Despite employing a small army of contractors to monitor posts, it’s clear the company is no longer fit for purposeWay back in the 1950s, a pioneering British cybernetician, W Ross Ashby, proposed a fundamental law of dynamic systems. In his book An Introduction to Cybernetics, he formulated his law of requisite variety, which defines “the minimum number of states necessary for a controller to control a system of a given number of states”. In plain English, it boils down to this: for a system to be viable, it has to be able to absorb or cope with the complexity of its environment. And there are basically only two ways of achieving viability in those terms: either the system manages to control (or reduce) the variety of its environment, or it has to increase its internal capacity (its “variety”) to match what is being thrown at it from the environment.Sounds abstruse, I know, but it has a contemporary resonance. Specifically, it provides a way of understanding some of the current internal turmoil in Facebook as it grapples with the problem of keeping unacceptable, hateful or psychotic content off its platform. Two weeks ago, the New York Times was leaked 1,400 pages from the rulebooks that the company’s moderators are trying to follow as they police the stuff that flows through its servers. According to the paper, the leak came from an employee who said he “feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight – and making too many mistakes”.... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2019-01-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook tracks everyone who visits its site, including people who don’t have an account, and even continues to track users and non-users who have opted out of targeted ads, researchers at two Belgian universities have found.Researchers at the University of Leuven in cooperation with researchers... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2015-03-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook is revealing its latest technology to the world this week at its annual Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco. And while the show is geared at developers, a good chunk of the news should apply to brands and publishers that regularly use the platform, particularly with mobile... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2015-03-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The controversial news that media outlets including The New York Times and BuzzFeed may publish straight into Facebook’s ecosystem was a hot topic at Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, where hundreds of digital publishing executives are gathering this week to hash out the issues... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2015-03-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook is positioning itself to become the data, media-consumption and content-sharing backbone for the entire digital media industry. Between making user data available in its video ad network LiveRail, making its video player embeddable on publishers' websites, growing its number of... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2015-03-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The march towards media companies publishing content directly to Facebook continues.Barely a month after Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said publicly that the social network wants to host media companies' articles and videos, The New York Times reported that BuzzFeed, National... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2015-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The social network, eager to get more out of its booming video player, is testing out a feature that makes it easy to binge.This week, The New York Times reported that Facebook is in talks to host content from BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and the Times within the blue confines of its own site,... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2015-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Now that Facebook has video ads, how is it going to make sure you hang around to watch more of them? According to a report on The Information, the social network is in talks with publishers like Vice, The Onion and Vox Media to make short-term videos... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2015-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The news that Facebook is working with publishers to host their content has caused a lot of hand-wringing among those who worry about ceding too much control of ad revenue and data. But in some cases, it can make sense for a publisher. For new or small ones, Facebook's exposure can help them... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2015-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook announced its video advertising platform LiveRail will enable publishers to use anonymized Facebook user data to target ads on their sites and mobile apps. It will provide assurance that media buyers are indeed buying the audience segments they want to reach,... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2015-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous. With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2015-03-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook has been in discussions with nearly a half a dozen media organizations about hosting their content on the social media site, according to The New York Times.Placing content inside Facebook will allow people to access it faster, sources familiar with the plan told the Times. When people... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2015-03-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook’s Messenger app has traditionally been used for keeping in touch with friends. Now people can also use it to send each other money. In the future, it could become a platform which other apps could use, if recent rumors prove true.This Wednesday and Thursday at its F8 conference in San... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2015-03-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Longterm subscription funding platform Patreon adds creators after acquiring Subbable, a similiar platform founded by the Green brothers. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Israeli-based quiz and list publishing platform uses content from organisations including such as the Daily Telegraph and AOLQuiz and list publishing platform PlayBuzz has announced it has raised $16m (£11m) in venture capital funding to drive international expansion.The second funding round,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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New media titans have shown they can attract investors' money, raking in millions in venture capital funding, but they have not answered clearly whether they can show a profit.At South by Southwest, sales chiefs for three heavily-funded digital publishers said they can do that too, or can soon,... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2015-03-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"@TheBuzzer," a Fox Sports network show that exists almost entirely on social platforms, has reduced its output on YouTube over the past several months in favor of publishing videos directly to Facebook and Twitter. In doing so, it has found that Twitter is best for videos about breaking news... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2015-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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John Smith’s Bookshop chain has triumphed at the Academic, Professional & Specialist Awards, scooping all four titles it was eligible for. Meanwhile Oxford University Press has won Publisher of the Year yet again. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook was a focus of the first day of the IPG spring conference in Chipping Norton yesterday (4th March), which saw Perseus reveal the inside story on having a book selected for the Facebook Book Club, while publishers told they are "too nice" and need to develop more attitude if they are to... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook continues its campaign to invade Google's ad-tech turf.Facebook is building an ad exchange that would automate the sale of other publishers' ads, according to people familiar with the matter. LiveRail, the online video ad-tech firm that Facebook bought last summer, will be the one... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2015-03-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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U.K. publishers are employing a number of tactics to garner Facebook traffic. Digiday spoke to five of the UK publishers in the top 10 to receive traffic from the social network -- and learned a few tricks. Having engineered its sites for mobile -- and consequently, social -- six of Trinity... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2015-03-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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