Overview: Social Web

Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions — steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories. The fact that these decisions are being made by algorithms rather than human editors doesn’t make Facebook any less responsible for the harmful effect on its users and t…

Our latest whitepaper keeps you updated on what you need-to-know for your Facebook publishing into Fall 2016 and the holiday season...we consolidated our most recent and most important findings into a guide for you to master your social publishing on Facebook this season. 

the next greatest advancement in casual technology and User Experience... a set of glasses known as Spectacles pair up with Snapchat via Wi-fi or Bluetooth ... and enable their users to record 10 seconds of video... in a circle with 115 degrees of view... mimic human vision, so users can record what they see and play it back as if it came from the…

Facebook seems incapable of rooting out hoaxes even after acknowledging they are clearly fake news... at least five different pages shared a story after Facebook acknowledged it was fake and were still able to reach tens of thousands of people through the social network. None of the posts carry any warning that the content is fake... BuzzFeed anal…

The debate on whether Facebook is a media company or not is not new... My take: it matters how users perceive Facebook, not how others — Facebook insiders or not — define it.

will stream Trump’s rallies directly each night and feature pre-and post-event commentary... a way for the campaign to circumvent the mainstream media ... says as much about Trump’s future in media as it does about Facebook’s.

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

voters feel let down by the BBC’s coverage being hampered by impartiality rules... we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”

One of the vlogs I did at the EU Week of Regions & Cities with the winners of the #EUinmyRegion blogging competition I ran for the EC. All vlogs can be found in this Moment.

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,”

To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high... the mastery of such intelligent, kind-hearted, and considered disagreement emerges as a supreme art of living And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so …

Referral traffic to publishers from LinkedIn ... has been on a steady uptick... In January, publishers saw traffic to their sites from LinkedIn explode, in some cases tripling...puts LinkedIn into the top-10 referrers of the web... Publishers are now in a better position to make decisions on LinkedIn editorial strategy... a very particular traffi…

a great summary of the difference between Snap’s Spectacles and Glass too — the former is a pair of sunglasses that records video, while the latter was technology strapped to your face.

NBC News has found that people are willing to click through to its site when there’s breaking news, so it’s posting less of those articles on Instant Articles while posting more feature-type content... The New York Times ... tended to be long-form think pieces or analysis, not breaking news

lets people share illustrated filter-enhanced photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours, just like on Snapchat.

Facebook wants to have the responsibility of a publisher but also to be seen as a neutral carrier of information that is not in the position of making news judgments... when Facebook was still censoring the napalm photo ... the site’s trending bar began posting ... a story suggesting September 11 were caused by a “controlled demolition”.

over 30 news organizations ... and tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to share best practices on how to verify true news stories and stop the spread of fake ones.

Following the controversial firing of the editorial team who managed the Trending Topics... technology that will help prevent fake news stories from showing up in the Trending section.

We’d love to make it easy for you to get up and running with Facebook Ads. These are the exact steps and lessons we’ve been taking to build up our own paid ads campaigns, and we’ll be keeping this post up-to-date with the latest news and learnings.

Another controversial Facebook takedown, another muddy explanation for an erroneous removal.

all the pros and cons had to be considered. Here are some of the reasons and learnings behind this decision.

“a monopoly of content distribution that will be mainly driven by user-generated content, and by professional content by commercially interested players.... pretty traumatic scenario of information or propaganda. It will be very painful for democracies.”

the reality-based community... people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... That’s not the way the world really works anymore... We’re an empire... we create our own reality. ... Trump is building on the foundation laid by Karl Rove and other great American fabulists, but he’s doing something funda…

“the news on Facebook is what Facebook says it is.”... before the arrival of the internet news in newspapers was what newspapers said it was... the controllers of news outlets - newspapers, TV and radio, online - make choices about what to publish and, more significantly, what not to publish. Facebook’s increasing dominance over advertising is c…

with newsrooms reeling... a weakening of the stable platforms threatens to cause general informational impoverishment, a degradation of the entire information ecosystem. Adding to the worry, people today are exposed to news ... through a single platform—mainly social networks, which tend toward a clustering of like-minded individuals. Together,…

One small tag for Facebook, one giant disaster for your favorite publishers... For publishers sharing native ads ... have to tag the brand in the post... that brand’s marketing team gets access to the post’s insights... allow savvy marketers to calculate just how big a margin publishers are taking on these campaigns — and potentially walk away fe…

I’m not saying that these are the only principles that work on Twitter. But I think they’ve worked for me, and for my purposes.

Since Facebook made its livestreaming feature widely available earlier this year, publishers have been experimenting with on-the-spot video in a variety of ways... we are starting a series of in-depth articles chronicling their experiments IBTimes UK has been working on three different live video formats: Q&As; with columnists and reporters, panel…