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Facebook News: What is Happening right now?

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The rise and shine of social media and the internet have changed humanity for good. Thanks to social media, we can connect with anyone in seconds, no matter what corner of the world he is in.

It is impossible that we talk about social networks and don’t mention Facebook news.

We can easily say that Facebook is the one who started it all. Facebook started a phenomenon that has taken the world to its edge.

Almost everyone, irrespective of age gender, or region, has had a Facebook account at some point in their life.

And that is the charm of Facebook, unlike other social media platform that is confined to a certain age group, Facebook news is open to all.

But unfortunately, just like every day has its night the era of Facebook is probably ending too.

Facebook has been on top of the social pyramid for quite some time.

It’s the time it has to step aside and give the throne to newer networks like Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Why? Well, there are many reasons for that.

Gen Z is no more interested in Facebook News:

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While Millennials and Baby boomers were an all big fan of Facebook and welcomed it with wide arms, Gen Z is not so much.

Gen Z doesn’t find Facebook as interesting and exciting as some other networks like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.

Even millennials are losing their interest, I can say this positively as I, a proud millennial am losing interest in Facebook.

I no longer have the urge to spend hours and hours on Facebook like I used to do three or four years ago and I have noticed this trend in my fellow millennials as well.

According to a study, only 51% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 say they use Facebook, a dramatic drop from 71% who said they used the social network in a previous study in 2015.

It’s a reality: the time that users spend on Facebook news is getting smaller.

Although in 2017 the company obtained 56 percent more net income than the previous year, its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, reported that each day its 2,130 million unique monthly users are spending 50 million fewer hours within the social network.

Who’s to blame? Well, different people have different opinions.

Facebook News and Recent Changes in the Algorithm

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After presenting the results of the company for the fourth quarter of 2017, Zuckerberg revealed that the most recent changes in its algorithm are the main responsible for this decrease.

For example, the decision to show fewer viral videos to ensure that “people’s time is well spent” decreased user interest in the platform, according to the company.

It is a measure that is part of the premise that Facebook news has been promoting since last year: to stimulate “significant connections” between people instead of content consumption.

Zuckerberg wanted Facebook news to be a platform that helps connect people with their friends and families, and that is the reason for the new algorithm.

In early January the company announced that it will give higher priority to personal and friend publications than to brands and media.

Although the effects of this change are not yet known, Zuckerberg had already warned that the measure will also have an impact on the amount of time people spend on social networks.

Facebook News with Full of Controversies

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2018 was a year full of controversy for Facebook.

It faced the crisis of false news, the proliferation of hate speech within the social network, and Russian interference in the US presidential elections in 2016.

Analysts, governments, and entities have pointed to social networks for inadequate management of the information disseminated by their platforms, demanding prompt measures to avoid affecting their credibility.

Onavo Scandal

Facebook has earned a bad reputation in terms of freehand privacy.

Six years ago, Facebook bought Onavo, a company dedicated to mobile data statistics, and with it, it collected data that would later be crucial in such important decisions as the purchase of WhatsApp.

But the company led by Mark Zuckerberg has not stayed there to get our data and deliver it to other companies.

Since 2016 Facebook paid users between 13 and 35 years to install Facebook Research, a VPN that allowed the company to know all our web activity.

A paid program with up to 20 dollars a month and even more depending on the referrals obtained.

Being a VPN application with access to sensitive data, Facebook Research requested special permits to operate.

During the program, according to TechCrunch, Facebook Research even requested screens from Amazon’s history for users who participated in the program.

uTest, Applause and BetaBound were the services used for “Project Atlas”, the name that this program would receive and whose objective would be to find new trends throughout the web.

A program that puts users’ privacy at risk and was reason enough for Apple to decide to remove the application from its application store.

A decision that Facebook does not share.

Even minors can participate, although in this case up to 18 years old need the consent of their parents.

Facebook doesn’t take responsibility for their action as they say that it’s not spying because victims were getting paid.

Facebook News: Facebook sued for video game scandals

The scandals are on Facebook news, which after several privacy scandals now faces a claim that the company would have taken advantage of minors to get more income from online games.

Some minors spent thousands of dollars without realizing it.

Some of the children who spent money on those add-ons for Facebook video games did not understand what they were doing, although Facebook employees did detect it.

One of those children came to spend $ 6,500 on all kinds of items for the characters he handled in these games, and in some cases, those parents tried to recover those funds even going to court.

The increase in these return requests caused the limits that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) establishes to detect fraudulent practices to be exceeded.

Often the child did not realize that what he was doing cost real money, something that confirmed the parents of these children.

Those purchases were hidden as small buttons in the corners that allowed them to gain more magical powers, more weapons, or more lives to play.

More than 9% of that money was claimed by the credit card companies at the request of parents who had realized that they had not authorized that expense and their children had used those credit cards without knowing it.

Facebook decided to reach an agreement with those affected by agreeing to launch a process to manage the “in-app” return requests made by minors in the United States.

Mishandling of Private Information:

The New York Times published an investigation on Facebook.

According to the details revealed, Mark Zuckerberg’s company allowed Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and other large companies to access private messages and obtain data from their users.

The research is based on hundreds of pages of internal Facebook documents and interviews with more than 50 employees of the company.

A work where it is stated that the Facebook news market and data are larger than many users knew.

Given the new details, Facebook and the other companies involved have been quick to issue a statement offering their position.

It would be the case of Microsoft, where Facebook allowed the search engine Bing to access the names of all the friends on the social network.

A similar case occurred with Netflix and Spotify, where Facebook allowed those companies to read the private messages of Facebook users.

Amazon would also have made use of Facebook data, specifically, the e-commerce giant obtained names and contact information through friends.

In Yahoo, it allowed seeing the publications of friends. A type of data that a few years ago had announced that they would stop sharing.

In total, according to the NYT, more than 150 different companies benefited from the data of millions of users.

The oldest agreements date from 2010, but also from 2017 and even some were still active during 2018.

In response to this information, some of the large companies named as Amazon or Microsoft said that the data were used appropriately but they refused to discuss more details

Facebook News: Facebook Hacked in late 2018

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A hack endangered almost 50 million user accounts. Facebook developers discovered the security breach on September 25.

From Facebook, they inform that the researchers of the company are still not clear about how it happened, but they do know where the problem was centered.

They assured their users that no passwords were obtained, nor the bank accounts of the users.

In principle, it seemed that the attackers only had access to the information of the profiles as if it were with the “see how” function.

That is to say, they have been able to see gender, photos, the city of residence, and the place of study. The typical information that appears in the user profiles.

Facebook indicates that not only have 50 million accounts been violated, but there are another 40 million that could be in danger.

As a preventive measure, they will reset the tokens of all these accounts.

Affected users will have to log in again on all their devices and will receive a message telling them what the reason was.

It remains to be resolved exactly how the attack was carried out and where it came from, as well as the information that could have been breached.

Now one of Facebook’s most important challenges is to convince its users that it is responsible enough to handle the incredible amount of data that the company handles.

Facebook’s clear history privacy tool? Real or just false promises?

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Last year Facebook announced that it is launching a new tool to protect the privacy of its users.

What this program is supposed to do is it can delete your personal history from 3rd party apps and prevents them from using it for their gains.

How will it do that? We don’t know. It’s rather ironic coming from a company that itself was accused of stealing and selling people’s private information.

Maybe Facebook is trying to amend its reputation and it’s all for a good purpose as they say.

But the problem is that they promised the launch of this tool by the start of 2019 but it’s not out yet. It’s facing delays and postpones again and again.

They are claiming that it will be finally launched by the end of 2019.

Now we will see if Facebook keeps its promise and provide its users with a valuable tool or if these are mere rumors to gain the trust of users once again.

Is it the end of Facebook? Facebook News

Well, the answer is no. Despite all of these reasons, Facebook is still the biggest social media network out there.

The financial results presented by Facebook for 2018 are quite clear.

Practically all the metrics have continued to grow and show us how the social network machine is very well-oiled.

Facebook remains the social network with the most users, with 2.320 million monthly users.

A figure that does not include WhatsApp or Instagram. Of this amount, more than 1,500 million people visit it daily, which represents approximately 66% of the total.

A figure that has remained stable over the years.

The loss of the users and all these scandals, however, does not seem to be impacting Facebook, and not only because the company purchased WhatsApp and Instagram.

But because Facebook itself as an advertising platform continues to increase profits and hardly notices this bad press in the number of monthly active users.

It is often said that they have no competitors and that even a rival company like Google has not succeeded in dealing with them.

In other Facebook News, we will see what happens in the future and if, in the end, Zuckerberg decides to unify their platforms.

What does seem clear is that the company is solid and large enough to receive all kinds of scandals and also break records of users and benefits. Too big to fall?