Facebook is in full damage control mode this week, following a brewing scandal over whether or not the Trending Topics it surfaces are politically biased. Now, it’s bringing in the big guns: Mark Zuckerberg.
In a Facebook post published Thursday night, Zuckerberg said Facebook has found no evidence that its employees have been intentionally suppressing conservative content in its Trending Topics section, as was alleged in a recent report.
Still, he said the company would launch a full investigation to ensure that there’s been no foul play. And if there has been, Zuckerberg wrote, “you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it.”
Zuckerberg also said the company would be inviting “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to come to Facebook and discuss these issues in person. “I want to have a direct conversation about what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible,” he wrote.
Facebook is no stranger to politics, but most often, that relationship has involved Facebook lobbying Washington for changes that would be beneficial to its business, because powerful as Facebook is, it still needs government’s help to grow.
Here, we’re seeing the inverse of that relationship in action. Political leaders now need Facebook to disseminate their policies and perspectives. Any indication that that important communication channel is being tampered with can feel like an existential threat.
But the perception that such a thing is happening would be just as big a threat to Facebook, which millions of people trust to deliver them the news they need and want to read.
“The reason I care so much about this is that it gets to the core of everything Facebook is and everything I want it to be,” Zuckerberg writes. “Every tool we build is designed to give more people a voice and bring our global community together.”
Since the initial report was released, Facebook has published its guidelines for Trending Topics, and to us, at least, these guidelines look less like Facebook is doing anything nefarious and more like Facebook is, well, exercising news judgment because, whether it admits as much, Facebook is now in the news business.
In order for a topic to be eligible for Trending Topics, it must be surfaced by the company’s algorithms, based on how much engagement it’s getting. Then, the editorial team vets those topics to make sure that, for instance, they’re cited by multiple trustworthy sources and are tied to real events. For Facebook, this kind of transparency is key, and arguably, should have been a matter of public knowledge from the beginning.
In his post, Zuckerberg reiterated his mantra that “the world is better when people from different backgrounds and with different ideas all have the power to share their thoughts and experiences.”
“For as long as I’m leading this company,” he added, “this will always be our mission.” It’s a reminder that, just as it was with Steve Jobs and Apple, when it comes to Facebook, Zuckerberg gets the last say. So, he’s asking people to trust that he will make the right decisions for them, because this is not just Facebook’s mission, it’s his personal mission, too. But as we know well—especially in an election cycle like this one—that kind of blind trust is tough to earn and easier to lose.
Facebook Messenger wants to be so much more than a messaging platform for you and your friends.
To keep you from ever leaving Facebook, it wants to be the place where you shop and track your packages. It wants to be where you can get mundane tasks done using its artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant called M. And it wants to be where you grab a ride.
You can already call an Uber on Messenger. Now you can get a Lyft too.
The service announced today will initially be available in 11 US cities, including San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Washington, DC, among others. By next week, Lyft and Facebook say you’ll be able to call a Lyft on Messenger throughout the US.
And at first glance, the alliance would seem more beneficial to Lyft, which gains access to, presumably, a non-trivial portion of Facebook Messenger’s more than 800 million monthly active users. Lyft implies as much, calling Facebook Messenger its “marquee API partner” (sorry, Slack).
But for Facebook, every such partnership is just one more way to let people get things done in the real world via Facebook. If you can accomplish everything you need to get done in Facebook, why leave Facebook at all? For a platform obsessed with “engagement,” this is exactly what advertisers—that is, Facebook’s actual customers—want to hear.
You see a lot of videos on Facebook—and a lot of those videos are ads. But Facebook knows that when you’re sitting on the bus and scrolling through your feed, you don’t want to hear an ad blare at you and annoy your seatmates. Now Facebook wants advertisers to rethink their ad strategy: it’s not TV ads. It’s TV ads with the sound turned off.
To help advertisers along, the company said today a few new features today that it will now include automated captions for videos. To make that possible, workers have transcribed over 50,000 video ads, Facebook says, to help train the captioning tool to become more accurate over time. Advertisers will also be able to review and edit the automated captions before posting the video ads.
This is important because the company says that most video ads are indeed watched without sound. In fact, Facebook says that when video ads pop up and play loudly without people expecting the noise as they’re scrolling through their phone feeds, 80 percent “react negatively” toward both the advertiser and Facebook itself.
“Advertisers should take this into account when creating video ads, making sure their stories don’t require sound to communicate their message,” the company said in a blog post today. “In one study of Facebook video ads, 41 percent of videos were basically meaningless without sound.”
Facebook’s Caption
Captions, meanwhile, can help give you context when you’re scrolling through your silent feed. Facebook says that including captions on video ads increases the amount of time people spend watching them. The company also recommends that advertisers show captions, logos, and products in ads, especially in the first few seconds.
For Facebook, video has become an increasingly important part of how you experience the service. We now watch more than 100 million hours of video on Facebook each day, the company says. Video is also favored by advertisers, who are willing to pay more to serve up targeted video ads than, say, banner ads. To help advertisers figure out how to best capture you attention (and, ahem, pay Facebook), the company is also rolling out new metrics to let advertisers, for example, see the percentage of people who have viewed their ads with sound.
This is not the first time advertisers have grappled with how we watch ads on social media. In fact, we noted that during the Super Bowl, a few ads seemed to have been made with the specific idea of working both on your TV as well as your phone. Facebook knows how you use its News Feed. It wants to make sure that its advertisers know that too.
One billion people are now using WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service that Facebook acquired little more than two years ago in a deal valued at $19 billion.
WhatsApp and Facebook announced their one-billion-user milestone this afternoon in a blog post. If you leave out apps that Google and its partners bundle with Android phones, this milestone likely makes WhatsApp the second-most popular app on Earth after the primary Facebook app. As WhatsApp puts it: “That’s nearly one in seven people on Earth who use WhatsApp each month to stay in touch with their loved ones, their friends, and their family.”
WhatsApp is relatively unpopular in the US, even though it was founded in Silicon Valley by two ex-Yahoo engineers, Jan Koum and Brian Acton. But across Europe and South America as well as in developing economies in Africa and India, it has proven to be an enormously popular way of sending and receiving messages, images, and video without paying steep texting fees to local wireless carriers. And in places where mobile infrastructure is thin, like India, it provides a viable alternative to social networks like Facebook.
Koum, Acton, and company have also added voice-calling to the app, letting people make calls over the Internet rather than through carriers. And like Facebook’s own messaging app, Facebook Messenger, it may eventually offer video calling.
Now the task for Koum and company is to find a viable source of revenue. Thanks to the Facebook acquisition, they have ample runway, but the particulars of their business model are still evolving. Two weeks ago, the company dropped its $1-a-year subscription fee (which only kicked in after one, anyway), saying it planned to make money through businesses that use the app to communicate with consumers.
The idea is that you’ll use WhatsApp to make restaurant reservation, book plane flights, and the like. It’s a market that Facebook is also exploring through Messenger, and that an app called WeChat has already mastered in China.
Last August, Facebook opened up a new live streaming feature—think Periscope, but in your News Feed—to a select group of VIP accounts. Today, the velvet rope has been lifted. You no longer need to be famous to broadcast your life to all your friends and casual acquaintances. You just need an iPhone.
The feature, which should already be in effect for US iPhone owners, with worldwide expansion coming over the coming weeks, should be familiar to anyone who’s watched a livestream before, be it on Periscope, Meerkat, or from a celebrity’s Facebook account. A new icon now appears under your status update, showing an upper body with a double halo over the head, which apparently translates to “Live Video.” Write a short description of what your audience is going to see, and start filming. You can see the names of friends who are watching, and they can comment on just how deftly you’re scrambling those eggs.
These videos aren’t ephemeral, either. Once you’re done, they’ll be saved to your timeline, where you can either delete them or keep them for posterity.
Opening up access to all iPhone users (don’t worry, Android support is coming at some point) makes sense for Facebook on several fronts. It helps keep livestreaming upstarts like Periscope and Meerkat at bay, while also increasing engagement time on Facebook itself, as people stick around to record and watch little doses of daily life. It also underscores just how important video has become to Facebook; the company said yesterday that its customers already watch 100 million hours of video every single day. If all goes according to plan, the next 100 million will come from videos they create themselves.
Facebook
Facebook has big news for sports fans—and potentially bad news for ESPN and Twitter.
Late Wednesday night, the social networking giant announced the launch of Facebook Sports Stadium, a new hub on Facebook that will aggregate all the Facebook buzz about live sporting events in one place.
Fans can follow games, get live stats, see what their friends are saying, and view expert commentary from journalists, the leagues, and the teams. With this new tool, Facebook is making a more concerted effort to convince advertisers that Facebook is a valuable resource for targeting sports fans on game day.
“Sports is a global interest that connects people around the world,” wrote Facebook product manager Steve Kafka in a blog post announcing the new tool. “This product makes connecting over sports more fun and engaging, and we will continue listening to feedback to make it even better.”
Until now, the one major advantage that Twitter has had over Facebook is its ability to capture people’s attention during live events. That’s why live-Tweeting is considered socially acceptable, while live-Facebooking is, well, fairly obnoxious.
And yet, Twitter’s character restrictions, the difficulty in finding people to follow, and the constant stream of unfiltered, chronological Tweets can make Twitter alienating for new users. In fact, that information inundation is even alienating to some power Tweeters. Facebook, on the other hand, has always been far more user-friendly, but often lacks that roar of the crowd during live events. Now, for sports fans at least, that’s about to change. Facebook’s Sports Stadium appears to be an attempt to offer the immediacy of Twitter without what some consider to be that platform’s problematic legacy design.
And Facebook isn’t the only one trying to chip away at Twitter’s live event dominance in an effort to woo sports fans and advertisers alike. Just yesterday, during the launch of its Super Bowl channel, YouTube announced that it’s beta testing real-time ads, which allow advertisers to time ads across Google platforms with big moments during live events.
For now, Facebook is only launching the tool for football fans, but it plans to expand to basketball, soccer, and other sports soon. If Sports Stadium does take off, it may be tough for Sports Twitter to keep up. After all, according to Facebook, there are 650 million sports fans on its platform. Twitter, by contrast, has just 320 million monthly users total. We’ll keep an eye on both platforms to see which one wins out on Super Bowl Sunday.
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. Money SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images
While the rest of us spend the next three weeks dieting and exercising before promptly forgetting about our New Year’s resolutions altogether, Mark Zuckerberg will be busy building an artificial intelligence system that can control his home, similar to Tony Stark’s AI assistant, Jarvis, in Iron Man.
The young billionaire and new dad announced his audacious resolution on Facebook Sunday night, reminding us all, once more, that he doesn’t quite celebrate special occasions like the rest of us. Must we remind you about how he honored the arrival of his baby daughter Max?
In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote that he plans to build the tool himself, something he probably doesn’t do much of as CEO of the largest social network in the world. “It’s a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself,” Zuckerberg wrote, “so this year my personal challenge is to do that.”
Zuckerberg says this tool will build upon existing technology, but that he will train it to understand his voice, use facial recognition technology to let guests into his home, and check in on any disturbances in Max’s room when he’s not around. Oh, and it’ll do all the usual smart home stuff like control the temperature, lights, and music. So, essentially, it’d be a slightly smarter and potentially cooler version of Amazon’s Echo product, which already uses voice recognition to answer questions and complete simple tasks around the house.
Of course, for a company like Facebook, which is one of Silicon Valley’s top developers of artificial intelligence technology, there are strategic advantages to this resolution, as well. As Zuckerberg wrote, “On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.”
It’ll be interesting to see if, after so many years spent away from a day-to-day engineering role, Zuckerberg still has the tech chops to pull this off.
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To this point, sharing music on Facebook has been spotty. You could post a YouTube clip of a song you like if you wanted your friends to actually hear it, or more likely just connect with Spotify to let your friends and acquaintances follow your every aural obsession, bouncing them to Spotify if they wanted to listen along. Starting today, though, you’ll be able to share, you know, actual songs. Well, parts of them, anyway.
Users of Facebook’s iOS app will now have the option to create an entirely new type of post, called a Music Story, which lets friends listen to a 30-second clip of a song streamed from either Apple Music or Spotify. Like a song you find in your stream? You’ll have the option to either save it to your own Apple Music/Spotify collection, or to buy it outright.
Facebook’s new “Music Stories” play 30-second clips of songs within the Facebook iPhone app. Facebook
Music represents yet another frontier for Facebook, which has previously invested heavily in video and fast-loading Instant Articles to boost engagement. Being able to give people song samples and to let them save or buy those songs, all without leaving the app, should help capture some of that attention. And if you’re not a Spotify or Apple Music user, fear not; more music services should be added soon. If you’re an audio-inclined Android fan, well, the future’s a little murkier, but expect Music Stories to trickle down eventually, especially if it’s a hit.
In 2012, Google began notifying its users if it believed those people’s accounts or computers were at risk of a state-sponsored attack. Three years later, Facebook has now followed suit, the latest in a string of security-conscious measures the social network has recently enacted.
Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos announced the latest protection in a post on the site. “While we have always taken steps to secure accounts that we believe to have been compromised, we decided to show this additional warning if we have a strong suspicion that an attack could be government-sponsored,” Stamos wrote. “We do this because these types of attacks tend to be more advanced and dangerous than others, and we strongly encourage affected people to take the actions necessary to secure all of their online accounts.”
Those steps range from turning on Login Approvals (Facebook’s version of two-factor authentication) to avoid being compromised in the first place to replacing their computers altogether, in the event of a confirmed attack. Stamos also clarified that Facebook will only use this warning “where the evidence strongly supports” a state-sponsored attack. Basically, if you see the message below, you have cause for serious concern.
Facebook may be a few years behind Google, but it’s to date the only other major company to offer that level of alert. The move also joins other significant steps Facebook has taken to ensure user privacy and security. In June, it offered the option to share public encryption keys, to keep email notifications between the site and its users encrypted (though intra-network messages remain unencrypted). A year ago, Facebook launched a “dark web” version of itself on Tor, an important extra layer of encryption and privacy for those trying to avoid surveillance.
There’s always more that could be done. But every layer of protection is important, and Facebook continues to demonstrate its willingness to add more and more.
Facebook’s On This Day feature is a nostalgia machine, seemingly created to send you clicking through years-old photos of college parties or pining over your ex. Because of that emotional heft, Facebook has introduced some new filters to the tool, so that you can make sure to block certain memories from your notifications. Here’s how to do just that:
If you have On This Day activated, look under Apps on your left-hand sidebar—On This Day should be near the top. Select it, and you’ll be taken to a feed of throwback Facebook moments. On the right-hand side near the banner image, you’ll see Preferences—choose that.
Molly McHugh
A box will surface, allowing you to filter out people and dates from the content that On This Day will show you. There you go: A little eternal sunshine for your spot-filled mind.
Then One/WIRED
Today during a Q&A at Facebook headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the social network is indeed working on some kind of Dislike button. “People have asked about the dislike button for many years,” he said. “We’ve finally heard you and we’re working on this and we will deliver something that meets the needs of the larger community.”
Last December, during another Town Hall Q&A, Zuckerberg spoke about the Dislike button, acknowledging that the singular Like button created issues in the News Feed. For instance, when you see a post about a relative who’s passed away, or a break up, or a natural disaster, you want to show support… but Like doesn’t really apply to those situations.
At the time, Zuckerberg hedged the issue a bit, though, hinting a little that a Dislike option may appear in the future—and it seems that the future is approaching quickly. His wording today indicates that it’s unlikely the word “dislike” would be the name of what we actually get; there have previously been rumors of buttons with words of support or sympathy. Interpretation as to what “meets the needs of the larger community” remains, but it certainly sounds like we are moving outside the singularity of the Like.
You can continue watching the Q&A below.
Today’s Q&A with Mark live from Facebook HQ will begin at 11:30 PT. Tune into the live stream here.
Posted by Q&A with Mark on Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Back in June, Facebook introduced us to its Moments app, an A.I.-infused service that helped friends easily share photos they took while together or while at the same event. Moments is intended to be an antidote to all the “hey text/email/message me that picture” nonsense that typically follows a party or vacation.
Now, Moments is moving beyond simple stills: Facebook added a video feature that takes photos and turns them into customizable movies (or slideshows, rather). It sounds a little like Google Photos, in that these Moments videos will select the best photos. Google Photos’s Assistant feature can make you slideshows with a soundtracks, and also does a nice job of automatically choosing your best images to create other enhancements like GIFs and panoramas1. Facebook says the photos are chosen based on storytelling. “It’s primarily optimized for a diversity of photos so it can capture a beginning, middle, and end of the ‘story.’ It also chooses a personalized set of photos to select the ones you and your friends are in.” Eventually, this will improve to include Liked photos and make sure to keep duplicates out.
Here’s an example of what the videos look like:
The update is available today for iOS and Android.
1UPDATE 3:03 PM ET 08/25/15: This story originally said Google Photos’s Assistant feature did not include videos, but it does in fact sometimes create slideshows automatically.
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Are you a “haha,” “hehe,” or “lol” person? Typically I’m an “lol” girl who mashes her keyboard with “HAHAHAHhahajakakjahaahkajkjjsdhfkajdsfk” to convey real, body-quaking laughter. If you thought your preference for online laughter was meaningless, think again. According to a post from the Facebook research team, “e-laughing is evolving” and the social network has been analyzing the data we use in its platform since the end of May. (Definitely hit the link for the deep dive; it’s a fascinating study.)
To likely no one’s surprise, the most common expression of e-laughing is “haha” followed by emoji. Facebook goes deeper yet into the nuances of who uses what sort of online laugh:
Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas.
Most people stick with one type of e-laugh, while about 20 percent will switch between two. And while “haha” and “hehe” or even “hahaha” and “hahahahahahaha” and “hahahahhhhahahahaha” (a misspelled, elongated “haha” that most of us might interpret as “this is so funny I don’t care that these letters are in the wrong order”) might seem like they belong in the same category, there are subtle inferences to make about them each.
The six letter hahaha is also very common, and in general, the hahaers use longer laughter. The hahaers are also slightly more open than the hehe-ers to using odd number of letters, and we do see the occasional hahaas and hhhhaaahhhaas. The lol almost always stands by itself, though some rare specimens of lolz and loll were found. A single emoji is used 50% of the time, and it’s quite rare to see people use more than 5 identical consecutive emoji. Perhaps emoji offer a concise way to convey various forms of laughter?
If you’re a visual learner, thankfully Facebook broke out all the graphs and charts to illustrate how we laugh online.
“Live” is everywhere. Snapchat is doing it. Twitter has plans to enhance it. Periscope and Meerkat are built on it.
So it’s not exactly surprising that Facebook is now getting in on live action. The social networking giant began testing a new feature on Friday that brought the annual Chicago music festival Lollapalooza live to users at home. Users could browse Lollapalooza’s “Place Tips,” a Facebook initiative that launched earlier this year, to see updates and photos from their friends at the festival as well as live, trending content from artists.
Fans at the event in Chicago could also use Place Tips in their Facebook app to see the band lineup for the day and figure out how to get to the next show they wanted to see. “Facebook is using location signals like GPS as well as physical Facebook Bluetooth beacons to surface Place Tips to people at the show in high-traffic areas of the festival,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
Perhaps more importantly, users who wanted to skip the crowds altogether could follow the event from the comfort of their couch or pool all in one place in the app, rather than seeing bits and pieces scattered throughout their feeds. Facebook says that the majority of Facebook monthly active users are connected to a musician or band page, so Lollapalooza may have been the perfect way to see how fans would respond to the option of following along at home—and for artists to see how they could connect with those fans via the app.
Facebook’s initiative doesn’t sound all that new. After all, Snapchat has already become a dominant force in bringing live events from around the world to viewers at home with “Stories.” Twitter has announced plans to offer a new tab with curated tweets that offer up what’s happening at real-time live events. And several live streaming apps, like Twitter’s Periscope and Meerkat, are hoping broadcasting yourself live will become as easy and ubiquitous as texting.
But with its massive user base, Facebook’s entrance into live events has the potential to attract an audience of an entirely different scale. Live events are popular on Twitter, where many people tune in to cheer, joke, or chat with others during televised attractions such as the Super Bowl or series premieres—the running commentary of the so-called “second screen.”
Advertisers, of course, love live events because they can directly tailor and target their messages to a captive audience—say, pop music lovers. But Facebook has a billion more monthly active users than its struggling rival. With its massive reach, Facebook could attract a truly global live audience that it could serve up to advertisers seeking to connect with the whole world.
Yesterday, a handful of users noticed a Facebook button that popped out videos in the News Feed so they floated above the timeline, allowing users to keep scrolling. You can move the video around the screen as well, getting it completely out of the center of the feed.
The Next Web
Right now, the feature is nothing more than a test, but it would be a benefit to everyone who’s feeling torn over Facebook’s autoplay videos. Now, if a video piques a small amount of interest but you also don’t want to take mere moments to pause and watch it, then popping it out to the corner so you can keep moving down the feed is the perfect compromise.
Link:
Zuck to Invite Politicians to Facebook to Talk Trending News