Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The media bet its future on Facebook. Did it learn from that mistake? Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images BuzzFeed, the archetypal new media company of the 2010s, announced last week that it was shutting down its news division. In 2012, the small “web buzz” start-up started hiring reporters. The newsroom…
Given the company’s character and scale and long ethical rap sheet, it is reasonable to construe every message issued by the company formerly known as Facebook as a threat. The company surely doesn’t intend this, but the story of the company’s growth and success has by now been overtaken by the sum of the many,…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
Facebook, which along with Google accounts for around 60% of advertiser spending online, has knowingly built some of its astonishing success on incorrect data, newly unsealed court documents allege. Incidentally, this may pose a problem for a business which generates of its revenue from selling ads. In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was…
Among all of the antitrust probes facing Google right now, the case dropped on Wednesday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stands out for a few reasons. First, it focuses on the tech giant’s dominance in digital ads, rather than focusing on search the way that the Justice Department and more than 30 states have…
Facebook is no stranger to climate misinformation. Just last month, the platform became a key player in spreading surrounding the wildfires raging across the West Coast to an audience of tens of thousands, taking them down only after public outrage. And last year when activists that climate misinformation seemed to be exempt from the platform’s…
For a platform that likes to keep reminding us over and over and over again that it prizes our individual privacy, Facebook’s done a pretty piss-poor job of actually following through. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the company purposefully prevent any of us from opting out of this sort of data-mining machine, while…
Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more…
Is adding “From Facebook” to the branding for the social media giant’s Instagram photo- and video-sharing network and WhatsApp messaging application a good move, a bad move or inconsequential? Writer and business coach Jason Aten opted for the second, saying in his post on Inc., “Let’s put this in context: This branding move would be like…