Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook’s purpose is now to promote togetherness. Zuckerberg’s solution is to encourage users to engage more through video, a medium he described this week as a key community-builder. But can cat videos really make us all better friends? With about 26% of the world on Facebook, we’re sure to find out.
On Wednesday Facebook admitted that up to 270 million accounts are ‘illegitimate’ and should not count towards total user figures. Illegitimate accounts are mainly fake or duplicate accounts, and they currently make up 13% of Facebook’s 2.1 billion users. Illegitimate accounts are often used to circulate fake news, and put Facebook under pressure to monitor accounts more effectively.
One of the most followed accounts on Twitter was temporarily deactivated on Thursday. Donald Trump’s account was suspended by a Twitter customer support worker on their last day. 11 minutes without POTUS updates shocked the world, but the US didn’t grind to a halt. Maybe rule by tweet isn’t the way after all?
Twitter says it isn’t responsible for copies of the UK Parliament ‘Sleaze Dossier’ being posted by anonymous users on Tuesday. Twitter’s Terms of Service says that users are responsible for the material they post. But this raises yet more fake news questions for a platform already in front of the US Congress for potential Russian election meddling. Now will they have to answer to Westminster?
Visual
Earlier this week there was a subtle change made to Instagram Stories. Now preview tiles are twice as big mid-feed. The popularity of Stories, and its built-in audience from Instagram is beginning to truly threaten Snapchat. But on the upside, the competition between them is stimulating the creation of more and more new features, giving social media users more choice than ever.
Instagram now supports three languages read right to left – Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. The whole app had to be revamped to include the new language options, showing just how committed to global dominance Insta is. It is currently only available on Android devices, a smart move considering 70% of Arabic-speaking users have Android devices.
Winner
Is Snapchat throwing subtle shade at Google with its new dancing burger? Natural sequitur to the popular dancing hot dog? Maybe. But it’s also a brag that Snap won with users for putting the cheese on top of the burger in its emoji, whereas Google puts the cheese underneath (naturally causing havoc online, *gasp*). But we seriously doubt that bad cooking skills are going to bring down the search-engine behemoth.
Loser
WhatsApp suffered another outage at 7am on Friday, and people have flocked to Twitter to complain. The platform has 1.2 billion users worldwide, but only users in Europe and South-East Asia seem to have been affected. It seems people really had trouble coping without their favourite encrypted message service, so let’s hope we find out Whats Appening soon.
Creative
Bacardi’s Snapchat lens collaboration with DJ Major Lazer included interactive music content, including swirling orange Barcardi bottles. Over 18 million people viewed it in 24 hours when it was released in June, a case study published on Thursday reveals.
