Month: March 2020

When it comes to the internet, content may be king, but in many cases, the emperor has no clothes. That is to say, the masses may click on interesting stories, video, music and other media, but building a lucrative business around that content can be a struggle, with advertising-based models often providing little in the…

Photo: GettyWhen we think about companies “harvesting our data,” chances are we’re thinking of The Big Tech Names doing that harvesting. But sometimes, even these companies get taken for a bit of a ride. Case in point: earlier today, the adtech company OneAudience got slammed with a hefty Facebook lawsuit, on charges that the company…

On Friday, Facebook announced that it would further attempt to limit coronavirus-related chaos on its platform by banning commerce listings and advertisements for medical face masks. “We’re monitoring COVID19 closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency,” Facebook Director of Product Management Rob…

The change should reach your devices sometime in the next week.Facebook didn’t explicitly outline the reasons behind the decision, but it has ongoing plans to make Messenger faster and lighter rather than an a do-it-all front end. The decision to axe Discover certainly helps achieve that goal. It’s also an acknowledgment that all-encompassing apps like…

Hi, it’s Steven again, still on book tour but now back to newslettering. It’s been two weeks since you’ve heard me say that, at first, this weekly column—which has had its hands washed for 20 seconds before sending!—will be free for everyone to access. Eventually, only WIRED subscribers will get Plaintext as a newsletter. You’ll…

Photo: DAMIEN MEYER/AFP (Getty)As tech and social media giants engage in a kind of Whac-A-Mole for COVID-19 scaremongering and product misinformation on their websites, Facebook says it’s cracking down on ads intended to mislead users about their products on its Marketplace.A spokesperson for the social media giant told Business Insider, which first reported the news,…

Mark Zuckerberg has outlined some of the steps that Facebook and his family’s non-profit, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are taking to respond to the spread of both the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 and viral misinformation about the illness, in a statement posted earlier this evening.Facebook’s response focuses on three areas: providing accurate information; stopping…

doesn’t count — Facebook upheld its pledge to ban census misinformation—after media callout. Kate Cox – Mar 6, 2020 4:42 pm UTC Enlarge / The real Census form will look a lot more like this, and a lot less like a Trump campaign website. Facebook infamously has a broadly laissez-faire policy for political candidates. If…

Photo: GettyA good rule of thumb is to be skeptical of the privacy-forward changes Facebook touts to the public, and to deeply interrogate any of the quieter changes it rolls out behind the scenes since those—surprisingly—often mark the real efforts that the company’s taking to be a little bit less of an invasive shitshow. In…

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats. Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes the standard Most Relevant feed, the existing Most Recent feed of reverse chronological posts that was previously buried as a sidebar bookmark…

Facebook is fighting misinformation related to the coronavirus outbreak. Image: NurPhoto/Getty images By Stan Schroeder2020-02-26 09:03:14 UTC Facebook will no longer permit ads that promise a cure for the Covid-19 coronavirus, Business Insider reported Wednesday.  “We recently implemented a policy to prohibit ads that refer to the coronavirus and create a sense of urgency, like…

Image: Getty In the wake of a carpet-bomb of Bloomberg-sponsored memes, The New York Times reported rumblings of nervous activity over at Facebook HQ this week. Several meme accounts, including previous FyreFest shills FuckJerry, had mobilized into an entity called “Meme 2020”; Bloomberg appeared on dozens of feeds with millions of followers, photoshopped in board…