Facebook has plans for an always-on Safety Check hub

Over a billion people now use Facebook on a daily basis, and that’s just on their phone. That dominance is bringing in huge profits, but the site’s popularity makes it an incredibly useful tool during emergencies. This is thanks to the company’s Safety Check feature, which was launched to help help account for people during natural disasters but has since been used to mark people safe following attacks in Paris, Nice, the nightclub shooting in Orlando and other local tragedies.

After claims that Facebook was exerting too much influence over events deemed important enough to activate Safety Check, the social media giant has put some control in users’ hands, but it wants to do more. Wired reports that the company is developing what it’s calling a “crisis hub,” a place that offers live information and media about natural disasters and other events where people can say that they’re safe.

Given that Facebook automatically becomes home to status updates, news articles, live video and other important media following a major event, it makes sense that it would collate all of that information and display it in a single stream. Safety Check product lead Katherine Woo and her team are developing algorithms that are capable of doing just that, giving users a dedicated place to check on the welfare of others but possibly mobilize a response if the event calls for one.

Facebook remains quiet on what its crisis hubs will look like, or when it expects them to go live, but Wired reports that Facebook Live will play a big part. If users broadcast live video or post updates, be it from a disaster zone or a protest, Facebook can become a reputable news source alongside traditional news media. As the recent US elections show, Facebook as a platform has great influence, even if Zuck and co. don’t believe it helped Donald Trump win the presidency.

Source: Wired

Facebook buys CrowdTangle to help publishers track content

The name CrowdTangle may not be familiar to you, but Facebook just snatched up the company to help its publishers track how content moves around the internet. CrowdTangle’s platform launched four years ago, giving companies a real-time look at content performance to gauge if posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social channels are effective.

CrowdTangle set out to help activists organize social activity, but that venture wasn’t profitable. The company then took the tool that displayed engagement and transformed it into a standalone product. That activity dashboard is used by the likes of BuzzFeed, CNN, ESPN and other big name media companies and brands. As The Verge notes, you can partially blame the tool for a lot of the repetitive content on the internet these days. When a publisher sees a quick post with the latest trailer from The Walking Dead is doing well, that video clip starts to show up all over the place.

Facebook is currently dealing with a major issue of fake news stories being wildly popular on the social network. Thanks to so-called “filter bubbles,” users can tweak settings to only see stories they agree with, creating echo chambers for over half of adults who get their news from the site. Even after it ditched human editors, the algorithms that replaced them are still having issues determining what’s real and what’s not. It’s easy for these types of stories to get pushed around the internet once they start trending and get picked up by Facebook users and publishers alike.

Facebook didn’t disclose the purchase price, but it did say that CrowdTangle will remain open so that publishers can use it to keep track of performance. “We think Facebook is the single most powerful platform in the world in connecting people to each other and to stories they care about,” CrowdTangle said on its website. “And at a time when there is a revolution taking place in how people connect with the world, our team is passionate about building tools that help publishers get the data and insights they need to succeed.”

Via: The Verge

Source: CrowdTangle

The Engadget Podcast Ep 14: Welcome to the Terrordome

Trigger warning: This episode in a solid hour of Donald Trump talk.

If you’re still with us, strap in. Dana Wollman, Nathan Ingraham and Devindra Hardawar join host Terrence O’Brien to talk about how social media traps us in echo chambers. The they’ll envision what the world of tech and science looks like under a President Donald Trump. Hint: Things are a little bleak.

The Flame Wars Leaderboard

Wins

Loses

Winning %

Christopher Trout
5
1
.833
Mona Lalwani
3
1
.750
Dana Wollman
10
6
.625
Devindra Hardawar
10
9
.526
Chris Velazco
3
3
.500
Cherlynn Low
6
7
.461
Nathan Ingraham
4
6
.400
Michael Gorman
1
5
.167

Relevant links:

• Under Trump the future of Net Neutrality and broadband is uncertain
• Planet Earth might be the biggest loser under President Trump
• Donald Trump’s ‘Transition Team’ launches GreatAgain.gov

You can check out every episode on The Engadget Podcast page in audio, video and text form for the hearing impaired.

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Facebook disables ‘ethnic affinity’ ads for housing, jobs

Facebook will disable settings that let advertisers exclude racial and ethnic groups when buying ads for housing, employment or credit, the company wrote in a blog post. It first started allowing “ethnic affinity” marketing several years ago, letting advertisers target specific multicultural groups. However, Propublica noticed that it was able to place housing ads that excluded African Americans, Hispanics, and other groups. That caught the eye of the Congressional Black Caucus, which called it a violation of the Fair Housing Act.

After meeting with members of the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucus groups, the company agreed to make some changes. “We will disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for ads that we identify as offering housing, employment or credit,” VP Erin Egan said. To do that, the social network will use algorithms that detect and disable ethnic affinity marketing for ads in those categories. It will also update its policies to make the rules clearer and require advertiser “to affirm that they will not engage in discriminatory advertising on Facebook.”

To avoid these problems in the future, I urge Facebook and other technology companies to address the lack of diversity in the ranks of their leadership and staff by recruiting and retaining people of color and women.

It appears that the company will still allow ethnic affinity marketing in other ad categories, though. It defended the practice earlier, saying that it “helps brands reach audiences with more relevant advertising.” It’s not unusual, of course, for advertisers to display different ads for the same products in specific TV markets, for instance, or ethnically-targeted magazines.

However, even outside of housing or employment, many critics still find the practice questionable. For instance, Universal created two completely separate ads for the film Straight Outta Compton, then targeted white and African American users separately on Facebook. As Ars Technica put it, the version aimed at white users makes it look like a gangster film, negatively reinforcing cliched stereotypes. Meanwhile, the ad aimed at black Facebook users focuses on the history and personalities of the artists.

Facebook says that “discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook,” and that it will continue to speak with civil rights groups and policymakers to fight the problem. Black Caucus member Rep. Yvette D. Clarke commended Facebook on the change, but thinks it needs to make a more fundamental shift. “To avoid these problems in the future, I urge Facebook and other technology companies to address the lack of diversity in the ranks of their leadership and staff by recruiting and retaining people of color and women,” she tells Engadget.

Via: USA Today

Source: Facebook

Zuckerberg says Facebook didn’t influence the election

If you controlled a media publishing platform that connected to millions of people, it’d make you a pretty powerful individual. Not so, according to Mark Zuckerberg, who has come out against the notion that Facebook helped win it for Trump. TechCrunch reports that the CEO was challenged about his social network’s laissez-faire policy towards stopping the flood of fake, bubble-reinforcing propaganda. He thinks that the notion that the torrent of fabricated stories “influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.”

Zuckerberg believes that it’s wrong to suggest that the diet of false stories, much of it generated in Macedonia, influenced things. Instead, he said that “voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” and that you “don’t generally go wrong when you trust that people understand what they care about.” In addition, the Zuck says that the company studies fake news and analyzes how it can be improved, and feels that fake stories aren’t much of a problem. In the same breath, the company is also pledging to do more to tackle fake news in the future.

The Facebook chief also said that the problem isn’t to do with the news feed, or people’s social networks at all, but the level of engagement. He added that “the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn’t there,” but that “you just tune it out when you see it.” That’s at odds with what Facebook said last year, too, when it said that if you were only seeing self-reinforcing stories, its because your friend circle wasn’t diverse enough.

Source: TechCrunch