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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Following on from Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the US Congress in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and as part of his testimony, Facebook has revealed all (or most) of the many ways that it collects data on its users. While some of the data it collects about you, (like how much time you [...]
Unless you've been living under a social media rock for the past couple of months, you've probably noticed that Facebook has been in the news a lot, and has been embroiled in some recent controversies. Privacy issues have always been a concern when it comes to Facebook, and the recent news of the Cambridge Analytica [...]
Over the last year and more, there has been a disturbing trend of people live-streaming their suicides on Facebook, and considerable outcry against the social media platform for not doing anything to prevent it. Now, I'm not much of a Facebook fan, I'll be the first to admit. That said however, it seems unreasonable to [...]
Social media comes with many privileges, and just like any other medium, these privileges come with responsibilities. Finding the balance between freedom of expression and social responsibility can be hard, particularly, from an individual perspective. The rules of engagement are somewhat different for individuals compared to businesses. Many businesses enlist the assistance of marketers to [...]
In what is supposed to be a temporary measure, Facebook has announced that they will be removing some popular self-reported targeting options for advertisers, in order to prevent people from taking advantage of them to target hate groups. The fields that are being removed include education, field of study, job title and employment. Facebook explained [...]
