Category: SOCIAL MEDIA

Older users over 65 yrs shared more fake news, New York and Princeton Universities researchers reveal

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Trojan

According to a new analysis by researchers at New York and Princeton Universities. Older users shared more fake news than younger ones regardless of education, sex, race, income, or how many links they shared. In fact, age predicted their behavior better than any other characteristic — including party affiliation. Today’s study, published in Science Advances, examined user behavior in the months before and after the 2016 US presidential election. In early 2016, the academics started working with research firm YouGov to assemble a panel of 3,500 people, which included both…

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Facebook handed over 150 companies intrusive access to your data

Facebook gave over 150 companies almost unfetted intrusive access to users’ data than previously admitted, exempting them from its usual privacy rules, according to the New York Times. It has emerged that companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and Yandex had special arrangements to retain access to users’ data (and data on their friends), despite platform changes in 2014 that restricted the practice. For example: — Netflix and Spotify were able to read users’ private messages — Microsoft had access to the names of virtually all users’ friends, without consent…

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Facebook Transparency Report reveals fewer user data requests by African Governments

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facebook

According to the recently released Facebook Transparency Report for the six months from January to June 2018, demands by African governments for information on Facebook users remain low compared to other countries, Globally over the six-month period there were 103 815 requests and in 74% of those requests Facebook produced some data. This was a 26.1% increase when compared to the last six months of 2017, when there were 82 341 requests. It is also an increase of 31.6% from the first half of last year, when there were 78…

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Nearly half of young users have deleted Facebook, Pew survey shows

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Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they’ve deleted the app from their phone in the last year. Some of them may have reinstalled it later. Significant shares of Facebook users have taken steps in the past year to reframe their relationship with the social media platform. Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according…

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Facebook, Instagram hit by 13hr outage, Zuckerberg not stepping down as chairman

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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were yesterday hit by a 13-hour outage that affected some users throughout the world, the company confirmed. The outage comes at a particularly sensitive time when businesses use Facebook and Instagram to promote pivotal Black Friday sales, some of which have already started. “Earlier today, a server configuration caused intermittent problems across all apps globally creating a degraded experience for users. The issue has since been resolved, we are back to 100 percent for everyone and we’re sorry for any inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson told ABC…

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Instagram is making a bold move on fake likes and follows

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fACEBOOK,INSTAGRAM,MESSANGER

Instagram is preparing for a huge purge on automated apps people use to leave spammy comments or follow then unfollow others in hopes of growing their audience. Any fake likes and follows from accounts that use third-party services to get more engagement are going to now be removed the company announced as part of policy change today. Instagram says, We’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity. This type of behavior is bad for the community, and third-party apps that…

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Hackers Are Snatching High-Profile Instagram Accounts

olivia Craig
Instagram Fundraiser

In the Wild West of “influencer” marketing, there are few protections and plenty of easy marks. Hackers sometimes create their own fake brands to phish influencers, but often they pretend to be representatives from real companies, this is according to a new report by TheAtlantic “They’ll set up some sort of username that’s something that seems like it would be legit, like @LuluLemonAmbassadors,” he said. “They’ll use all the company logos, make it seem as legit as possible, make the bio seem normal. Use the company’s mission statement. It’s super…

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Rogue Move? Facebook to start flooding WhatsApp with Ads in 2019

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WhatsApp launches end-to-end encryption on messages for all its users

WhatsApp has been free, but soon users can expect a significant change in their experience of WhatsApp. The Android and iOS chat app, originally released in 2009, will start to embed paid-for content in the app’s Status feature from 2019. The Status feature is similar to Stories on Instagram and Facebook, letting users upload Snapchat-style pics and videos that can be viewed for 24 hours. Facebook wants to interrupt some of these Statuses with short ads, although details are light. WhatsApp’s co-founders were famously against ads, and supportive of encrypted…

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Instagram Is Down Worldwide, Users Unable To Log In

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Instagram seems to be down for a lot of users worldwide. Its website and app both are inaccessible at the momentum.  More than 1,000 people worldwide have reported problems with the Facebook-owned platform early on Wednesday morning. Attempts to log in on a desktop browser are producing a blank page with the message: ‘5xx Server Error’. On the mobile app users are being told that their feed cannot be refreshed. Frustrated users expressing dissatisfaction on Twitter suggested the Instagram outage stretched across the globe with the app not working in…

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Majority Facebook users not aware how the site’s news feed works

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A Pew research has revealed that a sizable majority of U.S. adults use Facebook and most of its users get news on the site. But a new Pew Research Center survey finds that notable shares of Facebook users ages 18 and older lack a clear understanding of how the site’s news feed operates, feel ordinary users have little control over what appears there, and have not actively tried to influence the content the feed delivers to them. The findings from the survey – conducted May 29-June 11 – come amid a…

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