Category: SOCIAL MEDIA

Snap reportedly laying off around 100 engineers

Dianne Jacobs

Snap is about to undergo another round of layoffs, with this one seeing a cut of around 100 engineers, according to Cheddar and CNBC. While that’s a small portion of Snap’s total headcount — around 3,000 people — it reportedly represents about 10 percent of the company’s engineering team. The cuts are expected to come within a week and will be the first focused on engineering. Snap hasn’t commented on the report. This is the fourth round of layoffs at Snap in the past year, though the first three were…

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How Much Screen Time is Too Much?

Dianne Jacobs

Concerns about the harm caused by too much screen time – particularly when it is spent on social media – are widespread. But working out what a healthy amount might be is far from easy. Apple’s Tim Cook recently said he would not want his nephew on a social network, while child health experts wrote to Facebook warning excessive use of digital devices and social media “is harmful to children and teens”. Some negative experiences on social media – like bullying, or becoming worried about how your appearance compares to…

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No More Bulk Tweeting and Duplicate Accounts on Twitter

Dianne Jacobs

Twitter is announcing major limits on how users and apps can automate tweets, in order to curb spam and political propaganda bots. Developers are now banned from using any system that simultaneously posts “identical or substantially similar” tweets from multiple accounts at once, or makes actions like liking, retweeting, and following across multiple accounts at once. Twitter will remove these options from its own TweetDeck app, and third-party developers have until March 23rd to comply. Twitter says these actions are “an important step in ensuring we stay ahead of malicious…

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Snapchat CEO says the redesign is here to stay

Dianne Jacobs

Despite a lot of backlash over a big redesign for the Snapchat app, the CEO Evan Spiegel vigorously defended the redesign and basically said people need to get used to it. Spiegel said at the Goldman Sachs Internet & Technology Conference that even people complaining about the app was a sort of validation that the changes the company wants to happen are, indeed, happening. Snap aimed to try to separate the idea of communication and broadcasting with Snap into similar buckets, rather than the features being kind of mixed up…

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Germany’s Flawed Social Media Laws

Dianne Jacobs

The new German law that compels social media companies to remove hate speech and other illegal content can lead to unaccountable, overboard censorship and should be promptly reversed, Human Rights Watch said. The law sets a dangerous precedent for other governments looking to restrict speech online by forcing companies to censor on the government’s behalf. Governments and the public have valid concerns about the proliferation of illegal or abusive content online, but the new Ger“man law is fundamentally flawed,” said Wenzel Michalski, Germany director at Human Rights Watch. “It is…

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Snapchat redesign faces backlash

Dianne Jacobs

The redesign of the app was to make it easier to use but as the update rolls out to more users, Snapchat is getting criticism that the new interface is difficult to navigate. “I might start using Instagram Stories now,”  said Ashley Vasquez, a 21-year-old Snapchat user who is a senior at the University of Maryland in College Park. A Change.org petition asking the company to remove the new update has amassed more than 590,000 signatures by Monday afternoon. Other users began sharing a workaround for reversing the update by…

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Facebook Gaining Popularity among Old People as the Young Leave

Dianne Jacobs

A report shows that Facebook is for old people as teens and young adults are ditching the social network while the over 55s are joining. In 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer. A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year. The report says that while Facebook has so far been successful…

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Instagram testing feature that enables users to regram posts to stories

Dianne Jacobs

Instagram has confirmed it is testing an option that lets you “regram” public feed posts from other users to your Story. For those who have access to the new feature, it will appear as “Add post to your story” when you tap the share icon underneath a post. If you don’t want your public posts to be shared in this way, there is the option to change your privacy settings. Even if your account doesn’t have the ability to currently reshare, you should still see the option now for “Allow…

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Facebook bans all crypto-currency ads

Dianne Jacobs

Facebook has said it will block any advertising promoting crypto-currency products and services. The company said it was open to emerging technologies but many companies were not acting in “good faith” when extolling the virtues buying into virtual currencies. Recently, a wave of new currencies have emerged, seeking to piggyback Bitcoin’s huge increase in value. Facebook urged users to report any ads the company’s security measures missed. It admitted it would not always catch every ad for a crypto-currency. “We want people to continue to discover and learn about new…

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Appeals court rules that Tinder’s pricing for premium service Tinder plus violates age discrimination laws

Dianne Jacobs

A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus. Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by charging $9.99 per month if a user is under 30, versus $19.99 per month if you’re 30 or older, Tinder is discriminating based on age, in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Unfair Competition Law (those are both California laws). Tinder co-founder Sean Rad defended the pricing at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference back in 2015 by saying, “Our…

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