Online Dating and Social Media Insights

Instagram sent shockwaves through the social media community on Monday when it announced that it’s pausing any further development of its “Instagram Kids” project. 

For months, the Facebook-owned company has resisted urges from advocacy groups and state attorneys general to shelve the idea. It tried to quell the hue and cry by announcing new safety features for younger users. In a blog post, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said the company’s original intentions were good. 

“We started this project to address an important problem seen across our industry: kids are getting phones younger and younger, misrepresenting their age, and downloading apps that are meant for those 13 or older … We’re announcing these steps today so we can get it right.”

Instagram defends app but decides to pull the plug

The straw that may have broken Instagram’s steadfastness came in the form of a Wall Street Journal article. In its report, the Journal asserted that Instagram’s own in-house research suggested that there was a “significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.”

Instagram executive Pratiti Raychoudhury responded to the article, saying that it doesn’t accurately reflect the facts. “It is simply not accurate that this research demonstrates Instagram is ‘toxic’ for teen girls. The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced.” 

Raychoudhury claims that more teenage girls who struggle with issues like loneliness, anxiety, sadness, and eating said that Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse. The only area where teen girls supposedly said Instagram wasn’t helpful was when it came to body image. 

Despite its defense of the project, Instagram ultimately decided to pull the plug on the app after facing wave after wave of criticism. However, Mosseri still says the idea has merit. 

“We firmly believe that it’s better for parents to have the option to give their children access to a version of Instagram that is designed for them — where parents can supervise and control their experience — than relying on an app’s ability to verify the age of kids who are too young to have an ID,” he wrote. 

Two U.S. senators say they will launch an investigation into allegations that Facebook is aware that its popular Instagram platform is “toxic” for teenage girls.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who lead a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, were spurred to action by an investigative report published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal.

The report cited company documents and sources it said showed Facebook is aware that many teenage girls on the app are prone to negative body image. It suggests that the constant access to photos of fashion and fitness influencers' bodies is damaging to teens' self-esteem.

The article cited March 2020 internal research that found that 32% of teen girls said Instagram only made them feel worse when they felt bad about their bodies. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” the researchers concluded.

Congress steps in

“It is clear that Facebook is incapable of holding itself accountable,” Blumenthal and Blackburn said in a joint statement. “The Wall Street Journal’s reporting reveals Facebook’s leadership to be focused on a growth-at-all-costs mindset that valued profits over the health and lives of children and teens.”

The two lawmakers said they were in touch with Facebook senior management over the summer and received “evasive” and “misleading” answers when they asked about how the platform affected its youngest users.

“We are in touch with a Facebook whistleblower and will use every resource at our disposal to investigate what Facebook knew and when they knew it — including seeking further documents and pursuing witness testimony,” the lawmakers concluded. “The Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster reporting may only be the tip of the iceberg.”

Facebook willing to work with Congress

A Facebook spokeswoman told the Journal that the company welcomed “productive collaboration” with members of Congress and would seek opportunities to work with outside researchers on credible studies.

The company also previously acknowledged internal research on the subject but said the findings are proprietary and would not be released. Congress, of course, has subpoena power.

One question lawmakers might pursue is whether or not Instagram is more harmful than other similar platforms. The Journal cites what it says is an internal document that suggests it is more damaging than other social media apps and sites.

“Social comparison is worse on Instagram,” the 2020 research report states. According to the Journal, the document points out that TikTok is all about performance, while rival Snapchat is focused on jokey face filters. It said Instagram, on the other hand, focuses heavily on appearance and lifestyle.

What Facebook users can and can’t say on the social media platform has become an increasingly divisive issue. Forget hyper-partisan politics — the company has been pressured to moderate “misinformation” on a wide range of topics.

The company has been known to take strong action against what it sees as objectionable content, as many ConsumerAffairs reviewers can attest.

“My account has been restricted (Facebook Jail) several times now,” writes Tim of Florissant, Missouri. “Each time was due to my response to a post that I had seen.”

Tim complained that his responses were taken as stand-alone statements and not considered in their context to the post. He says Facebook’s artificial intelligence may have perceived his words as threatening. 

“If the written responses were considered in relation to the post, they could not have been construed as threatening,” Tim argues. “It is a very flawed system of censorship that limits the ability to express new thoughts and insights!”

Ann of Kenton, Tennessee, tells us she has spent a fair amount of time in Facebook jail as well. Her claim is that Facebook objects to information she says is well-documented.

“They censor everything and use fake fact checking that does not even apply to the post,” Ann posted in her review.

Some Facebook users are more equal than others

But it turns out there are a few million Facebook users who aren’t subjected to that kind of scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal cites internal documents and numerous Facebook sources who say the social media giant exempts many high-profile users. 

According to the Journal, the program goes by the name of Cross Check or XCheck. The internal documents show it protects millions of VIP users from having to meet Facebook’s normal enforcement process. Some celebrities and politicians are “whitelisted,” meaning their posts are pretty much immune from take-downs.

The Journal contends this is not exactly a secret at Facebook. It cites a 2019 internal review of Cross Check practices and found it to be widespread.

‘Not actually doing what we say’

“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” the review concluded. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

In a statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone acknowledged that criticism of the practice is fair but said the program was started with the best of intentions: “to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.”

Stone said many of the documents cited by the Journal no longer apply and that the company is working to phase out the practice of whitelisting.

More than 1,000 contract workers hired by Facebook read and listen to some messages posted on its messaging app, WhatsApp, according to a report by ProPublica.

That’s significant because WhatsApp is encrypted and privacy is a major element of its branding. But the Facebook workers -- based in Austin, Dublin, and Singapore -- apparently don’t review all messages, just those that other users have flagged as abusive or illegal. 

According to the report, private messages, images, and videos that have been identified by other WhatsApp users as improper go through Facebook’s artificial intelligence systems. The contractors then decide if the claims are valid. Should they find evidence of child pornography or terrorist activity, ProPublica says the messages may be shared with law enforcement.

“WhatsApp is a lifeline for millions of people around the world,” Facebook said in a statement. “The decisions we make around how we build our app are focused around the privacy of our users, maintaining a high degree of reliability and preventing abuse.”

Facebook says it doesn’t ‘moderate’

Facebook also makes a point of saying it does not moderate WhatsApp content. “We actually don’t typically use the term for WhatsApp,” WhatsApp spokesman Carl Woog said, pointing out that the team’s mission is to “identify and remove the worst abusers.”

But ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, maintains that the review “is just one of the ways that Facebook Inc. has compromised the privacy of WhatsApp users.” It says the app is “far less” private than its users believe.

In 2016, two privacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims that Facebook was mining data from WhatsApp subscribers for its digital advertising business.

WhatsApp is a free messaging app that was founded in 2009. It was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion and now has more than 2 billion users worldwide.

Under Facebook’s ownership, WhatsApp partnered with Open Whisper System to add end-to-end encryption.

A new study conducted by researchers from the University of Georgia explored the social repercussions associated with spending too much time on smartphones. 

According to their findings, consumers are more likely to snub their friends in person by spending too much time on their phones -- and certain factors can increase that likelihood even further. 

“I observed that so many people use their phones while they are sitting with their friends at a cafe, any dining time, regardless of the relationship type,” said researcher Juhyung Sun. “People are really sensitive to their notifications. With each buzz or sound, we consciously or unconsciously look at our phones.” 

‘Phubbing’ becomes widespread

The researchers were most interested in understanding which factors most influenced consumers to snub their friends in favor of their smartphones -- a phenomenon they call “phubbing.” The team looked at personality traits and mental health factors to see how this trend impacts consumers’ relationships. 

They found that even though many people think it's disrespectful to be on their phones while with a group of people, but that doesn’t appear to change consumers’ behavior. Instead, they found that phubbing occurs most often when there are at least three people around. 

“It’s ironic that while so many people believe that phubbing behavior is rude, they still do it,” said Sun. “A majority of people phub others, and in a group, it may seem OK, because it’s just me, the speaker doesn’t notice I’m using the phone. The number of people in a group can be one reason.” 

Personalities and mental health also play a role

The study also showed that some personality traits may impact the likelihood of phubbing. For instance, participants who tended to be more agreeable, trusting, selfless, and cooperative were less likely to prioritize their phones over their in-person interactions. 

“They have a high tendency to maintain social harmony while avoiding arguments that can ruin their relationships,” Sun said. “In face-to-face conversations, people with high levels of agreeableness consider phubbing behavior rude and impolite to their conversation partners.” 

Mental health also played a role in the likelihood of people ignoring their friends and opting for their phones. The researchers learned that people with high levels of anxiety or depression are more likely to distract themselves on their phones. 

Moving forward, the researchers are curious how the massive shift to the online world during the COVID-19 pandemic will impact future in-person interactions. One of their suggestions for consumers is to turn off their phone’s notifications or even just turn the device over on the table, which signals to everyone that they’re present and engaged. 

Florida has passed a law requiring gas stations to take added precautions against gas pump skimmers that steal consumers’ payment card information. Gov.  Ron DeSantis signed the legislation, which requires additional protection during fuel purchases while also mandating prompt reporting when crooks tamper with gas pumps.

Early gas pump skimmers were devices placed over the pump’s real card readers. When a customer inserted a card to pay for fuel, the scammer was able to retrieve the name, number, and expiration date from the card.

Today’s card skimmers are more sophisticated and harder to detect. Today’s scammers have the ability to install them inside the pump. Using Bluetooth technology, they can easily steal consumers’ card data.

In 2019, scammers were able to steal credit card data at Wawa convenience stores on the East Coast by launching a phishing attack that resulted in malware being downloaded onto the company’s network. Without having to physically tamper with the pump, criminals were able to steal millions of credit card numbers.

New requirements for stations

The Florida law specifically addresses physical gas pump tampering. When it takes effect in January, it will require gas stations to put in place a secondary security measure in addition to pressure-sensitive security tape at the pump. 

Among the secondary security steps Florida gas stations can take are the installation of anti-skimmer devices, locks, and alarms. They can also make daily inspections on gas pumps or install tap-and-go payment systems that make it harder for skimmers to take your money.

Consumers are also responsible

Law enforcement officials say consumers should be more vigilant when they fill up and look for signs of tampering. The biggest giveaway that something is wrong should be when you notice the security tape that seals the opening to the pump is broken or missing.

Consumers can also avoid being victimized by this crime if they use gas pumps that are closest to the station’s building or in a highly visible area. Skimmers usually choose pumps that are out of the way to limit the risk of being observed.

A 2020 survey by CompareCards shows that this crime is widespread and getting worse. It found that 31% of credit card customers believe they have been a victim of a skimming incident at some point during the past year. That’s an increase from 23% in 2019 and 15% in 2018.

Several recent studies have explored how social media can affect consumers’ mental and emotional well-being -- especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Now, researchers from the University of British Columbia Okanagan are exploring the specific things about these platforms that can affect consumers’ happiness. 

According to their findings, endless scrolling can lead to negative emotions. When consumers see posts or pictures that their friends and family are sharing on social media, this often leads to comparison to their own lives, which can increase negative feelings. 

“Social network sites are an integral part of everyday life for many people around the world,” said researcher Derrick Wirtz. “Every day, billions of people interact with social media. Yet the widespread use of social network sites stand in sharp contrast to a comparatively small body of research on how this use impacts a person’s happiness.” 

Being mindful about social media use

To better understand how social media use can negatively affect consumers’ well-being, the researchers conducted a 10-day long study that surveyed participants about the ways they used Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Participants were randomly surveyed over the course of the study and were asked about specific tasks on social media, including their habits for posting pictures or status updates, messaging friends or family members, scrolling the news feed, and staying up-to-date on news. 

The researchers learned that mindlessly scrolling was the biggest factor that contributed to the participants’ negative well-being because it doesn’t require any direct connection with another person. Instead, it allows the user to start comparing how they stack up against whatever post or picture they’re viewing. 

“Viewing images and updates that selectively portray others positively may lead social media users to underestimate how much others actually experience negative emotions and lead people to conclude that their own life -- with its mix of positive and negative feelings -- is, by comparison, not as good,” Wirtz said. 

The study also revealed that spending a lot of time on any or all of these sites was linked with more negative feelings, which could highlight to consumers that being more mindful about the time they spend on social media could most benefit their mental health. 

“The three social networks examined -- Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram -- yielded remarkably convergent findings,” Wirtz said. “The more respondents had recently used these sites, either in aggregate or individually, the more negative effect they reported when they responded to our randomly-timed surveys over a 10-day period.” 

Ultimately, the researchers aren’t encouraging consumers to quit social media cold turkey. Instead, they recommend that consumers use these platforms to their advantage by enhancing the social aspect and prioritizing their real-life connections. 

“If we all remember to do that, the negative impact of social media use could be reduced -- and social network sites could even have the potential to improve our well-being and happiness,” said Wirtz. “In other words, we need to remember how we use social media has the potential to shape the effects on our day-to-day happiness.” 

Having a strong social network can yield several physical and mental health benefits for consumers, and now a new study is exploring what makes some friends feel more supported than others. 

According to researchers from Ohio State University, consumers are most likely to feel supported when their closest contacts all know and like each other. 

“The more cohesive, the more dense this network you have, the more you feel you can rely on them for support,” said researcher David Lee. “It matters if your friends can depend on each other, just like you depend on them.” 

Making the most of social connections

The researchers conducted two online studies to determine how consumers best felt supported by their friends and family. In one study, 240 participants were asked to make two lists of the people closest to them based on those who knew each other and those who didn’t know each other. They were then given a hypothetical scenario in which they’d need to reach out to one of the two groups for support in the case of an emergency. 

Participants reported that they’d feel more supported by the group that knew each other rather than the group that was unconnected. The researchers explained that there could be several reasons for this trend, but one of the primary takeaways is that connected support networks are often viewed as just that: connected. Rather than thinking of each friend or family member individually, thinking of them as a group yields more support. 

“You can have two friends who are both very supportive of you, but if they are both friends with each other, that makes you feel even more supported,” said researcher Jonathan Stahl. 

The second study had over 330 participants list the eight people they felt the closest to and how supported they felt by each connection. To understand how support can shift depending on the interconnectedness of those on the lists, the participants also ranked how close each connection was to each other. 

Ultimately, the researchers learned that closeness between support systems once again played a role, as the participants rated connections as more supportive when they were close with other friends or family on the list. 

Moving forward, the researchers hope that consumers understand how beneficial it can be to have groups of family and friends spend time together and feel close to one another, because this is a key component in feeling loved and supported. 

“We found that our support networks are more than the sum of their parts,” said researcher Joseph Bayer. “People who feel they have more social support in their lives may be focusing more on the collective support they feel from being part of a strong, cohesive group. It’s having a real crew, as opposed to just having a set of friends.” 

A deadly pandemic and social upheaval have created chaos and change in wide areas of life this year, including relationships.

The changes are on display in Match’s annual Singles In America study, which underscores the obstacles 2020 has brought to relationships. Dr. Helen Fisher, chief scientific advisor at Match, says the changes to the dating landscape this year are unprecedented.

"Prior to 2020, no one expected that singles would consider a date's willingness to wear a mask,” she said. “Recent cataclysmic events have led singles to want more from dating: a desire for a relationship over casual dating; more meaningful conversations, and more honesty and transparency during a date." 

In other words, people are a little more serious about who they go out with. Fisher says the study found that the typical single now wants to know who you are, where you're headed financially, and what you expect from a possible partnership. 

Social distancing in dating

How exactly do you date in an era of social distancing? Fisher says singles have found a way.

“With the rise of video dating -- a new stage in the courtship process -- singles are saving time, money, and kissing fewer frogs."

According to the study authors, the pandemic sped up a trend that was already unfolding. People are waiting until their late 20s or even later before seeking a relationship. Relationships are also developing more slowly, with singles taking more time to get to know potential partners.

Priorities have also shifted. Forty-four percent of singles in the study said they had more meaningful conversations with a date in the last month than they generally had before the pandemic. For Gen Z, it was 50 percent.

Looks less important

Sixty-one percent of Gen Z daters and 49 percent of millennials say they are less focused on their potential partner’s looks. Sixty-three percent of active Match users say they are spending more time learning about their potential partners, and 69 percent believe those interactions are more honest.

The study clearly shows that the pandemic has brought about new rules in dating, including whether or not to date at all. About two-thirds of singles are open to going out with someone right now, but 36 percent say they have been highly selective about going on a date.

A question that may come up before a date is offered or agreed to is whether the person has been practicing social distancing. Twenty percent say they are more careful about touching and kissing. Face masks have also become a significant part of dating, with 20 percent of singles saying they insist that both people on the date wear a face covering.

The survey shows the pandemic has been a strain on existing relationships. One in four singles broke up with their significant other during the spring’s coronavirus lockdown. Twenty-two percent said they lost contact with someone they hoped to date.

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have reached an agreement with advertisers in an attempt to address concerns regarding the presence of harmful content on their sites. 

The agreement comes just a few months after major advertisers boycotted Facebook over concerns about the presence of harmful content, like bullying and hate speech. Advertisers accused the platform of doing too little to rein in this type of content and pulled their advertising in protest.

Now, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have agreed to adopt some new practices. Under a deal announced Wednesday, the social media platforms will allow outside firms to audit how they go about categorizing, reporting, and eliminating harmful content. The companies will also develop systems that give advertisers more control over the content that appears alongside their ads. 

"As funders of the online ecosystem, advertisers have a critical role to play in driving positive change and we are pleased to have reached agreement with the platforms on an action plan and timeline," World Federation of Advertisers CEO Stephan Loerke said in a statement.

Advertisers are calling the agreement a “step in the right direction.” 

“This is a significant milestone in the journey to rebuild trust online,” said Luis Di Como, Unilever's executive vice president for global media. "While change doesn't happen overnight, today marks an important step in the right direction.” 

Facebook is handing over some valuable rights to creators who make images and graphics. In a Monday morning update, the social media platform says it’s working with a cadre of partners who will soon be able to decide if Facebook users can use their graphics and to what extent. 

For example, let’s say People magazine has established its rights over a certain photo used on its Facebook page, but other users copy and paste it into one of their own posts. At that point, Facebook says People will now have the option to allow users to keep using the image, request that the image be taken down, or limit the territories where the image can be used. 

“We want to make sure that we understand the use case very, very well from that set of trusted partners before we expand it out because, as you can imagine, a tool like this is a pretty sensitive one and a pretty powerful one, and we want to make sure that we have guardrails in place to ensure that people are able to use it safely and properly,” says Dave Axelgard, product manager of creator and publisher experience at Facebook, in a comment to The Verge.

Facebook continues to clean up its own backyard

In the past, Facebook has admitted that its content enforcement “wasn’t perfect.” However, the company seems to be trying to get on the right track following events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. One example would be its ban of hate groups.

Facebook handing over rights management to content creators will likely cause issues for its users who love posting pictures, memes, and other similar content. 

While there are some content creators who create digital fodder for their own jollies, there are many who do it for a living and expect platforms that thrive on content to protect ownership rights. That potentially puts Facebook users who plead innocent because they found the photo on another page, didn’t plan to profit from it, or saw others using the same photo in a tough position.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been difficult for consumers to gather with their friends and loved ones face-to-face. Though gathering virtually has become easier than ever, a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin explored what types of virtual communication left consumers feeling the most connected to the people in their lives. 

The study revealed that phone calls were the best way for consumers to feel connected and bond with their friends or family, more so than any type of texting-based communication. 

“People feel significantly more connected through voice-based media, but they have these fears about awkwardness that are pushing them towards text-based media,” said researcher Amit Kumar. “When it came to actual experience, people reported they did form a significantly stronger bond with their old friend on the phone versus email, and they did not feel more awkward.” 

Building connection

The researchers conducted two experiments to determine what form of communication best served consumers who were trying to stay connected to their family or friends. One experiment paired strangers with various types of communication -- including video chat, phone call, or texting -- and had them ask deeply personal questions to one another. The other experiment gauged how participants felt reconnecting with an old friend via phone call or email, and then had them do just that. 

In both instances, phone calls came out on top in terms of building connection. Whether with a stranger or an old friend, hearing someone’s voice was an integral component of feeling a real connection, which is something that was lost over text or email. 

For both tests, the researchers asked participants about various styles of communication, both in terms of what they preferred and what they believed would produce the best results. All of the participants felt that the form of communication wasn’t as important as what was being said, which made these results all the more surprising. 

Moving forward, the researchers hope that consumers use these findings to feel more connected to their loved ones, especially as in-person gatherings are still limited. 

“We’re being asked to maintain physical distance, but we still need these social ties for our well-being -- even for our health,” said Kumar. 

A new study conducted by researchers from Indiana University explored how being generous can affect how others perceive you. Their work revealed that not only are more generous people typically viewed as more attractive, but the opposite was also true: Those who were seen as more attractive were more likely to be more generous. 

“Poets and philosophers have suggested the link between moral and physical beauty for centuries,” said researcher Sara Konrath. “This study confirms that people who are perceived as more attractive are more likely to give and givers are seen as more attractive.” 

People are attracted to generosity 

To understand how attractiveness and generosity are linked, the researchers analyzed results from three different studies that included responses from participants of all different ages. The researchers’ overarching goal was to have participants rate other people’s attractiveness without knowing anything about their background or personality. Their second goal was to assess whether attractive people are more or less likely to be altruistic. 

Participants were also asked about which traits they typically find attractive in other people, which helped the researchers determine how physical attractiveness stacked up against other attributes. 

Regardless of age, the findings showed that attractiveness and generosity are undeniably linked. The study revealed that consumers are more likely to expect people they find attractive to be more generous, and being generous, regardless of physical appearance, was an attractive trait to the majority of the participants. 

Researcher Femida Handy explained that “despite being conducted at different times, using different participants, and using different methods and measures,” the outcome was clear across all three studies. 

The next beauty trend?

Moving forward, the researchers hope that these findings spark a new wave of generosity among consumers. Considering how highly so many of the participants rated generosity as an attractive trait, these findings could ignite positive changes for the future. 

“Our findings suggest that beauty products and procedures may not be the only way to enhance an individual’s attractiveness,” Konrath said. “Perhaps being generous could be the next beauty trend.” 

Taking all the facts into account is important when it comes to making a big decision, but a recent study shows that many people prefer to follow their gut -- even when another choice is more likely to succeed. 

Researchers from The Ohio State University found that choosing based on habits, gut feelings, or by what happened the last time the choice came up is very common. The findings contradict the belief that people usually make the wrong choice because they don’t know any better. 

"In our study, people knew what worked most often. They just didn't use that knowledge,” said study co-author Ian Krajbich. "There's this tension between doing what you should do, at least from a statistical perspective, versus doing what worked out well recently.”

Going with a gut feeling

The researchers came to their conclusions after studying participants who played a computer game. Players were asked to identify patterns within the game and make a decision that gave them the best outcome. While following the pattern led to success more often, there was still a 10-40 percent chance that it would not give the best outcome. 

The researchers said that 56 of the 57 participants were able to discern the pattern in the game to make the decision that gave them the highest chance of success. However, only about 20 percent of players chose to consistently go with that choice after it failed them; instead, many of them deviated and made choices based on their gut feelings. 

The researchers believe that participants decided to go with their gut feelings when making in-game decisions because picking the best pattern only led to a slightly higher chance of success. Krajbich says the study findings highlight how decisions can turn out in real life. People can learn what choices lead to the best outcomes, but he says that putting that knowledge into practice can be difficult.

"It can be hard to judge whether you made a good or bad decision based just on the outcome. We can make a good decision and just get unlucky and have a bad outcome. Or we can make a bad decision and get lucky and have a good outcome," Krajbich said.

True for medical emergencies

The findings from this study parallel results from another study published earlier this year about gut feelings and medical emergencies.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington found that consumers tend to make gut-reaction choices based on their emotions, opinions, and anecdotal stories instead of established facts when it comes to medical care. The team noted that the results are especially worrying in light of the current COVID-19 health crisis.

“[People] are especially dismissive of facts if the incident is something they personally experienced. Specifically, we show that when an issue is health-related, personally relevant or highly threatening, then decision-making is compromised and people tend to rely on anecdotes,” said researcher Traci Freling. 

While previous studies have explored how social media can make users feel excluded by their friends, a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder found that it can also make users feel worse after a breakup. 

According to the researchers, social media platforms have made it harder than ever for users to get distance from relationships that have recently ended. These platforms can serve as a constant reminder of what ex-partners are up to -- including forming new relationships. Moreover, the researchers found that utilizing tools to block, mute, or unfriend exes didn’t make things better. 

“Before social media, break-ups still sucked, but it was much easier to get distance from the person,” said researcher Anthony Pinter. “It can almost make it impossible to move on if you are constantly bombarded with reminders in different places online.” 

Why it’s so hard to move on

The researchers had 19 people involved in the study, all of whom had experienced the end of a relationship in the last 18 months and had a poor experience with social media after the breakup. 

The participants were interviewed for over an hour each about their social media use after their breakup. They answered questions about how the internet contributed, either positively or negatively, to their coping. 

The researchers learned that there were several features -- particularly on Facebook -- that made it difficult for consumers to get distance from their exes and move on from their past relationships. Participants were frequently reminded of their relationship bliss via the Memories feature, which calls up pictures, videos, and posts from past years, making it harder for social media users to put that part of their lives behind them. 

Moreover, Facebook made it nearly impossible for the study participants to ignore their former partners’ life updates, as the News Feed is a constant reminder of things going on with a person they no longer want to be updated on. And while this could be a way for users to upload a new profile picture or share news about a job, it could also be the way to share a new relationship, making it all the more difficult for exes to move on. 

Unfriending isn’t the answer 

While Facebook, like several social media platforms, gives users the option to block, unfriend, or mute others, the researchers learned that these tools weren’t enough for the participants. 

“A lot of people make the assumption that they can just unfriend their ex or unfollow them and they are not going to have to deal with this anymore,” Pinter said. “Our work shows that this is not the case.” 

He explained that exes’ information can pop up via comments or likes from mutual friends or in mutual groups, or even from their family members or friends who haven’t been unfriended. This can leave heartbroken consumers with constant reminders of their lives pre-breakup. 

While these tools certainly aren’t going to rid exes from consumers’ social media profiles, Pinter suggests using them anyway, as they can offer some peace of mind when a relationship ends. Perhaps most importantly, he says staying off social media for a while can work wonders while consumers process their feelings. 

“In real life, you get to decide who gets the cat and who gets the couch, but online it’s a lot harder to determine who gets this picture or who gets this group,” Pinter said. 

Personal safety is starting to get the attention it deserves from connection-driven companies.

First, there was Uber’s integration of an in-app 911 text feature to increase passenger safety amid reports of sexual assaults. Now, dating app Tinder joins in by adding three new features to its app: 

• A safety service that connects users to personal emergency services; 

• Photo Verification, which will compare a posed photo taken in real-time to profile photos, which can help verify a match's authenticity and increase trust in member profiles; and 

• An in-app Safety Center.

“Every day, millions of our members trust us to introduce them to new people, and we’re dedicated to building innovative safety features powered by best-in-class technology that meet the needs of today’s daters,” said Elie Seidman, CEO of Tinder, announcing the new features. “I’m proud to share these updates, which represent an important step in driving our safety work forward at an unmatched scale.”

The protections

Tinder uses the Noonlight platform for its app, which allows users to trigger an alarm by clicking a button; users can connect other smart devices to automatically trigger alarms for them. Until now, most of Noonlight’s partners have been universities like Washington University in St. Louis and Southern Methodist University.

In Tinder’s situation, the app’s members will also be able to share details about upcoming dates -- including who, where, and when they are meeting. It’s sort of a “bodyguard [and] quick backup for daters” when a user is meeting someone for the first time, claims Brittany LeComte, Co-founder and CCO of Noonlight. “It’s a first-of-its-kind added security measure to help protect Tinder members even when they’ve taken their interactions off the app into real life.”

If at any time a Tinder user feels they’re in a dangerous situation, a quick press of the Noonlight app will quietly contact Noonlight dispatchers who, in turn, will send a text to confirm the situation. If that text goes unanswered, Noonlight will send a code and call them. If the user doesn’t answer the phone at all, Noonlight will dispatch emergency services.

The Photo Verification feature allows users to make sure that who they’re meeting is who they say they are. The feature utilizes artificial intelligence to give Tinder users access to a series of real-time posed selfies, which are compared to existing profile photos of the person they’re meeting.

The feature is still in the incubation phase, according to Tinder’s Safety Center. The team says it will treat it like an on-going update of Tinder’s overall safety features.

YouTube announced on Wednesday that it’s implementing a more stringent harassment policy in an effort to reduce the prevalence of hate speech and threats on its platform. 

The Google-owned video streaming giant said it will be removing videos that insult people based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, regardless of whether the victim is a private individual or well-known YouTube creator. 

YouTube said explicit threats, even those that are “veiled or implied,” will not be allowed on the site. Additionally, channels that exhibit a pattern of harassing behavior are subject to removal. 

“Channels that repeatedly brush up against our harassment policy will be suspended from the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), eliminating their ability to make money on YouTube,” the company said in a blog post. “We may also remove content from channels if they repeatedly harass someone. If this behavior continues, we’ll take more severe action including issuing strikes or terminating a channel altogether.” 

Cracking down on hateful comments

YouTube also said that almost all content creators now have the ability to review potentially harmful comments. 

“Beyond comments that we remove, we also empower creators to further shape the conversation on their channels and have a variety of tools that help,” YouTube said. “When we're not sure a comment violates our policies, but it seems potentially inappropriate, we give creators the option to review it before it's posted on their channel.” 

YouTube said channels that enabled the feature when it was first introduced saw a 75 percent reduction in user flags on comments. The feature is expected to be extended to most channels by the end of 2019. 

The enactment of a tougher harassment policy on YouTube comes a few months after conservative comedian Stephen Crowder repeatedly mocked a progressive journalist based on his homosexuality and Latino background. The company said at the time that Crowder didn’t technically violate YouTube’s policies, but later it responded to the matter by stripping Crowder of his ability to make money off of ads.

YouTube says its tougher position on harassment is intended to create a healthier environment for users to share their ideas and opinions.   

"Harassment hurts our community by making people less inclined to share their opinions and engage with each other," wrote Matt Halprin, YouTube's global head of trust and safety.   

New data from the Pew Research Center indicates that U.S. consumers are wary of letting social media sites handle news coverage.

Pew said it conducted a poll of more than 5,000 consumers this past July and found that 62 percent of people believe social media has “too much control” over the selection of news that users see on their platforms. 

Roughly half of respondents said they believe people may be more likely to see problematic news -- such as bias and sensationalism -- as a result of social media sites dispersing news information. 

The top three concerns held by consumers regarding the issue were “one-sided news,” “inaccurate news,” and “censorship.” A majority of respondents (55 percent) said the role social media companies play in delivering the news on their sites results in a “worse mix of news.” 

In terms of political leanings, Republicans were found to be more skeptical about giving social sites control over the flow of news. A majority of Republicans (75 percent) believed social media has too much control, compared to 53 percent of Democrats. 

Facebook’s news initiative 

The report comes ahead of Facebook’s launch of a dedicated news tab featuring a selection of news from “high quality, trusted” sources. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the idea to carve out a dedicated space for news was derived from the success of Facebook Watch for video. 

"One of the things that's really worked over the last year or two is we've launched [Facebook Watch] for video, where people who weren't getting all the video they wanted in News Feed could go to a place that's a dedicated space to get video,” Zuckerberg said. “Because that has started to really grow quickly, we've decided that there really is an opportunity to do something like that with news as well."

"It's important to me that we help people get trustworthy news and find solutions that help journalists around the world do their important work," Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook’s News Tab is rumored to be slated for a fall rollout. Last month, The Information published details from an internal Facebook memo, which provided a few guidelines for how the site will decide which stories are shown. 

The memo stated that human editors will be responsible for curating a “Top News” tab. Those editors will look at articles’ sourcing when deciding what to feature. Additionally, Facebook will reportedly “seek to promote the media outlet that first reported a particular story, and additionally prioritize stories broken by local news outlets.” 

A new study conducted by researchers from Swansea University found that being kind is the best personality trait when it comes to finding a lifelong partner. 

Researchers enlisted over 2,700 college students from all over the world to theoretically “buy” the personality traits of their ideal partner choosing from eight possible attributes: 

• Religiosity 

• Secure finances 

• Humor 

• Creativity 

• Attractiveness 

• Kindness 

• Desire for children 

• Chastity 

Participants hailed from western countries like Norway, Australia, and the U.K., and Eastern countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The researchers noted that men and women from either side of the globe had different priorities when it came to their partners. 

While the women involved in the study spent more on financial security than their male counterparts, male participants spent more on physical attractiveness than female participants. However, kindness ultimately won out across the board, as the trait comprised between 22 and 26 percent of all participants’ “purchases” overall. 

The researchers believe that having cross-cultural studies of this nature is an effective way to really crack open consumers’ mindsets and provide insights into decision-making. 

“Looking at very different culture groups allows us to test the idea that some behaviours are human universals,” said researcher Dr. Andrew G. Thomas. “If men and women act in similar ways across the globe, then this adds weight to the idea that some behaviours develop in spite of culture rather than because of it.” 

Finances could be important down the line

Other recent studies have looked more deeply at how finances can make it or break it for some couples. 

While one recent from earlier this year found that almost half of consumers would end their relationship due to excessive spending habits, another found that overall financial compatibility could also be a deal breaker in relationships. 

"It's probably not a great idea to ask for someone's financial history on the first date," said credit card analyst Mike Cetera. "However, it's better to know if a potential partner has a history of bad financial decisions before the relationship goes too far, especially if you plan on making large purchases together or sharing bank accounts." 

Instagram has had its fill of hateful and mean comments. The social media platform rolled out two new anti-bullying tools on Tuesday, underscoring its fight with the mantra: “We are committed to leading the industry in the fight against online bullying, and we are rethinking the whole experience of Instagram to meet that commitment.”

Bullying is a much larger issue than some might think. At ConsumerAffairs, we’ve seen reports that 1 out of 3 parents worry about their children being cyber-bullied, as well as research from the Mayo Clinic that found children who are bullied are at an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and several other conditions when they become adults. Even Congress senses the rising tide of the issue and is trying to do its share via the Children and Media Research Advancement Act (CAMRA Act).

It’s apparent that Instagram has also done its homework on the effects of bullying, claiming its new tools “are grounded in a deep understanding of how people bully each other and how they respond to bullying on Instagram.” 

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, made a point of protecting the sanctity of its teen base in particular. “This is especially crucial for teens since they are less likely to report online bullying even when they are the ones who experience it the most,” he said.

What Instagram users can expect

Up to bat first is an artificial intelligence-powered feature that notifies Instagram users when their comment runs the risk of being considered offensive before it’s posted. 

“This intervention gives people a chance to reflect and undo their comment and prevents the recipient from receiving the harmful comment notification,” Mosseri said. “From early tests of this feature, we have found that it encourages some people to undo their comment and share something less hurtful once they have had a chance to reflect.”

The second feature is called “Restrict,” and it works just like it sounds -- a user “Restricts” someone when they feel there are “unwanted interactions” from another user. After taking this step, comments from that person will only be visible to that person. 

“We wanted to create a feature that allows people to control their Instagram experience, without notifying someone who may be targeting them,” Mosseri explained.

“You can choose to make a restricted person’s comments visible to others by approving their comments. Restricted people won’t be able to see when you’re active on Instagram or when you’ve read their direct messages.”

Their grandparents may still be avid users, but members of Generation Z, the age group behind millennials, appear to have little use for Facebook, generally regarded as the king of social media.

A survey conducted for The Manifest shows only 36 percent of Generation Z, people between the ages of 13 and 17, use Facebook at least once a week. That compares with 89 percent of millennials, their slightly older peers.

In fact, Facebook appears to be more popular the older you are. Ninety percent of Gen Xers use Facebook at least once a week, while baby boomers are the biggest users, with 96 percent checking in at least once a week.

“I use Facebook daily because so many of my peers and older friends use Facebook, and I like to catch up,” said Catherine Callahan, a baby boomer social media user, health advocate, and owner of ICareHealthCare, a home health care agency in Santa Barbara, California.

Content no longer king?

Perhaps because so many grandparents are now spending time on Facebook, Generation Z wants to be somewhere else. But there may also be other factors at work.

"Snapchat and Instagram are cooler for younger generations because they have less content," said Mark McIntyre, CEO of MaxAudience, an advertising and web design agency. "You get to choose to see all the good stuff and none of the junk. It's way more image-based and way less text-based, and you don't get everyone's rant."

The survey shows 68 percent of Generation Z uses Snapchat at least once a week and 74 percent use Instagram. But the big winner in the social media sweepstakes is YouTube because  89 percent of Generation Z members use it at least once a week.

While the youngest generation is the biggest YouTube watcher, a majority of every generation tunes into the video platform at least once a week. Eighty-one percent of Generation X and 52 percent of baby boomers also check out YouTube weekly.

"Video content is the richest form of visual content," said Joseph Rothstein, CEO of Social Media 55, a social media marketing agency. "It allows you not only to remember the sounds but also the sights."

YouTube announced on Wednesday that it intends to take down videos that contain white supremacy concepts as part of its effort to crack down on extremist views and hate speech.

“Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status,” the company said in a blog post.

Videos denying that well-documented violent incidents, like the Holocaust or the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place will also be banned under the policy.

“It’s our responsibility to protect [creativity and access to information], and prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence,” the company continued.

Controversial stance on anti-gay remarks

This week, YouTube also came forward with its response to journalist Carlos Maza’s account of being persistently harassed by rival content creator Steven Crowder. Maza, who presents a series called Strikethrough for Vox, posted a video compilation of Crowder insulting him in the form of his own “debunking” video response.

In the video, Crowder is heard imitating Maza’s accent and calling him a "lispy queer", a "gay Vox sprite" and a "gay Mexican".

After being contacted by Maza to weigh in on the issue, YouTube said an "in-depth review" it conducted over the course of several days found that the videos weren’t in violation of its policies.

"While we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don't violate our policies," YouTube said in a statement.

“As an open platform, it’s crucial for us to allow everyone–from creators to journalists to late-night TV hosts–to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies,” the company said on Twitter. “Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site.”

Some have suggested that the speech contained in Crowder’s videos does violate YouTube’s policies, which prohibit videos that are “deliberately posted in order to humiliate someone” and videos in which someone “makes hurtful and negative personal comments about another person.”

Twitter, which has for the past year been striving to improve the user experience on its platform, has confirmed that it’s testing a new conversation “subscription” feature. The feature would enable users to follow a tweet thread without liking or replying to it.

After a prototype of the feature was spotted by a user in the Android version of the app, Twitter quickly confirmed that it was working on the tool with the goal of making Twitter more “conversational.”

To subscribe to a conversation, users will soon be able to simply click a button at the top right corner of a thread of interest. Users will then be notified when additional tweets are added to the thread. The company didn’t say when it would launch the feature.

Testing other features

In recent years, Twitter has made several efforts to try and facilitate “healthy” conversations on its platform. Earlier this month, the platform confirmed that it’s testing a way to let users hide and unhide replies to their tweet instead of blocking or muting them.

“With this feature, the person who started a conversation could choose to hide replies to their tweets. The hidden replies would be viewable by others through a menu option,” said Michelle Yasmeen Haq, a senior product manager at Twitter.

“We think the transparency of the hidden replies would allow the community to notice and call out situations where people use the feature to hide content they disagree with. We think this can balance the product experience between the original Tweeter and the audience.”

Last summer, Twitter announced that it would begin automatically demoting replies that its system deemed to be from so-called “troll” accounts as part of a larger effort to curb abuse on its site.

In February, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was “looking at” possibly launching a clarification tool that would let users edit their tweets within a five to 30-second window while still keeping the original version of the tweet publicly viewable.

At the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival recently, Twitter unveiled a new in-app camera function that lets users take and post photos and videos.

“We’ve really intentionally tried to make the images and footage that are captured on the ground at an event look different than other images and videos that you might attach to a tweet,” said Keith Coleman, Twitter’s head of consumer product.

Social media can create a lot of stress in our day-to-day lives, but researchers from Carnegie Mellon University are exploring new ways for consumers to use these platforms to improve their relationships.

According to a recent study, consumers who include their partner in their social media posts are more likely to prevent any related negative consequences in their relationships.

“Prior research has shown that self-disclosure positively affects online relationships,” said Dr. Juwon Lee. “We wanted to explore whether that would remain the case in an online context, where users can share detailed information with large audiences -- a phenomenon that typically wouldn’t be possible in person.”

Importance of sharing

The researchers were curious to see how sharing personal information on social media affects relationships, so they conducted five studies to determine the positive and negative effects.

The researchers’ primary focus was on how intimacy and satisfaction affected relationships, and they were interested to see if the outcomes were different for familial relationships, romantic relationships, and friendships. Moreover, they wanted to see how relationships were either hindered or strengthened when someone posted about their relationship or themselves.

Friendships were affected by posting on social media, though there were some mixed responses from those in romantic relationships.

Researchers found that posting on social media can make partners feel isolated or left out, while also feeling unsatisfied in their relationships. However, the researchers say a simple fix could be including your partner in your next status update.

“When you include a significant other in your post, perhaps as confirming a relationship status online or posting a photo together, we found that it counters the negative effects of online disclosure, increasing the feelings of intimacy and satisfaction,” said researcher Omri Gillath. “This validates the relationship, and a partner likely would see their significant other’s post as caring and inclusive.”

The researchers hope that these findings give consumers a deeper understanding of how their social media posts are affecting their important, intimate relationships, and plan accordingly with any future posts.

“For many of us, sharing our feelings and daily experiences on social media is one of the main ways we stay in contact with friends and family,” said Dr. Lee. “Because of this cultural shift from face-to-face or phone conversations, it’s important that we understand how our usage of these technologies affect our personal relationships.”

Being mindful

While researchers have recently found that readiness for commitment is of the utmost importance when determining relationship success, social media use can also play a role. One team found that sending a friend request to a former romantic partner may cause issues in a current relationship.

"Although they may say, 'I trust you and it's OK,' they are not happy about it," said researcher Joyce Baptist. "They eventually perceive that their significant other is spending too much time connecting with others on social media rather than paying attention to their own partner."

As part of its ongoing effort to facilitate healthy conversations on its platform, Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that lets original posters hide and unhide replies to their tweet instead of blocking or muting them.  

The new tool will be tested publicly “in the coming months,” said Michelle Yasmeen Haq, a senior product manager at Twitter. In a tweet thread, Yasmeen Haq provided a few more details on potential new feature:

“With this feature, the person who started a conversation could choose to hide replies to their tweets. The hidden replies would be viewable by others through a menu option,” she said.

“We think the transparency of the hidden replies would allow the community to notice and call out situations where people use the feature to hide content they disagree with. We think this can balance the product experience between the original Tweeter and the audience.”

Increasing moderation

Yasmeen Haq noted that Twitter users are already utilizing the site’s block, mute, and report features in an effort to keep their conversations “healthy.” However, these tools “don’t always address the issue,” she said.

“Block and mute only change the experience of the blocker, and report only works for the content that violates our policies,” she said in a Thursday tweet.

Over the past few years, Twitter has taken several steps to curb abuse on its site and improve the user experience. Last May, the micro-blogging platform announced that it would begin hiding replies that its system deemed to be from so-called “troll” accounts.

“The result is that people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search,” the company said in a blog post.

A few weeks ago, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was “looking at” possibly rolling out a clarification tool that would enable users to edit their tweets within a five to 30-second window while still keeping the original version of the tweet publicly viewable.

In the wake of Valentine’s Day, many coupled-up consumers are taking stock of their relationships, and a new study may have them thinking about the future.

According to researchers, the success -- or failure -- of a relationship is greatly affected by both partners’ readiness to commit to one another.

“Feeling ready leads to better relational outcomes and well-being,” said researcher Chris Agnew. “When a person feels more ready, this tends to amplify the effect of psychological commitment on relationship maintenance and stability.”

Feeling ready

The researchers used a number of studies and independent responses from consumers in relationships to gauge how readiness affects the success of relationships.

In the first study, over 400 adults were asked to respond to a survey based on their relationships so the researchers could gauge stability and each partner’s investment in their commitment. Another study involved over 200 college-aged students who were coupled up, all of whom were asked similar questions about their relationships. The researchers then followed up with them five months and seven months later to see if they stayed together and how the relationships were doing since the initial analysis.

The researchers found that in both cases, those who reported feelings of “readiness” during the survey were in healthier, more stable relationships, while the inverse was also true.

The researchers determined that those who felt ready to be committed were 25 percent less likely to break up with their partners than those who weren’t ready. However, despite how confident participants were in their partners, if the timing wasn’t right, the relationships ultimately failed.

The researchers note that there are many factors that could play a role in participants’ feelings of relationship readiness, all of which should be taken into consideration when consumers are thinking about starting a new relationship.

“People’s life history, relationship history, and personal preferences all play a role,” Agnew said. “One’s culture also transmits messages that may signal that one is more or less ready to commit.”

Things to consider

While many consumers turn to interest-specific dating apps to meet new love interests, those who are already in relationships have a lot to think about -- particularly where financial matters are concerned.

Not only is financial compatibility a large indicator of relational compatibility, but nearly half of consumers reported that they would end a relationship over spending concerns. Forty-six percent of couples surveyed said they would end a relationship if their partner spent money irresponsibly.

"It's probably not a great idea to ask for someone's financial history on the first date," said credit card analyst Mike Cetera. "However, it's better to know if a potential partner has a history of bad financial decisions before the relationship goes too far, especially if you plan on making large purchases together or sharing bank accounts."

It seems researchers have lately been trying to tell us something. We’re spending way too much time on social media.

The latest warning comes from Texas State University where researchers have found a link between negative social media activity and major depressive disorder (MDD) in millennials. Their findings are published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Research.

The study focused on a group of millennials who used social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. It found that young people who were diagnosed with MDD tested higher for social media addiction.

This group of millennials, many of whom came of age with social media, tended to compare themselves to their peers who were obviously better off than they were. This group was bothered more than others by being tagged in unflattering pictures on social media.

They were also less likely to post pictures of themselves with other people. They also had fewer followers.

Not all bad

Krista Howard, co-author of the study and a member of the Department of Psychology at Texas State, is quick to say that social media isn’t all bad. She says it can have many positive benefits, including showing people they have social support.

“The key is for individuals to develop an awareness of how they currently use social media and to determine what changes could be made in their social media use to reduce the behaviors associated with psychological distress,” Howard said.

Another academic study, released last week, also points to the negative effects of too much social media. Researchers at Michigan State linked too much social media to bad decision-making.

Their study rated participants on their dependence on social media and then had them take a test that measured their decision-making skills. Invariably, those who spent the most time on social media made the worst decisions.

Feeling excluded

Last fall, researchers at the University at Buffalo published their findings that showed social media use can create feelings of being excluded. It occurs, the researchers found, when a person sees their friends on social media engaged in an activity that didn’t include them.

Howard says it just gets back to limiting social media use. In addition to spending less time looking at Facebook or Instagram, she suggests unfollowing individuals or groups that are the cause of distress and limiting online social comparisons.

For many consumers, spending too much time on social media often happens subconsciously. We pick up our phones, and before long, hours have passed.

While many of us think nothing of the extra time spent scrolling on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, a new study conducted by researchers from Michigan State University found that too much time on social media can lead to bad decision-making.

“Decision making is oftentimes compromised in individuals with substance abuse disorders,” said lead researcher Dar Meshi. “They sometimes fail to learn from their mistakes and continue down a path of negative outcomes. But no one previously looked at this behavior as it relates to excessive social media users, so we investigated this possible parallel between excessive social media use and substance abusers.”

Too much time online

Meshi and his team didn’t explore why users are making poor decisions, but they were curious to see if there was a correlation between too much time on social media and future decision-making.

The researchers conducted a survey in which 70 participants answered questions about their social media use. The questions were tailored to see how dependent the participants were on social media, how they feel when they can’t use it, and how they’d feel about never using it again.

Following the survey, the participants completed a common psychological task that helps gauge decision-making skills -- the Iowa Gambling Task.

The goal of the task is for participants to collect as much money as possible. Each participant is presented with four identical decks of cards. By following patterns presented throughout the task, they were asked to choose between “good decks” -- which rewarded them with money -- and “bad decks” -- which penalized them.

The researchers found that those who spent more time on social media were likely to have less money at the end of the task, while people who spent less time on social media finished the task with more money.

The group noted that many drug addicts perform similarly on the Iowa Gambling Task, as they have difficulty making good decisions. According to Meshi, this study uncovered another layer of social media’s effect on society, and more research needs to be done to better educate consumers.

“I believe that social media has tremendous benefits for individuals, but there’s also a dark side when people can’t pull themselves away,” Meshi said. “We need to better understand this drive so we can determine if excessive social media use should be considered an addiction.”

Social media addiction

Much research has been done recently that explores the way consumers are using social media, showing both the positives and negatives of the platforms.

A recent study looked at what it would cost certain consumers to deactivate their Facebook profiles for up to one year. Experimental auctions revealed that it would cost anywhere from $1,100 to over $2,000 for the study’s participants to cancel their Facebook profiles for that long.

The study included college students, residents of a large midwestern town, and respondents of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. As costly as the bids ran, some users refused to bid at all, signaling their dependence on Facebook and their unwillingness to even consider deactivating their profiles.

Instagram is giving users with multiple accounts the ability share the same post to any or all of their accounts simultaneously. The new “self-regram” function will become available to all iOS users, and some users may see it as an option now.

"We are rolling out this feature to provide a better experience for people who often post to multiple accounts," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

To utilize the new feature, users can simply flip the toggle next to the accounts they want to publish to when they’re composing a post. The option is called “Post to Other Accounts,” and it’s located under the options to tag other users and location.

Previously, users had to either manually repost the content on another account or use a third-party repost app.

TechCrunch pointed out that one possible downside of the new feature is that it could cause users’ feeds to become somewhat monotonous, ”with different audiences of different accounts seeing the same shots and captions.”

Last year, Instagram gave Stories users the ability to regram public feed posts to their Story. The photo sharing platform is also testing an Android shortcut for importing photos from Google Photos.

“You have been able to share to feed from Google photos on Android before, but the ability to do so was hidden behind a couple of different steps, so we’re up-leveling that ability to make it easier,” the company said.

Instagram hasn’t said when (or if) its new “self-regram” feature will become available to Android users, nor has it provided a timeline for the completion of the feature’s rollout to iOS users.

Facebook users will soon have 10 minutes to unsend a message on the social network’s Messenger app.

In the “coming soon” section of a note detailing its upcoming version of Facebook Messenger, the company said version 191.0 will let users “remove a message from a chat thread after it's been sent.”

"If you accidentally send the wrong photo, incorrect information, or message the wrong thread, you can easily correct it by removing the message within 10 minutes of sending it,” Facebook said.

Currently, Facebook only lets users delete messages on their end. Deleting a message doesn’t remove it from the recipient’s inbox. Facebook Messenger’s upcoming "unsend" feature is in addition to its "secret conversations" feature, which was unveiled two years ago and lets users set their messages to expire after a predetermined amount of time.

In April, reports surfaced that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was using an early version of the feature that lets users retract messages.

“After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014, we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications,” Facebook told TechCrunch in April. “These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”

More than a billion people worldwide use Messenger monthly, according to Facebook.

As social media continues to dominate the technological landscape, there has been no shortage of news coverage on users’ controversial posts. Social media has become an indelible part of background checks for new jobs, and the effects of a simple post are more wide-reaching than ever.

Researchers at the University of California-Davis recently conducted a study that explores the longstanding effects of negative social media comments.

“It’s not just that negative chat has a long life,” said lead author Seth Frey. “But it has a longer effect on the original speaker. Negative people are really hurting themselves.”

More than just words

To see the ways comments on social media are affecting users, the researchers analyzed over 600,000 conversations from a popular online social game. Though the average age of those involved in the study was between eight and 12 years old, there were millions of users involved in the conversations that were happening in the game.

To gauge the positivity or negativity of the statements in the chats, the researchers utilized a toolkit typically used for Twitter posts that measures feelings and attitudes.

Perhaps the most significant finding from this study was that positive messages resonate for a far shorter period of time than negative messages. Moreover, negative messages have the power to affect everyone -- including the sender -- and typically tend to incite more negativity.

The researchers found that negative messages can linger throughout the chat for an average of eight minutes, while positive messages linger for just one minute.

Frey and the researchers believe social media users should take heed when posting online, as this study shows that what you write online is far more powerful than many users think when mindlessly chatting. It also shows that the words used online affect everyone -- including the person that sends them.

Frey also pointed out that the way we communicate online is often very different than how we communicate in face-to-face settings, and the findings from this study show how powerful our words online can really be.

“It’s really about isolating the effects that your angry and distasteful actions have on you in the future,” said Frey.

Wide-reaching effects of social media

While this study showed the power behind what we post on social media, there are many other ways social media affects our day-to-day lives.

Over the summer, CareerBuilder released results from a survey which found that 70 percent of employers use social media sites as part of the applicant screening process, while another seven percent were in the process of implementing it.

The findings from that survey also showed that nearly 60 percent of employers rejected candidates based on what they posted on social media, while 22 percent said they looked on candidates’ social media with the sole intention of finding a reason not to hire them.

From an interpersonal standpoint, a recent study found that many people feel excluded by their friends on social -- though it isn’t intentional.

The study found that social media can have an exclusionary effect on users based on the way they are basically forced to watch their friends (unintentionally) exclude them in certain online interactions.

“We’re using these technologies daily, and they’re pushing information to users about their networks, which is what the sites are designed to do, but in the end, there’s negative effects on people’s well-being,” said researcher Michael Stefanone.

Facebook has officially entered the dating world, albeit only in Colombia for the time being.

With one out of every three people dating online and a $1.3 billion online dating market, Facebook -- or any platform for that matter -- would have a tough time not taking advantage of the opportunity.

That, of course, raises the question: does Facebook want to be all things to all people?

It may well.

The social media platform may be drooling over the prospect of gaining more face time with Millennials who reportedly spend more than 10 hours a week using dating apps, not to mention getting back the ex-pats who left when Facebook’s privacy issues reared their ugly head earlier this year.

The company tries to straddle the fence between benefit for its users and benefit for its bottom line by pointing to research that says social media leads to social change. With scrutiny regarding privacy following Facebook everywhere it goes, a venture into online dating just adds more questionable breadcrumbs on that privacy path.

Facebook users are hesitant at best. More than half of Facebook users ages 18+ admit they’ve adjusted their privacy settings in the past year, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

“Facebook is pretty safe I think, but will a dating app make it sleazy?,” wrote one poster. Another chimed in with, “I am not entirely sure what I expect from this. Only good things… right?”

How Facebook’s dating app will function

Inside Facebook’s walls, its employees have purportedly been testing “Facebook Dating” for months. More like e-Harmony and Match.com, but less like Tinder, Facebook Dating is a simple I-like-you-and-you-like-me recipe, but with a couple of added flourishes.

For one, Facebook dating will allow users to create a separate “dating” profile. For another, the social media kingpin says the mobile version would offer a way for people attending events to make their profile visible in hopes of making a real-time connection.

If there’s any question that a Facebook dating app raises, it’s how to thwart stalking. Facebook is reportedly testing a dating feature in Colombia designed to curb the stalking element.

According to reports, the app’s developers have built in mechanisms that require users to tie messages to a piece of content which should cut down on trollers who have nothing more to offer than a cute pickup line, plus the added safety net that keeps users from following others who don’t respond in kind.

Earlier this week, Instagram rolled out new e-commerce tools that allow users to shop directly in the app both through Stories and the Explore page.

Though the feature has been in the testing stages since June, users around the world will now be able to use it in real time. Brands can add one product sticker per Story, and with one tap, users can get price information and purchase it. On the Explore page, Instagram has cultivated a new shopping channel that will show users brands that they either follow or that Instagram thinks they’ll be interested in.

Before these new features, shopping on Instagram was a complicated process. Now, the social media app has really streamlined things.

“Shopping is more than an errand -- it’s also about what you discover along the way,” the company said in a statement. “For many people on Instagram, shopping is an entertaining way to get inspired and connect with new and interesting brands.”

Other shopping features

Instagram has rolled out other shopping features on the app in recent years. Brands have been able to tag individual items with their price, thus allowing users to tap on the item and head to the brand’s website for purchase. Instagram recently expanded these offerings to cover countries like the U.K. and Brazil.

According to Instagram, since the price tag feature launched, over 90 million accounts tap to see tags in shopping posts every month. The push to enter the e-commerce market could lead to new revenue opportunities for Instagram.

“Instagram is a place where you discover new things, brands, destinations for travel, and furniture,” said Jonah Berger, a marketing and social influence expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “The challenge at the moment is that discovery is happening, but Instagram isn’t necessarily getting credit. They’re trying to make money off of something that’s already happening.”

Currently, brands don’t have to pay for these shopping tools, though that could change soon, according to a company spokesperson. Instagram could eventually move into a sponsored format.

Additionally, users are encouraged to shop and buy things based off of their family members, friends, and celebrities they follow on social media, which seems like a promising game plan for the app, according to experts.

“The whole phenomenon is very promising,” said Anindya Ghose, a professor at NYU Stern’s School of Business. “A number of companies have tried it so far with mixed results. The potential is much higher than what we’ve seen so far.”

Instagram is reportedly working on building a standalone shopping app that would allow users to browse and buy goods from merchants they follow directly, The Verge reported on Wednesday.

Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” the Verge said Instagram’s potential new e-commerce platform is currently being developed and could be called “IG Shopping.” However, few details are available at the moment and the app could be canceled prior to its launch.

Instagram declined to comment on the report.

Testing other shopping features

More than 25 million businesses already have accounts on the Facebook-owned platform, and four out of five Instagram users follow at least one business, the company said. For this reason, the sources said Instagram believes it’s "well-positioned to make a major expansion into e-commerce."

Last March, Instagram launched a shopping feature that lets companies tag posts with individual products enabling users to view sources and shop from photos. The company is currently testing an Instagram Stories feature that also allows users to buy goods from the Instagram app.

Earlier this year, Instagram gave some companies an electronic payment option which enabled their followers to book appointments for restaurants or salons without leaving the app.

In a new study done by Rutgers University, researchers evaluated YouTube selection of facial plastic surgery videos. The study shows that not only are most of the videos misleading to the public, but many are nothing more than marketing attempts posted by individuals not in the medical field.

Boris Paskhover, an assistant professor at Rutgers Medical School’s department of otolaryngology who specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, was the lead author of the study, and worked with a team of medical students to evaluate over 240 YouTube videos. The videos had a combined 160 million views and were found after searching keywords including “ear surgery,” “rhinoplasty,” “nose job,” “lip fillers,” “dermal fillers,” “face fillers,” “face lift,” “lip augmentation,” and “blepharoplasty.”

Paskhover emphasized that millions of people turn to YouTube for answers, but consumers should be warned that the site does not include the potential risk factors or alternative options to surgery.

“Videos on facial plastic surgery may be mainly marketing campaigns and may not fully be intended as educational,” Paskhover said.

The study

When evaluating the videos, the researchers used DISCERN criteria, which is “a valid and reliable way of assessing the quality of written information on treatment choices for a health problem.” The criteria includes a discussion of non-surgical options, risks, and the validity of the information that’s presented. Additionally, the researchers noted if the people posting the videos were healthcare professionals or third parties.

The results showed that the majority of videos did not include qualified professionals who were explaining the procedure. In 94 of the videos evaluated, no medical professional was present at all. Contrastly, 72 videos included board-certified surgeons, provided valuable information, and came out with high DISCERN scores.

“However, even videos posted by legitimate board-certified surgeons may be marketing tools made to look like educational videos,” Paskhover said.

“Patients and physicians who use YouTube for educational purposes should be aware that these videos can present biased information, be unbalanced when evaluating risks versus benefits, and be unclear about the qualifications of the practitioner,” Paskhover continued. “YouTube is for marketing. The majority of the people who post these videos are trying to sell you something.”

YouTube’s plan to fight misinformation

Last month, YouTube rolled out a new plan to prevent users from uploading and spreading false information in times of crisis. The initiative was designed to help the public get accurate information.

The platform found that it would often become inundated with videos -- many of which were full of misinformation -- following an intense or explosive news cycle. Many people were just looking for the news, but the videos left them confused and misinformed.

“We’re making changes to put more authoritative content in front of people,” said Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer.

With the changes, YouTube’s recommendation engine has been altered to show news-related videos from reputable outlets to appear first.

“It’s very easy to quickly produce and upload low-quality videos spreading misinformation around a developing news event,” Mohan said.

Instagram users have taken to Twitter to complain about a new hack on the social media site that locks them out of their accounts and then changes the username, image, and email address on the account.

Mashable first broke the news yesterday after spotting various tweets from Instagram users. There are “two of hundreds of Instagram users who have reported similar attacks since the beginning of the month,” Mashable reported. “According to data from analytics platform Talkwalker, there have been more than 5,000 tweets from 899 accounts mentioning Instagram hacks in just the last seven days.”

Instagram users are reporting that they can no longer sign into their accounts because the login details have changed. Some accounts have been deleted entirely, while others have the profile pictures changed to animated images from Disney or Pixar films. Other users had their email addresses changed to emails with Russia’s .ru domain.

Instagram’s response

The company addressed the issue on its blog yesterday, saying it will be conducting an investigation into the hack.

Many users have taken to Twitter to complain that the platform hasn’t done enough to help them during this process. Users’ login information has been changed, and so they can’t recover their accounts.

One user tweeted: “hey instagram -- another victim of account hacking here and I can’t find any way to report it! Absolutely livid and lack of official response is awful -- please help or release a statement on action for those affected! #instagramhacked”

“We are aware that some people are having difficulty access their Instagram accounts,” Instagram wrote in a blog post. The company also gave users directions on how to recover accounts and advised that people should cut off access to any suspicious third-party apps and activate two-step authentication.

An Instagram spokeswoman said in a statement that the company’s top priority is safety for users.

“When we become aware of an account that has been compromised, we shut off access to the account and the people who’ve been affected are put through a remediation process so they can reset their password and take other necessary steps to secure their account,” she said.

Both Facebook and Instagram will be rolling out a new feature in the U.S. in the coming weeks that will allow users to track how much time they’ve spent on the apps.

Users will be able to access minute-by-minute breakdowns of just how long they’ve been scrolling each day and in the last week by checking on “digital well-being screen time management dashboards.”

Additionally, users will have the option to set daily minute limits on the app, at which point the user will get a notification if they’ve exceeded the time limit they’ve set. However, going over the self-imposed timer won’t prevent users from continuing to scroll through the app.

“We’re building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram -- any time should be positive and intentional,” said Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. “Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.”

“It’s really important for people who use Instagram and Facebook that the time they spend with us is time well spent,” added Ameet Ranadive, Instagram’s Product Director of Well-Being. “There may be some trade-off with other metrics for the company and that’s a trade-off we’re willing to live with, because in the longer term, we think this is important to the community and we’re willing to invest in it.”

Smartphone addiction

This isn’t the first instance of a company allowing users to see just how much time they’re spending on their phones or on a certain platform. Apple recently unveiled new software that will allow users to monitor their iPhone use.

“We need to have tools and data to allow us to understand how we consume digital media,” said former Apple executive Tony Faddell. “We need to get finer grain language and start to understand that an iPhone is just a refrigerator, it’s not the addiction.”

The decision came after Apple received a great deal of backlash from investors regarding the addictive quality of its devices.

“According to [an] APA survey, 94 percent of parents have taken some action to manage their child’s technology use, but it is both unrealistic and a poor long-term business strategy to ask parents to fight this battle alone,” the shareholders wrote. “Imagine the goodwill Apple can generate with parents by partnering with them in this effort and with the next generation of customers by offering their parents more options to protect their health and well-being.”

Similarly, lawmakers are pushing for legislation for more research on technology’s impact kids. The bill -- entitled the Children and Media Research Advancement Act -- would spend $95 million that would include long-term studies over the next five years.

“What we feed the minds of children is as important as what we feed their bodies,” said Michael Rich, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “We need to understand it as best we can. We need to use data to project forward what can create the healthiest and safest environment in which we are raising kids and interacting with each other.”

Last Friday, YouTube announced an update that allows users to stream vertical videos on their desktops with no black bars on the side. With the update, the video’s aspect ratio is automatically adjusted to fit a computer’s screen size. YouTube announced the update in its user forums.

The update had already hit mobile devices on both Android and iOS, swapping the black bars on the side on small videos for an expanded video when possible or white space in other cases.

“Historically, for non-widescreen videos (not 16:9) like vertical and square videos, we would show black bars alongside the video, making the video really small,” YouTube explained. “This update moves away from the need for black bars. We launched this update on mobile awhile back (both Android and iOS) so this change also aligns the desktop and mobile viewing experience.”

Videos that will be affected by the update are those in standard 16:9, vertical videos, and the older 4:3 format. The update is intended to make videos outside of the standard 16:9 aspect ratio easier to view, as well as allow YouTube to compete with other platforms that do not display black bars.

User response to the update

Though the update is still rather new, YouTube has received some backlash from users, as the response has been mostly unfavorable.

In the days following the update, users have complained that the videos are even smaller than before, parts of the video are cut off, and the quality of videos has decreased. One user wrote of her experience with a video that was larger than 640 x 480, but with the new update, the video was forced into a 640 x 480 screen. Parts of the video were allegedly cut off, and she noted poor quality.

“Some YouTube videos just don’t look good when the screen is big,” the user wrote. “Either give us a way to opt out of this, or fix it.”

Snapchat users who used the platform’s Snapcash feature to send and receive money from other users will have to find a new way to do so by the end of the next month.

The company recently confirmed to TechCrunch that it will be shutting down Snapcash on August 30. The news originally broke when code was discovered inside of Snapchat’s Android app that displayed a “Snapcash will no longer be available after %s [date]” message.

“Yes, we’re discontinuing the Snapcash feature as of August 30, 2018,” said a Snapchat spokesman when questioned about the code. “Snapcash was our first product created in partnership with another company -- Square. We’re thankful for all the Snapchatters who used Snapcash for the last four years and for Square’s partnership!”

Not taking off

Although Snapchat declined to comment on why it was shutting down Snapcash, TechCrunch notes that the service had been previously associated with payments made for erotic content. The publication notes that some Twitter users had taken to using the service to collect payments in exchange for sexually explicit online photos.

Perhaps more poignant, though, is that Snapcash has struggled to take off while competitors like Venmo and PayPal have continued to gain prominence amongst users. Although Snapchat itself has made several changes in the past year to add to the user experience, it seems that a peer-to-peer money transfer service is not in the company’s plans for the immediate future.

In an effort to give more control over followers lists, Instagram is in the testing stages of a new feature that would allow users to easily remove followers without a notification.

Users with public accounts can’t stop anyone from checking out the updates on their feeds. However, users with private accounts always have the option to remove followers. Before this new feature, public accounts either had to block the user and then unblock them (a practice known as “soft blocking), block them completely, or set their accounts to private.

However, where blocking users is concerned, the person on the receiving end currently knows when they are being blocked. With the new “remove follower” feature, the follower in question will have no way of knowing they’re being removed.

The feature is only in the testing phases -- and solely for Android users -- as of right now. For users eager to see if they’ve been chosen to test out this new feature, they can head to their followers list and look for an icon with three vertical dots to the far right of a user’s name. If you tap on the icon, it will prompt the user to remove the follower.

A string of updates

Instagram has been releasing similar updates recently in an effort to give users the utmost control and privacy over their accounts.

In May, the platform introduced the “Mute” feature. Users that mute a follower’s account no longer see the posts in their feed, but they can still visit the account profile to see everything they’ve missed. Similar to the new “remove follower” function, the user that has been muted is not notified of the decision, and the option is always available to users to “un-mute” said follower.

Earlier this month, Instagram also began testing a new “Do not Disturb” feature. The update was designed to give users more freedom over when they received notifications from the app, as well as its sister companies -- WhatsApp and Facebook. On Facebook, the “Do not Disturb” feature can be activated for a set period of time, or until the user decides to manually turn it off.

The overarching theme is that Instagram wants to give its users complete control over their accounts, and ensure that it’s not driving users away -- whether from too many notifications or harassment from fellow users.

In an effort to regain users’ trust in the popular social media site, Twitter will be removing millions of fake accounts from users’ followers lists starting on Thursday.

Many Twitter users have let fake or automated accounts follow them in the hopes of inflating their follower totals and generating the appearance of having social media influence. Oftentimes, these individuals use their high follower counts to help spur business endeavors, advance political activism, or bolster entertainment careers.

The change will take place immediately on Thursday, with users instantly seeing their follower numbers drop if they have bought fake followers or were followed by fake accounts. In doing so, the total combined follower count on Twitter would drop by six percent, despite the company not revealing the exact number of affected users. Overall, tens of millions of suspicious accounts will be removed from users’ followers.

“We don’t want to incentivize the purchase of followers and fake accounts to artificially inflate follower counts, because it’s not an accurate measure of someone’s influence on the platform or influence in the world,” said Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety. “We think it’s a really important and meaningful metric, and we want people to have confidence that these are engaged users following other accounts.”

The decision to remove fake accounts will also benefit advertisers who rely on social media influencers to promote products and brands to their wide reach of followers. Unilever, an advertiser who spends billions of dollars a year on advertising, recently announced it would no longer pay influencers who purchased followers. Instead the company said it will put that money towards advertising that helps to eliminate fraud. The company’s CEO Keith Weed was complimentary of Twitter’s recent decision.

“People will believe more and read more on Twitter if they know there is less bot activity and more human activity,” Weed said. “I would encourage and ask others to follow.”

Twitter’s recent security measures

Twitter has long been working to remove spam accounts from its site. Late last month, the company mandated that new users verify their accounts with an email address or phone number when first signing up.

“This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We will be working closely with our Trust & Safety Council and other expert NGOs to ensure this change does not hurt someone in a high-risk environment where anonymity is important.”

At the time of the decision, Twitter reported that the change had stopped the creation of over 50,000 spam accounts per day.

Earlier this year, Twitter also began suspending accounts that were linked to “tweetdecking” -- the process of mass retweeting stolen content in order to help it go viral. Twitter users saw popular “tweetdeckers” like Common White Girl, Dory, and Finah suspended from the site for violating spam policies that forbid mass duplication.

“To be clear: Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behavior may result in enforcement action,” the company wrote.

In an effort to prevent users from uploading and spreading false information in times of crisis, YouTube is rolling out a new plan to help the public get accurate information.

Recently, whenever there’s a breaking news story, a slew of videos full of misinformation start circling around YouTube. While many individuals are just looking for the news, these misleading videos leave many misinformed and confused. However, the trend is set to end soon.

“We’re making changes to put more authoritative content in front of people,” said YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan.

Changes ahead

Moving forward, YouTube is striving to show users the importance of being an ally to news reporters. The platform has outlined a number of new investments and improvements that it will be implementing.

According to Mohan, YouTube’s recommendation engine has been altered to allow news-related videos from reputable outlets to appear first. He referenced a recent issue of conspiracy theory videos cropping up on the website following incidents like school shootings and other tragedies.

“It’s very easy to quickly produce and upload low-quality videos spreading misinformation around a developing news event,” Mohan said.

Mohan also noted that it’s harder to produce accurate videos in that short a timeframe. To combat this issue, YouTube will be releasing a “new information panel.” This will appear at the top of the search results and show developing news stories. Mohan said this new feature will “be activated in the immediate aftermath of the event.”

To make sure users are getting the most accurate information, YouTube’s new algorithm won’t show a video first. Instead, users will first be directed to a news article sourced by Google News. The results will also feature a banner informing users that the story is still in the developing stages and that information is “subject to change.”

The new feature is currently available in 17 countries, and Mohan said that YouTube is looking to expand, as the company hopes to “double that number” in the coming months.

Staying connected

As Google is YouTube’s parent company, these changes come as part of a three-year, $300 million Google News initiative. According to YouTube, $25 million will go to “innovation funding” grants for news organization, as well as for more support staff.

According to Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s Chief Business Officer, the efforts are designed to set up “long-term sustainable skills” for web videos. Additionally, Kyncl discussed YouTube’s new “working group” for executives and representatives of news outlets to “help shape the future of news on YouTube.”

Facebook has announced that it’s shutting down three of its apps due to low usage. The apps that will be shut down include Hello, tbh, and Moves.

In a blog post, the company said it’s axing the apps to keep the company from getting stretched too thin.

“We regularly review our apps to assess which ones people value most,” Facebook said. “Sometimes this means closing an app and its accompanying APIs. We know some people are still using these apps and will be disappointed -- and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support. But we need to prioritize our work so we don’t spread ourselves too thin. And it’s only by trial and error that we’ll create great social experiences for people.”

Shutting down apps

Hello is an Android-only address book app, which Facebook launched in 2015. The app allowed users to combine their Facebook information with their phone’s contact information.

Tbh (which stands for the acronym “to be honest”) is an anonymous social media app aimed at high school students, which Facebook acquired just eight months ago. The app allowed teens to share opinions via anonymous polls, as well as give positive feedback to friends. It was downloaded over 5 million times in a matter of weeks after it was launched, but that momentum didn’t continue.

"[For tbh] it seems like after an initial burst of downloads, that usage was too low," Thomas Husson, vice president at research firm Forrester, told CNN Money.

The third app that will be shutting down is Moves, a fitness tracker which Facebook bought in 2014. Moves was relatively popular, having even once earned an “Editors Choice” recognition from Apple. Nonetheless, Facebook has still decided to shut down the app and its API at the end of July. Users have the option of downloading their data before the app closes.

Facebook will delete the user data from all three of these apps within 90 days.

Instagram just released an update to its app that allows users to add songs -- from artists like Bruno Mars, Dua Lipa, Calvin Harris, or Guns N’ Roses -- to their Stories. The launch comes following Facebook’s new relationship with all major record labels and is expected to make the photo sharing app even more popular.

The songs will be offered to users directly in the app and will play as background music to whatever picture or video they post to their Stories. Instagram also reported that new songs will be added to the app daily.

Much like the Sticker feature in Instagram Stories, adding music will work in much the same way. Users can search for any song, artist, or genre, and then drag and drop the song of their choice from the Music “sticker,” and it will then be added to their post.

The new Music feature will be available for both picture and video posts. Instagram also allows users to scan through the entire song to find the section they want to post in their Stories. Additionally, iOS users can switch to the Music shutter mode in the Stories camera to pick a song prior to taking a picture or video. When watching a Story that has a song, friends will be able to see the song’s title and artist and the song will play automatically.

“Now you can add a soundtrack to your story that fits any moment and helps you express how you’re feeling,” Instagram writes.

Instagram reported that artists with rights holders will be properly compensated for their music, though how those payments will work out is still unclear.

Success of Stories

This new update to Stories comes on the heels of a big announcement from Instagram.

Just last week, the company revealed that the app has one billion monthly users. And today, it announced that there are 400 million daily Instagram Story users -- up from 300 million in November and 250 million last year.

Instagram Stories have taken off recently, as the company continues to add new features, like SuperZoom, Highlights, and the ability to reshare public posts. The number of users utilizing Stories is currently growing six times faster than Snapchat’s whole app. Many believe Snapchat’s redesign -- which was received very poorly by users -- was partly the reason behind the company’s slowest growth rate ever last quarter.

As for Stories’ new Music feature, it is currently available in select countries -- most likely where the company was able to get licenses for songs -- and it is expected to roll out to more locations soon.

In an effort to bring Instagram to areas where mobile coverage is spotty or data is expensive, the social media company just released Instagram Lite -- a new version of the app that “takes up less space on your device, uses less data, and starts faster.”

The app appeared today in the Google Play App Store without any official statement from the company. However, the official description in the App Store describes the app as “small” so that users can save space on their phone and download it quickly.

According to TechCrunch, Instagram Lite takes up 1/55th of the space of the full app at just 573 KB compared to the 32-megabyte main app. The Lite version allows users to filter and post photos to their feeds, watch Stories, or browse the Explore page. However, it currently lacks the capabilities to share videos or Direct messages with friends.

Instagram has yet to report if the Lite app will contain ads, as advertisements typically tend to use a lot of data.

Benefits of the Lite app

In creating a version of the app that is better suited for emerging markets, Instagram is addressing a number of common issues consumers are facing overseas.

With the Lite app, users on older phones, phones with less storage, phones operating on slower network connections, or those who can’t afford big data packages can still utilize the features that one billion Instagram users have access to. Additionally, users won’t have to delete anything -- apps or photos -- off of their devices to download the Lite version, or spend tons of time waiting for it to download.

Instagram Lite was released in testing phases in Mexico this week. As the year progresses, the app will become available in more countries and expand to include both messaging and video posting/sharing.

“We are testing a new version of Instagram for Android that takes up less space on your device, uses less data, and starts faster,” the company said in a statement.

The Lite trend

Recently, many apps have adapted their software to produce new Lite versions.

Earlier this month, Uber launched Uber Lite in India and boasted about its five-megabyte size and ability to connect users to rides in areas with little to no reception. Similar to Instagram’s new Lite app, Uber Lite is available only for Android users. Upon release, Uber Lite was only available in India, though the company reported that it was working to expand it to other countries.

In 2015, Facebook launched a lite version of its app, and by 2017, boasted 200 million users. The success of that helped launch Messenger Lite this past April.

As part of its ongoing effort to fight abuse and spam accounts, Twitter has announced that it will require new users to verify either an email address or a phone number when signing up for an account.

“This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness,” Twitter said in a blog post.

"We will be working closely with our Trust & Safety Council and other expert NGOs to ensure this change does not hurt someone in a high-risk environment where anonymity is important," the company added.

Twitter said it will be placing warning signs on suspicious accounts and conducting an audit of existing accounts to challenge any that are suspected to be spam. The change has already stopped more than 50,000 spam signups a day, Twitter said.

Purging problematic accounts

The site ramped up its efforts to crack down on suspicious activity after it was revealed that Russian troll accounts infiltrated and spread misinformation on social-media platforms during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Earlier this year, CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that Twitter hadn’t done enough to address hate speech and abuse on the platform.

“We didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences,” Dorsey said in March. In May, Twitter announced it would begin hiding tweets that it believes to be from trolls.

“These issues are felt around the world, from elections to emergency events and high-profile public conversations,” Twitter said Tuesday. “As we have stated in recent announcements, the public health of the conversation on Twitter is a critical metric by which we will measure our success in these areas.”

Twitter also revealed that, rather than waiting for other users to flag problematic accounts, it is developing a machine learning algorithm that detects and removes them automatically. The company said that the system, "identified and challenged more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week” during the month of May -- an increase from 3.2 million a week last September.

Last week, Twitter acquired Smyte, a company that specializes in spam and abuse issues. However, the platform’s fight against spam and abuse appears far from over.

"We know there's still a lot of work to be done," Twitter said. "Inauthentic accounts, spam and malicious automation disrupt everyone's experience on Twitter, and we will never be done with our efforts to identify and prevent attempts to manipulate conversations on our platform."

YouTube announced at VidCon yesterday that it was working on new, innovative ways to generate revenue -- for both the company and content creators -- outside of traditional advertising. Now, YouTube is rolling out channel memberships, merchandise, a new marketing partnership with FameBit, and the launch of “Premieres.”

“YouTube is a vibrant community where everyone has a voice,” said Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer.

“Every day, creators use their voices to entertain, spur action, and bring about positive change. That’s why over the last year we’ve doubled down on building the products and tools that the creator community needs. Not only to thrive on YouTube, but to continue to develop the video platform of the future.”

Channel memberships

With this new feature, users pay $4.99 per month to get unique badges, new emojis, members-only posts in the Community tab, and access to custom perks offered by the creator. This includes amenities like extra videos, shoutouts, or exclusive livestreams. The feature will be available to channels with over 100,000 subscribers.

YouTube says it will monitor the perks creators offer to their members to ensure they meet guidelines, as well as to ensure creators can follow through with what’s being promised. However, the company won’t limit creators to what they want to offer their members.

“This tool set is fairly powerful, so we want to make sure that they don’t put products out there that they can’t really commit to,” said Rohit Dhawan, YouTube’s director of product management. “It’s kind of like a blank canvas...it’s us giving the creators the tools to customize their membership offering and provide whatever perks they feel are going to be valuable to the fans.”

Switching to Channel Memberships has proven to be beneficial to both creators and YouTube. Comedy creator Mike Falzone has seen his YouTube revenue triple since January when he started using memberships. Spanish gaming channel elrubiusOMG now has six times as many members. Swedish instrumental band Wintergatan is now making over 50 percent of revenue from Channel Memberships.

Overall, creators earning five figures a year is up 35 percent, and those earning six figures is up 40 percent, according to YouTube.

Merchandise

In addition to Channel Memberships, creators will also be able to sell to fans directly.

Creators with more than 10,000 subscribers will be able to sell t-shirts, hats, phone cases, or any of over 20 different merchandise items that are related to their channel.

The new program is affiliated with Teespring, which will retain a cut of the merchandise (which varies per item). Teespring will get a flat price per item, but the creator has free reign to mark up the items as much or as little as they’d like, and then keep the difference.

During testing, Teespring reported an 82 percent success rate for YouTubers using the merchandise service, and this led to an average of 25 percent more units being sold per user.

Additionally, creators who have been connected with brand sponsorships via FameBit will be able to use the merchandise tool to link fans to whatever products they’re selling.

Premieres

Lastly, YouTube will be rolling out Premieres -- a new way to leverage the popularity of Live Videos without having to go live.

By using Premieres, creators can make a landing page on their channels to promote videos prior to their release. The page will have a chat feature, as live videos do, so creators can take advantage of Channel Membership perks even if they aren’t producing live content. The Premiere video will be added to a creator’s channel once it’s wrapped.

“We’re going to use our search and discovery platform to promote these,” said Kurt Wilms, group product manager. “Upcoming premieres can appear on the [YouTube] homepage and in recommended videos. They’re going to appear across all the dedicated discovery portions of our site, which is awesome.”

Facebook announced on Thursday that it is expanding its third-party fact-checking program to an additional 14 countries to combat the spread of false news on its site.

In the wake of the 2016 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that false news and misuse of the social network are among the site’s biggest problems. He vowed to make changes to the site to help stem the spread of misinformation.

Over the last two years, the company has implemented several strategies to fight false news, including removing fake accounts, hiring “news publisher specialists” to advise on content that appears on the platform, and relying on artificial intelligence to help fact-check more than a billion posts each day.

Now, Facebook says it is expanding its news fact-checking program to new countries, with “plans to scale to more countries by the end of the year.”

Reducing false news stories

Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program, which debuted last spring, relies on organizations like the Associated Press and Snopes to inform the site’s moderators of content that is misleading. Content that is not verified as accurate appears smaller, making it harder to read and easier to miss.

“We reduce the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked false,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch earlier this year.

In a blog post announcing the expansion of its fact-checking program, Facebook proclaimed that “the effort will never be finished and we have a lot more to do,” but said that its fact-checking policies can reduce the spread of inaccurate news stories by "an average of 80%."

Fact-checking photos and videos

When Facebook first announced the program, it was only available in France. It is now expanding to an additional 14 countries. Facebook also announced that it will start fact-checking photos and videos in addition to text.

“This includes those that are manipulated (e.g. a video that is edited to show something that did not really happen) or taken out of context (e.g. a photo from a previous tragedy associated with a different, present-day conflict),” Facebook said in a statement.

The company also announced that it’s partnering with Schema, an open-source framework used for fact-checking. Facebook says the partnership “will make it easier for fact-checkers to share ratings with Facebook and help us respond faster, especially in times of crisis.”

Facebook announced on Thursday that it’s giving group administrators the option to charge a monthly subscription fee to users looking for exclusive, members-only content. Subscriptions will run from $4.99 up to to $29.99 a month.

The social network will test the subscription idea with a handful of its larger groups. Those range from those focused on getting parents of high schoolers in tune with the college application process to a meal-oriented group that posts meal plans and shopping lists.

"We hear from group admins that they’re looking for ways to help them earn money to deepen engagement with their members and continue to support their communities," said Facebook’s Director or Groups, Alex Deve.

"Subscription groups align with the experience that we made available to support video creators earlier this year, and is part of our overall approach to helping creators and leaders to financially support the work they do to engage their fans and communities," according to Deve.

The development of Facebook groups has been a major agenda item for the company. Just last year, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg went on record saying rather than continuing to rely on the platform’s mission to "make the world more open and connected," Facebook would set its sights on giving "people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," with Facebook Groups -- and their billion users -- playing a major role.

A commitment to content

Administrators of these exclusive groups have their work cut out for them if they want their members to feel good about ponying up a monthly fee.

A case-in-point is Sarah Mueller, whose Declutter My Home group was created to inspire others to declutter their homes. Before she knew it, there were 42,599 people in her group taking part in moving her notion forward.

Now, with her new subscription-based group called Organize My Home, Mueller is committed to galvanizing members to work together on projects, organizing group challenges, holding live Q&A sessions, and offering videos and tutorials to make the group’s $14.95 monthly fee worth its while.

Free groups aren’t going anywhere

Until the subscription program takes off or proves itself a flop, Facebook’s free groups will still be around.

"As we learn from this pilot and understand how group members feel about subscription groups, we’ll continue to improve this experience to help admins offer more to their members and continue to invest in their communities," Facebook’s Deve concluded in the company’s blog post.

Instagram, a Facebook-owned social media platform, announced Wednesday that it will be rolling out a brand new long-form, vertical video feature. 

Called IGTV, the videos will currently live within the Instagram app until it gets its own standalone app in the coming days.

Though all Instagram users will be able to post to IGTV, the more followers you have, the longer the video you can make. Instagrammers with over 10,000 followers can post videos up to one hour long, which is why the company is targeting celebrities like Kim Kardashian West and Selena Gomez to publish content on IGTV.

Users with under 10,000 followers can post videos up to 10 minutes long. Previously, all users -- regardless of follower count -- were given 60 second Instagram videos.

As it stands right now, all IGTV videos will be pre-recorded, though a live feature is something the company could develop down the road.

The future of IGTV

Instagram has big plans for IGTV, many of which are contingent on how the feature fares with the younger generation. Though the platform currently plans to have two standalone apps, that could very well change should teens adopt it as their go-to social media platform.

Additionally, users of IGTV can expect the hub to be ad-free -- for now.

“Ads will not be part of IGTV at launch, but we’ll be exploring and test ways to help creators monetize after launch,” an Instagram spokesperson stated.

Early comparisons to YouTube

Right out of the gate, IGTV is being compared to the Google-owned video platform YouTube.

Prior to the IGTV launch, many Instagram users were linking to long-form YouTube videos in their Instagram stories. This new feature might eliminate the need for that practice.

“Now, Instagram can keep that in-house, and drive greater engagement and time spent,” said media and technology analyst Rich Greenfield. “I think this is a natural evolution from pictures to video, to stories and now to long-form video to capture as much human attention as possible.”

A new survey conducted by the Gallup and Knight Foundations finds that Americans believe that 39 percent of the news they see on television, read in newspapers, or hear on the radio is misinformation.

When taking in news through social media, U.S. adults estimate that nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of what they read is either made up or unable to be verified as accurate.

The survey of 1,440 randomly recruited Americans found that some demographics were more likely than others to believe that the news they consume is “fake.”

Demographic differences

Republicans were found to be more likely than Democrats to perceive news from legacy media outlets as misinformation.

Half (51 percent) of Republicans and 54 percent of self-described conservatives were likely to perceive misinformation when it comes to legacy media, compared with just 23 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of liberals.

People with a high school education or less believed that roughly 40 percent of traditional media stories are intentionally wrong on some level.

“The extent to which Americans perceive misinformation in the news environment and their belief in the effectiveness of methods to counteract it are influenced to a large degree by their political leanings and their opinions of the news media more broadly,” the Knight Foundation said in a summary of the findings.

Combating misinformation

Seventy percent or more of respondents said that methods to counteract the spread of misinformation, including giving greater prominence to stories from reputable news sources, could be at least “somewhat effective.”

“These results underscore how a lack of trust in the news media intertwines with perceptions of misinformation,” the Knight Foundation said.

“Although Americans continue to see the media as playing a critical role in informing citizens in our democracy, the ability of the institution to effectively fulfill that responsibility is hampered when citizens are not confident that the information they receive is accurate.”

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would be taking steps toward combating the spread of inaccurate news on its site by shrinking the visual prominence of news stories found to be inaccurate by Facebook’s third-party fact checkers.

Twitter said earlier this year that it would notify nearly 678,000 users that may have inadvertently interacted with accounts believed to have been linked to a Russian propaganda service called the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

Starting next Monday, Facebook users will begin seeing video ads in their private conversations in Messenger. The autoplay ads will appear in users’ inboxes alongside their chats with family members and friends.

The social media giant has reportedly been running out of places to put advertisements, and Messenger was the next available spot.

The move may prove successful for Facebook, as a recent survey by Statista found that Messenger is the third most popular social media site by monthly users. Additionally, in the early tests of these ads, the company has found that users aren’t using Messenger any differently with the new ads.

What it means for consumers

Perhaps the biggest concern for Facebook users is the privacy factor.

These ads are designed to automatically start playing right alongside private messages, which may feel intrusive to users. Stefanos Loukakos runs Messenger’s ad business, and he is confident the company will monitor user reaction and response to the new ads.

“Top priority for us is customer experience,” Loukakos said. “So we don’t know yet [if these will work]. However, signs until now, when we tested basic ads, didn’t show any changes with how people used the platform or how many messages they send. Video might be a bit different, but we don’t believe so.”

Second try with Messenger ads

While this is the first time video ads will play in Messenger, Facebook did roll out static ads in the app at the start of 2017. Ad space had become limited on the platform, similar to the way it has now, and the company needed more retail space.

However, that time around, only users in Thailand and Australia were seeing these ads. They appeared in the Messenger app, and users could swipe between five different advertisers. Additionally, users had to scroll past their own conversations to get to the ads -- making it slightly less intrusive.

Later in 2017, Facebook began rolling out ads across users News Feeds’ in creative new places. The company began putting ads in Instagram stories, it tested ads in the Marketplace, and started selling mid-roll video ads in the hopes that one of these new formats would be fruitful for the company and solve the problem of very limited ad space.

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it’s rolling out changes to its platform intended to make it easier for users to discover relevant breaking news, events, and stories.

Users will soon see personalized breaking news and live events at the top of their timelines, eliminating the need to follow hashtags or search for certain accounts in order to get relevant news and stories.

“We’ve been working to change how you discover all the information around news, events, and stories, and today, we’re sharing a few steps forward,” Twitter said in a blog post. “It’ll be easier to find and follow the big events and stories you care about in your timeline, notifications, and Explore.”

Personalized news and event notifications

In the coming weeks, Twitter users will be given the option to receive notifications about breaking news that is relevant to their interests.

Twitter says it’s experimenting with sending notifications to users based on their interests, which the site will determine based on accounts followed and what a user tweets about. Users who would rather not receive push notifications for personalized breaking news can toggle off these notifications in the recommendations section of Twitter’s settings.

Redesigned Explore tab

Additionally, the Explore section of Twitter will soon be organized by topic instead of content type.

“We heard from you that Explore would be easier to navigate if it was organized by topic instead of content type (video, articles, etc). We’re now experimenting with topic tabs in Explore so it’s easier to see what’s happening in news and entertainment, and what’s most relevant to you,” Twitter said.

Twitter has also started organizing Moments -- the feature that aggregates world news -- into a vertical display like the Twitter timeline, rather than a horizontal orientation.

The changes will roll out gradually to iOS and Android users in the U.S. in the coming weeks and months, but Twitter has already launched its change to Moments just in time for World Cup festivities. A specialized version of this feature will be available for sports, which will have video at the top and a live-updating score.

In an effort to crack down on bad businesses that lie to consumers, Facebook has launched a tool that will enable users to review businesses after they make a purchase.

Facebook said in a blog post on Tuesday that it would ban businesses that receive enough customer complaints from advertising.

“Bad shopping experiences aren’t good for anyone,” Facebook said. “When items take a long time to arrive or don’t meet your expectations, it can cost you time and money. And if these things happen after purchasing something from a business’ ad on Facebook, it can sour your overall impression of Facebook.”

Reducing advertising abuse

Companies that fail to “improve customer satisfaction and better meet customer expectations” after receiving feedback could have their ads banned from the platform.

“We spoke with people who have purchased things from Facebook advertisers, and the two biggest frustrations we heard were that people don’t like ads that quote inaccurate shipping times or that misrepresent products,” Facebook said.

The new tool is intended to identify and mitigate these common user frustrations by letting people review businesses, with the ultimate goal of “connecting more people with businesses that meet their expectations.”

Facebook users can leave feedback for ads they’ve recently viewed under the 'Ads Activity' tab, the company said. From there, users can click on the 'Leave Feedback' button and respond to a brief questionnaire that asks for ratings on various ads.

'We believe this tool will give people more confidence in the businesses they interact with and help hold businesses more accountable for customer experiences they provide,' Facebook said.

Follows efforts to fight ‘fake news’

News of Facebook’s new user review tool follows the company’s announcement that it would begin allowing advertising on Marketplace. The company is aiming to provide users with a better ad model “by strengthening privacy and choice, while giving businesses of all sizes new and better tools to help them grow.”

The company has also taken several steps to keep false news off its platform, as well as give users greater control over what personal data is shared with the site.

Facebook has revealed that a bug changed the default sharing settings of about 14 million users to “public” for four days last month.

The bug occured between May 18 and May 22, while Facebook was testing a new feature. In an official Newsroom post, Facebook said that it is currently notifying those affected and asking them to review the posts that they made between those dates.

"We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts," said Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer.

"We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before -- and they could still choose their audience just as they always have."

Transparency in handling issues

After the bug was discovered, Facebook said that it went so far as to change every post made by affected users during that window of time to private -- including posts possibly intended to be shared publicly.

“The problem has been fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they’d been using before,” the company said.

Facebook said that notifying users of the bug is part of its new focus on transparency in the way it handles issues.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that we need to be more transparent about how we build our products and how those products use your data – including when things go wrong. And that is what we are doing here,” Facebook said.

Facebook is changing the way it displays news on its platform, replacing "Trending" stories with 'Breaking' local and national news.

The change will take place this week and is designed to blunt some of the criticism directed against the social networking giant over its power to influence opinion.

Writing in the company blog, Alex Hardiman, Facebook's head of News Products, said research shows the feature was not getting much use and was only available in five countries.

"We’ve seen that the way people consume news on Facebook is changing to be primarily on mobile and increasingly through news video," Hardiman wrote. "So we’re exploring new ways to help people stay informed about timely, breaking news that matters to them, while making sure the news they see on Facebook is from trustworthy and quality sources."

Taking some heat

Facebook took heat during the 2016 election when content provided by unvetted publishers, which was either untrue or of questionable validity, reached millions of viewers. Since then, Facebook has been tweaking its news delivery system.

With the change, the "Trending" button will be replaced with a "Breaking News" label. Facebook has been conducting a test that allows 80 publishers to embed a "breaking news" indicator within its content in the news feed, and users will be receiving breaking news notifications as part of the change.

Facebook is also testing a feature called "Today In." It's a section of the site that connects users to the latest breaking and relevant news from local publishers in their city, as well as updates from local officials and organizations.

Changes to news videos

Facebook says it will also soon launch a section on Facebook Watch that provides live coverage, daily news briefings, and "deep dives" into events and issues.

"People tell us they want to stay informed about what is happening around them," Hardidan said. "We are committed to ensuring the news that people see on Facebook is high quality, and we’re investing in ways to better draw attention to breaking news when it matters most."

Facebook may be feeling pressure to improve its news content because so many consumers now get so much of their news from it. Newspapers are on the decline, as is cable television viewership.

A report from the Pew Research Center, published in September, found 67 percent of Americans get at least some of their news from a social media platform. The report concludes that Facebook, by far, is the most influential, with 66 percent of U.S. consumers using the site and 45 percent of those users depending on Facebook for news.

A new study on teen social media use conducted by the Pew Research Center finds that Facebook is falling out of favor among teens, but alternatives such as Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram are growing in popularity.

YouTube is the number one online platform used by teens, with 85 percent reporting that they use it. Instagram came in second at 72 percent, followed by Snapchat at 69 percent.

Meanwhile, 51 percent of teens said they used Facebook -- a big change from 71 percent in 2015, when Pew conducted its last study. Only 10 percent of teens said Facebook was their most visited site.

"The social media environment among teens is quite different from what it was just three years ago," research associate Monica Anderson, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. "Back then, teens' social media use mostly revolved around Facebook. Today, their habits revolve less around a single platform."

Changing social media habits

Nearly half of teens said they’re online “almost constantly” -- up from 24 percent in 2015. The number of teens with the ability to access social media on-the-go has also increased. Pew found that 95 percent of teens have a smartphone or access to one, compared to 73 in 2015.

However, teens have mixed views on whether being constantly connected through social media is good or bad. Thirty-one percent reported a mostly positive effect and 24 percent cited a mostly negative effect. Around 45 percent said they didn’t think social media had a positive or negative impact.

Teens who reported a more positive effect noted that social media fosters connections between friends and family. On the flip side, those who said it has a negative impact pointed out that bullying and rumor-spreading can run rampant on social media sites.

Impact of social media

Here are a few remarks from teens who believe social media has a more positive impact.

• “I feel that social media can make people my age feel less lonely or alone. It creates a space where you can interact with people,” said a 15-year-old girl.

• “We can connect easier with people from different places and we are more likely to ask for help through social media which can save people,” said another 15-year-old girl.

In contrast, here are the sentiments of teens who believe social media can have harmful effects:

• “People can say whatever they want with anonymity and I think that has a negative impact,” said a 15-year-old boy.

• “Teens are killing people all because of the things they see on social media or because of the things that happened on social media,” said a 14-year-old girl.

Starting today, consumers can hire home service professionals -- such as house cleaners, plumbers, and contractors -- through Facebook’s mobile Marketplace.

In a statement about the launch, Bowen Pan, product manager at Facebook, noted that requests for home service recommendations have skyrocketed, totaling “millions of people” since the beginning of 2018.

For the new service, Facebook said it’s partnering with three existing home service marketplaces: Handy, Home Advisor, and Porch.

“More people ask for recommendations related to home services on Facebook in the U.S. than any other topic. By partnering with Handy, HomeAdvisor, and Porch, people will now have a place on Marketplace to find the right professional to help with their next home project,” Pan said.

Finding professionals

Facebook’s new addition to Marketplace will give users plenty of options when it comes to finding help around the house. The company says users will be able to browse through hundreds of thousands of professionals across the country.

These professionals can be searched by location and will have ratings, reviews, and credentials. If more than one professional surfaces as a potential match for a project, users can describe the task and use Messenger to send it to multiple professionals at once and judge their responses.

Amazon offers a similar service, called Amazon Home Services, that lets users browse nearby firms offering home services, including house cleaning, yard work, and construction.

The new tool is starting to roll out today for iOS and Android and will be available to all U.S. users in the coming weeks.

A number of progressive groups are planning to launch a six-figure digital ad proposal that will push the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to break up Facebook.

The group has three main goals that it hopes will ultimately dismantle the monopoly Facebook has on social media:

• Break off Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger into their own companies that are separate from Facebook;

• Make it possible for users on competing social networks to communicate with each other; and

• Implement stronger privacy rules.

The groups have started an online petition entitled Free From Facebook that clearly outlines their missions and goals. It also provides details on the immense power Facebook wields over our current society.

“Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have amassed a scary amount of power,” the website says. “Facebook unilaterally decides the news that billions of people around the world see every day. It buys up or bankrupts potential competitors to protect its monopoly, killing innovation and choice. It tracks us almost everywhere we go on the web and, through our smartphones, even where we go in the real world.”

“The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, can make Facebook safe for our democracy by breaking it up, giving us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protecting our privacy. Together, we will make sure that they do,” the groups conclude.

Facebook responds

The proposed ads will run online on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as in traditional website ad slots. The groups involved include Demand Progress and MoveOn Civic Action, in addition to the anti-concentration Open Markets Institute.

The groups have decided to push the issue now because of the FTC’s new Chairman Joe Simons, who has expressed some willingness to explore tech concerns. As of yet, no new FTC commissioners have expressed their agreement that any Silicon Valley giants should be broken up.

In response to the push for action, Facebook said that splitting up its various entities would be a detriment to consumers.

“Facebook is a competitive environment where people use our apps at the same time they use free services offered by many others,” said a Facebook spokesperson. “The average person uses eight different apps to communicate and stay connected. People use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger because they find them valuable, and we’ve been better able to fight spam and abuse and build new features much faster by working under one roof.”

Recent scrutiny and privacy concerns

News of this push to break up the social media giant comes after the company has experienced a great deal of scrutiny.

Earlier this year, Facebook was being investigated after up to 87 million people had their data repurposed by Cambridge Analytica to influence voter decisions in the 2016 election. CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent nearly four hours taking questions from 42 Senators, all focused on his company’s mistakes with user privacy.

“Our sophistication in handling these threats is growing and improving quickly,” Zuckerberg said. “We will continue working with the government to understand the full extent of Russian interference, and we will do our part to not only ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, but also to give everyone a voice and to be a force for good in democracy everywhere.”

Steps towards greater privacy

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook announced plans to enforce Europe’s stringent privacy settings around the world. The company says its taking steps to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which is set to go into effect later this month on May 25th.

Under this new legislation, companies must obtain consumers’ consent before sharing their information, and that consent can be rescinded at any time. Users under the age of 16 must also have a parent consent on their behalf.

The laws give users the option to choose whether they want Facebook to use partner data to show relevant ads. The company decided to convert 20 privacy screens to one single screen, streamlining and clearly defining the security process. Facebook also now disables the facial recognition feature -- unless directed otherwise by users -- and asks consumers if they want to display religious, political, or relationship information on their profiles.

“We support smart privacy regulation and efforts that make it easier for people to take their data to competing services,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “But rather than wait, we’ve simplified our privacy controls and introduced new ways for people to access and delete their data, or to take their data with them.”

Twitter has announced that it will automatically demote reply posts that are likely to distort users’ conversations. The company says it will do so by organizing conversations based on thousands of “behavioral signals.”

Troll-like replies in “communal areas” of the platform will be pushed to the bottom, as will posts from users repeatedly tweeting at accounts that do not follow them. Users will have to click the "show more Tweets" button to see tweets that were made less visible.

“The result is that people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search,” the company said in a blog post.

To weed out unhealthy contributions to Twitter conversations, the platform’s algorithm and human reviewers will look for certain signals, including how often a user is blocked by people they interact with, whether they have created multiple accounts from a single IP address, and whether the account is closely related to others that have violated the company’s terms of service.

“We’re also looking at how accounts are connected to those that violate our rules and how they interact with each other,” the company added.

Improving the Twitter experience

The move is part of the company’s push to create healthier conversations on Twitter -- a goal first announced by CEO Jack Dorsey in March. At the time, Dorsey admitted that the company hadn’t done enough to address hate speech and abuse on the platform.

“We didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences,” he said.

Now the company is taking steps to mute posts that don’t facilitate healthy conversation. Although some of the tweets that Twitter plans to demote don’t outright violate the site’s policies, many of them have a negative impact on other users’ experience.

“What we’re talking about today are troll-like behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation on Twitter, particularly in communal areas like conversations and search,” the company explained.

“Less than 1% of accounts make up the majority of accounts reported for abuse, but a lot of what’s reported does not violate our rules. While still a small overall number, these accounts have a disproportionately large – and negative – impact on people’s experience on Twitter,” the company continued.

Twitter said it tested the changes in select markets and saw a noticeable drop in abuse problems. Abuse reports on conversations dropped by 8 percent, while abuse reports in search dropped by 4 percent.

Instagram is testing a new feature that lets users add their payment information and make purchases right from Instagram, TechCrunch reports.

Users can add a credit or debit card and a pin for additional security. Once the initial setup is complete, the tool can be used to make purchases from within the platform.

The feature is currently undergoing a trial with select users. Those who have the feature will find it under “payment settings” in their profile settings.

In addition to letting users make purchases without leaving the app, users are able to book appointments at a limited number of spas and restaurants through a third-party integration with dinner reservation app Resy. Instagram says the tool could eventually be used for a range of services, such as booking tickets to movies and events.

Faster shopping on Instagram

In March 2017, the photo-sharing platform announced that it planned to give business profiles the option to let users book services. At the time, Instagram didn’t say anything about native payments.

The company said the feature would be launched later in 2017, but no such feature was unveiled by the end of the year. The feature seems to be coming a little later than expected, but it appears to finally be rolling out in a trial version.

The ability to shop from within the app would change the way users currently make purchases through the platform, which is by relying on third parties to complete the transaction. Faster and easier shopping would benefit Instagram and brands alike, since users would stay on the app for longer and also be less likely to quit on their way to checkout while filling in their payment info.

The terms of service for the new feature state that the Instagram payment system is backed by Facebook’s Payments rules, according to TechCrunch.

Instagram hasn’t said when it will launch the new feature internationally.

Monday was a big day for Twitter. The social media platform’s stock price shot up nearly five percent on news that it inked a deal with Disney, NBC, and Viacom to stream live shows.

With video content accounting for more than half of its ad revenue, Twitter’s move is not only bold, but brainy. In cutting its new video deals, the company nearly doubled its number of video shows, from 16 to 30.

And, if Twitter’s first quarter is any indication, there’s a real possibility it could video stream more than 5,000 live broadcasts, with nearly 80 percent of those reaching a worldwide audience.

Accentuating live video

The Disney partnership is a prize catch for Twitter. Disney brings ABC, the Disney Channel, Marvel Comics, and ESPN to the table. With ESPN, Disney is giving Twitter the keys to do its spin on SportsCenter Live with a mix of sports-related news and insights available through Twitter’s “Moments” tab.

Twitter recently launched a new set of tools designed to let users Tweet special moments from a live video in hopes of making it easier for people and publishers to find, watch, and discuss those highlights.

It looks like the entire social media world is betting video content will be its bread and butter going forward. In the last two months, Google announced its plans for YouTube Remix and Facebook ponied up a reported $30-35 million to have exclusive rights to Major League Baseball games.

All Twitter’s signs point to yes

Twitter seems determined to make 2018 a big year, too. The company heads into its May 30 annual stockholder meeting on the heels of a 10 percent uptick in daily active users and a year-over-year revenue gain of 21 percent in the first quarter.

The company also continues its march to get out of Facebook’s shadow when it comes to news. Recently, Twitter put into play a feature that highlights news stories tweeted by people a user follows, a ploy that could domino the amount of time users spend with Twitter.

“We've begun sharing curated timelines of Tweets around breaking news events in different parts of the app, including the Home timeline and search results, to make it easier to find relevant news and the surrounding conversation,” Twitter wrote in its Q1 investor letter. “This is a first step in a much more cohesive strategy around events that’s inclusive of both the conversation on Twitter and live video, and we’re continuing to experiment with ways to bring more personalized, relevant content to people across our product.”

Facebook has taken another step toward stemming the circulation of false news on its site. Now, any news links that haven’t been verified as accurate by Facebook’s third-party fact checkers will shrink to the size of the link in mobile users’ News Feeds.

“We reduce the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked false,” a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.

The company previously set out to squash fake news by marking posts deemed to be false with a red flag. However, the red flags caused users who wanted to believe the false stories to click and share the flagged stories more.

Harder to read, easier to miss

Facebook unveiled its new plan to combat misinformation at the Fighting Abuse @Scale event in San Francisco. In addition to shrinking the size of false news stories, the stories are accompanied by a “Related Articles” box that includes links to posts debunking the story.

By shrinking the appearance of false news stories, the company is aiming to make misinformation less noticeable while scrolling. Facebook hasn’t eliminated false news sites altogether for fear of being seen as taking an editorial stance on the issue.

Facebook is also now using machine learning to scan newly published articles for signs that they may contain inaccurate information. The technology, when used in conjunction with other signals (like user reports), is intended to help Facebook’s fact-checkers spend their time reviewing articles that are already in the running to likely be marked as false.

“We use machine learning to help predict things that might be more likely to be false news, to help prioritize material we send to fact-checkers (given the large volume of potential material),” a spokesperson from Facebook said.

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer has pleaded guilty to money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution, according to a Washington Post report. The executive has agreed to testify against fellow co-founders of the website, several of whom are currently in prison and awaiting full detention hearings scheduled for next week.

In his admission statement, Ferrer admitted that he conspired with other Backpage officials to facilitate prostitution crimes being committed by users of the site. The company achieved this, Ferrer said, by creating a moderation process that removed explicit words and images from advertisements peddling prostitution.

“Such editing did not, of course, change the essential nature of the illegal service being offered in the ad – it was merely intended to create a veneer of deniability for Backpage,” Ferrer said. “[The] editing practices were only one component of an overall, company-wide culture and policy of concealing and refusing to officially acknowledge the true nature of the services being offered in Backpage’s ‘escort’ and ‘adult’ ads.”

“I have long been aware that the great majority of these advertisements are, in fact, advertisements for prostitution services (which are not protected by the First Amendment and which are illegal in 49 states and in much of Nevada).”

In addition to modifying advertisements, Ferrer admitted that he and other Backpage officials duped credit card companies and banks that refused to process the company’s payments.

“I worked with my co-conspirators to find ways to fool credit card companies into believing that Backpage-associated charges were being incurred on different websites,” he said.

Ferrer’s guilty pleas were filed in state courts in California and Texas, as well as in federal court in Arizona.

Guilty pleas and shutting down pages

Court documents unsealed on Thursday show that Ferrer’s plea process began earlier this month when he pleaded guilty to money laundering in a federal court in Phoenix. The executive then traveled to Texas where he again pleaded guilty to money laundering and Backpage pleaded guilty to human trafficking.

Ferrer then traveled to Sacramento where he pleaded guilty to money laundering once more and was released on bond. Although he has agreed to testify against other executives at Backpage, the California plea agreement indicates that Ferrer will face up to five years in prison; sentences handed down in Arizona and Texas would run along the same time period.

Ferrer has also agreed in his California plea to take down every Backpage-affiliated website that he can within five days and forfeit all Backpage-related domains within 14 days.

The case that can change the world

Regulators in California have been entrenched in legal battles with Backpage for years over the site’s activities and practices. In 2015, the state filed charges against the company for pimping and money laundering, but the case was thrown out the following year.

Maggy Krell, a former assistant attorney general in California and lawyer who worked on the case, says that the recent pleas and indictments could be a major turning point.

“This is such an important step forward for the many people who’ve been combating human trafficking. There is no one in the entire world who made more money off sex trafficking than the owners of this website,” she said.

“Seeing it shut down and having their business model become clearly illegal is really gratifying. If one case can change the world, it’s this case.”

Grindr, the popular dating and hook-up app targeted to gay men, is facing tough questions from United States senators after European researchers revealed that it was sharing user data with third parties.

“Grindr collects highly personal data about its users,” wrote Senators Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) in a letter addressed to Grindr’s interim CEO Zhou Yahui.

The senators are asking Yahui, who is based in Hong Kong, to answer over a dozen detailed questions about how the app collects data and what it is used for. The senators are demanding a response by April 17.

“Simply using an app should not give companies a license to carelessly use, handle or share this type of sensitive information,” they add.

Users asked sensitive questions

Grindr surged in popularity with the premise of searching for potential hook-ups in an anonymous and safe environment. The app was initially tailored only to men seeking other men and allowed users to set up profiles without confirming their identify.

However, a rise in spam profiles caused the company to ditch anonymous profiles in 2013. In 2017, Grindr announced that it was opening the app to women, transgender people, and bisexual men.

Despite the changes over the years, Grindr has soared in popularity and now has a registered 3.6 million users.

When new users create their Grindr profiles, they are asked a series of sensitive questions, including their sexual preference and HIV status. Users then have the option of displaying their HIV status on their profile for others to see.

But consumers likely assumed that the information would stay contained in the app -- not be shared with third parties.

Users' HIV statuses shared 

Data researchers in Norway, where data collection laws are much stricter than they are here, discovered the company’s practices via a technical analysis published on Saturday. According to their findings, users’ HIV statuses are shared with two outside analytics firms and their sexual preferences are shared with several third-party companies that do not encrypt the data.

The Consumer Council, an advocacy group in Norway, looked over the results and announced plans shortly after to file a complaint to the country’s regulators. The group charges that Grindr’s practices are in violation of Europe’s laws designed to protect user data.

The findings gained attention in the United States when BuzzFeed published a report independently verifying the data-sharing on Monday.

ACT UP New York member James Krellenstein told BuzzFeed news that Grindr is unique for encouraging users to be transparent with each other about their HIV status.  

“To then have that data shared with third parties that you weren’t explicitly notified about, and having that possibly threaten your health or safety — that is an extremely, extremely egregious breach of basic standards that we wouldn’t expect from a company that likes to brand itself as a supporter of the queer community,” he told the publication.

Grindr reponds

In a statement on their United States website, Grindr had a somewhat defensive response while also acknowledging that it had room to improve.

"We give users the option to post information about themselves including HIV status and last test date, and we make it clear in our privacy policy that if you choose to include this information in your profile, the information will also become public," the company’s CTO Scott Chen wrote.

He claimed that the company has never sold personal data and added that it they are “always looking for additional measures that go above and beyond industry best practices to help maintain our users’ right to privacy.”

But Grindr did not indicate in its statement whether it would agree to answer the Senators’ more detailed questions about its data collection practices.

The company later backtracked somewhat, telling the publication Axios that it would stop sharing users’ HIV status with the outside vendors.

Earlier this month, Match Group -- owner of the dating app Tinder -- filed a lawsuit against its rival Bumble for alleged patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property. Now, Bumble has escalated the feud by filing a lawsuit of its own against Match.

The lawsuit comes two weeks after the women-founded dating app published a full-page, anti-bullying open letter slamming Match’s allegations in the New York Times.

“We swipe left on you. We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us, copy us, and, now, to intimidate us,” Bumble said. “We’ll never be yours. No matter the price tag, we’ll never compromise our values.”

“We swipe left on your attempted scare tactics, and on these endless games. We swipe left on your assumption that a baseless lawsuit would intimidate us. Given your enduring interest in our company, we expected you to know us a bit better by now,” the company added.

Bumble’s allegations

In its lawsuit, Bumble accuses Match of stealing trade secrets, among other things, and argues that the patent lawsuit is baseless. The lawsuit isn’t Bumble’s response to Match’s initial lawsuit -- it’s a separate one altogether, TechCrunch points out.

Bumble acknowledged that the two companies had been discussing acquisition over the past six months. However, Bumble alleges that once Match found out there were other companies also interested in investing in or acquiring Bumble, Match filed suit to make Bumble seem less attractive to those other companies.

Bumble alleges that Match Group requested that Bumble provide “confidential and trade secret information” which Match said they “needed to provide a higher offer for Bumble” -- an offer that ultimately never came.

Finally, Bumble claims that Match “published false or disparaging information about Bumble, including statements in the press falsely claiming that Bumble infringed Match’s intellectual property, as well as false statements in the Lawsuit”.

Bumble says the information published by Match has potentially affected future investment and acquisition opportunities. The lawsuit requests relief in the form of monetary damages (an estimated $400M), as well as a permanent injunction preventing Match Group from using any of the confidential information it obtained during acquisition discussions.

Craigslist announced on Friday that it’s shutting down its personal ad section.

The global classified ad site made its decision in response to Congress passing the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (FOSTA), which makes websites liable for facilitating sex trafficking.

“US Congress just passed HR 1865, ‘FOSTA’, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully,” Craigslist said in a statement on its site.

“Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking Craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.”

Websites held accountable

The measure -- which was approved by both chambers of Congress -- was passed by the Senate on Wednesday after the House approved it last month. President Trump is expected to sign it into law as soon as this week.

The legislation would create an exception to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which would clear the way for websites to be targeted with legal action for enabling prostitution and sex trafficking.

It would also "enable state law enforcement officials, not just the federal Department of Justice, to take action against individuals or businesses that violate federal sex trafficking laws."

Those in support of the legislation say it will help curb the problem of online sex trafficking. However, numerous tech companies argue that the bill is a form of censorship.

‘Significant unintended consequences’

Last year, 10 tech trade groups co-authored a letter condemning the bill. The groups said the amendment would invite “significant unintended consequences” and create legal ambiguity that would have a "chilling effect."

"Platforms will err on the side of extreme caution in removing content uploaded by their users, while cutting back on proactive prevention measures," they wrote.

In a separate letter, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) argued that bad actors "could easily escape by changing their URL address or relocating abroad."

"We urge Congress to take a narrow approach that directly targets bad actors,' the CTA said. "Specifically, Congress should urge the Department of Justice to aggressively use its powers to identify and prosecute the limited number of rogue websites that are violating the law."

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, says big tech platforms are having a negative impact on competition and society.

Berners-Lee penned an open letter marking the 29th birthday of the internet in which he argued that the “powerful weight of a few dominant” tech platforms are creating barriers for competitors, which could stifle innovation over the next 20 years.

“These dominant platforms are able to lock in their position by creating barriers for competitors,” Berners-Lee wrote. “They acquire startup challengers, buy up new innovations and hire the industry’s top talent. Add to this the competitive advantage that their user data gives them and we can expect the next 20 years to be far less innovative than the last,” he said.

Ruling of tech companies

The web, which was “once a rich selection of blogs and websites,” is now controlled by a few mega platforms, Berners-Lee says. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon wield a large amount of control over how ideas are shared.

Platform power has made it possible for people to “weaponize the web at scale,” he says.

“In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data,” he writes.

The current response of lawmakers has been to look “to the platforms themselves for answers,” but calling on companies that were built to maximize profit to fix the problem isn’t likely to be effective, says Berners-Lee.

Socially minded regulation

Berners-Lee suggests that socially minded regulation may be the best means to ensure that the internet benefits everyone.

"A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease...tensions," he wrote. "Today’s powerful digital economy calls for strong standards that balance the interests of both companies and online citizens."

Ultimately, Berners-Lee wants to turn the web into something that will “reflect our hopes and fulfil our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.”

“It may sound utopian, it may sound impossible to achieve after the setbacks of the last two years, but I want us to imagine that future and build it,” he said.

As part of its mission to crack down on spam bots, Twitter has suspended accounts linked to “tweetdecking,” or the process of mass retweeting stolen content in order to help it go viral.

Popular “tweetdeckers,” including Common White Girl, Dory, and Finah, were suspended from the site because they violated the social network’s spam policies that forbid mass duplication.

Last month, Twitter announced new rules that would aim to prevent users from creating or controlling accounts in an organized fashion to achieve a particular goal (such as making a post appear to have more support than it actually does).

Under the new rules, users are not allowed to “sell, purchase, or attempt to artificially inflate account interactions.” Violating this policy is grounds for permanent suspension, the company said.

Manufactured virulity

Tweetdeckers operate by retweeting posts across multiple accounts in Tweetdeck in an effort to spread other users’ -- as well as paying customers’ -- tweets into forced virality. Several suspended tweetdeckers had amassed hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers.

"One of the most common spam violations we see is the use of multiple accounts and the Twitter developer platform to attempt to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain Tweets," Twitter wrote of its initiative to crack down on spam.

"To be clear: Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behavior may result in enforcement action,” the company added.

Twitter hasn’t confirmed whether or not the suspensions are permanent or commented on individual suspensions.

Findings from a new study conducted by researchers at MIT show false news gets disseminated much more quickly than real news, especially when it comes to social media platforms like Twitter.

Researchers say that’s because users tend to like and retweet “novel” news that they haven’t encountered before on the site without stopping to accurately discern whether it is true or false.

“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” said co-author Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Bots aren’t always the culprit

The researchers said they were “somewhere between surprised and stunned” at the stark difference in the trajectories of false and real news. They found that false news is 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real news stories.

While bots have often been blamed for the spread of inaccurate news, the team found that they’re not always behind the swift spread of false news. Ordinary people are primarily behind the rapid spread of inaccurate news within the social media ecosystem.

“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a co-author of the new paper.

Study details

For the study, the team spent two years studying the role Twitter plays in spreading false news across the globe. They examined around 126,000 stories that had been tweeted out by roughly 3 million people worldwide.

To determine if a story was real or fake, the researchers used six independent fact-checking groups, including politifact.com, snopes.org, and factcheck.org. The MIT researchers termed inaccurate news "false" as opposed to "fake,” because "fake news" is a term that involves multiple broad meanings.

Of the 126,000 stories tweeted, politics accounted for the biggest news category, and its spread was more pronounced than for news in other categories. Truthful tweets took about six times longer to reach 1,500 people than false tweets.

Novelty fuels spread

The results of the study suggest that novelty plays a key role in the spread of falsehoods on Twitter. “False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,” said Aral.

Spreading previously unknown (but possibly false) information can help social media users gain attention. As Aral put it, “people who share novel information are seen as being in the know.”

The full study has been published online in the journal Science.

Unilever has threatened to pull ads from Facebook, Google, and other online platforms if the tech giants don’t do a better job of controlling the spread of what the company calls “toxic” online content.

In a speech delivered Monday at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in California, Keith Weed, chief marketing officer at Unilever, called on technology companies to step up their efforts to improve transparency and consumer trust.

"We need to redefine what is responsible business in the digital age because for all of the good the tech companies are doing, there's some unintended consequences that now need addressing," Weed said.

Some of those unintended consequences include facilitating the spread of fake news and illegal content, he noted.

Rebuilding trust

Unilever -- which makes Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Dove soap, and more than 1,000 other brands worldwide -- is one of the biggest online advertisers, and digital advertising on platforms like Facebook and Google accounts for a significant portion of its ad spend.

But the company says it does not want to advertise on platforms that are rife with abusive, divisive, and unethical material. Unilever says consumer trust in social media platforms is waning due to the perceived lack of effort on the part of tech giants to keep out this “toxic” content.

In his speech, Weed argues that some online platforms are “sometimes little better than a swamp,” though he stopped short of mentioning any specific companies.

“2018 is either the year of tech-lash, where the world turns on the tech giants — and we have seen some of this already— or the year of trust. The year where we collectively rebuild trust back in our systems and our society,” he said.

Improving the industry

The company says it has already offered solutions to tech companies and wants to work with them to improve the industry.

“Unilever will not invest in platforms or environments that do not protect our children or which create division in society, and promote anger or hate,” Weed said. “We will prioritize investing only in responsible platforms that are committed to creating a positive impact in society.”

In a statement on Monday, one Facebook spokeswoman said that the platform “fully supports Unilever’s commitments and [we] are working closely with them.”

"Keith has always pushed us and the industry to be better," Google said in its own statement. "There is nothing we take more seriously than the trust and safety of our users, customers and partners, and we will continue to work to earn that trust every day."

Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook is flawed and vowed to make “fixing Facebook” his personal goal for 2018. Several changes -- including showing users more local news and less commercial content on their News Feeds -- have already been rolled out to users.

Google has announced that a new task force will be dedicated to policing extremist content on YouTube in 2018.

In the middle of content changes and its crackdown on clickbait, Facebook is focusing its ire on cryptocurrency.

The social media giant’s new advertising policy takes a direct shot at binary options, initial coin offerings, cryptocurrency, and the scammers who are trying to profit from the crypto money rage. Effective immediately, come-ons like “Start binary options trading now and receive a 10-risk free trades bonus!” will be gone from Facebook’s ad delivery.

“We want people to continue to discover and learn about new products and services through Facebook ads without fear of scams or deception. That said, there are many companies who are advertising binary options, ICOs and cryptocurrencies that are not currently operating in good faith,” said Rob Leathern, product management director for Facebook Business.

Is Facebook just pressing the pause button?

Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg showed cautious interest in cryptocurrency and its potential role in decentralization.

In a post focused on Facebook’s challenges for 2018, he commented that counter-trends like encryption and cryptocurrency may give power back to the people, but “they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”

Leathern echoed that view and left the door open for the cryptocurrency promoters. “This policy is intentionally broad while we work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices, and enforcement will begin to ramp up across our platforms including Facebook, Audience Network, and Instagram. We will revisit this policy and how we enforce it as our signals improve,” he said.

Not everyone will be pleased by these changes

Recode's Kurt Wagner raises a concern that some of the power players in the Facebook camp might not be too happy with this change. Both Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, high-profile crypto backers, sit on Facebook’s board, and Facebook Messenger’s chief David Marcus is on the board of directors at Coinbase, a popular crypto exchange platform.

Andreesen has been on Bitcoin’s bandwagon since 2014, and according to CBS News, Thiel’s Founders Fund invested as much as $20 million in Bitcoin in mid-2017, and turned that into a tenfold investment.

Bitcoin’s rollercoaster ride

Cryptocurrency pioneer Bitcoin has gone from oblivion to curiosity to investment darling and was on a tear at the end of 2017. From its birth in 2009 and through the first two years of its infancy, Bitcoin’s value bounced around from worthless to 14 cents to $1.06 before settling in at 87 cents in February 2011.

After Gawker.com did a story on the currency’s embrace by online drug dealers, Bitcoin’s price soared to $27 and the fascination continued. Its value zoomed past $19,000 in December 2017 before taking a tumble back to under $10,000 by the end of January 2018.

But, naturally, in the midst of the euphoria, other cryptocurrencies jumped on the gravy train. And, in their zeal, some pulled out all the stops in trying to tap new customers. Facebook felt that it needed to throttle any potential “misleading and deceptive promotional practices” as decisively and quickly as possible.

A group of 100 child development experts and advocates has published an open letter urging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to shut down the site’s new messaging app aimed at kids.

Back in December, Facebook launched the free Messenger Kids app, touting it as a safe way for kids under 13 to chat with family members and parent-approved friends.

Since parents are given control of their child’s account, Facebook asserted that Messenger Kids would be filling a “need for a messaging app that lets kids connect with people they love but also has the level of control parents want.”  

But health experts argue that younger kids aren’t ready to have their own social media accounts and say the app should be pulled.

Targeting younger children

Led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the group of experts and advocates includes psychiatrists, pediatricians, educators, parenting organizations, and the children’s music singer Raffi Cavoukian.

"Messenger Kids is not responding to a need - it is creating one," the letter states. "It appeals primarily to children who otherwise would not have their own social media accounts," the letter reads. Another passage criticized Facebook for "targeting younger children with a new product."

The group says children under 13 aren’t old enough to navigate the complexities of online relationships or protect their own privacy.

“They also do not have a fully developed understanding of privacy, including what’s appropriate to share with others and who has access to their conversations, pictures, and videos,” the letter continued.

‘Gateway drug’

When the app was launched, Facebook said there were “no ads” or paid content downloads inside the app. It also assured parents that their “child’s information isn’t used for ads.”

In defense of the app, Facebook released a statement emphasizing that parents are “always in control” of their child’s activity.

"We worked to create Messenger Kids with an advisory committee of parenting and developmental experts, as well as with families themselves and in partnership with National PTA. We continue to be focused on making Messenger Kids the best experience it can be for families," said Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, in a statement to the Washington Post.

However, the company has been accused of using Messenger Kids as a ‘gateway drug’ to get kids hooked on social media at a younger age, making them more likely to use their service when they become teenagers and can be subjected to ad-targeting.  

Health effects of technology

The group says it’s “particularly irresponsible” of Facebook to launch an app geared towards preschoolers when there is growing concern about how social media use affects children’s development.

“Already, adolescents report difficulty moderating their own social media use,” they write. “Messenger Kids will exacerbate this problem, as the anticipation of friends’ responses will be a powerful incentive for children to check – and stay on – a phone or tablet.

“[T]he app’s overall impact on families and society is likely to be negative, normalizing social media use among young children and creating peer pressure for kids to sign up for their first account,” they said.

“Raising children in our new digital age is difficult enough,” they added. “We ask that you do not use Facebook’s enormous reach and influence to make it even harder. Please make a strong statement that Facebook is committed to the wellbeing of children and society by pulling the plug on Messenger Kids.”

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg vowed to try to make users “happier” in 2018 by making certain changes to the site. Shutting down Messenger Kids would be a highly positive move, the group of experts contend.

“Doing better is leaving younger children alone and allowing them to develop without the pressures that come with social media use,” they said.

A recent poll revealed that more than a quarter of Americans (29 percent) plan to make New Year’s resolutions for the year ahead -- a slight increase from 2016.

Researchers from Saint Leo University found that traditional New Year’s resolutions held steady, with top responses being: lose weight (55 percent), save more money (56 percent), travel more (29 percent); and spend more time with family (26 percent).

A small number of respondents (4.4 percent) said they want to spend less time with family in 2018 -- up from last year’s response of 0.4 percent. Vacationing more and finding a new job also ranked in the top five resolutions with 29 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

“On the whole, the top resolutions found on the poll all reflect a desire toward self/life improvement with saving money and more time with family also being big winners,” Dr. Christopher Wolfe, associate professor of psychology at Saint Leo University, told ConsumerAffairs.

Age differences

The poll also revealed a few demographic differences when it came to New Year’s resolutions. Millennials were more likely to make resolutions that would help them improve their life and health in the coming year compared to Gen Xers.

Almost half of millennial respondents (49 percent) plan to make resolutions, while only 31 percent of those in the 36 to 55 age group will do so; just 16 percent of those in the 56+ age demographic said they will make New Year’s resolutions.

Positive change

While younger consumers may be more likely than their older counterparts to make resolutions, the reason for creating New Year’s resolutions tends to be the same across all age groups.

People make resolutions in an effort to create positive change in their life, Wolfe says. Resolutions “can act as a sign post, a benchmark, or even a line in the sand; from a static point, this change can begin,” he said.

“We are often so wrapped up in our day-to-day routine that the thought of change can be daunting,” he added. “But as one year gives way to the next, we take the opportunity to set out a goal and try to embrace a desired change in ourselves.”

Tips for keeping resolutions

To improve your likelihood of sticking to resolutions, it’s important to try to see them as a beginning point -- “not an ultimatum or a race,” says Wolfe.

Setting small goals and embracing the fact that you may occasionally fail at keeping them can make sticking to resolutions seem less daunting.

“As our bad habits took time to set in, these new patterns of change will also take time to take hold and for real results be seen,” Wolfe said. Embracing this mindset towards resolutions can help ensure you don’t abandon your goals at the first sign of a setback.

Wolfe recommends focusing on small victories that support your resolution to help you stay motivated. It can also be helpful to take note of obstacles that you experience along the way..

“Look for triggers that may distract you from keeping your resolution and consider writing them down. Keep a small notebook of these triggers and add to it as you experience them,” he said. “The acts of writing them down and carrying the reminder may help to curb these triggers over time.”

A new poll conducted by a student loan company suggests that a third of people judge romantic prospects based on their credit card debt.

LendEDU, a company that refinances student loans, polled 1,000 people for their views on dating and personal finance. According to their results, 30 percent of people consider credit card debt a “critical factor” in deciding whether to date someone. 

Another striking trend among respondents’ attitudes was that a third of them would like to have their own debt paid off by a hypothetical mate.

“Thirty percent of people judging credit card debt as a critical factor in their dating partners definitely was one of the more eye-catching statistics,” says Mike Brown, a research analyst with LendDU, “especially because it received so many more votes than did student loan debt or annual income.”

“A person with a serious amount of credit card debt could be seen as irresponsible and lacking sound judgement, two qualities that are not exactly desirable when looking for a significant other,” he writes to ConsumerAffairs.

Less concerned with other debts

The respondents polled were less judgemental about people who owed student loan debt, with only 11.8 percent describing it as a “critical factor” in their romantic choices, an encouraging figure, given that Americans also owe more than $1 trillion in student loans. Salary is a little more important to people, though less so than credit card debt--18.6 percent of people judged potential dates on their annual income.

Modern Americans are saddled with more debt than any other generation in U.S. history; the average American household is carrying approximately $16,000 in credit card debt, according to the US Census Bureau and Federal Reserve. That totals more than $1 trillion, the highest amount of credit card debt in United States history.

The median income for Americans rose to just over $59,0000 in September, in what economists say is a positive sign. But previous research has warned of an unhealthy disparity between wages and between annual incomes and the cost of living. 

According to a June 2017 report by the National Low Income Housing coalition, earning the federal minimum wage is not enough to afford the average rent in any state.

With millions of Americans struggling to pay off bills on their homes, cars and education, credit cards can present a tempting opportunity to spend in the short-term, particularly as wages remain out-of-step with the cost of living.  

“It is more than common to see couples in their 30s and 40s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt because they bought a house outside of their price range, or a new sports car that they did not necessarily need,” investment banker Chris Markowski wrote in an editorial decrying the nationwide credit card debt as “terrible news for our future.”

The question of who pays for a dinner is a likely to cause more social anxiety than long-term financial concerns. The bigger issues impacting single people’s finances are credit card debt, student loan debt and the ever-persistent gap between wages and the cost of living.  It’s perhaps no surprise then that people hope that a romantic partner can give them an easy out.

As the dating pool has become more saturated with highly educated women, the chance of ‘marrying up’ has significantly increased for men, a new study finds.

The study, led by University of Kansas sociologist ChangHwan Kim, found that the number of highly educated and paid women exceeds the number of highly educated men in the marriage market.

“The pattern of marriage and its economic consequences have changed over time,” said Kim, an associate professor at University of Kansas. Women are now more likely to be married to a less-educated man -- and men aren’t complaining, says Kim.

Improves family standard of living

“Men don’t complain a lot about this,” he says, likely because it improves their economic well-being. Wives’ increase in earning potential contributes to an improvement of the family standard of living, the researchers pointed out.

“It seems fine for men because their wife is now bringing more income to the household,” he said. “One implication of these findings is that the importance of marriage market has increased for men's total economic well-being."

From a marriage-equality standpoint, the findings are “a really good sign,” says Kim. The increase in women with high-level degrees and well-paying jobs has helped to shrink the gap in income equality between husbands and wives.

“Marriage is now becoming more egalitarian and becoming equal,” he says.

The research is based on U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000 and the 2009-11 American Community Survey. Kim and co-author Arthur Sakamoto, of Texas A&M University, focused on education and earnings of people 35-44 years of age.

The full study has been published in the journal Demography.

Whether you’re looking to meet someone who shares your political views or hates the same things you hate, there’s likely a dating app out there to help you find your ideal match.

Now, there’s a dating site specifically geared toward those who love dogs. Hotdiggiddy, the new "Social Dating Site" for Dog Lovers, is centered around the idea that those who care for dogs are usually warm, loving, and responsible people.

The creators of the site say finding romance or friendship with a dog lover won’t only be a boon to your happiness, it’ll be a positive influence in the life of your four-legged friend as well.

Romantic or platonic relationships

"Have you ever invited someone over for a visit and as soon as they walked in the door your dog immediately reacted to them? Not in a nice way. Well, we have time and again,” said Scott Murray, CEO of Hotdiggiddy.

“We find that the people who our dogs like are usually people who we can trust and get along with; even if they are not dog owners themselves. These people just seem to give off good vibes that you and your dog can feel."

But you don’t have to own a dog to use the Canadian based dating site and app -- a love of dogs is all that’s required.

Dog lovers in relationships

In addition to giving off good vibes, dog lovers may also be better communicators. According to a University of Buffalo study, couples with pets have closer relationships and interact more than couples without pets.

The researchers explained that dogs make people want to seek out more social contact. As a result, they tend to form stronger and longer-lasting relationships.

Another potential perk of dating a dog lover: they may be more empathetic. A 2014 study found that dog owners are more engaged with their communities, likely as a result of being tapped into their empathetic, understanding side from all the hours spent caring for their pet.

Hotdiggiddy says it’s looking for people who are living life to the fullest. And while you only need to be over the age of 18 to use the site, its key demographic is 30 years of age and older.

Okay, when it comes to dating sites, this might actually be a good idea.

While other dating sites use various methods to match people looking for a partner, CreditscoreDating.com cuts right to the chase and matches couples based on their credit scores.

Members create a profile like they would on any other dating site, including relevant information a potential partner might reasonably want to know. But the profile also has to include the member's credit score.

The scores are not verified, but the site but says it believes that 92% of the posted scores are accurate.

Mixing love and money

But isn't mixing love and money a little crass? True, focusing on how a potential partner handles a checkbook and credit card might dampen the romance of dating, but it could save some heartache later on.

Some people on both sides of the issue – financial advisors and relationship experts – believe money management is an important relationship topic that is easily overlooked in the first blush of romance.

Financial advisor Christopher Krell urges couples to have a candid conversation about money, including their approaches to both spending and saving. He points to a 2012 study published in the Family Relations Journal which concluded that disagreements about money are the main reason marriages hit the rocks.

Kansas State University researcher Sonya Britt participated in that study, and her research paper reached the same conclusion. Regardless of income, she found arguments over money are a major predictor for divorce.

The danger of high and low credit scores

And that brings us back to credit scores. If one partner has a high credit score and the other a low one, it suggests that one is careful with finances while the other is either reckless or makes a series of uninformed choices. It isn't a recipe for a happy relationship.

Once a couple is married, they often share credit accounts. If one partner runs up bills and doesn't pay, the partner with the good credit score suffers too.

People looking for a relationship have begun to grasp this reality. A 2014 survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) found that uncontrollable debt can be toxic for romance.

The survey found 37% of respondents would not marry someone until their debt was repaid. Ten percent would marry but not help pay the debt while seven percent would take the somewhat extreme action of breaking off the relationship.

When consumers consider social media sites like Facebook, they might think of status updates, photos, events, and several other features. However, there are a number of “business” aspects that might come to mind too.

Specifically, consumers might think of brands on Facebook and their use of advertising. Engaging with those brands through liking and sharing content is all a part of business strategy, but how much difference does a “like” make exactly? Perhaps not that much, according to researchers from Tulane University.

"When we think of Facebook, we think of it as a very social platform. Most companies think that those social interactions will lead to more customer loyalty and more profitable customers," said lead author Daniel Mochon. "That's not necessarily the case. Customers rarely post on a brand's page on their own and typically only see a fraction of a brand's Facebook content unless they are targeted with paid advertising"

"Likes" don't guarantee engagement

The researchers tested their assertions by measuring consumers’ engagement with a wellness program called Discovery Vitality. Participants were able to earn program points by taking part in healthful behaviors like exercising. With this model, the researchers set out to see if people would try to earn more points if they liked the program’s Facebook page.

Invites to like the page and take a survey were sent out to one group, while those who were not invited acted as the control group. After four months, the researchers found no difference between the amount of reward points each group earned, suggesting that simply “liking” the page didn’t make much of a difference.

However, in phase two of the experiment, Vitality paid Facebook to display two of its posts to members who liked the page per week. After two months, those who liked the page earned 8% more reward points than the control group.

Boosting content more effective

The researchers think the ads were effective because it boosted Vitality’s reach, ensuring that its content would reach participants’ timelines. They say that the findings provide some evidence for how companies may want to use social media in the future.

"To our knowledge this is the first causal demonstration of the effect of Facebook page liking on customer behavior -- specifically behavior that takes place offline. The results suggest that Facebook pages are most effective when they are used as a form of traditional advertising rather than as a platform for social interactions," said Janet Schwartz, assistant professor of marketing at Tulane.

The full study has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research.

Classified ad site Backpage.com has a new problem. It's being sued by two nonprofit shelters for women and children, alleging that the site's owners know that it is being used for illegal sex trafficking but have done nothing to stop it.

The suit is based on evidence uncovered in a 20-month probe of Backpage by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation that led the online site to shut down its adult sections.

The 53-page report (available here), issued Jan. 9, found evidence that Backpage knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and underage girls and covered up evidence of these crimes in order to increase its own profits.

“Backpage,” said Subcommittee Chair Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) in a prepared statement, “did nothing to stop this criminal activity. They facilitated it. Knowingly.” 

“[Backpage] did not turn away ads selling children,” said Ranking Member Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a former sex crimes prosecutor. “We now know as a result of our legal battle, based on their own documents, they did not turn away ads selling children. They just tried to make it less obvious. And worse, coached the traffickers and the pimps on how to clean up their ads."

"Millions in profits"

In one of the lawsuits, the Phoenix-based Sojourner Center charges that, “Defendants made millions of dollars in profits each year from websites that they designed and intended to be used, and that they knew were being used, for illegal sex trafficking, including of children.”

“Sojourner Center provides shelter, care, and support to trafficking victims, including individuals trafficked on Backpage,” the complaint states, according to Courthouse News Service.

The second suit was filed by Florida Abolitionist and an anonymous woman, Jane Doe, who says she was “raped and sold at least five times in a period of 12 hours” after she was trafficked on Backpage in March 2013.

Filed in Orlando, this complaint says Doe’s “traffickers posted her photograph and an advertisement offering her for sexual services on Backpage without Ms. Doe’s consent or authorization.”

Plaintiffs in both cases are represented by the office of David Boies, who represented Al Gore in the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election.

Defendants in both cases are Backpage owners Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey, and James Larkin. Defendants in both cases include EvilEmpire.com and BigCity.com.

700,000 ads

The Sojourner Shelter says in its complaint that Backpage “depends on sex trafficking to remain profitable.”

“In May 2011, Backpage’s ‘Adult Services’ section, nationwide, featured over 700,000 paid advertisements,” the Phoenix complaint says. It adds that when Backpage’s major competitor, Craigslist, took down its Adult Services page in 2009, “online sex trafficking declined by 50 percent.”

The complaint continues: “After Craiglist.org’s exit from this market, Backpage, formerly a part of the Village Voice newspaper, changed its online advertising model to concentrate on, and quickly dominate, the market for advertising victims of sex trafficking, including underage children.

Many U.S. consumers might envision a typical, mature relationship as two married adults who own a house and live in harmony. But a new study shows that a new global trend may be taking form among older adults who have previously been divorced.

Researchers from the University of Missouri say that some older couples are choosing to forego typical living patterns for a more relaxed arrangement. Instead of living in the same place, they say that older couples that have experienced divorce are opting to keep separate homes, dubbed “Living Apart Together” (LAT).

“What has long been understood about late-in-life relationships is largely based on long-term marriage. There are now more divorced and widowed adults who are interested in forging new intimate relationships outside the confines of marriage,” said researcher Jaquelyn Benson.

Positives and negatives

While LAT relationships are more commonly accepted in Europe than in the U.S., the researchers point out that there are some advantages to the system. In their study, the researchers found that LAT couples tended to be more self-reliant – tending more towards financial and social independence than couples in a traditional relationship.

However, there were also some drawbacks observed about LAT relationships. LAT couples had more trouble than traditional couples when it came to expressing the nature of their relationship to others, with many stating that the terms “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” were not sufficient. Additionally, LAT couples had trouble determining how caregiving for a child or “family” decision-making should be handled.

“While we are learning more about LAT relationships, further research is needed to determine how LAT relationships are related to issues such as health care and caregiving. Discussions about end-of-life planning and caregiving can be sensitive to talk about; however, LAT couples should make it a priority to have these conversations both as a couple and with their families," Benson said. 

"Many of us wait until a crisis to address those issues, but in situations like LAT where there are no socially prescribed norms dictating behavior these conversations may be more important than ever.

Avoiding heartache

While some may suggest that the negatives outweigh the positives, Benson says that an LAT relationship may be perfect for older couples who have experienced the sting of divorce before.

“Recent research demonstrates that there are other ways of establishing long-lasting, high-quality relationships without committing to marriage or living together. . . If more people—young and old, married or not—saw LAT as an option, it might save them from a lot of future heartache,” she said.

The full study has been published in Family Relations.

Social media giant Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but the company has progressively been trying to find more ways to keep users engaged in its network. Last month, it launched Marketplace, an apparent answer to Craigslist, that is meant to allow users to see and buy items that people close by have for sale.

Now, the company says it will be testing out a new feature on some Pages that’s designed to help with job recruitment. It said in an announcement on Monday that the tool will help employers find new, prospective candidates for job openings. So far, the tool is only in the testing phase, but it could provide a challenge to popular networking site LinkedIn, which is also heavily invested in job listings and recruitment.

“Based on behavior we’ve seen on Facebook, where many small businesses post about their job openings on their Page, we’re running a test for Page admins to create job postings and receive applications from candidates,” a spokesperson told Reuters.

Applying via Facebook

According to TechCrunch, Pages can now formally share a job opening by accessing an option in the status update composer; details such as salary and prerequisites can be added to the opening before it is published. An “Apply Now” button on the job posting will allow prospective candidates to begin the application process, and any relevant information collected by Facebook can be used to fill in answers more quickly.

Users will be able to find the postings in a couple of different places. Currently, they can go to a company’s Page and look under the “Jobs” tab to see if there are any openings. In the future, businesses will also be able to post a job opening to their News Feed, allowing all their followers to see it.

Completed applications will be sent to the appropriate Page as a Facebook message, and administrators will be able to take the information from there.

Providing incentive

If successful, the new job listing feature is sure to drive even more internet traffic to Facebook. Since the jobs tab of each Page acts as its own landing site, companies and businesses may be able to attract more Facebook followers and increase their reach.

Also, since each application is sent as a Facebook message, it might incentivize businesses to start committing to the social network’s chat feature. However, TechCrunch notes that if this feature doesn’t work well due to the variety of Facebook messages a Page receives, moving to an email-based system may be better.

The whole development comes at an inopportune time for LinkedIn. Not only is it dwarfed by Facebook’s user base – a difference of nearly 1.32 billion – but its recent acquisition by Microsoft could put the service on its heels as it seeks to adjust. Whether it will be forced to recover and try to retain users over the long-term remains to be seen. 

Photos of latte art, adorable animals, and enviable vacations aren’t all users can find on the popular photo-sharing app Instagram.

Despite Instagram’s ban on hashtags like ‘thinspiration’ or ‘thigh gap’ in 2012, users have continued to post pro-anorexia images. Earlier this year, Wired reported that users simply worked around the ban, changing ‘thinspo’ to ‘thinspooooo’ and ‘thighgap’ to ‘thyghgapp.’

Now, a new feature on Instagram may help those suffering from eating disorders, depression, and other forms of mental illness. Users who come across a photo which may have been posted by someone in need of help can anonymously flag it.

Flagging a photo will prompt a message to the user that reads, “Someone saw one of your posts and thinks you might be going through a difficult time. If you need support we’d like to help.” Users who may be struggling will then receive different options to get help.  

Input from mental health experts

To create the new feature, Instagram worked with organizations like the National Eating Disorders Association and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

“We listen to mental health experts when they tell us that outreach from a loved one can make a real difference for those who may be in distress. At the same time, we understand friends and family often want to offer support but don’t know how best to reach out,” Instagram’s Chief Operating Officer Marne Levine told Seventeen.

Levine explained that the primary goal in putting the new tools into action is to let those suffering from a mental illness know that they are “surrounded by a community that cares” during a time in which the person may desperately need such a reminder.

Support options

Approximately 350 million people suffer from depression, according to the World Health Organization. Recent studies have shown that there's an undeniable link between social media use and depression.

Online sharing can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and obsessive behavior. On image-driven social media platforms like Instagram and Tumblr, where manicured photos of seemingly perfect lives rack up the most ‘likes’, excessive comparison can often promote negative feelings.

But with Instagram’s new feature, users will receive support options if they search for banned hashtags or post an image which may be associated with mental illness or self-harm.

There are several advantages that come with being prepared and having a backup plan. Those who take the time to consider alternatives are often less anxious about the future and more ready to make changes if something unfortunate does happen.

However, two researchers, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Pennsylvania, respectively, say that there are drawbacks to making a backup plan. Their study shows that those who make them are more likely to put less effort into a given task and fail at achieving a goal.

Less effort

Jihae Shin and Katherine L. Milkman conducted this study after the former admitted that she had reservations when it came to making backup plans. “I was talking with Katy about how sometimes I was hesitant to make a backup plan, because somehow I thought it might hurt my chances of success in my primary goal. Katy thought it was an interesting idea and we decided to test it,” said Shin.

The pair devised a series of experiments to see if the notion held any water. Participants in the study were asked to complete a sentence-unscrambling task with the promise that they could earn a free snack or a chance to leave the study early if they completed it.

Shin and Milkman asked some of the study groups to come up with other ways that they could get free food or make up the lost time later if they failed. After completing the task, the researchers found that those who were asked to make backup plans did worse on the assigned task and had lower levels of desire when it came to succeeding.

Knowing when to make a plan

Shin and Milkman admit that having a backup plan can be beneficial in many ways, but they say that taking time to make one also comes at a cost in some cases.

They conclude by saying that knowing when to make a backup plan can make all the difference when it comes to succeeding at a given task. If a certain task cannot be influenced by effort, they say that making a backup plan can be a good idea; however, tasks that require more effort should be focused on instead of relying on a failsafe.

“You might want to wait until you have done everything you can to achieve your primary goal first,” said Shin.

The full study has been published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 

If your idea of the perfect night is more solitary than social, you may be a regular Einstein. People with higher IQs are happier with less social interaction, a new study suggests.

In an effort to zero in on the relationship between friendship and overall life satisfaction, evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li examined data from a survey of 15,000 adults. The data revealed two underlying themes.

First: dense, city living may not exactly be conducive to happiness. And second, greater life satisfaction tends to come as a result of increased social interactions -- but not in every case.

Urban living Vs. Rural living

Where you live may play a big role in how happy you are, the study finds. Participants who lived in urban areas reported lower levels of happiness than those who lived in rural areas.

In breaking down why this might be, the researchers cited “the savanna theory of happiness,” which states that man’s early hunter-gatherer days probably had more of a small town vibe, which we may still subconsciously covet today.

"Situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors' life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today," the authors wrote.

But while small town experiences and increased social interactions are pleasing to many, they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

High-IQ individuals

Interestingly, the data revealed that highly intelligent people became less satisfied the more time they spent with friends.

"The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals," the researchers wrote, adding that life satisfaction in highly intelligent people dropped the more frequently they socialized with friends.

Why might this be? To find out, the Washington Post sought the expertise of Brookings Institution researcher Carol Graham, who suggested that brainiacs may be too focused on long-term goals to enjoy the frivolity of socialization.

"The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it ... are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective," said Graham.

The study has been published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Online dating can be a great way to meet new, like-minded people, but do men and women have inherent differences when it comes to using these sites?

According to researchers from Binghamton University, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Their study found that, in general, men tend to be much more aggressive on dating sites, sending multitudes of messages to different potential partners, whereas women take a more pragmatic approach to messaging.

Gender differences

The study used data from Baihe, a prevalent dating website used in China. While writing a reciprocal recommendation system based on the site’s data, the researchers found certain trends that seemed to persist across gender lines, especially when it came to contacting potential partners.

Men, for example, tended to be much more aggressive in sending out messages. They tended to focus on their own interests, disregarding how attractive they might be to the person receiving the messages. Unfortunately, it’s not a tactic that seems to work out too well for them.

“We found that males like to send a lot of messages to attractive female users, but they don’t get a lot of responses,” said Shuangfei Zhai, co-author of the study.

Women, on the other hand, tended to gauge their own attractiveness and the chances of a successful match before sending a message. This kind of self-conscious behavior inevitably leads to more matches.

“For females, they’re self-conscious because they tend to evaluate the likelihood of getting a response to the user that they’re sending messages to. In terms of the data, it shows that women have a much larger chance of getting responses from users that they send messages to,” said Shuangfei Zhai, co-author of the study.

The full study has been published in the journal Social Network Analysis and Mining.

Ashley Madison, the dating website that helped married members find partners for affairs, has repositioned itself and hit the reset button.

Two new top executives of parent company Avid Life Media – CEO Rob Segal and President James Millership – have unveiled what they call transformative changes to help the company bounce back from last year's system hack that made members' names public.

“A year ago, Avid Life Media was silenced by a devastating, criminal hack that affected our company and some of our members,” Segal said. The company is truly sorry for how people’s lives and relationships may have been affected by the criminal theft of personal information. That’s why we’re charting a new course and making some big changes.”

Among the changes, Ashley Madison will no longer be just a dating site for married people looking to cheat, but will also be a site for “the open-minded dating community.” The company says the website will try to appeal to a wide range of people seeking relationships.

Like any major business, Segal says Avid Life Media has made major investments in new security safeguards to counter cyber threats. After last year's exposure, Segal says Ashley Madison worked with Deloitte’s cyber security team to set up new security systems that include 24/7 monitoring.

The Impact Teams strikes

The Ashley Madison system hack took place nearly a year ago by hackers who identified themselves as The Impact Team. The hackers' objective was the removal of the website, claiming the company lied to its members.

A month later, some Ashley Madison members filed suit against the company over the data breach. However, the suit was complicated by the fact that the plaintiffs did not want to be publicly identified. That was the issue behind the suit in the first place.

Meanwhile, Segal confirmed to The New York Times that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Ashley Madison, but he isn't sure of the focus. Nonetheless, he said the company is cooperating.

Today’s fathers seem to be taking on a bigger role in the household. More dads than ever are handling the child care, tackling the grocery runs, and taking on the role of stay-at-home dad.

According to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics, U.S. dads are more involved in child care than ever, which could be a boon for kids’ health.

Studies have found that an involved dad can make all the difference. In fact, older kids with involved fathers tend to have fewer behavioral problems, symptoms of depression, and lower rates of teen pregnancy.

So how are dads of this generation stepping up to the plate when it comes to household responsibilities and caring for kids?

“Bro-cery shopping”

Millennial dads are spending more time in the grocery aisles compared to previous generations. In fact, a new survey by Ibotta finds that today's dads have increased the number of grocery purchases by 62% since 2013.

Younger fathers (ages 18 to 24) are purchasing 25% more groceries than dads in older generations. The numbers also show that men are making more trips to the grocery store each month (up 5% since 2013).

And it seems as though dads’ upped grocery game is taking some of the burden off of mom; the share of groceries purchased by millennial mothers has decreased by nearly 2.5% in the same time span.

Increase in stay-at-home dads

Today, there are roughly two million dads who do not work outside the home, according to Pew Research. While this number represents only 7% of fathers in the U.S., it’s an increase from 1989 when just 4% of dads stayed home.

Pew researchers note that the reasons more dads are staying home are changing, too. In 2012, nearly a quarter of dads said caring for home or family was their main reason for staying home -- four times as many as in 1989.

But not everyone is on board with these changes. A majority (62%) of those surveyed say an ideal marriage is one in which the husband and wife both have jobs and both take care of the house and children. However, 74% also say that having women in the workplace makes it more difficult for parents to raise children.

Your Facebook feed keeps you informed through the quips, quotes, and photographs that friends post. Most of the news is happy banter, but more and more we learn sad and tragic news from our friends through social media.

When the news of a young adult who died by suicide was posted on Facebook a few years ago, I was surprised. The funeral arrangements followed along with an outpouring of condolences for the family. People were “liking” posts and condolence messages and yet Facebook felt like an impersonal place for such visible grief.

Nowadays, the most universal means of sharing news of a death is through social media. It’s become so commonplace that I purposely check my Facebook feed more regularly to ensure that I don’t miss any difficult losses happening to my friends.

It seems inevitable that our friends, sharing their happy times, would share their sorrows. Last week, another young adult in my community died. The news was shared on Facebook by the bereaved mom. Legions of support quickly surfaced in Facebook feeds. An obituary in the local paper was linked to Facebook and details of the memorial service were disclosed.

Within hours after the funeral, the obituary and eulogies, along with tributes, were appearing on Facebook. Heartfelt condolence messages were posted and so appreciated that they solicited likes. Tributes on BuzzFeed and YouTube continue to appear with no end in sight.

Uncomfortable topic

While death remains an uncomfortable topic, Facebook has come to play an important role in bringing grief into our national conversation. When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, lost her husband, her candid posts on Facebook elicited a wellspring of condolences and further opened the dialogue on death.

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive at Facebook, wrote on Facebook about his experience with miscarriage, and he too shared his grief openly.   

Facebook allows us to memorialize our loved ones through tribute pages, giving friends and family a place to remember and reminisce about the deceased. These open communities help us feel less isolated in our grief. They give us a shared space to post our photos and grieve our losses.

A more current trend is to post photos and memories of our deceased family members and friends on their birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths. It is a way for our friends to remember their loved ones and elicit support from their social network.  

So how do you, as a Facebook friend, deal with loss? It is perfectly acceptable to express your condolences on Facebook. Feel free to write a comment of support, like another’s post, or share your own memories or photos of the deceased.

If you are uncomfortable talking so publicly about the pain of loss, you can ignore it. Just continue to handle condolences in the more traditional ways. Whatever you choose to do, one thing is for sure, social media is going to continue to define and re-define the ways in which we communicate.

Have we really come as far as we think we have in combating traditional gender stereotypes over the years? As it turns out, maybe not.

Women and men have undoubtedly seen changes in the activities they do and how they are represented. But according to new research, gender stereotypes haven’t actually changed at all in the last thirty years.

In fact, one study finds that people are even more likely to believe that men avoid “traditional” female roles. The study, published recently in the Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ), finds that while we might have changed, our beliefs have not.

Changes didn’t alter beliefs

In comparing men and women thirty years ago with men and women today, you would likely spot a number of differences. But change alone hasn’t been enough to completely free us from gender stereotypes.

"Those changes apparently have not been sufficient to alter strongly held and seemingly functional beliefs about the basic social category of gender," said researchers Elizabeth L. Haines, Kay Deaux, and Nicole Lofaro.

To reach this conclusion, the authors compared data from 195 college students in 1983 to 191 adults in 2014. The question: rate the likelihood that a typical man or woman has a set of gendered characteristics.

Stereotypes still alive

The researchers found that even though the 2014 crowd was more diverse, people still have firmly held beliefs on what defines a man or a woman.

Participants still believed gender stereotypes about their own gender. They were also likely to believe that each gender should present themselves in a certain way as far as personality traits, gender role behaviors, occupations, and physical characteristics.

The belief, for instance, that a man should be the one to “repair and maintain the car” hasn’t changed since 1983. Men are still perceived as less likely than women to engage in female gender roles, such as housekeeping and taking care of the kids.

Why?

As to why we have such strong beliefs on how men and women are different, the researchers say two reasons are likely:

First, an unconscious bias might distort the way we perceive -- therefore, we remember gender atypical behavior as more stereotypical than it actually was. Second, men and women might tend to shy away from cross gender behavior in order to avoid the backlash that usually comes with it (e.g. wimpy men or powerful women).

For those in therapeutic or advising roles, the researchers say it’s important to be aware of how gender stereotypes might affect the goals of their clients. They also recommend doing away with gendered criteria on job descriptions and boosting the awareness of gender stereotypes in the workplace. 

Don't you know a lot of people who are just disgusting? You know -- empty suits, braggarts, loudmouths, dull as dishwater, stand-off-ish, and just a general waste of space?

Well, soon, you'll be able to do something about it -- you'll be able to rate them, just the way you now rate cars, hotels, dating services, restaurants, and psychics on Yelp, ConsumerAffairs, and other review sites.

Yes, someone's finally done it -- a review app for people. It's called, logically enough, Peeple. It's set to launch this fall.

"Peeple is an app that allows you to rate and comment about the people you interact with in your daily lives on the following three categories: personal, professional, and dating," as the app's founders put it. "Peeple will enhance your online reputation for access to better quality networks, top job opportunities, and promote more informed decision making about people."

You'll be able to give one- to five-star ratings to anybody -- your neighbor, your aunt, lovers past and present, that rotten teacher from fifth grade and, of course, your boss. Not to mention your former boss.

Peeple explains itself, sort of, in this video:

Of course, it won't be the kind of thing where you can just sling mud at anybody and everybody. Oh no. The founders assure us that there will be controls in place to ensure that you actually know the person you are grinding into little pieces. You'll also have to be 21, have a Facebook account, and use your own name.

“People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions,” said Julia Cordray, one of the app’s founders, according to a Washington Post story. “Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life?”

Sure, why not indeed? Before you strike up a conversation with your seatmate on the subway, get his or her name and do the research.

You'll also be able to be an even better helicopter parent. The site's other co-founder, Nicole McCullough, is a mother of two who admits she doesn't know her neighbors too well. But when Peeple launches, she'll be able to check them out and decide if her kids should be allowed to play with their kids.

Can't be too careful, after all.

A month after the adultery-dating website AshleyMadison.com (registered motto: “Life is short. Have an affair.®”) admitted that hackers had managed to breach its database, those hackers have apparently made all of the stolen data available online.

Ashley Madison is owned by Avid Life Media, which also owns other hookup sites, including Established Men and Cougar Life. The hacker or hackers behind the breach self-identify as The Impact Team. At the time of the original breach, The Impact Team threatened to release all of the information it stole unless the site was taken down. And now, it appears that they have made good on that threat.

Released data

As Wired first reported last night, yesterday somebody hiding behind anonymizing software and browsers posted 9.7 gigabytes of apparent Ashley Madison data to the dark web. “The files appear to include account details and log-ins for some 32 million users of the social networking site, touted as the premier site for married individuals seeking partners for affairs. Seven years worth of credit card and other payment transaction details are also part of the dump, going back to 2007 [including] names, street address, email address and amount paid, but not credit card numbers.”

At the time of the breach, AshleyMadison.com claimed to have almost 40 million members in all.

According to its own statements, The Impact Team's main complaint with Ashley Madison isn't the fact that the website promotes or facilitates adultery, but that it allegedly lied to its clients. Specifically, people with dating profiles on Ashley Madison were also offered the chance to pay $19 for a “full delete” function – basically scrubbing their complete profile and activity history from the site.

The Impact Team claimed to have discovered proof that the “full delete” service was a lie, and the information never completely deleted from the database. (Granted, there's arguably some inherent contradictions in The Impact Team's claimed motivation “We dislike the fact that this website harmed its clients, so we're punishing the website by releasing data that will harm its clients.”)

Ashley Madison executives did not take the website down and so yesterday, according to Wired, somebody released an alleged data dump, preceded by an introduction saying, in part, that:

Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men. We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data.

Find someone you know in here? Keep in mind the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles. See ashley madison fake profile lawsuit; 90-95% of actual users are male. C