Month: June 2020

For those of you still Facebooking, get ready for the best news the platform has dropped in ages. If you aren’t already sick of all the political advertising blowing through your feed, you will be soon—unless you take advantage of a new feature that will hide every political ad on social network right now with…

Facebook adds a personal off switch for political ads, T-Mobile lays off hundreds of Sprint employees and a content management platform raises $80 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 17, 2020. 1. Facebook adds option for US users to turn off political ads, launches voting info hub Facebook made the controversial decision not to…

By Matt Binder2020-06-16 13:00:00 UTC The U.S. government continues to request more and more user data from the world’s largest tech companies. According to a new report by end-to-end encryption email company ProtonMail, user data requests from the U.S. government to Google have increased a whopping 510 percent since 2010. And its requests for Facebook…

The Covid-19 “infodemic” has laid bare how vulnerable the United States is to disinformation. The country is less than five months away from the 2020 presidential election, and by the thousands, Americans are buying into conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips and wondering about the healing powers of hair dryers. Where does all this come…

Facebook has launched what Mark Zuckerberg calls the “largest voting campaign in American history,” with the goal of urging and helping 4 million people register for the upcoming election. The social network’s voter registration campaign back in 2016 was a huge success, so now it’s aiming for double the number of people it helped register…

Critics say Facebook is actively enabling the spread of political misinformation online, but the social network has now come up with its own idiosyncratic solution: shift responsibility to the public at large by letting users “turn off” political ads they don’t like. Facebook announced the feature as part of a campaign ahead of the 2020…

Instagram is a massive money-maker. Parent company Facebook doesn’t release figures on how much money the division makes but reports claim it generated $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 alone–that’s a quarter of Facebook’s entire yearly revenue. Or, to put it another way, more money than YouTube makes for parent company Alphabet.At the heart…

you can’t do that — Google said it’s “working closely” with regulators who sued Facebook over same. Kate Cox – Jun 12, 2020 4:26 pm UTC Enlarge / A sign on the street is visible to anyone who walks or drives by. A sign online can be strategically, and illegally, targeted away from people against…

Facebook wants to be the go-to platform for all of your social needs, but a big move it made last month to take ownership in the world of GIFs — the short, looping videos that people use to convey sentiments in online conversations — may not go as it hopes. The UK Competition and Markets…

Like many ad platforms, Google lets businesses target their spend towards people who are in their desired customer base. That’s smart and efficient if you sell a niche product to a small group of folks, but it’s a tool that can be open to abuse. Google has announced that it is changing its policies to…