Following on from recent scandals surrounding the live-streaming of suicides on Facebook, the company last year launched an ambitious project to use artificial intelligence to detect when users might be likely to commit suicide, or otherwise self-harm. The algorithm analyses almost all posts made on Facebook, and rates each one with according to the probability [...]
Last week Instagram (owned by Facebook), announced that in a continuing effort to reduce "inauthentic" (fake) activity on the platform, they would begin removing fake likes and followers from the hugely popular social platform. They believe that this will allow for a more genuine Instagram experience, and intend for the move to mostly affect those [...]
At the beginning of this month, Facebook announced that they were rolling out advanced analytics that would make it possible to measure performance at a level higher than simply on specific posts. This will allow page admins to see things like the actions people take on the pages themselves, including the number of follows and [...]
Under pressure for some time already to combat the growing problems of bullying and harassment on Facebook, the platform has announced that they will begin to allow users to block comments from their posts by selecting keywords which they don't want to see. Instagram and Twitter have both offered keyword blocking since 2016, in response [...]
At the beginning of this month, Facebook announced that as many as 50 million user accounts had been compromised by hackers who took advantage of a vulnerability in the "View As" functionality (which lets you see how your profile would look to somebody else), to steal Facebook access tokens allowing them to take over other [...]
The on-going investigations into election interference and misinformation by the United States congress saw appearances by both the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, and the CEO of Twitter, who spoke before the hearing for the first time earlier this month. US Senators were looking for clarity on how the platforms algorithms work, and what leads [...]
A new YouTube app, specially designed to be and offline-first option that reduces the (often heavy) data load of the traditional YouTube, has launched in South Africa. According to Mzamo Masito, Google Africa CMO, “People in South Africa love YouTube, but the current app is too data-heavy for it to be usable to most viewers, [...]
So-called fake news has been one of the hottest topics for the last year, and platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have working on addressing threats posed by disinformation. At Facebook's developer conference earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that the platform would "never be unprepared again" for things like the interference of Russian trolls [...]
Hot on the heels of Facebooks reported slow-down of growth for Q2, Twitter followed suit by reporting not just that growth had slowed, but that they actually lost 1 million active users. That said, it appears that the decline has been mainly due to their efforts in reducing spam and general misuse of the platform, [...]
Facebook has just released its earnings report for the 2nd quarter of 2018, and slowed growth for the social media platform is causing some concern regarding its future potential. Although Facebook added another 22 million daily active users to its rolls during the second quarter, with 1.47 billion people (or 19.3% of the population of [...]
