Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Facebook Inc. FB 0.83% plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, a major step in its effort to fight false and sensationalist information that will also push the company further into a role it has long sought to avoid—content referee. The social-media giant will begin testing the effort next week by…
(AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Facebook unveiled major changes Friday to the News Feed of its 2 billion users, announcing it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback and diminish its role as an arbiter of the news people see. The move comes after the company endured harsh criticism for allowing disinformation to spread on its social…
close story-meta Photo The newsroom of Página Siete, a Bolivian newspaper. Traffic to the publication’s website plunged by 20 percent after Facebook began testing a new version of its News Feed in Bolivia. Credit Gonzalo Pardo for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest…
Digital publishers are reckoning with the potential impact of Facebook’s planned changes to its news feed, with reactions ranging from trepidation to confidence to reflection on the folly of depending on the social network for web traffic in the first place. Facebook on Thursday said it will introduce changes to the feed in coming months to promote content shared…
Snapchat takes its secrecy seriously. Very, very seriously. Take the case of one former Snapchat employee. On his first day, he was forced to sit through an ominous orientation in which he was threatened with termination if he so much as breathed a word of what he was working on to friends or family. He…
Behind every bad tweet is a life story in miniature. Let Drew Magary explain. As a professional online person, I have a soft spot in my heart for bad tweets. Sure, I like to chortle at a good tweet from one of the many amateur Mitch Hedbergs plying their trade on social media. But nothing…
2017’s “YouTube Rewind,” the end-of-year advertisement for the biggest trends and hottest creators on the platform, urges people to come together after an awful year. This heartfelt sentiment lasts about thirty seconds before the camera plunges back down to earth, where a rooftop party rages. Here, two blonde men look out at the horizon, squad…
Many of the publishers that spent 2016 and 2017 investing in Facebook products like Instant Articles and news feed videos enter the new year with new perspective on the relationship they have with the world’s largest social platform. For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, we spoke…
In the last year ProPublica has uncovered a number of different flaws in our advertising systems. Several of them were serious failures on our part. It’s why we apologized and took immediate action to prevent them in the future. Today ProPublica has raised new concerns about companies, including our own marketing team, using Facebook…
Tweet threads — also known as “tweetstorms” — will now be easier to create thanks to a new button the company is rolling out. Background: Threads, which Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen helped popularize a few years ago (before he quit Twitter last year), have become the go-to format for expressing longer and more nuanced…