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Facebook deflates filter bubbles by letting you follow topics, not just Pages

Facebook deflates filter bubbles by letting you follow topics, not just Pages

Facebook gets a lot of flack for just reinforcing your world views in its News Feed echo chamber instead of challenging your opinions. That’s because you choose exactly which friends and Pages to follow, so liberals might skip Fox News or Breitbart while conservatives avoid The Atlantic and Huffington Post. But Facebook’s newest feature could […]

Crunch Report | Facebook Hires 3,000 People After Getting Disturbed

Crunch Report | Facebook Hires 3,000 People After Getting Disturbed

Hi! You are about to activate our Facebook Messenger news bot. Once subscribed, the bot will send you a digest of trending stories once a day. You can also customize the types of stories it sends you. Click on the button below to subscribe and wait for a new Facebook message from the TC Messenger […]

Facebook replaces Oculus computer vision head at center of underage sex scandal

Facebook replaces Oculus computer vision head at center of underage sex scandal

The head of computer vision at Facebook’s virtual reality subsidiary, Oculus, has been replaced following his arrest related to an underage sex sting operation, TechCrunch has learned. Dov Katz was arrested at an Embassy Suites outside of Seattle in late December after allegedly soliciting sex from an undercover officer who he believed, at the time of meeting, […]

Alex Hardiman, former VP of product at The NY Times, will take the lead on Facebook’s news products

Alex Hardiman, former VP of product at The NY Times, will take the lead on Facebook’s news products

Facebook’s role in spreading news, especially fake news, has been in the spotlight since last year’s presidential election. Now it’s promoting Alex Hardiman to lead its news efforts on the product side. Hardiman worked at The New York Times, most recently as vice president of news products, until joining Facebook last year. She wrote on Facebook that her new role will […]

Facebook lets content owners claim ad earnings of pirated videos

Facebook lets content owners claim ad earnings of pirated videos

Facebook finally has a better solution to freebooting — the common practice of stealing video and uploading it to one’s Facebook Page to reap the engagement and audience growth. Today’s update to the Facebook Rights Manager tool that launched last year includes the new option to “claim ad earnings” on other people’s uploads of a […]

Facebook open sources Caffe2, its flexible deep learning framework of choice

Facebook open sources Caffe2, its flexible deep learning framework of choice

Today Facebook open sourced Caffe2. The deep learning framework follows in the steps of the original Caffe, a project started at the University of California, Berkeley. Caffe2 offers developers greater flexibility for building high-performance products that deploy efficiently. This isn’t the first time that Facebook has engaged with the Caffe community. Back in October, Facebook announced Caffe2Go, […]

The Mercury Effect

The Mercury Effect

In 1999 the eponymous owner of the popular proto-blog Stile Project wrote a post called “The Mercury Effect.” In it Stile described receiving a video from some fans who had, if I remember correctly, tortured a stray cat to death in his honor; they appeared to have been inspired by the other shocking material he’d […]

Facebook announces victory over a spam operation after six months of combat

Facebook announces victory over a spam operation after six months of combat

Facebook proudly announced today that it has — it thinks — put an end to the nefarious doings of a “sophisticated,” “coordinated operation” that has been spamming the site for the last six months. In a blog post, Facebook’s security team suggested the “inauthentic likes” came from accounts in “Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a […]