It’s not just news organizations that have been seeing a significant decrease in “interactions” from Facebook. Politicians from both parties are being hit hard, too, interfering with their ability to communicate with their constituents and with voters in general.
A new study by The Western Journal released Monday found that both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate had seen double-digit decreases in their interaction rates, with Republicans seeing a 37 percent decrease and Democrats a 27 percent fall.
Readers will remember that back in January, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed that prioritized “helping you find relevant content (and) helping you have more meaningful interactions.” This hit publishers especially hard.
A previous study by The Western Journal, the parent site of Conservative Tribune, found that it had hurt conservative news outlets more than liberal ones.
The new numbers are roughly what one might have expected when Facebook talked about putting “friends, family and groups” in your News Feed and “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.” However, depending on how they’re read, they could indicate an alarming trend. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Still reeling from the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica flap, Facebook may have a redux on its hands. The social networking giant acknowledged Friday it’s temporarily suspending Crimson Hexagon — which boasts a repository of more than 1 trillion public social media posts — from being able to tap Facebook and Instagram data.
In a statement given to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook vice president for product partnerships Ime Archibong said the company allows outside parties to use its data to produce “anonymized insights for business purposes.” But Facebook forbids “use of its data for surveillance purposes.”
Facebook has said that, as of right now, the company hasn’t found anything untoward in its probe of Crimson Hexagon. Facebook also plans to meet with the Boston company’s team in a few days.
According to the WSJ, “Crimson Hexagon pulls only publicly available data from Facebook and Twitter. However, it appears at least once to have mistakenly received private data from Instagram, according to people familiar with the matter.”
The paper goes on to explain that that 2016 incident stemmed from Crimson Hexagon getting hold of some private Instagram posts in a batch of hundreds of public ones. Crimson Hexagon didn’t know who to call about it, because they didn’t have a direct line or contact yet at the social network. – READ MORE
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