Items tagged with social-network
Facebook's privacy policies and its mode of operation as a whole has come under intense scrutiny following the Cambridge Analytica debacle. While testifying before Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a variety of questions as lawmakers sought to understand how the social network operates, and whether government regulation is needed. The damage control is ongoing for Facebook, and as part of the effort, its VP of global product management Monika Bickert shared some details on the company's internal enforcement guidelines for what content is and is not allowed. "We decided to publish these internal guidelines for two reasons. First, the guidelines will help people understand where we...
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Facebook is rolling out a new feature that it should have implemented a long time ago -- a dislike button! Just kidding, that's probably never going to happen, no matter how many inane posts flood the world's largest social playground. However, in lieu of a thumbs down icon, Mark Zuckerberg and the gang are updating the Facebook Search feature to scan posts that have been shared with you. "If you want to search using phrases like 'My friends who live in New York,' you still can. Your search results are personalized and unique to you and, as always, you can only see things that have been shared with you," Tom Stocky, Facebook's VP of Search, stated in a blog post.Facebook is essentially answering...
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Under the veil of the Internet, people tend to post things they wouldn't say in person. We've all encountered the so-called Internet tough guy or troll, though some comments and posts step so far out of bounds that it constitutes harassment and/or cyber bullying. It's a problem that not only exists, but also is getting worse, which is why Twitter decided to enhance its in-product harassment-reporting tool. In an effort to streamline the process of reporting abuse, Twitter made the process much more mobile friendly and cut back on the amount of initial information that's required. It now asks if you or someone else is being affected and what the nature of the harassment is. There's also a text...
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Perhaps Facebook is conducting a meta-experiment. The first part of it was the emotional contagion experiment we covered yesterday, wherein Facebook manipulated close to 700,000 users’ emotions via their Newsfeeds without any apparent knowledge, consent, or reasonable ethical oversight. The real experiment, though, might just be that Facebook wants to know how far it can push users before they actually quit using the social network. I’m being facetious here, but in all seriousness, after the outrage so many felt after yesterdays’ news, how many people actually quit Facebook because of it? I’m guessing almost none, and that highlights something extremely interesting about...
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How does one even begin a post with the above headline? In what is either a massive troll or an uncomfortable sign of the times, a pair of Brits named Matt Gray and Tom Scott are touting a new social network launching soon that will use only emoji. Dubbed “emoj.li”, the social network contains no words--no words!--but also no spam, which is its main selling point. “Social networks are broken,” says the product video, “with spam, trolls, memes, and hashtags.” Further, “There is no spam, because there isn’t an emoji for spam.” If you’re smelling a rat, you’re not alone, but Gray and Scott specifically state that this isn’t...
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Facebook doesn’t go down all that often, but when it does it’s big news. The social network reportedly experienced an outage at approximately 1 a.m. PST that affected users all over the world. Users in countries including Australia, New Zealand, England, South Korea, India, were unable to access Facebook, instead seeing an error message saying "Sorry, something went wrong". The outage lasted about half an hour. Credit: Reuters/Thomas White “Earlier today, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time,” Facebook’s APAC spokesperson Charlene Chian said.”We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%....
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Facebook, and every other social network and website where people virtually congregate and communicate, has a delicate balancing act of allowing as much freedom as possible while also ensuring that the environment is a safe and legal one. Facebook is taking a step further in the “legal and safe” direction by cracking down on the selling of regulated items, with the company specifically mentioning private sales of firearms. “This balance is important to how we view commercial activity on Facebook or Instagram. We have strict rules about how businesses can use our advertising tools,” said Facebook’s Monica Bickert, Head of Global Policy Management. “For example,...
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It makes total sense that Twitter would offer a way to share information about and buy products from within the service, so it’s actually not surprising to hear that a Twitter e-commerce solution is in the works. Re/code.net reports that in addition to nearly finalizing a deal with payment services company Stripe, the social network is flirting with integrating Fancy.com’s online shopping tools. The site found an open, non-password protected area of Fancy.com’s site that contained a mockup of what the product would look like. According to Re/code’s sources, Twitter is also fielding overtures from another potential e-commerce partner. Click to enlarge (Credit: Re/code.net)...
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The problem is a simple one: There are images out there that should not be on Facebook, where they’re viewable by anyone aged 13 and up. However, Facebook has an extremely difficult job to do when it comes to deciding which and what type of images might fall into the “banned” category, and the issue has recently come into focus over a beheading video that got so much attention that British PM David Cameron even weighed in on it. Facebook has now pulled the video, and although the social network isn’t actually changing any of its standards, it is revisiting how it enforces its guidelines. "When we review content that is reported to us, we will take a more holistic look...
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Up to now, viewability of kids’ Facebook accounts was set by default to “Friends of Friends”; now, those aged 13-17 start out with their audience set to “Friends” by default. However, they can also make their posts public, and they can turn on “Follow” to let their posts show up in the Newsfeeds of people who aren’t necessarily their friends. Basically, Facebook wants to let the youngsters have a louder voice on the social network, and by “louder voice” we presume that to mean “greater opportunity for generating ad dollars”. But before the Internet starts screaming about this latest loosening of Facebook privacy for kids,...
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When confronted with something that is both massive in scale and completely quantifiable, it does something to your brain. That “something” is hard to explain, but we feel it when we look at The Faces Of Facebook, which is a web page--a single web page--that contains the thumbnail images of all 1.2 billion (and counting) Facebook users. The work of “creative technologist” Natalia Rojas, the site keeps a running tally of all the world’s Facebook users in chronological order, which is a number that trends upward by the second on the social network. When you drag your cursor across the page, a pop-up tells you which Facebook image number (or FACE #) you’re about...
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Facebook is making it easier to recover your Facebook account in the event that you ever forget your password (which, let’s be honest, we’ve all done once or twice). Instead of going through the rigamarole of resetting your password and answering a bunch of security questions to do so, the social network announced the new Trusted Contacts feature, which is the polished and rebranded version of the Trusted Friends tool that Facebook started testing in 2011. Basically, you can choose three to five of your Facebook contacts who will receive a security code and instructions on how to help you in the event you need help logging in. You can easily set up and manage your Trusted Contacts...
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If you don’t have it already, surely you’ve seen some of your friends’ Facebook profiles converted to the new Timeline format: a large, (probably low-res) wide picture with a little profile pic inset on the lower left, a bit of personal info below that, and a two-column stream of stuff about them and their personal histories, including their friends, likes, places they’ve visited, photos, and so on. Like some, perhaps you’ve been dreading the day you have to spend an hour rejiggering your profile to suit the new format, untagging yourself in everything unflattering you can think of from your college days, selecting new privacy settings for everything you’ve...
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