Tagged: facebook

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Students solve Facebook’s fake news problem in 36 hours

Facebook is facing increasing criticism over its role in the 2016 US presidential election because it allowed propaganda lies disguised as news stories to spread on the social-media site unchecked. The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad that President Barack Obama called Facebook a “dust cloud of nonsense.” And Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction...

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Facebook revenue increases by blocking ad blockers

Facebook’s recent workaround for Adblock Plus and other ad blockers is already earning it money. On today’s blockbuster Q3 earnings call, the company said desktop ad revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year this quarter compared to around 9 percent in previous quarters, and that thwarting ad blockers was largely the cause for that boost. While Adblock Plus announced it would circumvent the ban, and temporarily...

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Facebook cookie fight isn’t finished

A ruling to protect German WhatsApp users’ data from Facebook suggests that the EU bloc will not back down on protecting consumers’ data privacy, despite an earlier win by Facebook in a Belgian appeal case. This summer, the Brussels Court of Appeals decided to reverse an earlier ruling restricting Facebook from tracking non-Facebook users in Belgium through the use of cookies. The new ruling...

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Germany orders WhatsApp data collection halt to Facebook

Facebook has been ordered to stop collecting and storing data on WhatsApp users in Germany, marking the first regulatory challenge to a controversial data-sharing scheme that the social media company announced in August. In a statement published Tuesday, Germany’s privacy watchdog said that sharing WhatsApp user data with Facebook, the messaging app’s parent company, constitutes “an infringement of national data protection law.” The regulatory body also...

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Facebook inflated video stats for two years

Facebook has been overestimating the average time it told advertisers that users were spending watching videos on its platform for two years, possibly affecting marketer spending on Facebook ads. The metric was artificially inflated because it only counted videos as viewed if they had been seen for three or more seconds, not taking into account shorter views, the company revealed several weeks ago in...

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WhatsApp may nudge you into sharing data with Facebook

When WhatsApp, the messaging app, launched in 2009, it struck me as one of the most interesting innovations I’d seen in ages – for two reasons. The first was that it seemed beautifully designed from the outset: it was clean, minimalist and efficient; and, secondly, it had a business model that did not depend on advertising. Instead, users got a year free, after which...

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Despite censorship, Facebook denies it’s a media company

Facebook makes value judgements about what can appear in News Feed and what’s censored, but insists its a tech company not a media editor. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, writer Josh Constine sat down with Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook and head of News Feed, to hear more about how policies control what you see. The talk started with Constine asking Mosseri much content people consume daily on...

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Twitter and Facebook join over 30 companies to stop fake news

Facebook and Twitter have joined a network of over 30 news and technology companies to tackle fake news and improve the quality of information on social media, the group said on Tuesday. First Draft Coalition, formed in June 2015 with the backing of Alphabet Inc’s Google, said it would create a voluntary code of practice, promote news literacy among social media users, and launch a...

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Facebook blocks site sharing due to problematic spam filter

If you were trying to share something on Facebook today and couldn’t, you weren’t alone. Facebook’s security systems were blocking a number of high-profile websites from sharing content from third-party sites to the social network. The social networking giant confirmed that one of the site’s spam filter — specifically used to prevent the spread of malware — encountered an issue, a spokesperson said. We...

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Facebook mobile web experience isn’t going away yet

Earlier this summer, Facebook began to disable messaging in its mobile web app in order to push people to use its mobile Messenger app. However, this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, Messenger head David Marcus said that the option to use the mobile web experience isn’t going away entirely. Instead, the company is selectively disabling the mobile web view for users of certain devices. Asked...