and other gig workers.

1. Geo tagging and targeting is your allies

Social media platforms may have global reach, but they also allow you to go very granular with your marketing.

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According to the National Center for Health Research, people who visited social media platforms 58 times or more per week were three times more likely to feel socially isolated. The center also found that heavy social media users are 2.2 times more likely to have eating and body image issues than moderate users.

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Updating your brand bio can be a great, simple way to boost engagement, especially heading into the new year. Your profile bio can play a key role in perception, and in driving subsequent action, so it is worth reviewing your details and ensuring that everything is as you want it.

Writing a Great Social Media Bio for Your Brand [Infographic]

And just like that, we have reached the final issue of the year — and also, somehow, the decade. As is tradition around here, let’s close out the year with some predictions from you about where platforms and democracy are headed in 2020 and beyond.

Thanks to everyone who contributed. Here are your thoughts, along with some of mine. This year, I’m ordering these in roughly how likely I think they are. So, the most likely things to happen at the top, and we move further into crazy town as you scroll down. Generally speaking, I feel more comfortable predicting product moves than policy shifts.

16 predictions for social networks in 2020

Is influencer marketing becoming a strategy of the past? Are influencers worth what brands pay them to endorse their products?


How This Social Media Agency Is Revolutionizing The Influencer Marketing Landscape

Apple has announced that Shortcuts, a powerful automation app for the iPhone and iPad, will come pre-installed on iOS devices starting this fall. This is great news because it is an incredibly handy app — based on Workflow which Apple acquired in 2017 — that lets you combine multiple actions to perform a specific task.

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Feedly, a popular RSS feed reader with millions of users worldwide, recently announced the creation of a new AI research assistant named Leo. Their goal with Leo is to create an AI with a set of skills that will enable it to better prioritize articles from news feeds.

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Google has used links to determine the authority of websites since its early days: the idea of webpages casting votes” for other pages by linking to them is at the core of the PageRank algorithm. This led to the rise of numerous manipulative link tactics.

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Imagine you got a spike of traffic from Facebook amounting to hundreds of thousands of visitors — but only a trickle of them converted.

And lets assume all the moving parts in your funnel are working properly; you’ve got a fast- loading website, great conversion copy, and well-functioning sign-up or contact forms.

Yet, with all of these things, your conversion rates from that spike of traffic were nothing to write home about. And what exactly could cause that?

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Web based feed readers are kind of a pain to use. They often implement changes that you do not want, while taking away features that you like.  Local readers are much better when it comes to this, because you can revert to an older version in case of adverse changes.

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If you are not seeing results from your social media efforts, have you asked yourself why you are doing all of that—other than because everyone else is doing it?

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Feedly, a popular RSS feed reader with millions of users worldwide, recently announced the creation of a new AI research assistant named Leo. Their goal with Leo is to create an AI with a set of skills that will enable it to better prioritize articles from news feeds.

Web based feed readers are kind of a pain to use. They often implement changes that you don't want, while taking away features that you like.  Local readers are much better when it comes to this, because you can revert to an older version in case of adverse changes.

Smart RSS Reader is a feed reader extension for Firefox and Chrome that I have been using for a week; I am quite impressed by it so far.

Install the add-on and click its toolbar icon to open a new tab with the extension's RSS reader. It has three panes, each of which has a toolbar at the top. The left pane is the feeds pane and lists all RSS feeds that you're subscribed too. Selecting a feed displays the title of the articles published by the site in the center pane. It also displays the author's name and the date when the article went live.

Apple has announced that Shortcuts, a powerful automation app for the iPhone and iPad, will come pre-installed on iOS devices starting this fall. This is great news because its an incredibly handy app — based on Workflow which Apple acquired in 2017 — that lets you combine multiple actions to perform a specific task.

What kind of things, you ask? Well, you can for example make it easier to open your favorite Apple Music playlist, find travel times to an address, create GIFs, and more. But one of its best uses in my opinion is use it as an RSS reader.

In a recent survey of 1000 consumers and 500 businesses, Animoto found that 75% of Millennials purchase decisions were influenced by a brands social media presence. But that's Millennials, a generation that's largely grown up online, and those response figures vary significantly across the different age brackets - so which platforms should you be focusing on to reach your target market?

To provide more insight, the team at Animoto broke their research down by generation.

Some of their key findings include:

Gen Z chose Instagram as the platform to follow brands
Baby boomers spend most of their time on YouTube and the Facebook Feed
Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X selected YouTube as the platform they rely on when making purchase decisions

The evaluation for class 10, 12 board exams will be done by teachers at their homes and 3,000 schools have been identified as exam centres to deliver the answer sheets to them, Union HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank' said on Saturday. He said 1.5 crore answer sheets of already conducted class 10, 12 exams will be delivered to teachers.