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people in 14 countries will begin seeing a link to a “Tips for spotting false news” guide at the top of their News Feed. Clicking it brings users to a section offering 10 tips as well access to related resources in the Facebook Help Center. Facebook is also collaborating with news and media literacy organizations in several of countries to produce additional resources.

“Improving news literacy is a global priority, and we need to do our part to help people understand how to make decisions about which sources to trust,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, wrote in a blog post about the initiative. “False news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories they find meaningful. We will continue working on this, and we know we have more work to do.”

It’s working with third-party fact checking organizations to flag false content in the News Feed, the company recently announced the Facebook Journalism Project to work with news organizations on products and business models, and it’s one of the funders of the new News Integrity Initiative, a $14 million project “focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.

“We work very hard to remove illegal content from our platform and are determined to work with others to solve this problem,” the company said in a statement. “As experts have pointed out, this legislation would force private companies rather than the courts to become the judges of what is illegal in Germany.”

Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, the measure would compel large outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to rapidly remove fake news that incites hate, as well as other “criminal” content, or face fines as high as 50 million euros ($53 million). Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed on the draft bill Wednesday, giving it a high chance of approval in the German Parliament before national elections in September. In effect, the move is Germany’s response to a barrage of fake news during last year’s elections in the United States, with officials seeking to prevent a similar onslaught here.

Instagram's working on a new ad type that it's calling "Branded content ads", which will let brands sponsor posts created by celebrities and publishers, and then promote them as they would their other ad efforts.

"Until now, brands could hire popular Instagram users to work on ad campaigns and promote products with branded content, but the posts would only reach the followers of the influencer. Branded content ads let the advertisers promote these Instagram posts just like they would any other ad."

The offering will essentially be an extension of Instagram's existing branded content tagging system - now, along with the 'Paid Partnership' tags (as shown below), brands will also be able to extend their promotions of the same.

On original reporting, Facebook says that it will now seek to identify and boost outlets that are the first to break a developing story or topic. "We do this by looking at groups of articles on a particular story topic and identifying the ones most often cited as the original source. We’ll start by identifying original reporting in English language news and will do the same for news in other languages in the future."

Hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts that amplified fake news and disinformation in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election are still active on the site, tweeting about other fake news and conspiracies more than a million times every day, according to a report released Thursday by the Knight Foundation.

Twitter hasn’t cracked down on many of its fake news amplifiers. Eighty percent of Twitter accounts that were spreading false information during the campaign were still active on the platform, researchers found.

The study found that most of the fake and conspiracy tweets on Twitter linked to only about 1o websites, including The Gateway Pundit and Truthfeed. That trend was largely unchanged from 2016. Additionally, about 60 percent of the accounts that shared and amplified fake news were estimated by researchers to have been automated accounts. Those accounts were densely connected, following each other at high rates and retweeting each other frequently, intensifying the impact and reach of each post.

Emoticons such as smiley faces are a new language that is changing our brain, according to new Australian research published in the journal Social Neuroscience.

"Emoticons are a new form of language that we're producing," says researcher, Dr Owen Churches, from the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, "and to decode that language we've produced a new pattern of brain activity.

According to Churches, faces are very special from a psychological point of view.

Shazam execs' talk of using their proprietary data for advertising puts them in league with The Weather Company, Pandora and Amazon, which are all mining information like pollen count, song choices and product purchases to inform ad targeting. Mr. McGurn said the Shazam app ingests the live audio feed from 160 TV networks every day. That positions the app as an ally to TV networks trying to stem their share of ad spend from being siphoned online.

Shazam is also currying favor with TV networks as a way to drive viewership. For last fall's Country Music Association Awards, Shazam pushed alerts featuring the show's air date and time to the in-app news feeds of eight million users who might be interested in watching, like those who had previously tagged a Blake Shelton song. Ten million people received such a notification for The Grammys.

People who use Shazam to "tag" the game's broadcast this year will be shown a new Twitter-like timeline. The live content feed will document the game -- from tweets to photos to ads -- and is designed to keep people using Shazam for the duration. But even if people tune in and out of the app, Shazam has created a new ad-retargeting program that plugs into Facebook.

Deep linking, in simplest terms, is the ability to link to a specific page inside an app. It’s very much like a Web URL. Each app has its own structure.

, iOS 9 will also introduce a seamless in-app search experience, and according to Apple, “improve its discoverability by displaying your content when users search across the system and on the Web.”

developers will be required to add code to their markup to allow their app content to be found in Spotlight search, and even more language to facilitate their Web URLs to seamlessly open app content

Preparing for a crisis takes place long before a crisis actually occurs. “Act like a post-crisis company pre-crisis,”

“Build a solid brand narrative so that when people are googling your company it’s not just your crises news that comes up.”

"Build relationships before pitching, especially in a crisis. Have the foundation laid so that when the time comes you can have resources to utilize in the media," she says.

99% of journalists say it’s somewhat important (9%), important (34%), or very important (56%) for a company to provide access to news releases within their online newsroom.93% of journalists say that it is important to have news releases organized by type of news category.94% of journalists say it’s somewhat important (14%), important (28%), or very important (52%) to have access to photographs within an online newsroom.90% of journalists indicated the availability of digital product press kits would be somewhat important (25%), important (34%) or very important (30%) for their work.75% of journalists say video files are an important component of an online newsroom.

Archived press releases are a fantastic source of inspiration for journalists, they provide historical insight into your company, can provide industry metrics (which journalists are always seeking) and ultimately give your media contacts some ideas for stories to run with.

Highlighting ContactsDepending on the size of your business, locations, industries and a whole host of other factors you may have several key media spokespeople on your list who can engage with the media.

Snapchat is at the mercy of competitors like Facebook and Google that can simply copy its products.Advertisers say Snapchat's unique selling point is that it is cool, new, and has created its own advertising "currency."But ad-buyers also need Snapchat to do more to prove its ads actually drive sales if they are going to commit meaningful budgets to the platform.

the barrier to entry for new entrants is low, and the switching costs to another platform are also low. Moreover, the majority of our users are 18-34 years old.

Users under 25, it says, visit Snapchat more than 20 times and spend more than 30 minutes on the app each day. It may have fewer users than its rivals, but, for now at least, they are highly-engaged

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The Facebook news feed algorithm appears to be calculated both per fan and per type of post. That means a person might see Coca-Cola’s photo posts, but not the company’s link posts. There are six post types: a text-only status update, a photo, a link, a video, a platform post, and a question. The first four are the most commonly used.

After some research, its clear that a Facebook page gets more fan engagement from photos than links, statuses, or videos. In fact, photos get as much as twenty times more engagement.

My experiments show that you can get a good amount of clicks on links above photos.

Brands may not adopt Facebook's new ad media in large numbers: It seems unlikely, but it is possible that marketers are just not prepared for the dynamic new ad model Facebook has unveiled.

FTC pushes for much more obvious disclosure of sponsored ads in users' newsfeeds: Allowing marketers to turn their posts into ads within the newsfeed is not new--Twitter is already doing the same thing with Promoted Tweets--but is the fact these are paid ads obvious enough to users? The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a longstanding standard that people must recognize ads as such and cannot be duped into thinking advertising is content.

"MySpace felt a lot of pressure to monetize quickly after it was sold to News Corp. And I think as result, they added advertising, they added things we might consider to be spammy, things users found intrusive."