Facebook hit back today at the New York Times‘ 5,600-word account of how the company dealt with Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It claimed that the story contained many inaccuracies. In short, the Times charges that Facebook’s senior leaders delayed, denied and deflected. Facebook “delayed” when its internal team found evidence […]
Facebook is separating Workplace from its main offering. Workplace, a suite of collaboration tools for Facebook’s enterprise clients, previously shared a domain with Facebook, but after security concerns around recent data leaks, has been given its own website property. Facebook told Walmart, one of its top customers, about the domain change the day Facebook disclosed […]
Facebook has reported slow growth this quarter, most likely a result of the data leaks, fake news and hate speech the embattled platform has faced over the last two years. But in its quarterly earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg spoke to four new directions that Facebook is headed, all of which will affect how social marketers […]
All recent accusations of bias have one thing in common, the same thing that Facebook has dodged questions of reform or regulation over and generally failed to directly address: its proprietary, micro-targeting ad platform. It was this ad platform that allowed the Russians to pay for propaganda in rubles, it was this ad platform that allowed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate its third-party audience categories, and it was this ad platform that has brought the latest accusations of gender bias back to Facebook.
The New Yorker has published a 14,000-word profile on Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While regulation continues to be proposed as the umbrella solution to several of Facebook’s problems this year, here are a few takeaways from the story on what Zuckerberg thinks about external regulation—and what efforts the platform is taking to regulate itself.
PR pros aren’t sweating the congressional scrutiny of social media and the push for new regulations, with some seeing the changes as beneficial to an industry that has long operated in opacity. The hearings last week saw Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify on Capitol Hill. Though the main topic was […]
Americans’ relationship with Facebook: it’s complicated. Six months after the revelations surrounding the illegal harvesting of user data to manipulate public opinion ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the public’s trust in social media still suffers and companies and individuals have changed their online behavior in response, Statista reports. According to a recent Pew Research survey, more than half of Facebook users […]
Though daily social media use is ingrained in many peoples’ lives, it seems that major social media companies may have reached a saturation point when it comes to adding new users—at least in a few markets. Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, released its second quarter results on August 7, in which it reported the app lost three million […]
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has released a policy paper proposing 20 different paths toward social media regulation. In the paper, Warner divides his proposals into three categories: combating disinformation, protecting user privacy and promoting competition in the tech space. Here’s what the paper’s key points mean for communicators.
James Nickerson will kick off the Facebook for Communicators Boot Camp at PR News’ Social Media Summit on Aug. 9 with a timely invocation on where the platform is going, including why regulation might not be a bad thing for Facebook and the ramifications of GDPR for users. Tying these future-focused topics together is Nickerson’s belief that marketers are in a unique position to heal the growing disconnect between brands’ trust in the platform and the distrust felt by end users.
