Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Yesterday outgoing Head of Communications and Policy Elliot Schrage shared more detail with our employees about the work we did with Definers, a Washington, DC PR firm. Many of you have raised questions about our relationship with the Definers consulting firm. We’ve been looking into this and though it is close to a holiday for…
A 16-year-old South Sudanese girl was sold off for marriage to the highest bidder on Facebook in November, raising concerns that the platform has become a “latter-day slave market.” A businessman from South Sudan outbid four others — which included a senior Sudanese government official — after the girl’s family posted a message on Facebook…
GIF: New York Times It’s the 2018 midterms, and today you have your chance to record just how you feel about that. The New York Times has set up a live map of results across the nation, where readers can click one of six emojis (angry, sad, afraid, neutral, happy, and laughing) to have their…
HQ could use another win. The company behind HQ Trivia, the once-viral game-show app created by the same guys who invented Vine, is facing a pivotal moment. HQ is preparing to launch a new game show, one that it hopes will legitimize its place as a rising player in the world of mobile entertainment. But…
A Facebook ad in October urged political conservatives to support the Trump administration’s rollback of fuel emission standards, which it hailed as “our president’s car freedom agenda” and “plan for safer, cheaper cars that WE get to choose.” The ad came from a Facebook page called Energy4US, and it included a disclaimer, required by Facebook,…
Recode, a technology website that was among the first in a wave of journalist-led media startups, is being folded into sister site Vox.com, its parent company said Thursday. Vox Media publisher Melissa Bell said in a memo that Recode would relaunch as a section of Vox.com starting next year. Recode will continue to exist as…
There is a family friend, a man I’ve known for decades. A highly educated man with total financial security in his recent retirement. A man who always had a good story to tell or an interesting side of a conversation to hold up. Then, a few years ago, he got on Facebook. Reading his timeline…
Illustration: Angelica Alzona (Gizmodo Media Group) When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think…
Brand collaborations are hot, and Facebook wants to do some matchmaking of its own. Facebook is testing a new ad format that features multiple advertisers in one unit, bundling dynamic ad campaigns from two different companies in a side-by-side version of Facebook’s Collections ads. Cameron Mills, who works in growth at e-commerce company Brandless, flagged the…
Pieter Hanson was in the middle of a marketing exam when his phone started blowing up, buzzing and buzzing until he was convinced something terrible had happened. Too anxious to focus, he whizzed through the rest of his test, handed it in to his University of Central Florida professor and bolted into the hallway to…