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Brands may demand powerful ways to unfriend fans: Many brands accumulated "friends" with little to no relationship with the brand.

With brands investing over $6 billion with Facebook, it seems unlikely to me that this algorithm change was designed to intentionally punish content produced by brands. It would be unwise to do that, because the appeal of Facebook to brands is the mix of organic and paid exposure.

When it comes to Facebook, our reach for the same period was about 900,000. So our Facebook posts were seen by about 1/5th the number of people on Twitter, which could make one assume that Twitter is the better social platform. In reality, the answer is more complicated. Like many publishers, we share far less on Facebook than on Twitter. Increasing our share rate might increase our overall reach. More important, however, is that one of our key hopes with social sharing is to drive traffic back to our site. According to Twitter’s stats, those 4.4 million impressions generated 7,300 clicks to our content. But Facebook, with far less impressions, generated 10 times that number of clicks to our content, about 70,000 over the past month.

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

If a recession brings shopping to a halt, marketers are unlikely to return to the type of broad branding campaign that’s come to define the influencer world. Seits believes that brands will demand more evidence that their marketing dollars are being put to good use, and that influencers give them sales, not just exposure. “Brands are going to be a lot more cautious about how they approach their marketing spend and their collaborations with influencers,” she says. “Now, we're seeing more of an emphasis on performance.”