You’ll Never Believe What FB Did Next…
Last week we posted about Facebook’s crackdown on ‘low-quality content’ and this week the social network has taken it a step further, strengthening the news feed algorithm to detect and down-rank clickbait headlines in 10 different languages. That’s bad news for lazy publishers who rely on ‘you’ll never believe…’ headlines but good news for anyone who values quality journalism.
In a further bid to control the quality of content on its site, Facebook is also cracking down on Live videos which are anything but. You may have seen some pages pushing out static, animated or looping images as Live videos? It has been a problem for a while, but now Facebook has updated its Live API policy to prohibit such content.
Tweeters are freaking out over a privacy policy update that was announced this week. In a bid to better personalise the ads you see on the site, Twitter now tracks users’ behaviour outside of its app and website. That includes other apps on users’ phones, their locations and what websites they’ve visited. They also have a feature that lists your perceived interests, based on that tracking. Interesting… and yeah, creepy.
Twitter cofounder Biz Stone has announced he is returning to the company amid a rough stretch of exec departures and slow growth. And the commentators are saying that’s a good thing! Stone is the ‘zaniest’ of Twitter’s founders – while Jack Dorsey had the vision and Evan Williams had the business sense, Stone was the voice of the people. It’ll be interesting to see if this changes things at Twitter – stay tuned.
Visual
In the next step of its mission to clone Snapchat, Instagram has finally announced ‘Face Filters’. It’s a smart move by Insta and one that will likely have Snapchat very nervous. Snap Inc noted that a third of their 166 million users play with filters every day… So if you can do the exact same thing on Instagram, where more of your friends are present, why go to Snapchat at all? Tough times for Snap… but can’t say we didn’t see this one coming.
Oh yeah, there’s another social battle raging this week… You may not have heard of Weibo, but it’s the micro-blogging site that just overtook Twitter in terms of users. The Chinese social platform this week reported a whopping 340 million active monthly users, compared to Twitter’s 328 million. To be fair, it probably doesn’t help that Twitter, Facebook, et al are blocked in China.
Winner
Facebook deserves a round of applause for a new initiative aimed at preventing suicide. The social network recently teamed up with a number of mental health organisations to provide support for distressed users over Messenger. And now the company has announced that The Trevor Project will also be on Messenger to serve as a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youths.
Loser
McDonald’s was slammed on social media this week after releasing a video ad that many people felt exploited child bereavement. The ‘Dad’ advert, which shows a young boy talking with his mother about his late father in McDonald’s, was immediately slammed online, with social media users and grief support groups describing it as ‘insensitive’, ‘absolutely awful’ and ‘totally inappropriate’. It was pulled soon after with McDonald’s issuing an apology.
Creative Spot
What do you get when you cross two creative minds, a few spare hours and 15,000 coins? A London Twitter user Jamahl McMurran tweeted a picture with this caption: “So my Airbnb guest and I decided to place 15000 2p coins on the canal and see what would happen…. #coinsbythecanal.” The pair filmed and live-tweeted the whole thing – check it out.
