Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Lisa.
1. Fool me once
April is here (how did that happen already?!)
I always look forward to the first day of this month as brands work hard to grab our attention by fooling around with crazy announcements and strange product launches.
Today’s fools include…
- Pimms sponsoring Big Ben
- Pizza Express banning cutlery
- Rowse luanching the UK’s first ever wasp honey
- Churchill Insurance creating Éau Yes – the world’s first perfume with ‘smell good’ insurance included
- Beefeater pubs luanching ‘Steak Tan’, fake tan made using real steak juices
Many are genuinely quite funny, others are just very, very weird. Some brands, like Google, have taken it too far.
2. Snapchat screenshots illegal
Taking a screenshot of a Snapchat message could land you in jail.
According to the government’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, any individual who screenshots a Snapchat message and shares it with others without permission could be sued by the original sender for copyright infringement.
Apparently, this law doesn’t just apply to Snapchat either. Under UK copyright rules, it is illegal for any user of any social media platform to take another user’s image and republish it to the public.The current maximum sentence for infringement of this type is ten years in prison and an unlimited fine.
3. Newsreader makes tit of himself
Sky newsreader, Niall Paterson, got the giggles live on air this week as he tried to present a feature on bird population levels across the UK.
He struggled to compose himself when delivering the good news about the rise in tit numbers nationwide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aht1cjzzHp8
4. TayTweets bad stuff
In a bid to get ahead of Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc, and other tech giants in the race to create interactive virtual agents, Microsoft launched TayTweets, an AI designed to improve customer service in voice recognition software.
The @TayandYou Twitter handle was modelled to chat ‘like a teenage girl’ and in the beginning, her millennial slang was totes on fleek.
But in just a short space of time, Tay began dishing out a stream of offensive tweets that were decidedly racist, anti-semitic and, sexist in nature. This is down to the fact that her ‘social abilities’ have been learned through the online ‘conversations’ she has with real humans… and real humans think it’s fun to say weird things online and also to troll corporate PR.
Microsoft initially responded by taking the chatbot offline to make “adjustments” to the AI profile, apologizing for any offense caused, but the handle is now back online under private settings although not responding to any tweets.
5. Top 10 Memes
FunnyStatus have compiled a list of the top 10 memes of all time… and the winner is…
You can see the full list here: http://funnystatus.com/master-of-memes/, although, we’ve pretty much got them all covered on the Browser Media blog!
