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Facebook While Facebook prepares to offer readers a way to  subscribe and pay for news  directly from inside its app, the social network continues to tinker with how it presents publishers’ content elsewhere. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook has removed Instant Articles — Facebook’s self-hosted, faster-loading article format for mobile — from Messenger. “As we continue to refine and improve Instant Articles — and in order to have the greatest impact on people and publishers — we’re focusing our investment in Instant Articles in the Facebook core app and are no longer offering Instant Articles in Messenger,” a spokesperson said. “We believe that Messenger is an exciting channel for new and interesting news consumption experiences, including the opportunity to build unique messaging experiences in Messenger that many publishers (including TechCrunch) have executed successfully via the Messenger Platform.” Instant Article...

Facebook collects a lot of your data, but you might never get to see what they really learn about you. Data Selfie aims to give you a glimpse by letting you analyze your own Facebook usage. While there’s no way to know exactly how Facebook analyzes your data without working for the company, Data Selfie gives you a rough approximation. Once you add it to Chrome, the extension tracks your activity on Facebook. Everything from what you click on to what you type. Data Selfie stores that information locally and doesn’t share it with anyone (though obviously Facebook is tracking it). After a while of usage, you can generate a report that will let you explore what someone could learn about from your activity. It shows simple things like the pages and people you spend the most time with, as well as complex thoughts like how you lean politically, or whether you’re more relaxed or emotional. If you’ve never paid attention to how simple things like your Facebook activity...

Facebook’s CEO today asked the question on the tip of most of our tongues: are we building the world we all want? In just under 7,000 words, Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto addressed the company mantra — connecting the world — while taking stock of the current political climate, socio-economic impact of globalization on its users, and the need to accelerate scientific research to address issues like climate change and pandemics. It was, in a word, epic. Zuckerberg’s plan, as you would expect, started with Facebook. The message revolved around community. Zuckerberg asked, and addressed, Facebook’s role in building “supportive,” “safe,” “informed,” “civically-engaged,” and “inclusive” communities. Here’s what he had to say. Supportive communities Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location. When we do this, beyond connecting on...

GIFs are commonplace in our conversations today, and messaging apps are constantly taking advantage of them and making it easier to insert them into a conversation. Facebook Messenger added native support for GIF search last year, and now it’s adding further support for GIFs on Android by taking advantage of  Gboard’s built-in  search feature… In case you missed it, Google’s Gboard keyboard for Android recently, and quietly, expanded support for GIFs outside of Android Nougat, allowing for users on almost any OS version to quickly search for GIFs via the keyboard. Granted, the process is a little smoother on Nougat with supported apps. Twitter  added the feature  earlier this month, and now Facebook Messenger is too. However, with built-in GIF search already in Facebook Messenger, you might be wondering why you would want to use GIF search via a keyboard like Google’s Gboard? The simple answer is diversity.  Android Police  points out that Mess...

Don’t get me wrong — I love Likes. They continue to serve as a simple way for people to show support for a thought, product offering or opinion, and they have provided marketers with a valuable tool to measure media effectiveness. Unlike the one-way nature of other media, social feedback mechanisms allow you to see how your audience is responding to different types of content with one lightning-fast, simple metric. But ever since  Facebook Reactions  were introduced, things have become a bit more complicated. A Like has always signified support for a message, where negative thoughts had to be expressed in comment feeds, or perhaps, not at all. Facebook Reactions (represented as Love, Sad, Wow, Angry and Laughing icons) have changed the way users can express their feelings for a piece of content. As marketers who love data, we should be taking advantage of any information that can help us create better posts. Reaction data is exactly that — signals fro...

While President Trump has helped make Twitter a regular part of the national conversation, the business behind the microblogging service is not looking up. That feeling was only reinforced by the meager revenues the  company reported  on Thursday. Things look especially slow when you compare the platform to rival social media apps. As this chart from  Statista shows, after gaining hundreds of millions of users in its first few years, Twitter has only added 31 million monthly active users over the past two years. Facebook's suite of behemoths have easily surpassed that over the same time frame, while Snapchat has outpaced it as well (though it has  slowed recently , too). Now, Twitter serves a much narrower niche than Facebook, so the fact that it can't keep up makes sense. But even with that in mind, the company appears to be in a prolonged rut.

Rob Price   Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.AP Mark Zuckerberg's wildly ambitious plan to treat and cure all diseases has made a step forward with the announcement that it is funding dozens of scientists over the next five years. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organisation run by the Facebook cofounder and pediatrician Priscilla Chan, his wife.  Launched with a $3 billion (£2.4 billion) cheque book in September 2016 , its aim is to help "cure all disease" by the end of the twenty-first century, with a focus on investing in long-term scientific research that wouldn't necessarily pay off straight away. Part of the CZI is the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a medical research organisation — and on Wednesday,  the Biohub announced it is providing $50 million (£40 million) in funding to researchers, TechCrunch reports . The cash is going to 47 different people, to fund their research for the next five years with up to $1.5 million (£1.2 million...

Facebook's ad policies have been updated to increase opportunity and prohibit discrimination. Tamar Weinberg Late last year, Facebook committed to updating  its ad targeting  practices to prevent discrimination for housing, employment or credit-related ads. Today, the company is  putting  its ad discrimination policy into practice with policy updates, tools and further education. Policy updates Facebook is strengthening its stance with clearly defined prohibitions against ads with discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability or medical/genetic condition. Education Facebook has also updated its policy with a  section  about discriminatory practices. Advertisers are prohibited from wrongfully targeting or excluding audiences in their ads. This section expands to groups of individuals who are connected to the ACLU, Department of Justice — ...

The Facebook logo is displayed on their website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France, February 1, 2017 Social media companies Facebook, Google and a group of news organizations launched an initiative on Monday to tackle fake news stories in France, with the media in the spotlight as the country's presidential election approaches. Facebook said it would work with several leading French news organizations, including Agence France-Presse, BFM TV, and newspapers L'Express and Le Monde to ensure that false news items were not published on its platform. Google also said it was part of the initiative, dubbed "Cross Check" by the partners. Facebook has faced criticism that it did not do enough to prevent false information being republished on its platform during last year's U.S presidential campaign, and in response has set up measures to try to tackle the problem. There have been similar concerns that people could disseminate false information on Faceb...

6Facebook Inc cruised past Wall Street's earnings and revenue expectations on Wednesday with strong growth in its mobile ad business, demonstrating that controversy over so-called "fake news" and inaccurate advertising measurements had little impact on its financial performance. With quarterly profit of $3.57 billion, more than double the $1.56 billion it reported a year ago, the company showed no signs of slowdown in growth. The results handily beat analysts' expectations, and shares ticked up about 0.2 percent in after-hours trading. The company had warned in November that ad growth would likely slow "meaningfully" due to limits on ad load - the total number of ads Facebook can show to each user. But there was little sign of that in the fourth quarter as total revenue soared to $8.81 billion from $5.84 billion a year ago. "I think the rate of growth will decline, but it will remain very high," said analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities...

Facebook Inc cruised past Wall Street's earnings and revenue expectations on Wednesday with strong growth in its mobile ad business, demonstrating that controversy over so-called "fake news" and inaccurate advertising measurements had little impact on its financial performance. With quarterly profit of $3.57 billion, more than double the $1.56 billion it reported a year ago, the company showed no signs of slowdown in growth. The results handily beat analysts' expectations, and shares ticked up about 0.2 percent in after-hours trading. The company had warned in November that ad growth would likely slow "meaningfully" due to limits on ad load - the total number of ads Facebook can show to each user. But there was little sign of that in the fourth quarter as total revenue soared to $8.81 billion from $5.84 billion a year ago. "I think the rate of growth will decline, but it will remain very high," said analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities....

Among Silicon Valley’s top tech employers, Facebook Inc could be the most vulnerable to U.S. President Donald Trump’s expected crackdown on guest-worker visas, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Labor Department filings. More than 15 percent of Facebook's U.S. employees in 2016 used a temporary work visa, giving the social media leader a legal classification as a H-1B “dependent” company. That is a higher proportion than Alphabet Inc's Google, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc or Microsoft Corp. (Click tmsnrt.rs/2l28fLH for a graphic showing H-1B visa applications and average pay) That could cause problems for Facebook if Trump or Congress decide to make the H-1B program more restrictive, as the president and some Republican lawmakers have threatened to do. Both Trump and Attorney General nominee Senator Jeff Sessions have opposed the program in its current form. They have also indicated that they are open to reforming it to “ensure the beneficiaries of t...