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posted by martyb on Friday October 27 2017, @08:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the raise-your-hand-if-you-never-used-facebook dept.

Facebook has released guidelines for publishers who want to appear in the "news feed":

Facebook has released new guidelines that outline how publishers can adapt to the company's efforts to fight back against fake/false news and other low-quality content.

Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri unveiled the guidelines at an event this morning at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he said they don't represent any changes to Facebook's approach — they're just a way for publishers to understand the strategy.

He added that Facebook's efforts in this area are "targeted at bad actors." But for legitimate publishers, the guidelines can still be important to "make sure you don't get caught up in the crosshairs."

Publishers have panicked at recent news feed changes:

The new feature Facebook is trying out is called Explore. It offers all sorts of stories it thinks might interest you, a separate news feed encouraging you to look further afield than just at what your friends are sharing. Meanwhile, for most people, the standard News Feed remains the usual mixture of baby photos and posts from companies or media organisations whose pages you have liked.

Sounds fine, doesn't it? Except that in six countries - Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia - the experiment went further. For users there, the main News Feed was cleared of everything but the usual stuff from your friends and sponsored posts - in other words, if you wanted to have your material seen in the place most users spend their time you had to pay for the privilege.

In a Medium post entitled "Biggest drop in organic reach we've ever seen", a Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik documented the impact. Publishers in his country were seeing just a quarter of the interactions they used to get before the change, he said. What had become a vital and vibrant platform for them was emptying out fast. Other journalists around the world have looked into the future and hate what they see. Their organisations have become addicted to Facebook as the one true way of reaching audiences and going cold turkey would be very painful.

Previously: The Tentacles of Facebook
Facebook is Going to Let Publishers Start Charging Readers to View Stories this Autumn
Google, Facebook Algorithms Promote 4chan Threads Identifying Wrong Man as Vegas Shooter


Original Submission

Related Stories

The Tentacles of Facebook 35 comments

A look inside the company and its astonishing reach into our daily lives through a series of studies conducted by Share Labs, first reported by the BBC but without linking directly to the material posted by Share Labs.

Share Lab is a research team based in Yugoslavia: "Where indie data punk, meets media theory pop to investigate digital rights blues"

For those of us born and raised before Facebook, life has many different aspects: work, family, hobbies. In each context we may behave differently and other people might have a different impression of our personality but Facebook, by mixing it all together, is causing a "context collapse", no longer partitioning our lives.

However, one of Zuckerberg's fears is "context restoration" whereas users become aware of the Panopticon and choose to "behave" in Facebook withholding essential data and thus ruining Facebook's algorithms. It may become a LinkedIn type of site, where everything posted is highly curated for professional purposes and the "social" migrates to other platforms, such as Instagram.

It is possible that in the near future Facebook and LinkedIn will be competing for the same market: professional or skilled traders and lose some of its potency. That is why Facebook is extending its reach to other websites, tracking both Facebook users and others to keep harvesting data about our daily activities and testing algorithms to influence every decision we make.

As Douglas Rushkoff puts it:

"Facebook will market you your future before you've even gotten there, they'll use predictive algorithms to figure out what's your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They'll get better at programming you – they'll reduce your spontaneity. "

As we all know, your social media profile has become of interest to would-be employers, law-enforcement and of course, advertisers. Some have started to demand wages for using Facebook, as we are creating the "product" they sell.

Those afraid of Big Government should be very afraid of behemoths like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and others which are not hindered by the constitution or human rights. It appears that we can run but no hide.


Original Submission

Facebook is Going to Let Publishers Start Charging Readers to View Stories this Autumn 19 comments

Facebook will start managing paid subscriptions to publishers' posts later this year.

AdWeek reports Facebook Says It Will Start Testing a Subscription-Based News Product in October:

A paywall is coming to Facebook, much to the delight of publishers.

Head of news partnerships Campbell Brown made the announcement at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in New York Tuesday, as reported by Leon Lazaroff of TheStreet.

Her announcement comes just over one week after several prominent publishers, as well as smaller newspapers—nearly 2,000 publishers in total—teamed up to form trade organization The News Media Alliance with the aim of pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption to negotiate with Facebook and Google.

According to Business Insider, Facebook is going to let publishers start charging readers to view stories:

With subscriptions, Facebook is opening up another way to make money off its platform at a time when some of its other publisher offerings, such as Instant Articles, have disappointed publishers. Facebook is also testing mid-roll video ads with a handful of publishers that it plans to eventually roll out to everyone.

And from TheStreet we have Facebook Exec Campbell Brown: We Are Launching a News Subscription Product:

"One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that 'we want a subscription product -- we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'" Brown said at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, an industry conference, in New York City on July 18. "And that is something we're doing now. We are launching a subscription product."


Original Submission

Google, Facebook Algorithms Promote 4chan Threads Identifying Wrong Man as Vegas Shooter 48 comments

Google has apologized on behalf of its algorithm(s), which promoted a fake news story identifying the wrong man as the recent Las Vegas shooter:

After yesterday's mass shooting in Las Vegas, Google briefly gave its "Top Stories" stamp of approval to two 4chan threads identifying (and triumphantly smearing) the wrong man as the shooter. Google apologized for including "inaccurate" web pages in its top results, saying that its algorithm had spotted a burst of activity around a little-used search term (the name of 4chan's so-called suspect), created a Top Stories carousel, and favored "fresh" content there above more authoritative sources.

This is far from the first time Google's search results have purveyed misinformation. In March, it finally instructed human quality raters — who manually evaluate web pages to train the Search algorithm — to flag offensive and factually incorrect material, which Search could then downgrade for users seeking general information about a topic. As the 4chan incident shows, though, it still has blind spots. And that's not really because of a problem with Google's algorithm. It's happening because Google's core business has never been about defining truth — yet that's what Top Stories is implicitly promising.

Facebook also promoted the "fresh" content:

[A] story by the pro-Trump political website "The Gateway Pundit" named a different person as the shooter, citing a Facebook page to claim the individual was "a far left loon" and "a Democrat who liked (MSNBC host) Rachel Maddow." Posters on the anonymous, anarchic 4chan.org forum likewise trumpeted supposed findings that the same individual was both the shooter and a "social democrat." BuzzFeed saved screenshots of the stories, which no longer turn up on either Gateway Pundit or 4chan.

[...] Facebook said its security team removed Gateway Pundit results and other similar posts from its social network, some within minutes. But because that removal was "delayed," the company said, images of the incorrect story were captured and circulated online.

"We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement.

Also at BBC.

Previously: Over 50 dead in mass shooting in Las Vegas


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Friday October 27 2017, @09:06PM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Friday October 27 2017, @09:06PM (#588428) Journal

    so fb's definition of news is either free (supplied by your friends), or paid-for (by companies that already struggle with revenue (mainly, news sites) or by companies that have lots of money - trying to sell you something)

    Fb - all the "news" you really didn't want, none of the stuff you need.

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Arik on Friday October 27 2017, @09:17PM (4 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Friday October 27 2017, @09:17PM (#588431) Journal
    Start by avoiding facebook, along with every other pretend technology company that fails at HMTL.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday October 27 2017, @10:08PM (2 children)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday October 27 2017, @10:08PM (#588450) Homepage Journal

      The man has a Master's from Harvard, can program in FORTRAN but cannot figure out how to send or receive email.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 1) by Arik on Friday October 27 2017, @10:56PM (1 child)

        by Arik (4543) on Friday October 27 2017, @10:56PM (#588460) Journal
        He can, he may not want to. He may simply take any excuse he can to avoid you.

        There's still the telephone and texting for instant affairs and the good old postal service still delivers hardcopy quite quickly and for shockingly low costs, domestically at least.

        But yes, I suppose if you want to force someone who'd rather ignore you to take notice of your pleas then some sort of 'public wall' would be just the thing. One more reason not to have one, IMHOP.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @04:55AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @04:55AM (#588574)
      <div id="comment_body_588431"><tt>Start by avoiding facebook, along with every other pretend technology company that fails at HMTL. </tt></div>
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @09:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @09:23PM (#588433)

    If it makes them money, they won't change anything of substance. Sure, maybe some new curtains, but nothing real will change.
    Listen to news at 11: $current_foe_of_the_day found meddling in $year $country elections...

  • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Saturday October 28 2017, @08:16AM (1 child)

    by AnonTechie (2275) on Saturday October 28 2017, @08:16AM (#588608) Journal

    I raise my hand ...

    --
    Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @08:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @08:03PM (#588776)

      me too

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