by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : To stop false news from spreading on its platform, Facebook has said it put in place a three-pronged strategy that constitutes removing accounts and content that violate its policies, reducing distribution of inauthentic content and informing people by giving them more context on the posts they see.
Another part of its strategy in some countries is partnering with third-party fact-checkers to review and rate the accuracy of articles and posts on Facebook, Tessa Lyons, a Facebook product manager on News Feed focused on false news, said in a statement on Thursday.
The social media giant is facing criticism for its role in enabling political manipulation in several countries around the world. It has also come under the scanner for allegedly fuelling ethnic conflicts owing to its failure stop the deluge of hate-filled posts against the disenfranchised Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar.
“False news is bad for people and bad for Facebook. We’re making significant investments to stop it from spreading and to promote high-quality journalism and news literacy,” Lyons said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday told the European Parliament leaders that the social networking giant is trying to plug loopholes across its services, including curbing fake news and political interference on its platform in the wake of upcoming elections globally, including in India.
Lyons said Facebook’s three-pronged strategy roots out the bad actors that frequently spread fake stories.
“It dramatically decreases the reach of those stories. And it helps people stay informed without stifling public discourse,” Lyons added.
Although false news does not violate Facebook’s Community Standards, it often violates the social network’s polices in other categories, such as spam, hate speech or fake accounts, which it removes remove.
“For example, if we find a Facebook Page pretending to be run by Americans that’s actually operating out of Macedonia, that violates our requirement that people use their real identities and not impersonate others. So we’ll take down that whole Page, immediately eliminating any posts they made that might have been false,” Lyons explained.
Apart from this, Facebook is also using machine learning to help its teams detect fraud and enforce its policies against spam.
“We now block millions of fake accounts every day when they try to register,” Lyons added.
A lot of the misinformation that spreads on Facebook is financially motivated, much like email spam in the 90s, the social network said.
If spammers can get enough people to click on fake stories and visit their sites, they will make money off the ads they show.
“We’re figuring out spammers’ common tactics and reducing the distribution of those kinds of stories in News Feed. We’ve started penalizing clickbait, links shared more frequently by spammers, and links to low-quality web pages, also known as ‘ad farms’,” Lyons said.
“We also take action against entire Pages and websites that repeatedly share false news, reducing their overall News Feed distribution,” Lyons said.
Facebook said it does not want to make money off of misinformation or help those who create it profit, and so such publishers are not allowed to run ads or use its monetisation features like Instant Articles.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews, Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
Sandeep Bhushan, Director, Facebook India and South Asia
By Nishant Arora,
Gurugram (Haryana) : When we talk about advertising potential on Facebook, the fact is that 2.2 billion global users — almost a quarter of the world’s population — constitute the largest marketplace on Earth that can be explored better with intelligent communication and targeted, age-specific outreach.
Facebook India has done its homework and has real, contemporary data based on primary research and insights survey on how Indians, especially millennials, are shopping on smartphones and still, many fall off the grid and cancel orders in the middle of their purchase journey.
In India, there are nearly 380 million smartphone users as of today, according to Counterpoint Research.
The number of Internet users in India will reach 500 million by June, says a joint report by The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB. On the other hand, the mobile phone customer base now stands at over 1.17 billion, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
Facebook today has 217 million users in India — a huge market to tap into and advertisers know this well — and are aware of the future too when seven in 10 smartphone purchases will be mobile influenced by 2022.
“We now have reliable data how people are buying on smartphones. We can make their path to purchase smooth, make those quickers reduce friction, increase sales and cut costs for businesses,” Sandeep Bhushan, Director, Facebook India and South Asia, told IANS in an interview.
“We are mapping the friction and planning products and tools for businesses to reduce the friction and, therefore, can provide greater value for businesses and consumers alike in a secure way,” Bhushan added.
Currently, mobile influences 58 per cent of smartphone purchase decisions, amounting to $8.5 billion worth of sales and it is expected to grow 1.8 times to reach 73 per cent and influence $15.6 billion worth of sales by 2022, according to a joint Facebook-KPMG report.
Facebook influences 33 per cent of purchase decisions amounting to $4.8 billion worth of sales and it is expected to grow two times to reach 44 per cent and influence $9.5 billion worth of sales by 2022.
According to Bhushan, Facebook is ready to help smartphone brands reduce the consumer drop-off from their purchase journey, creating $3.1 billion worth of potential revenue for them by 2022.
“We can reduce purchase time by 14 odd per cent. We also know that sales can go by up to $3 billion, built on the fact that consumers will use mobiles for various purposes and the device offers all kinds of possibilities. We can do right messaging at the right place with mobile and cut the friction,” Bhushan informed.
After facing the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook recently cleared that it does not tell advertisers who you are or sell your information to anyone.
“We provide advertisers with reports about the kinds of people seeing their ads and how their ads are performing, but we don’t share information that personally identifies you. You can always see the ‘interests’ assigned to you in your ad preferences, and if you want, remove them,” Rob Goldman, Vice President, Ads at Facebook, wrote recently in a blog post.
Facebook’s mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 91 per cent of advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2018 — up from approximately 85 per cent of advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2017.
“We understand that consumers are different — men, women, young, old, affluent and non-affluent — and have different purchasing patterns. Businesses can reach the right audience on Facebook where they can target by age.
“Consumers below age 25 are more tech-savvy; so businesses can provide them with deeper, technical information about a product. For consumers like me, all I need to know is my favourite brand has a new feature or not. This is what we do — simplify the path to purchase,” Bhushan told IANS.
To take the vision closer to reality, Facebook is already running a programme with one big smartphone player.
“In this programme, the moment you see an ad, you click, the lead form opens, auto populates, you click again and get a call from the promotor of the retail store next to you within an hour,” the Facebook India executive informed.
“We have interesting, intelligent forms which are auto-filled that gives customers flexibility and mental peace. All of this was not possible earlier,” Bhushan told IANS.
The data lets advertisers reach the right people, including millions of small businesses, who rely on Facebook every day to reach people who might be interested in their product.
“We are ready for products in any Internet situation. 2G is still default in India despite so much 4G talk as there are more mobile handset users that smartphone ones; so we have covered them too with Facebook Lite,” Bhushan stressed.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : After Facebook and Google, Microsoft has now banned advertisements showing cryptocurrencies and related products from its Bing search engine.
“Because cryptocurrency and related products are not regulated, we have found them to present a possible elevated risk to our users with the potential for bad actors to participate in predatory behaviours, or otherwise scam consumers,” Melissa Alsoszatai-Petheo, Advertiser policy manager at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
“To help protect our users from this risk, we have made the decision to disallow advertising for cryptocurrency, its related products, and un-regulated binary options,” she added.
Bing Ads will implement this change globally in June, with enforcement rolling out in late June to early July.
Google in March announced that it would ban advertisements for cryptocurrencies and other “speculative financial products” across its ad platforms.
The ban on such advertisements would come into force from June.
In January, social media giant Facebook banned all ads promoting cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and ICOs.
According to media reports, Twitter was also likely to ban cryptocurrency, token sales and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) advertisements on its platform.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
London : Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has no plans as of now to face members of a British parliamentary committee probing the misuse of the firm’s data its practice of collecting user information, the media reported.
In a letter to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Rebecca Stimson, Facebook’s Head of Public Policy in the UK, said that “Zuckerberg has no plans to meet with the committee or travel to the UK at the present time”, theregister.co.uk reported on Tuesday.
The committee had expressed dissatisfaction with Facebook’s response to various points it raised including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web and budgets for investigations.
Stimson’s letter, however, did not dampen the desire of the committee to hear from Zuckerberg directly.
“Although Facebook says Zuckerberg has no plans to travel to the UK, we would also be open to taking his evidence by video link, if that would be the only way to do this during the period of our inquiry,” said Chair of the Committee Damian Collins in response to Stimson’s letter.
“For too long these companies have gone unchallenged in their business practices, and only under public pressure from this Committee and others have they begun to fully cooperate with our requests,” Collins added.
The committee issued Facebook 39 questions it said the firm’s Chief technology Officer Mike Schroepfer had failed to answer in his evidence to the parliamentarians.
The committee said Facebook’s latest responses to these questions do not fully answer each point with sufficient detail or data evidence.
The committee said it plans to write again to address significant gaps in Facebook’s answers in the coming days.
“It is disappointing that a company with the resources of Facebook chooses not to provide a sufficient level of detail and transparency on various points including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web, budgets for investigations, and that shows general discrepancies between Schroepfer and Zuckerberg’s respective testimonies,” Collins said.
“Given that these were follow up questions to questions Schroepfer previously failed to answer, we expected both detail and data, and in a number of cases got excuses,” Collins added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
Washington : Democrats from the US House Intelligence Committee have released thousands of advertisements that were run on Facebook by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) to influence the 2016 US Presidential election.
The Democrats on Thursday released 3,519 such ads purchased by the IRA during the 2014-2016 period.
“More than 11.4 million American users were exposed to those advertisements. The data made available today does not include the 80,000 pieces of organic content shared on Facebook by the IRA. We expect to make this content public in the future,” the House Intelligence Committee said in a statement.
Exposure of organic content may have reached more than 126 million Americans, it added.
“The Facebook advertisements we are publishing today have been carefully reviewed by the Committee Minority and redacted by Facebook to protect personally-identifiable information (PII),” the statement said.
“Russia sought to weaponise social media to drive a wedge between Americans, and in an attempt to sway the 2016 election,” tweeted Adam Schiff, Democrats’ ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.
Reacting to Schiff, Facebook said that it gave more than 3,000 ads to Congress so they could better understand the extent of Russian interference in the last US Presidential election.
“In the run-up to the 2016 elections, we were focused on the kinds of cybersecurity attacks typically used by nation states, for example, phishing and malware attacks. And we were too slow to spot this type of information operations interference. Since then, we’ve made important changes to prevent bad actors from using misinformation to undermine the democratic process,” Facebook said in a blog post late Friday.
On February 16, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian individuals and three Russian organisations for engaging in operations to interfere with US political and electoral processes, including the 2016 Presidential election.
Throughout the indictment, Mueller lays out important facts about the activities of the IRA, the notorious Russian “troll” farm, and its operatives.
—IANS
