Facebook appears to have been blocked in Vietnam as a part of a government-imposed crackdown on social media, amid public protests over an environmental disaster attributed to toxic discharges from a steel complex built by Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics. Dissidents are blaming wastewater from the steel plant for a mass fish death at aquatic farms and in waters off the country’s […]
Facebook is now strongly refuting claims that it suppressed conservative Trends after issuing a more vague and indirect PR statement earlier today about having neutrality guidelines. Facebook VP of search Tom Stocky Facebook has “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true” wrote VP of search Tom Stocky on the social network tonight at 9:30pm […]
Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere, we’re now entering what I call the “Experience Age.” When was the last time you updated your Facebook status? Maybe you no longer do? It’s been reported that original status updates by […]
Get ready for a lot more ads on Instagram and elsewhere that feel ever more personalised to you. Instagram today is turning up the volume on its ad tech play, courtesy of its owner, Facebook. Today the photo- and video-based social network is adding Dynamic Ads — a retargeting unit that Facebook launched on its own network […]
Despite gripes about the usefulness of Facebook chatbots, “tens of thousands” of developers are building them, Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky revealed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. And, 5,000 Shopify merchants are now distributing order confirmations and shipping alerts via Messenger, showing e-commerce companies are eager to reach the app’s nearly one billion users. You […]
The Senate Commerce Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to answer questions about Facebook’s Trending Topics feature. Trending Topics displays trending news headlines and story summaries in a sidebar next to the main news feed, and a former contractor who worked on Trending Topics has alleged that conservative news topics and outlets were often […]
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service that claims a billion users, has launched desktop clients for Mac and Windows. The release comes about 15 months after WhatsApp released its first web app. People who have already been using WhatsApp in their web browsers will find that the software isn’t significantly different. The company said in an […]
Facebook announced this morning that its private photo-sharing application, Facebook Moments, is now available in all countries worldwide, thanks the launch of a new, modified version in the EU and Canada. While the U.S. and other international versions of the application take advantage of facial recognition technology to suggest which friends to share with by […]
If you think Facebook will get rich on Oculus, you better be patient. Mark Zuckerberg said on the Q1 2016 earnings call he sees VR as a long, long-term bet rather than a way to make a quick buck on 3D games. “This is early and it’s going to take a long time. There’s a lot […]
Last week Apple released the latest iteration of its “Shot on iPhone” campaign. The new ad was developed for Mother’s Day, and features a slideshow of pictures and videos of moms and their kids. Now, a week later, Apple launched the aptly-named website momsshotoniphone.com, which lets you create a custom version of the ad that has a photo […]