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Facebook plans to migrate its Sponsored Stories ad platform into users' news feeds early next year, the company says. Introduced last January, Sponsored Stories - a new ad format integrating your Facebook friends' activities into small ads - began appearing in the column on the right side of the News Feed. Last month, the ads began appearing in the Ticker as well. Perhaps anticipating criticism for the latest migration of Sponsored Stories, a Facebook rep emphasized that the ads will be used sparingly. Most users, she says, will see the maximum of one ad per day in their News Feeds. The speed at which the ads cycle through the News Feed, meanwhile, will depend on various factors that Facebook hasn't yet determined, a Facebook rep says.

"In the lead-up to tonight's film, Generation Like, we've been asking our Facebook and Twitter communities to tell us why you use social and how it's affecting your lives. Hundreds of you have told us about the choices you're making - and why you're making them. We've asked a few writers who've thought a lot about social media to read your comments and reflect on them in the context of tonight's film. We also want to hear from you! Share your reactions below in the comments. Does Social Media Empower or Exploit? Douglas Rushkoff, Generation Like correspondent Douglas Rushkoff: Does Social Media Empower or Exploit? Generation Like correspondent Douglas Rushkoff is the author, most recently, of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, as well a dozen other books on media, technology and culture. He was correspondent on three previous FRONTLINE films, The Merchants of Cool (2001), The Persuaders (2004), and Digital Nation (2010). Follow him on Twitter @Rushkoff. In the lead-up to Generation Like, FRONTLINE has been asking questions about social media on social media. As I wade through the many responses, I am reminded of my own questions about these platforms when I began making this documentary. Like me, many of you are thrilled by the opportunity for connection and self-expression that social media offer.   Calum James Facebook is the best communication tool ever created. February 12 at 7:02pm   But many of you also share a sense of skepticism about what it is that social media - and the companies behind them - ask from us in return.   We all know this has something to do with our data. We create consumer profiles for the unseen companies on the other side of the screen, and enter into a relationship with them that isn't entirely clear. "Who is doing what for whom, and to what end?" The need to understand this better - and what it means for the young people using this stuff - is what set us on our journey to explor

"Facebook's News Feed, a homepage built by our friends and organized by our clicks and likes, isn't really a "news" feed. It's an entertainment portal for stories that remind us of our lives and offer something like an emotional popper. In fact, news readers self-identify as a minority on Facebook: Fewer than half ever read "news" on the site, according to a 2013 Pew study, and just 10 percent of them go to Facebook to get the news on purpose, as opposed, say, being assaulted by a breaking news event when you're just scanning baby photos. To see this more clearly, let's compare the BuzzFeed network's most viral stories-i.e.: the stories that go biggest on Facebook-to the top stories on Twitter and the most-searched stories. First, here are the top stories on Twitter in 2013. It's a blend of news, like terrorist attacks and music shows, and evergreen silliness with Ryan Gosling and Kim Kardashian. "

"We filmed four dozen original interviews while making The Facebook Dilemma. Our reporting team conducted in-depth interviews with current and former Facebook executives, internet activists, government and intelligence officials in the United States and around the world, the digital chief of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and leading journalists and scholars. Explore many of these interviews - and see how we used them in the film - in this interactive version of The Facebook Dilemma, part of FRONTLINE's Transparency Project."

"Do people really live the lives they portray on Facebook? The answer is-partially... because most people share selectively.  For example, have you ever posted something on Facebook then checked back later to see how many people "liked" your post? If you have, don´t worry, you are in good company. For most people, Facebook sharing is not selfish, it is social. That is why we call it social media."

"A week ago, The Washington Post reported that altered videos ("shallowfakes") of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - slowed down to make it look as if she were drunk and slurring her words - were spreading on social media. Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal attorney, tweeted one of them (though he later deleted the tweet). From the Post: One version, posted by the conservative Facebook page Politics WatchDog, had been viewed more than 2 million times by Thursday night, been shared more than 45,000 times, and garnered 23,000 comments with users calling her "drunk" and "a babbling mess." YouTube took the videos down. Facebook said it would downrank them, but wouldn't remove them altogether. "We don't have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true," Facebook said in a statement to The Washington Post. The company said it instead would "heavily reduce" the video's appearances in people's news feeds, append a small informational box alongside the video linking to the two fact-check sites, and open a pop-up box linking to "additional reporting" whenever someone clicks to share the video. Monika Bikert, Facebook's head of product policy and counterterrorism, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that Facebook's policy is that "people make their own informed choice about what to believe. Our job is to make sure we're getting them accurate information." She claimed that "anybody who is seeing this video in their news feed, anybody who is going to share it to somebody else, anybody who has shared it in the past, they are being alerted that this video is false.""

"The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company's failure to protect millions of users' data, to the proliferation of "fake news" and disinformation, mounting crises have raised the question: Is Facebook more harmful than helpful? On Monday, Oct. 29, and Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018, FRONTLINE presents The Facebook Dilemma. This major, two-night event investigates a series of warnings to Facebook as the company grew from Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room to a global empire. With dozens of original interviews and rare footage, The Facebook Dilemma examines the powerful social media platform's impact on privacy and democracy in the U.S. and around the world."

"Since November, when Mark Zuckerberg first wrote about his vision for how content should be governed on Facebook, a team within our company has been working to design and implement this idea, with the help of input and feedback from people all around the world. Today, we're announcing more details on the structure of the Oversight Board and its relationship to Facebook in the form of a charter. This central governing document defines the board's mandate and describes its relationship to Facebook. It establishes its membership, governance and decision-making authority, and it sets out parameters for things like the size, scope and power of the board. In the coming months this charter will be available in multiple languages on a new board website."

We recently looked at the most shared articles in the US on Facebook over the past year. The stories range from cute to thought provoking and represent the type of news people have been sharing and discovering with friends in 2011.   

"That Facebook post about a super-secret conspiracy mainstream media doesn't want you to know about? It could soon be accompanied by a link to actual reporting repudiating those claims. Facebook began rolling out a new initiative to debunk fake news Thursday that automatically serves up related links from reliable sources for stories that have been flagged by fact-checkers as potential hoaxes."

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you've told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star's posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you've indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, that is what motivated the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to collect data from more than 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, to build its own behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns. The company has worked for a political action committee started by John R. Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration, as well as for President Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. "We find your voters and move them to action," the firm boasts on its website."

"The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant's biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica - a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon - used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on." The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers' Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook's "platform policy" allowed only collection of friends' data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook's role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert

"When the Harvard psychiatrist and tech consultant John Torous learned that Facebook monitors its users' posts for warning signs that they might be at risk of suicide, he was shocked. Having grown accustomed to working with tech giants like Microsoft on scientific research, he wondered why he'd never heard about Facebook's program. He was even more surprised to find out that as part of its efforts, Facebook was sending emergency responders to people's homes. Facebook's monitoring tool has been running since 2017 and was involved in sending emergency responders to people more than 3,500 times as of last fall, the company said. But the reason Torous hadn't heard of it is because the company hasn't shared information about the tool with researchers such as him, or with the broader medical and scientific community."

Facebook is supposed to start a news tab that prioritizes local news and outlets that first break stories. Facebook as yet to confirm that this will be a feature.

"Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram - the social media platform most used by adolescents - is harmful to teen girls' body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a Sept. 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report."

"A change in the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) means that children under the age of 13 can be shown ads targeted toward them when they're online. This could lead to Facebook lowering its age of admission. Drafted in 1998, well before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks burst onto the scene, the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday updated COPPA. The amendments work to protect children online, noting that certain information cannot be collected without parental consent, such as geolocation information and photos. However, the act also notes that it's now OK to advertise to children under the age of 13 (which is Facebook's minimum age requirement):"

"The city of Boston and the friends and family members of the marathon bombing victims will never forget the day when two explosions ripped through the crowd at the race, killing three people and injuring more than 200. Neither will the family of Sunil Tripathi, but for very different reasons. Their story is told in the documentary film Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. Sunil was a gifted student from a high-achieving family. But in college at Brown University, Sunil began to struggle with depression. In March 2013, he went missing. His family organized a massive search operation, and - somewhat reluctantly - used social media to help with the search. "Despite how uncomfortable it was to take our personal childhood and smatter it across Facebook, we just knew this was what we had to do to get his story out," says Sangeeta. And then, the bombing happened. Three days after the bombing, the FBI released photos of the suspects. On Twitter, a former classmate of Sunil said she thought one of the suspects looked like him. That was picked up by reddit. And suddenly, the Tripathis' Facebook page was bombarded with hateful messages, many saying that, given his name and appearance, Sunil must be a Muslim terrorist. "This is not just one or two comments that would make Mom cry," says Ravi. "It progressed to having as many laptops open as possible and deleting every single post. It almost felt like a case study in mob mentality, in virtual mob mentality." Journalists saw the buzz on social media and started calling the Tripathis. Some retweeted the accusations. Others actually repeated them on television. The Tripathis, who had been waiting for their phones to ring with information about Sunil, were suddenly getting questions about his alleged involvement in the bombing. News vans lined up outside their home and reporters were knocking on their front door."

"Through this agreement, Facebook will provide Heineken with a global marketing platform that reaches millions of people as well as access to Facebook's deep expertise in building long-term relationships between brands and their audiences," Heineken said in a statement. "The collaboration also provides Heineken with access to Facebook's latest products."

the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently making its way through the House of Representatives, and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are supposedly intended to combat copyright violations on the Internet. Unfortunately, these bills are written so broadly so as to not only eliminate Internet piracy but replace the innovative and democratic aspects of the Internet with a tangled bureaucratic mess regulated by the government and corporations.While holding companies accountable for their role in copyright infringement is important, this legislation threatens to turn the whole Internet on its head, disrupting innovation in business and technology and muting democratic dialogue, by allowing copyright holders to unilaterally impose sanctions on companies accused of copyright infringement without due process. Based solely on an accusation (not a conviction, mind you) of a copyright violation, the U.S. Attorney General, and sometimes the copyright holding companies themselves, will be able to block access to and business transactions with websites accused of such violations. Financial institutions will be forced to stop transferring legal funds to accused websites, search engines will be forced to block accused websites, and advertisers will be forced to stop placing ads on accused websites. Moreover, the bill is written so broadly as to override the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to operate freely. Unfortunately, under SOPA, if a user on YouTube or Facebook were to mistakenly or unintentionally upload copyrighted material to the sites, those websites could also be shut down

Yahoo News, The Washington Post,The Independent, and The Guardian have amassed millions of readers for social editions of the publications that launched in September. These publications are all sending large numbers of posts into Facebook news feeds, often to the point of eclipsing other types of content