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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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