Facebook made two announcements about ad transparency today — one around the ads purchased by any Page and another around expanding its recently announced archive of political ads. It seems like ad transparency is a big focus today, as Twitter just launched its own Ads Transparency Center, allowing anyone to see ads bought by any […]
Facebook likes to keep it in the family. Gabe Madway, Instagram’s director of comms who’s run its day-to-day efforts for the past four years, is departing to work for a new company later this summer, and he’ll be replaced by Anna White from Facebook’s internal PR team. She’ll report to Kristina Schake, Instagram’s Global Comms director […]
Regardless of what you may think of Facebook as a platform, they run a massive operation, and when you reach their level of scale you have to get more creative in how you handle every aspect of your computing environment. Engineers quickly reach the limits of human ability to track information, to the point that […]
Facebook knows the historical app audit it’s conducting in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal is going to result in a tsunami of skeletons tumbling out of its closet. It’s already suspended around 200 apps as a result of the audit — which remains ongoing, with no formal timeline announced for when the […]
Don’t want to know the ending to a World Cup game or Avengers movie until you’ve watched it, or just need to quiet an exhausting political topic like “Trump”? Facebook is now testing the option to “snooze” specific keywords so you won’t see them for 30 days in News Feed or Groups. The feature is […]
Facebook’s been criticized for tearing America apart, but now it will try to help us forge bonds with our neighbors to the south. Facebook Messenger will now offer optional auto-translation of English to Spanish and vice-versa for all users in the United States and Mexico. It’s a timely launch given the family separation troubles at […]
Apple News has a new old mission: Curating political news and analysis by paying a team of experienced human editors to quality-assess journalism, rather than letting unchecked algorithms run wild and exaggerate anything — no matter how awful, obnoxious or untrue. ‘Fakebook’ eat your heart out. Apple says human curation is not a new direction […]
Facebook’s kid-friendly messaging app, Messenger Kids, is expanding to its first countries outside the U.S. today, with launches in Canada and Peru. It’s also introducing French and Spanish versions of its app, and rolling out a handful of new features focused on promoting respect and empathy, including a “Messenger Kids Pledge” and something called “Kindness Stickers,” […]
Set the “days without a Facebook privacy problem” counter to zero. This week, an alarmed developer contacted TechCrunch, informing us that their Facebook App Analytics weekly summary email had been delivered to someone outside their company. It contains sensitive business information, including weekly average users, page views and new users. Forty-three hours after we contacted […]
Are you ready for some scary numbers? After months of Mark Zuckerberg talking about how “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits”, Facebook is preparing to turn that commitment into a Time Well Spent product. Buried in Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased “Your Time On Facebook” feature. It shows the tally […]