Social Media

Facebook Is Finally Going to Stop Showing You Garbage Hoaxes

Your Facebook News Feed is, more often than not, full of fetid, steaming, click-projectile-vomiting garbage. And Facebook wants to change that! Its latest attempt at weaning out undesirables? Calling out dumb, viral hoaxes. Starting today, anytime a significant number of users mark a post as a hoax, Facebook will add a little annotation noting that…

Behind the scenes of “behind the scenes at National Geographic”

Have you seen that “behind the scenes at National Geographic” photo where those guys are running from a bear? It’s pretty amusing. But it’s a fake. Super duper, 100 percent fake. So where did it come from? After I debunked the photo in my latest FAKES round-up, Tim Sparks, a filmmaker in Colorado, contacted me…

Facebook has started testing Facebook at Work, the colleagues-only app it is designing to encourage workday use. “Pilot partners” began using the app today. It will initially debut on iOS and Android, and will also be available from the mobile site. [The Guardian]

What Should Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s Resolution Be?

Every year, casual wear enthusiast and Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg embarks upon a singular self-betterment goal. Past goals have included learning Mandarin and only eating animals he personally murdered. But for 2015? Zuckerberg doesn’t have a goal set yet, and is crowdsourcing for suggestions. Some of the suggestions are good, like paying off the college…

Facebook’s “Year In Review” Videos Can Be Real Jerks

Facebook’s algorithm-driven “Year in Review” videos are supposed to be a fun, quick way to relive your life in 2014. They’ve likely littered your timeline for the past few days/weeks now. But what if you simply want to forget the past shitty 12 months of your life? Suddenly, these clips become not so fun. This…

Facebook Is Ditching Bing’s Search Results

Facebook and Microsoft have had a relatively long-standing partnership when it comes to search: for years, Facebook searches would also show Bing results, and Bing queries have thrown up results from your friends. But history seems to mean very little to Facebook, which appears to have quietly killed Bing results. Reuters quotes a Facebook spokesperson…

Facebook Wants to Save You From Yourself and Your Drunk Selfies

Facebook is investing in artificial intelligence research to a potentially creepy end: The social network’s top minds want to build software that can do anything from read your status updates to warn you when you’re about to upload an embarrassing picture. Put another way, Facebook wants to stop you from uploading drunk selfies. Let me…

Ebola Ebola Ice Bucket Robin Williams Ebola: 2014 As Told By Facebook

This is what we the users have wrought. Facebook released today a list of topics we wouldn’t shut up about in 2014. Not a spoiler: It’s a whole lot of Ice Bucket Challenge. For anyone who has even dipped a toe into the Facebook stream this past year, this list should come as no surprise.…

Facebook Finally Lets You Search For Specific Posts

Facebook is getting some long overdue functionality to help you find not just people and pages, but also specific posts from the past. So as in the example above, if you search for your friend Jessica’s wedding, it’ll search full posts for keywords “Jessica” and “wedding” and hopefully return the result you were looking for.…

How Facebook Is Hacking Together a Better Data Center 

Data centers are boring. They have to be; these are spaces of control, consistency, security. You wouldn’t expect to find much creativity inside the plain facades of these highly-regulated structures—much less hacked-together experiments involving robotic Blu-ray storage systems and thousands of Mac Minis. But inside these seemingly boring buildings there’s an industry booming with change…

What Today’s Facebook Supreme Court Case Means for Free Speech Online

How carefully do you think about the things you post on Facebook? Depending on the outcome of today’s Supreme Court hearing, that answer could soon be way more carefully than you ever have before. Today, the nine justices will be hearing Elonis v. United States, the very first Supreme Court case to directly deal with…

Facebook Groups: Another New App You Don’t Want or Need 

Facebook’s Great Unbundling isn’t stopping anytime soon. And the latest little birdie pushed from the nest is none other than Groups. Because someone somewhere has to want a standalone Groups app somewhere. Probably? The good thing here, though, is that unlike Messenger (for iOS, at least), Groups is at least not disappearing from the Faceobook…

WhatsApp Now Provides End-to-End Encryption For Your Messages

Encryption is a vital tool in helping keep your messages tucked away from prying eyes. Trying to stay safe while texting, though, meant also being siloed into effective-yet-niche chat platforms such as Silent Circle. But today, WhatsApp will start bringing end-to-end encryption to its 600 million users. The new security feature is a default setting…

Report: Facebook’s Working on a New “Facebook at Work” Site

Fancy creating a little more distance between your social and professional facades on Facebook? Well, the Financial Times is reporting that Zuckerberg & Co. are working on a new site, called “Facebook at Work,” that will do just that. The newspaper reports that the site will look very much like the Facebook you know and…

Facebook’s Wind-Powered Data Center Is Now Processing Your Posts

Facebook’s first data center powered solely by renewable energy is now in operation in Altoona, Iowa. The center was expected to open in 2015, so it’s ahead of schedule. Facebook’s enormous data centers are the humming, remote engines that make the company’s services possible. They don’t take up much space in the public eye, but…

Reader’s Digest Will Pay to Retweet You in Print

You there! Hooligan! How much to retweet that tweet about butts in our weekly print periodical? Twenty-five dollars, you say? Sold! At least, that’s how we’d like to imagine it went down. Because as more and more traditional newspapers are being forced to shutter their doors in favor of their internet-based brethren, the ones that…

Facebook Just Made It Super Easy to Kick Junk Out of Your News Feed

Facebook’s rolling out a handy little update that lets manage your News Feed better. It lets you see what pages or people you’re seeing the most of in your News Feed, and banish the ones you don’t like. Goodbye forever, Stupid Blog I Hate. In the settings portion of Facebook, select Manage News Feed. From…

5 Questions Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Answer As He Discussed Appletinis

This afternoon, Facebook users got a chance to interrogate Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s future. Well over 10,000 questions were submitted before the Q&A, many thoughtful, some pressing. So of course he answered the goofy ones. Zuckerberg was engaged and charming during the session. He (kind of) addressed why Facebook made people install Messenger, and…

​Twitter Takes Another Teeny Tiny Step Toward Becoming Facebook

Twitter tweaked its website design today to move the status bar where you compose a tweet a couple short inches from the right-hand corner to the center of the page. And guess what, it looks just like Facebook now. Before, you had to navigate alllll the way over to either the small nondescript compose button…

Facebook Just Created a Custom Tor Link and That’s Awesome

Facebook is often criticized over privacy concerns, but the social network just made a historic move in the name of security and anonymity. The social network just created a dedicated Tor link that ensures people who visit the site from the anonymous web browser won’t be mistaken for botnets. This is a big deal, mostly…