Facebook

The cost of Facebook ads is on the rise – but advertisers don’t seem to mind because they’re seeing results. At least for now. According to the most recent Q2 benchmark report from Facebook ad partner Nanigans, the click-through rate (CTR) on Facebook ads was up 146% year over year and rose 47% from the Continue Reading →

Facebook rolled out the red carpet for Michael Sayman when the social network hired him for a job that started last month, including flying him out to meet Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. Sayman, 17, brought his mom along on the trip. The position Facebook recruited him for: summer intern. “When I got the e-mail Continue Reading →

If it seems like your Facebook friends are a bit more depressed than usual, blame Facebook. The social media site recently revealed that it tweaked the news feed of about 700,000 users to see how they reacted to positive or negative posts. Facebook’s researchers were studying how emotions can be spread on social media, and Continue Reading →

For a small study that tweaked the newsfeeds of less than 1 percent of the Facebook population, the so-called “emotional contagion” experiment has triggered a wave of attention — most of it negative — aimed at the giant social network and how it may or may not be affecting its users. But if nothing else, Continue Reading →

Thousands of Facebook users received an unsettling message two years ago: They were being locked out of the social network because Facebook believed they were robots or using fake names. To get back in, the users had to prove they were real. In fact, Facebook knew most of the users were legitimate. The message was Continue Reading →

Three years after Facebook acquired Beluga and turned it into Messenger for smartphones, its dedicated chat app got a version specially designed for iPad rather than just running as an enlarged iPhone app. Messenger for iPad features a multi-window interface showing a list of threads and your current conversation at the same time. Messenger had Continue Reading →

Facebook has just bought video ad tech startup LiveRail, which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. Facebook tells me it will invest in keeping LiveRail running and is evaluating how to intermingle their data, but it plans to use its use data to Continue Reading →

The scariest part about Facebook’s “mood experiment” is that there’s nothing we could do about it. I’ve posted plenty of stories on this site about Facebook about ways to protect your account from Facebook’s tweaks and updates. Facebook’s played relatively dirty in the past, but has always left some an opt-out clause or security feature Continue Reading →

Facebook upset the Internet this weekend when a joint study conducted by one of its data scientists revealed that the company had socially engineered the news feeds of 689,003 users to make them feel feelings. For one week in January 2012, those users became unwitting guinea pigs as their feeds were flooded with either positive Continue Reading →

Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook’s experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for “informed consent”. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, points in an extensive blog post that “Facebook didn’t give users informed consent” to Continue Reading →