Judd Legum writes: On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) will be retiring from Congress to become the company’s CEO in January. Nunes has no experience in the media business and once sued a fictional cow for making fun of him on Twitter. Writing in Bloomberg, Matt Levine… Read More »
MIT Technology Review reports: In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a program publishers could use to monetize their content.… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it, the tech giant’s researchers warned in internal memos. About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according… Read More »
Kyle Chayka writes: Last Thursday, the same day that Facebook’s parent company rebranded under the new name Meta, Mark Zuckerberg gave a meandering tour of the metaverse—the as-yet-hypothetical next phase of the Internet, a unified space that mingles digital and physical reality—in a video presentation for the Facebook Connect 2021 event. The metaverse, which Zuckerberg… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known… Read More »
Jaron Lanier writes: [W]hat we need to talk about is the dominant business model. This model spews out horrible incentives to make people meaner and crazier. Incentives run the world more than laws, regulations, critiques or the ideas of researchers. The current incentives are to “engage” people as much as possible, which means triggering the… Read More »
Nicholas Carr writes: There are several ways to decipher intent in social media communications. Some are straightforward. Certain platforms, like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Clubhouse, operate largely as broadcasting channels, while others, like Messenger, Zoom, and Facetime, are used mainly for personal conversation. Many platforms, Snapchat being a prominent example, offer users different modes of… Read More »
Ian Bogost writes: In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart… Read More »
The Verge reports: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To… Read More »
The New York Times reports: Facebook has told employees to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016” that pertain to its businesses because governments and legislative bodies have started inquiries into its operations, according to a company email sent on Tuesday night. The move, known as a “legal hold,” follows intense media, legal and regulatory… Read More »
Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: Facebook, like the internet itself, is supposed to be a global phenomenon. It’s designed, its leaders say, to unite the world, transcend difference, and collapse distance. Its global reach and influence is undeniable. Nothing in human history has connected more than 3 billion human beings. Nothing has had such a profound set… Read More »
Nieman Lab reports: As if there wasn’t enough Facebook news to digest already, another deep dive from The Washington Post this morning revealed that Facebook engineers changed the company’s algorithm to prioritize and elevate posts that elicited emoji reactions — many of which were rolled out in 2017. More specifically, the ranking algorithm treated reactions… Read More »
Adrienne LaFrance writes: Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over… Read More »
The New York Times reports: In 2019, Facebook researchers began a new study of one of the social network’s foundational features: the Like button. They examined what people would do if Facebook removed the distinct thumbs-up icon and other emoji reactions from posts on its photo-sharing app Instagram, according to company documents. The buttons had… Read More »
The Atlantic reports: In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: Mark Zuckerberg praised India in December as a special and important country for Facebook Inc., saying that millions of people there use its platforms every day to stay in touch with family and friends. Internally, researchers were painting a different picture: Facebook’s products in India were awash with inflammatory content… Read More »