Maybe we shouldn’t delegate our freedom of speech to social networks…
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
edited by Marco Nurra
- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft have all signed a European Union pledge to combat racism and xenophobia on their platforms. For some, the EU’s online hate speech deal raises the specter of outsourced censorship.
- Do we trust social platforms to manage our collective expression? Do we need a First Amendment for social platforms? Here’s Buzzfeed’s call on social networks to provide transparency for user speech. “We are suggesting that the platforms make a public commitment not just to opaque and ad hoc rules, but to time-honored principles and process.”
- “The most important thing to remember is that beautiful speech doesn’t need protection — it’s ugly speech that needs protection,” Jeff Bezos said. “Somebody is going to write something very ugly, and certain people will say they need to be punished for that ugly speech. But if you step back and think about what a great society we have, a big part of it is the fact that we have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. We don’t have to like it. We don’t have to invite those people to our dinner parties. But you should let them say it.”
- Snapchat reportedly has more daily users than Twitter. What does that mean for news? Even though Snapchat is growing among younger users, Twitter remains a more popular platform for news consumption.
- That means that Snapchat is not interested in news? On the contrary, Snapchat is redesigning Discover to make it more like a newsstand. Instead of static media logos in circles, representing the channels, publishers will have an actual cover image to draw readers into the content, according to Digiday. One publisher said the cover images would make Snapchat content look more like a magazine — and hopefully attract more eyeballs.
- Mary Meeker released her 21st annual report on the biggest trends in technology and the Internet. The number of photos shared on the Internet has more than doubled in the last two years: more than three billion photos are shared everyday on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp. The chart also shows the rapid rise of Snapchat (shown in gold) in just a few years.
- Surprise! Readers want quality news, but aren’t willing to pay for it. “We have an incredible history as a news organization, going back 165 years. But we must answer some of the questions around what audiences want from news going forward, or we won’t have the same relevance in the next 165 years,” said Reuters EMEA commercial director Jeff Perkins in an interview.
- Media companies publishing to Facebook are reaching 42 per cent fewer people since January. Back in the fourth quarter and through January, media companies were doing phenomenally well. Then Facebook made a change to the algorithm. The new algorithm might have prioritised posts from individuals to try to reward them for sharing more personal stories on the network, as the report said the company was worried that people were writing less about events or thoughts from their own life. It could also have been trying to recalibrate the algorithm so people’s feeds did not feature several articles from the same news organisation consecutively and to prioritise video content, he added.
- Usage of ad-blocking software has doubled in the past year, a report says. Research from PageFair and Priori Data, which tracked downloads of ad-blocking software from app stores, shows that ad-blocking activity almost doubled in the past year, rising by 90%. More than 415 million people — or about 22% of the world’s smartphone owners — now use ad blockers on their mobile devices.
- 80 percent of those who know about ad blocking use it. A new survey of users found that only 41 percent of those surveyed were aware of ad blocking. But among those who are aware of it, 80 percent block ads on desktop and 46 percent do so on smartphones, suggesting it’s just awareness that’s holding back higher ad blocking adoption. And among those blocking, roughly half said they planned to ad block as long as they can.
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