Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about literally everything in the world. And hidden in that unending torrent are an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances that would be better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report […]
Facebook is introducing a new feature to give users peace of mind around how their profile photo can be used and accessed by others. The social network today announced a pilot program in India that is designed to protect users who are concerned about other people gaining access to their profile image. The new ‘photo […]
Facebook today announced a series of improvements for its Safety Check feature – the service that allows Facebook users to communicate about their safety to friends and family during a crisis. Most notably, people will now have the option to start fundraisers from within Safety Check, in order to immediately translate concern for victims of […]
Last week Facebook solicited help with what it dubbed “hard questions” — including how it should tackle the spread of terrorism propaganda on its platform. Yesterday Google followed suit with its own public pronouncement, via an op-ed in the FT newspaper, explaining how it’s ramping up measures to tackle extremist content. Both companies have been coming […]
Facebook’s Safety Check feature was activated today, following news that a fire had engulfed a 24-storey block of flats in West London. At least six people are reported to have died in the blaze, with police expecting the death toll to rise. The Grenfell tower contains 120 flats. Clearly this is a tragedy. But should Facebook be reacting […]
Though Facebook is rarely mentioned alongside Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in discussions about conversational AI, the company has published a hoard of papers that underscore a deep interest in dialog systems. As has become clear with Siri, Cortana and Alexa, dialog is hard — it requires more than just good speech recognition to deliver a […]
How should Facebook decide what’s allowed on its social network, and how to balance safety and truth with diverse opinions and cultural norms? Facebook wants your feedback on the toughest issues it’s grappling with, so today it published a list of seven “hard questions” and an email address — hardquestions@fb.com — where you can send feedback and […]
Update: It happened! Snap fell down to its IPO price (for a few seconds) of $17 per share after its continued steady march south over the past several weeks. The company is now barely holding just above its IPO price. Snap’s last earnings report resulted in a disaster, and while the company still managed to stay […]
Reply threads on Facebook are about to get a lot more animated. To mark the 30th anniversary of the GIF format, all users will get the new GIF comment button that Facebook began testing three months ago. Facebook also announced that almost 13 billion GIFs were sent on Messenger over the past year, with 400 […]
Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor: Since the earliest days of the commercial web, there was a Faustian bargain struck between users and content publishers: Users got free access to online content in exchange for tolerating ads sold by the very same publishers delivering […]