TheNewsGuru

Tag: Facebook

  • Amit Fulay ‘unfriends’ Google, accepts Facebook job offer

    The Head of Product for Google Allo and Google Duo, Amit Fulay, has announced leaving the Internet search giant to join number one social media platform, Facebook.

    Fulay took to microblogging platform, Twitter yesterday to post about his resignation from the Mountain View company, hinting at Facebook, he will be joining a product development team.

    In his 7.5 years at Google, Fulay was instrumental in the development of instant messaging mobile applications like Allo, Duo, and hangouts.

    At Google, Fulay has been working as a Product Manager since 2010. He was recently made the Head of Product for Real-Time Communications, which included Duo, Allo, WebRTC, and other products from the company.

    Fulay is also active on Twitter, where he announced new features and asked for feedback regarding the Google Allo and Duo apps.

    Meanwhile, Facebook has not revealed what Fulay is specifically in charge of, in the company. His LinkedIn account has not been updated yet.

    It is expected that Fulay will be a part of Facebook’s efforts on its messaging platform. He also tweeted.

    Google has not revealed who will be replacing Fulay in the company.

  • Mark Zuckerberg presents Facebook 2018 manifesto

    Mark Zuckerberg presents Facebook 2018 manifesto

    Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Facebook Inc., Mark Zuckerberg has said the topnotch social media firm “has a lot of work to do” in the year 2018.

    The Facebook CEO made this known in a statement today in what seems to be the platform’s manifesto for the year.

    “Today feels a lot like that first year. The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent,” Zuckerberg stated.

    He explained that 2018 for him would be a personal challenge year in which his firm will focus on fixing these important issues.

    “We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory,” he said.

    “This may not seem like a personal challenge on its face, but I think I’ll learn more by focusing intensely on these issues than I would by doing something completely separate.

    “These issues touch on questions of history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, and of course technology,” he further stated.

    He revealed that Facebook would be bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these key issues.

    “For example, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization.

    “A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands. (The first four words of Facebook’s mission have always been “give people the power”.) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force.

    “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it,” he said.

    “There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands.

    “But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.

    “This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together,” he added.

     

  • WhatsApp suffers global outage

    WhatsApp suffers global outage

    WhatsApp suffered a global outage on New Year’s Day 2018 for about an hour before the problem was fixed.

    A spokesperson of the messaging platform confirmed the development, but said experts at the social media firm immediately had no idea what happened.

    “WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved,” a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

    “The cause of the outage, about an hour long, was not immediately known,” the statement added.

    In Nigeria, one of WhatsApp’s biggest markets, the app was down just a few minutes past midnight into the New Year.

    Users in other countries also complained of outages on social media.

    While the firm did not expressly state the cause of the downtime, it might not be unconnected to the volume of data peddled on the platform between the night of December 31st 2017 and January 1st 2018.

     

  • Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg gets $23.6 billion richer

    Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg gets $23.6 billion richer

    Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg got $23.6 billion richer in 2017 in a list of biggest billionaire gainers of 2017 released by Forbes.

    Forbes tracked the net worth of more than 2,000 billionaires in 2017 with Jeff Bezos, the richest person on earth since October, leading the 2017 biggest billionaire gainers list.

    TheNewsGuru reports Forbes measured the gains between January 1, 2017 and December 14, 2017, and with the development, Zuckerberg’s net worth now stands at $72 billion.

    The 10 biggest billionaire gainers added a total of $204 billion to their fortunes, compared to a mere $74.7 billion gain in 2016.

    Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been on a steady roll in 2017, its stock up by nearly 60%, bolstered by growth in mobile advertising, Forbes stated in a web post.

    In December 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced they would give away 99% of their Facebook shares to philanthropic causes.

    “Zuckerberg also requested the creation of a new class of shares which would allow him to retain his voting control over the company. After a public outcry, Zuckerberg, who cofounded Facebook in 2004 at the age of 19 and holds about a 17% stake in the company, scrapped the plans in September.

    “The 33-year old billionaire also announced that he will expedite his philanthropic efforts and sell 35 million to 75 million Facebook shares over the next 18 months to fund a variety of causes,” Forbes narrated.

    Others who topped the gainers list are: world’s richest real estate tycoon, Hui Ka Yan; LVMH’s CEO, Bernard Arnault; Chinese tech billionaire and Tencent Holdings’ chairman, Ma Huateng; and the fourth richest person in the world in 2010, Mukesh Ambani.

    Others are: Carlos Slim Helu & family, Yang Huiyan, Larry Ellison, and Francois Pinault & family, who made the top 10 gainers list.

     

  • Quick read: 6 valid tips on how to secure your social media accounts

    Social media is now an essential part of business and our daily lives; thus, making it critical that you keep your accounts safe.

    You can only imagine the damage that will be done if someone gained unauthorized access to your accounts. It can ruin your reputation depending on the content of your account that is exposed to the public.

    These tips should help in keeping your social media accounts safe and secured.

    Activate two-factor authentication

    The easiest and most effective way to secure your social media account is two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication locks out illegitimate users by requiring them to input a verification code sent directly to their mobile phone through SMS text message once they login with the correct username and password combination.

    Verify with links

    Another method to secure your social media accounts it to verify and be careful of what links you click on. Many links on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram direct to legitimate news sources, but there have been numerous incidents when this is not the case.

    Use a strong password

    This point has been over flogged but some people do not still abide by it. They use weak passwords for their social media accounts and at the same time, they use that password for all their accounts. This is risky as once the weak password is discovered, hackers can have access to all your accounts. You can use a password manager like LastPass to keep track of your passwords.

    Use emails that are not public to login

    This is an unknown tactic that very few individuals and businesses use. This means logging in to your social network accounts with a non-public email address, or an email that no one knows about.

    Limit third-party applications

    Another contributor to social media theft are third-party applications. Limiting third-party applications that have access to your social media accounts will leave them near impossible for hackers to gain unauthorised access.

    Be careful where you login

    Many malicious attackers create almost identical login pages dedicated to stealing social media credentials. Be careful where you choose to login, always verify the URL and application before allowing any form of access.

     

  • FG requests Facebook user data of Nigerians

    Facebook has announced the release of a report that reveals the federal government (FG) requested user data of Nigerians on the social media platform five times in the first half of 2017.

    The details of the latest ‘Government Requests Report’ was published by Facebook on Monday.

    TheNewsGuru reports the FG carried out five legal process requests for five different Facebook users/accounts.

    Facebook did not, however, revealed the details of the accounts governments requested their data.

    “We respond to valid requests relating to criminal cases. Each and every request we receive is checked for legal sufficiency and we reject or require greater specificity on requests that are overly broad or vague,” the social media firm said in a statement.

    The ninth Facebook transparency report showed that governments’ requests for information about users increased 21 percent worldwide compared to the second half of 2016, from 64,279 to 78,890.

    Facebook also announced on Monday that it removed nearly 3 million posts, including videos, ads and other forms of content, from its services during the period under review, following complaints of counterfeiting and copyright and trademark infringement.

    The worldwide data on intellectual property-related takedowns is a new disclosure for Facebook as part of its biannual “Transparency Report,” Chris Sonderby, a Deputy General Counsel at Facebook, said in a blog post.

    Aggregate data shows Facebook received about 377,400 complaints from January through June, with many referencing multiple posts. About 60 percent of the reports related to suspected copyright violations on Facebook.

    A “small fraction” of requests were excluded because they were not sent through an official form, Facebook said.

    The company removed user uploads in response to 81 percent of filings for counterfeiting, 68 percent for copyrights and 47 percent for trademarks, according to its report. The percentages were roughly similar for Instagram.

    “We believe that sharing information about (intellectual property) reports we receive from rights holders is an important step toward being more open and clear about how we protect the people and businesses that use our services,” Sonderby stated.

     

  • Facebook declares war against engagement baits

    Facebook has declared it will begin demoting posts with engagement baits that goad people into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions.

    Facebook, in a statement on Monday, said posts similar to “God has seen you suffering, comment ‘YES’ if you don’t want to suffer anymore,” and also similar to what is on the featured image on this post, known as engagement bait, seek to “take advantage of our News Feed algorithm by boosting engagement in order to get greater reach”.

    “So, starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts from people and Pages that use engagement bait,” the social media giant said.

    Facebook said to help foster more authentic engagement on its platform, teams have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait.

    “Posts that use this tactic will be shown less in News Feed. We will begin implementing stricter demotions for Pages that systematically and repeatedly use engagement bait to artificially gain reach in News Feed,” said Henry Silverman, Operations Integrity Specialist at Facebook.

    The social media firm said “Posts that ask people for help, advice, or recommendations, such as circulating a missing child report, raising money for a cause, or asking for travel tips, will not be adversely impacted by this update. Instead, we will demote posts that go against one of our key News Feed values – authenticity”.

    Publishers and other businesses that use engagement bait tactics in their posts should expect their reach on these posts to decrease, as Pages that repeatedly share engagement bait posts will see more significant drops in reach.

    “Page Admins should continue to focus on posting relevant and meaningful stories that do not use engagement bait tactics,” Facebook advised.

     

  • Facebook Messenger records higher video chat sessions in 2017

    Facebook Messenger video chat sessions this year took a leap forward recording 17 billion realtime video chats.

    “The art of conversation has evolved, and we’re no longer limited by just text. Just think about it, now you can group video chat with masks, choose from thousands of emojis or GIFs to add more color to your messages, and immediately capture and share photos, even when you’re already in a conversation,” Sean Kelly, Product Management Director, Messenger, wrote in a blog post late Wednesday.

    Facebook records two times as many video chat sessions in 2017 compared to 2016, the company said.

    Kelly said that the experience is the same whether a user is on Android or iOS and the company introduced a few Augmented Reality features like masks, filters, and reactions in June to make video chats more fun and expressive.

    Apart from these, GIFs, videos, group conversations or group video chats, Messenger helped people say what they want to say, however, they want to say it and gave people the freedom to connect in the way that is most relevant to them.

    People shared over 500 billion emojis in 2017, or nearly 1.7 billion every day. GIFs were a popular choice too, with 18 billion GIFs shared in this year.

    “Visual messaging is now our new universal language, making our conversations more joyful, impactful, and let’s face it, a whole lot more fun,” Kelly added.

    This year Facebook invested in a powerful and fast camera, pre-loaded with thousands of stickers, frames and other effects to make conversations better.

    The social media giant said that while some cultural pundits argued that messaging makes people isolated, they found that messaging brought people closer.

    “On average, there are over seven billion conversations taking place on Messenger every day in 2017. At the same time, on average, 260 million new conversation threads were started every day in 2017,” Facebook said.

    New Years, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day were three of the top five most active days for chats on Messenger.

    Also, in 2017, 2.5 million new groups were created on Messenger every day and the average group chat includes 10 people.

    Since its launch in March, people shared more than 11 billion reactions, up from two billion shared in June. The most popular reaction in a group and one-on-one conversation was “??”.

    The most popular custom emoji was the red heart and the most popular custom chat colour was red.

     

  • Quick read: 5 clear indications that you are a social media junkie

    Social media has, no doubt, almost completely changed how we communicate. But, there is a point where the obsession with social media goes from harmless fun to an intrusion on your life.

    How do you know if you have arrived at this point? These signs shared by Jumia Travel, the leading online travel agency, will definitely help.

    It is the first thing you do in the morning

    Almost every social media addict will begin their daily routine by scrolling through what they have missed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more during your eight hours of sleep.

    Your friends only contact you via social media

    Social media has made it possible to keep in touch with friends and family. If your friends use these apps to get in touch with you, it’s because they know you’re most likely already on them. Very few people now bother to make calls.

    You check your timeline and feeds at every location

    There’s nothing wrong with checking your phone once in awhile. But when you scroll through your feeds or timeline at every location, you are simply engrossed or attached to social media.

    You hear imaginary notifications

    It is a serious case of addiction when you start to imagine notifications in your head. Many of us have experienced the imaginary phone vibration causing you to quickly check your phone for a notification that never came.

    You monitor likes and retweets

    Social media likes and retweets mean a lot to someone addicted to it. It has become a form of acceptance and after a while getting more can become an addiction. They keep monitoring who liked and did not like their pix.

     

  • Former Facebook VP says Social Media is ‘Destroying the Fabrics of Society’

    Former Facebook Vice President for User Growth has criticised social media for “destroying how society works”.

    Chamath Palihapitiya said he feels “tremendous guilt” for having created tools “that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”.

    The YouTube video of his talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business, which took place in November, surfaced on The Verge with Palihapitiya saying it is not just about Facebook, but that the entire social media industry is to be blamed for “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”.

    The ex-Facebook VP claimed that he tries to use Facebook as little as possible. “I can’t control them,” Palihapitiya reportedly said of Facebook.

    “I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that sh**. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that sh**”.

    The problem isn’t just about fake news and hate speech in the US, he mentions, “this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem”.

    He expanded this stance by pointing towards a recent incident in India where hoax messages on WhatsApp allegedly led to lynchings of innocent people. Bad actors, willing enough, are capable enough of orchestrating such incidents at their will, is what Palihapitiya believes is the problem with social media.

    He did, however, mention that Facebook “overwhelmingly does good in the world”.

    This stance amplifies the perception of major social media platforms having an unfair advantage over public discourse in the world.

    Some users believe that political incidents like Trump’s presidential win and Britain’s exit from the EU are to be blamed, in part, on manipulative information shared on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook, both owned by the same company.

    Social media isn’t the only topic that Palihapitiya talked about at the event.

    He also said that the entire Silicon Valley venture funding model was broken as investors are apparently pumping money into “sh*tty, useless, idiotic companies,” instead of the real environmental and healthcare issues, according to Palihapitiya who runs a VC firm called Social Capital, which focuses on companies in education and healthcare sectors.