A Court Order to Terminate Hate Speech Tests Facebook | WIRED

May 10, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

FACEBOOK MAY WANT to see itself as a platform for others to share news, not a publisher that intervenes to filter what appears on the site. But the world keeps getting in the way.

The latest demand for Facebook to exercise something like editorial control comes from an Austrian court, which ruled yesterday that the company must take down posts identified as “hate speech” in a case brought by the country’s Green party over insults to its leader. “There’s a multitude of ways to enforce the court’s decision in case Facebook is not willing to fully comply,” says Alexander Nessler, an attorney at the firm representing Greens politician Eva Glawischnig in the case. “In the end, it’ll depend on Facebook’s actual reaction.”

Facebook accused of targeting ‘insecure’ children and young people, report says | Mashable

May 3, 2017May 2, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Facebook has apologised for reportedly allowing advertisers to target emotionally vulnerable people as young as 14, as a 23-page leaked document obtained by The Australian revealed.

According to the news outlet, the document prepared by two top Australian Facebook executives uses algorithms to collect data (via posts, pictures, and reactions) on the emotional state of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary students,” and “young Australians and New Zealanders … in the workforce,” indicating “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”

In other words, data says they feel “worthless” or “insecure” and are therefore well-positioned to receive an advertiser’s message.

Facebook reports the BBC to police for sending sexualised images of children | Mashable

March 7, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Facebook reported BBC journalists to the police after they provided, under request, sexualised images of children discovered on the social network’s private groups.

The episode occurred as part of a BBC investigation into Facebook’s content moderation systems, which the news organisation says isn’t effective.

The BBC reported dozens of photos to Facebook, including an apparent freeze frame showing child abuse, but more than 80 percent of the photos weren’t removed.

Following the investigation, the BBC asked Facebook for an interview about its moderation system.

Flipboard’s Quest To Save Online Publishing—And Itself | Fast Company

February 8, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010, but the apps it presented offered a rather nostalgic revival of traditional media. Photos, graphics, magazines, and books optimized for its high-res screen featured a print-era visual polish that had been sorely missing from ad-crammed web pages and monochrome ebook readers.

One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page; and flicking up on the screen triggered a visual effect that looked like flipping pages. Flipboard was among the top 10 iPad apps in its early days, according to rankings by AppAnnie. “It seemed to be a perfectly timed creature of the iPad age, of the tablet age,” says digital advertising consultant Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.

Facebook Ordered To Pay $500 Million In Oculus Lawsuit | Forbes

February 2, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

A jury in Dallas, Texas ordered Facebook to pay video maker ZeniMax $500 million after concluding that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey violated a non-disclosure agreement, according to published reports. The same jury rejected claims by ZeniMax that Oculus had misappropriated its intellectual property.

While the award, which is likely to be appealed, is sizable, it is less than the $2 billion in damages ZeniMax sought, and it isn’t likely to significantly affect Facebook, which has more than $29 billion on its balance sheet. Facebook shares, which were up on Wednesday, barely budged following reports of the judgement. They shot up more than 2% in after hours trading after Facebook reported financial results.

Um, why am I being targeted with Australian anti-refugee ads on Facebook? | Mashable

November 14, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Those “No Way: You will not make Australia home,” campaign ads from the country’s government have made it to Facebook, and they’re targeting…Australians.

Earlier in the week, the government proposed a lifetime ban on refugees who arrive by boat. Now, some Australians are being served the same anti-immigration campaign as people in other parts of the world are seeing. Including myself.

The anti-immigration ads have been around since 2014, aiming to deter would-be asylum seekers from making their way to Australia by boat.

They’ve been translated into 16 different languages, including Tamil, Arabic and Vietnamese. The format has even been copied by far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

I have a Vietnamese background, but as someone born and raised in Australia, I’m not really sure why I’m being served the ads.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and the Future of Disaster Response | WIRED

November 10, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

DAVID MORAN WAS all set to go out that Saturday night. He thought he might hit Parliament House, Orlando’s oldest gay nightclub, or maybe make it over to Pulse, another mainstay. But after he and a friend ended their shift at the restaurant where they both worked, car trouble kept them marooned in the parking lot for an hour. So Moran went home and fell asleep watching Bob’s Burgers on Netflix instead.

He was awakened just before 5 am by the sound of his phone buzzing next to him on his bed. He fished it out from between the covers and found a text message asking if he had heard the news about Pulse. “Mass shooting,” said the message that arrived next. Now wide awake, Moran instinctively thumbed his way to Facebook.

How Facebook’s last year shows dominance in mobile advertising — and what’s next | Mashable

September 27, 2016September 26, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

There’s plenty of shiny toys to look at when it comes to Facebook — Oculus Rift, WhatsApp, Messenger and ambitious plans to bring the internet to every corner of the globe.

At its core, however, is good old advertising. Well, maybe not old.

“We’re going to pursue any avenue we can to help business owners, all within the bounds of privacy control,” said Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of ads and business platform. “Consumers need to feel comfortable if we ever creep anybody out we’ve done a poor job.”

Ahead of Advertising Week 2016 in New York, Mashable spoke with Bosworth to learn how Facebook has grown in digital and mobile advertising and what the team is creating next.

Facebook and Twitter Turned Him Down. Now He’s Worth $4 Billion | Inc.com

March 15, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

First off, I love this kind of story.

Let’s go back in time to 2009. Brian Acton was an accomplished programmer who’d checked the box with stints at both Apple and Yahoo.

Now he was looking for work–and he was coming up short. His Twitter feed tells the tale.

Acton had been the 44th employee at Yahoo, but he’d lost millions of his dot-com fortune when the bubble burst in 2000. Despite the bright-sided nature of his Tweets, the 37-year-old didn’t know what was next.

He toyed with a startup idea, but it wasn’t going anywhere. And as Marc Cenedella–founder of The Ladders, and more recently, Knowzen–wrote on Medium a few days ago, Acton…