Twitter's troll and harassment problem is well-documented, and the social media site has faced mounting criticism over its apparent inability to keep users in check. In a letter to shareholders, Twitter today announced that it will be making "meaningful updates" to its safety policy -- but it doesn’t say what they might be.

The letter says that Twitter wants to "drive value" across three key areas: audience, content, and revenue. For the audience side of things, this means timeline tinkering and contextualizing content. For content, it means partnerships, streaming video and syndication. To make the most of revenue, some fat must be trimmed, and this means internal restructuring and job losses.

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Out on the streets people may be keeping an eye open for killer clowns, but on Facebook this Halloween things are also taking a frightening turn. The social network is using this spooky time of year to introduce augmented reality masks to Live video -- with a Halloween twist, of course.

At the same time, Facebook is also adding "limited-edition" Halloween reactions. These transform the now familiar Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry reactions in something rather more ghoulish.

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Okay, I’m back, still without cataract surgery but I have the fonts cranked-up on this notebook and my one working eye is still, well, working so I am, too. My next column will be about last week’s Internet DNS failure but right now I want to write about all these folks who have been asking to connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media. I’ll bet you have the same problems that I do.

Once you have enough connections (I have 2785 Facebook "friends" and 2552 "connections" on LinkedIn) you become a target for people trying to build their networks. In the beginning my philosophy about these things was to never ask anyone to be my friend or my connection but to always accept any friend or connection requests. I didn’t feel I was taking advantage of anyone yet my networks grew nicely, though I’d hardly met any of these people in real life.

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Facebook has stated time and time and time again that it is not a media company, despite appearing to act very much like one. The company's protestations become all the more difficult to swallow when one looks at the way it handles news. In reality, Facebook wields far more power and influence that it's willing to admit.

There have been countless instances of Facebook censoring posts from individuals, groups and organizations. Facebook appears to have an unwritten (or largely unpublished) set of rules defining what can be posted on the social network, and just this week Facebook staff wanted to censor posts by Donald Trump because they were considered hate speech. Zuckerberg disagreed, overruled his employees and allowed them to go ahead. One rule for us, another rule for them.

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Increasingly people are suffering from password fatigue, so when signing up to websites it's very tempting to use existing social media accounts.

However, according to a survey from customer identity and access management specialist Janrain, 93 percent of people are concerned about how their account data and activity are being shared and used.

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When Facebook Live launched as a service available to everyone (after a celebrity-only debut) it didn’t take long for people's fears of terrible incidents being broadcast to come true. We've had celebrities livestreaming, we've had death, injuries and accidents livestreamed. What next? War.

Over in Iraq, the city of Mosul is currently under the control of ISIS. Iraqi and Kurdish military forces are in the process of attacking the city to regain control. What's unusual -- and particularly disturbing -- about this is that the whole event is being livestreamed on Facebook by Kurdish media group Rudaw -- complete with viewers' reactions in the form of cartoon emoji.

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The latest high-profile victim of online abuse is actress Faye Marsay, famous for her portrayal of the Waif in Game of Thrones. After finding herself on the receiving end of hate and harassment, she has announced that she is to quit Facebook.

Marsay's decision comes after guidelines were unveiled to help determine whether criminal proceedings should be brought against individuals engaging in online hate crimes.

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The Moments feature could be set to disappear from Twitter's mobile apps. Having only recently announced the roll out of a curation option to everyone, Twitter is now experimenting with replacing it with a more inviting Explore feature.

Speaking to Mashable, Twitter confirmed that a "content discovery"-focused Explorer tab could replace Moments in the future. For now, though, there is an experimental change visible to some iOS and Android users that sees the Moments and Explore tabs show up side by side.

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You may not have heard of Workplace by Facebook, and that could be for one of two reasons. Firstly, it used to be known as Facebook at Work but, more importantly, it has been in closed beta for nearly two years.

Today, Facebook announces that Workplace is now available all over the world, giving enterprise users a way to stay connected with co-workers. Promising "the best of Facebook plus new features", Workplace can be used by any company or organization that feels a personalized, internal social network with messaging capabilities could be beneficial.

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The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has today published new social media guidelines that set out online offenses for which people could be prosecuted. Launched as part of Hate Crime Awareness Week, the guidance will be used to decide whether criminal proceedings should be brought against individuals.

Among the offenses outlined in the document is 'virtual mobbing' -- encouraging others to engage in online hate campaigns. The CPS points out that anyone doing this could face charges under the Serious Crime Act 2007. Also published today is the Public Policy Statements on Hate Crime which is due to be put to public consultation and will focus on hate crimes against disabled people, as well as attacks of a racial, religious, homophobic and transphobic nature.

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Just about all of the key players in social media have turned to algorithms to control the order in which posts appear in users' timelines. Google has already introduced algorithmic sorting for Google+, and now it is rolling out to Communities.

Just as with Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, the decision to move towards algorithms rather than a simple chronological timeline is one that will be divisive. But Google has made it easy to toggle the setting, helping to keep everyone happy.

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If you're a keen Facebook user, you may well have accepted invites to events advertised on the social network. To help make your life a little easier, Facebook has now launched a new, dedicated app called simply Events from Facebook to more easily find out what's going on nearby.

More than this, the app can pull in information from your existing calendar so you can see all of your events and appointments in one place to avoid double-booking yourself. It's iOS-only for the time being, but an Android version of the app is in the pipeline.

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Facebook has been testing its privacy-focused Secret Conversations feature with a select, and then wider, group of users for a little while now. Today the end-to-end encrypted messaging system rolls out to everyone. If you're concerned about your privacy (firstly, why are you using Facebook?), it's your duty to use it.

Secret Conversations remains an opt-in feature, and once enabled it means that only the sender and recipient are able to see messages -- there is no scope for interception by Facebook or any other third party. There's also an important self-destructing messaging option, but there's one glaring problem.

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The social networking giant has managed to attract the ire of advertisers after it revealed that it overestimated video viewing figures for two years. A flaw in the tool used to measure the number of views meant that figures relating to video viewing times were inflated by between 60 and 80 percent.

Just how long people spend watching videos is important information for advertisers, but Facebook managed to miscalculate average viewing times by ignoring views lasting under three seconds. With so much of Facebook's incoming revenue derived from advertising, and the importance the company places on video, the snafu is an embarrassing one that advertisers will take some time to forget.

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Hackers are using social media to gather information about their next victim. They use that information to form sophisticated strategies and deliver advanced threats into networks.

These are the results of a new Blue Coat Systems report, based on a poll of 3,130 workers in various industries in Great Britain, France and Germany. Key takeaway from the report is that user behavior has not improved much since last year. This year, 42 percent of respondents say they only accept friend requests from people they know.

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