Facebook has taken a leaf out of YouTube's book and launched an app and website specifically geared towards "creators" (people who post videos to its platform). The app is essentially a rebrand of the celebrity app Facebook Mentions, which was promoted as a better way to build communities. In fact, users will only be able to find the new Facebook Creator in the App Store when searching "Facebook Mentions", despite the actual title having changed. The app is meant to make it easier for creators to post videos, go live, and connect with their communities. It offers exclusive features like adding intros and...
Messenger Day -- the Facebook Messenger version of WhatsApp Status and Instagram Stories -- is no more. Instead, the feature has been rehashed and renamed. No longer will Messenger Day be treated as a standalone feed. It will instead form part of Facebook Stories -- a Snapchat clone that already features on the base Facebook app. "Starting today, we are introducing a new experience called Stories, connecting Messenger Day and Facebook Stories," the company wrote on its Messenger page. "Any photos or videos you add to your Stories will appear on both Facebook and Messenger, and will be shared with the same...
Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor will check to see if Facebook is abiding by a Russian data storage law -- and the result may lead to the company blocked from the country altogether. "In the near future Roskomnadzor will plan a series of supervisory activities aimed at analyzing the activities of the administration of Facebook in terms of the processing of Russian users’ personal information, the terms of services for users, and the content of existing legislation," it said in a statement Wednesday carried by the Interfax news agency, according to Reuters. The law, which came into effect last year, requires websites that store citizens' personal data to do...
Worried that an abusive ex may upload intimate images of you to social media? Facebook may have a solution for you, though maybe not in the way you expect. The company is testing a feature in Australia that lets users send their images to themselves on Messenger, allowing the platform to store the images' digital footprints and prevent anyone else from uploading them in the future. While this feature may set all your danger instincts on high alert, the company says that it isn't actually storing your images (which are secured by end-to-end encryption) but rather their hash values or links. Facebook then uses the photo-matching...
At the end of October, Facebook broke the news that it planned to introduce a new advertising feature that would lead to any paid posts run by brands becoming readily visible to anyone who visited the page. What this effectively means is the end of the concept known as "dark posts", which allowed brands to choose not to publish specific pieces of content organically to their page, but instead, only promote them to a highly specific audience via paid budget amplification. Although the change comes as a direct response from Facebook to combat unfair paid political tactics on social media channels,...
Facebook's userbase is a curious number. Not only is it the largest of any social network on the planet at 2.07-billion users per month, it also has more duplicate accounts than Snapchat has users. The company's earning report, released Wednesday, announced a spike of over 60-million users in Q3 2017. Daily active users are also up, now tipping the 1.4-billion mark. But lurking within these numbers are some 207-million duplicate accounts. "This quarter, we implemented a new methodology to help identify duplicate accounts," noted CFO David Wehner in an earnings call. "As a result, we increased our estimates for duplicate accounts to approximately...
Facebook has been touting its artificial-intelligence services as a way to quickly identify those promoting terrorist content on the platform, but not all of these services are as foolproof as the company would have us believe. Last week, Israeli police arrested a Palestinian construction worker when Facebook's translation tool mistakenly translated the Arabic for "good morning" to "attack them" in Hebrew, and "hurt them" in English, according to Gizmodo. Police were notified of the post, and were suspicious of the accompanying image that showed the worker leaning on a bulldozer, which has been used as a weapon in previous terrorist attacks. No Arabic-speaking police officer...
Facebook has been testing a feature that separates friends' posts from public pages' in six countries, but it says there are no current plans to roll the test out further. The test is a response to user complaints about clogged News Feeds that are now filled with the likes of memes and recipe videos rather than friends' personal updates. In Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia, Facebook currently has two tabs: one for the common News Feed, which is purely personal posts from friends, and one called Explore, with posts from pages. This "Explore" tab is different in other parts of the world,...
Two videos of a little girl coerced into stealing items from shoppers' handbags in Cape Town have gone viral on Facebook. Published on 19 October by Facebook user Tyron-Nicklaus Norman, the two clips have since accumulated a combined 1.6-million views with an additional 21 000 shares. In the post, Norman explains the circumstances of the second video in which his wife was a victim. "Hi everyone, My wife was a victim of pick pocketing this evening. The part that is most sickening is that it was a little girl that did it," he writes. "She was being forced by a grown up woman...
If you're too lazy to visit a restaurant, or even open your favourite food ordering app, Facebook now lets you place orders for delivery or pick up directly from its app and website. The company's VP of local Alex Himel today announced the move in a press release. "Today, we’re taking the time out of finding what you want to eat by officially launching the ability to order food for pick-up or delivery, directly on Facebook," he writes. "People already go to Facebook to figure out what to eat by reading about nearby restaurants, and seeing what their friends say about...
Facebook executives are gearing up to "push toward even greater transparency" in a series of live interviews with digital news site Axios. As part of the company's Hard Questions series -- heretofore existing only in the form of blog posts -- the company is opening up to reporters and editors from multiple news outlets and independent groups. At least in the case of Axios, Facebook says that the reporters will "fully control the questions and resulting coverage". The company says that it looks to take on the "most crucial topics in social media" -- including terrorism, hate speech, and Russian propaganda. The first interview will see...
Facebook and Instagram users across the world are today experiencing connectivity issues. Reports from users on Twitter and websites like DownDetector and Outage Report suggest that connection issues began around 5pm SAST. Facebook is having issues since 11:11 AM ESThttps://t.co/YbrNS7dpo9 RT if you're also affected #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/b5q3KqwkKs — Outage Report (@ReportOutage) October 11, 2017 On Facebook, users were unable to post status updates while Instagram users experienced a similar issue. The outage affected users across the world, including Japan, Brazil, India, the majority of Europe and the United States. In our tests, both Facebook and Instagram are seemingly up in South Africa. #FacebookDown began trending on Twitter...
Mark Zuckerberg has made some pretty tone-deaf moves in his time. Earlier this month, the Facebook CEO implied that people upset about Russian propaganda were as bad as those who wanted liberal content removed from Facebook. But just when you think he can't do worse, he goes and scores a personal best. This time, the Zuck appeared in a livestream promoting a Facebook VR tool as a cartoon version of himself in disaster-stricken Puerto Rico. Along with Facebook's head of social virtual reality Rachel Franklin, Zuckerberg toured the flooded areas as Puerto Ricans worked around his smiling, high-fiving avatar. Many citizens in the US-territory are...
US President Donald Trump and his administration have made it their mission to sow a distrust for the media throughout the US -- and the prevalence of "fake news" sites isn't helping -- but Facebook is looking to restore the broken relationship its users have with journalism. The company has begun a test to give users more information on the news articles that appear on their timelines. This information -- accessed by clicking a lower case "i" -- includes a background on the original publication, a look at related articles, and a map of where the article is being shared. It will also...
Facebook has revealed that 10-million US users were shown Russian propaganda ads that may have interfered with the 2016 US election -- and that may not be the final number. In a blog post connected to the company's Hard Questions series, Vice President of Policy and Communications Elliot Schrage provided more clarity on an issue that has been intentionally left murky. Schrage said that the total reach of dubious Russian ads was 10-million people, but only 44% of ad impressions (the number of times ads were displayed) were before the election. The company has not clarified user reach prior to the election. In 2016, the...
Trump, Merkel and other world leaders star in new G7 Summit meme
Upcoming petrol price hike sends South Africans into mild Twitter panic
WATCH: dramatic video of Cape Town cash-in-transit heist emerges
Viral video: 22-year-old ‘Spiderman’ saves dangling child in Paris high-rise rescue
The future of marketing is data-driven, creative, and (most importantly) people-based
WATCH: dramatic video of Cape Town cash-in-transit heist emerges
Aussies struggle to watch World Cup after Optus’s streaming goofs
Hi again loadshedding: Eskom’s really unfunny meme is back in South Africa
Robbie Williams (and his World Cup middle finger) spikes Google Search traffic
Daredevil raccoon out-trends Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un as it scales skyscraper
Memeburn focuses on everything digital in the emerging markets sphere. More about us here
