Amaya Toman The beginning and first half of this year is clearly marked by purchases and acquisitions for Microsoft. While ZeniMax went under Microsoft relatively recently, the Redmont giant has now acquired Nuance Communications, which is engaged in the creation of voice recognition technologies. Next, in today's summary, we will also look at fraudulent campaigns on Facebook. Let's get straight to the point.
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Fraudulent Facebook campaigns
The Facebook company has recently developed a number of tools with the help of which the social network of the same name should become as fair and transparent a place as possible. Everything doesn't always work out as it should. Indeed, some government and political entities have managed to figure out a way to gain fake support on Facebook and at the same time make life miserable for their opponents - and apparently with the tacit help of Facebook itself. News site The Guardian reported earlier this week that responsible Facebook employees take different approaches to coordinated campaigns aimed at influencing users' political opinions. While in richer regions such as the United States, South Korea or Taiwan, Facebook takes quite drastic measures against campaigns of this type, it practically ignores them in poorer areas such as Latin America, Afghanistan or Iraq.
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This was pointed out by former Facebook data expert Sophie Zhang. In an interview with The Guardian, for example, she stated that one of the reasons for this approach is the fact that the company does not see campaigns of this type in poorer parts of the world as serious enough for Facebook to risk its PR because of them. Government and political entities can then simply avoid Facebook's more detailed and rigorous scrutiny of their campaigns by using the Business Suite to create fake accounts from which they then gain support.
Although the Business Suite application is primarily used to create accounts for organizations, businesses, non-profit organizations or charities. While the use of multiple accounts by one and the same person is frowned upon by Facebook, within the Business Suite application, one user can create a large number of "corporate" accounts, which can later be modified so that they can look like personal accounts at first glance. According to Sophie Zhang, it is precisely the poorer countries of the world in which Facebook does not oppose this type of activity. Sophie Zhang worked for Facebook until September of last year, during her time at the company, according to her own words, she tried to draw attention to the mentioned activities, but Facebook did not react appropriately flexibly.
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Pavel Jelic Microsoft bought out Nuance Communications
Earlier this week, Microsoft bought a company called Nuance Communications, which develops speech recognition systems. The $19,7 billion price will be paid in cash, with the entire process expected to be officially completed later this year. There was already intense speculation that this acquisition was in the offing during the past week. Microsoft has announced that it will buy Nuance Communications at a price of $56 per share. The company apparently plans to use Nuance Communications technology for its own software and services. Recently, Microsoft has been taking quite bold steps and decisions in the field of acquisitions - earlier this year, for example, it bought the company ZeniMax, which includes the game studio Bethesda, and recently there was also speculation that it could buy the communication platform Discord.
