Articles about Facebook

Facebook has faced accusations of interfering with the headlines that appear in Trending Topics, censoring conservative stories. While admitting to a left wing bias in Silicon Valley, the social network has denied supressing the appearance of right wing news.

However, leaked internal documents show that there is a very structured and controlled process in place that sees employees -- rather than algorithms -- influencing the news that Facebook users see. The documents reveal that there is an editorial team in place, with stories being ranked and promoted by hand. Perhaps just as worrying is the revelation that a very small number of news sources are used by Facebook.

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When a medical student is learning how to do surgery, he or she can't walk up to somebody on the street and start cutting into them. Instead, they will initially practice on cadavers and computer simulators. The same can be said for hacking. If a person wants to learn how to discover or test vulnerabilities, hacking the Pentagon or University, for instance, is not a wise idea.

Luckily, like a medical surgeon with a cadaver, Facebook offers its Capture The Flag platform -- hacking challenges in a test environment. Today, it is making that gamified security training platform open source in an effort to encourage wannabe hackers and security enthusiasts.

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Facebook has rolled out its photo-sharing app Moments around the world, and users in Europe have been treated to a modified version. Specifically, the European version of the app lacks the facial recognition feature that allows for automatic tagging of people.

In many ways, Facebook has been forced to release a degraded version of Moments to its EU audience because of the varying privacy laws that exist in different countries. The hobbled app will not attempt to identify individuals in photos, but will group together images that "appear to include the same face".

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Back in the day, I remember AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ being all the rage for messaging. For a while, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger were popular with the young folks too. Nowadays it seems to be Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which is a bit weird, because Facebook owns the latter -- hopefully they merge eventually.

One of the frustrating things about WhatsApp, however, is that it does not have a desktop client, instead being web and mobile only. Well, now this changes. Today, the messaging solution gets an official client for both Windows and OS X -- sorry Linux desktop users. At least that aforementioned web version is available.

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Facebook may be insisting that its news curators are not suppressing right-wing stories, but a senior executive is willing to admit that Silicon Valley as a whole is rather left-leaning.

Alex Schultz, vice president of growth at the social network, says: "There is definitely a left-wing bias to any company based in San Francisco". He made the comments at an LGBT discrimination conference, joking that "a Republican may be the most at-risk diversity at Facebook".

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Having been hit with allegations of censoring news from conservative outlets, Facebook has issued a strenuous denial. Gizmodo reported claims from former Facebook "news curators" that they were directed to not only suppress news from right wing sources, but also to "inject" stories into Trending Topics regardless of their actual popularity.

Suggestions that its Trending Topics are driven by a liberal agenda have been denied by Facebook. The social network says it "found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true", going on to say that while there is a review team in place, its guidelines "do [not] permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another".

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It is as though people have been asking for something more than the Like button on Facebook since the concept was first born. After years of asking, Facebook delivered. Facebook Reactions arrived at the end of February to much excitement.

But the excitement was short-lived, it seems. Two months after launch a study has found that hardly anyone is making use of the five new options (Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry). Analysis by Quintly reveals that Reactions account for a mere 3 percent of interactions, and the findings make for interesting reading.

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With the ongoing debate about privacy and encryption, the rollout of end-to-end encryption to Facebook-owned WhatsApp came as little surprise. Now Facebook Messenger is set to gain a couple of privacy-enhancing features including self-destructing messages.

Already found in other messaging tools such as SnapChat and Telegram, self-destructing messages have been unearthed in Messenger for iOS version 68.0. As you would expect, the feature makes it possible to place a time limit on how long messages are visible for, making it ideal for communicating sensitive information.

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When Facebook announced its first quarter results this week, it also announced that it created a new class of stock. The non-voting Class C stock proposed would enable Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to more easily fund their philanthropic ventures, whilst keeping Zuckerberg himself firmly in control of Facebook.

In response to this, a lawsuit has been raised that says the proposed deal is unfair. The shareholders raising the class action lawsuit said the deal would grant Zuckerberg even more control and that the board committee didn’t do enough "to obtain anything of meaningful value" in return. The lawsuit accuses him of wanting "to retain this power, while selling off large amounts of his stockholdings, and reaping billions of dollars in proceeds".

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Facebook has put other tech giants to shame by comfortably beating analyst expectations in the last quarter, with revenues over 50 percent up thanks to surging mobile advertising sales.

As mobile web browsing continues to grow throughout the world, advertisers are realizing that taking a mobile-first approach has the potential to be extremely lucrative. Facebook has looked to capitalize on this by improving its mobile app and expanding its live video solution, both of which have attracted advertisers.

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Facebook has published its latest Global Government Requests Report covering the second half of 2015. The transparency report reveals that there has been as 13 percent increase in the number of government requests for data, but it also shows that Facebook is still not able to be as transparent as it might want.

For the first time the social network is able to report about the number of data requests that have a non-disclosure order attached to them. More than half of the requests -- 60 percent, in fact -- have gagging orders that prevent Facebook from notifying users about requests for their data.

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The use of bounty programs to track down security vulnerabilities in websites and software is increasingly common these days, and it's a tactic employed by Facebook. One bounty hunter -- or penetration tester -- hacked his (or her… they are anonymous) way into the social network and made the shocking discovery that someone had already installed a backdoor.

Orange Tsai managed to compromise a Linux-based staff server and found there was already a piece of malware in place syphoning off usernames and passwords. These account details were being transmitted to a remote computer, and after revealing this to Facebook, Tsia pocketed $10,000 as a reward.

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The tax arrangements of international technology companies have been in the spotlight for a little while now. Few people disagree with the idea that they should be paying their way when it comes to tax, and one of these people is Steve Wozniak. He thinks Apple should pay tax at a rate of 50 percent -- just like him.

Just like Amazon, Facebook and Google, Apple manages to avoid a great deal of tax by channeling money through a subsidiary located in the Republic of Ireland. This reduces its tax bill dramatically by avoiding the UK corporation tax of 20 percent, and instead paying the Irish rate of 12.5 percent. Apple co-founder Woz feels the company should be paying the same rate that he has to.

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Facebook has been going a little crazy with News Feed updates of late, making constant changes in a bid to ensure that people see content they actually want to read. The real motivation may be ad revenue, but it's always pushed as surfacing (ouch... sorry... I slipped into buzzword mode...) more relevant content. The new changes are no different.

The most recent update to the feed algorithm will take into account not only which news articles people click on, but how long they spend reading them. This will help Facebook to not only determine what sort of article interest users but also help the social network to identify clickbait that doesn't deliver what it promises.

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Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular messaging services today, boasting over 900 million monthly active users. However, since competition in this market is increasingly fierce, to maintain momentum the social network has to keep improving its service.

Earlier this month, at its F8 developer conference, Facebook announced support for chat bots with the purpose of enabling businesses to deliver better customer support, and now it is rolling out group calling to Messenger users across the globe.

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