Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Category: Facebook

Who Determines What’s News on Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg announced last week yet another change to the Facebook newsfeed. Following a contentious year that embroiled the platform in controversy, Facebook intends to give preferential treatment to news sites based on users’ feedback as to which providers are most trusted.

From Zuckerberg’s post,

The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division. We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that’s not something we’re comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you — the community — and have your feedback determine the ranking.”

Who those users are, how they are selected and exactly how “trust” is measured remains to be revealed. News and media professionals don’t appear to have a voice in determining the authority and credibility of news sites.

That’s problematic. In the past, Facebook demonstrated clear vulnerabilities when relying on its community. In mid-2016, when Facebook fired the editors curating its Trending module to instead rely on its algorithm and user engagement around stories, the community proved itself to not be the most reliable arbiter of legitimate news. False stories from dubious sources, such as a false report indicating Megyn Kelly had been fired from Fox News for endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, immediately rose to the top. Facebook later changed Trending again to try to tackle those issues.

So far, Facebook’s attempts to police its own platform have had little impact on the mitigation of disinformation and “fake news.” The platform itself reported that over 126 million Americans saw Russian disinformation leading up to 2016 election emanating from the community. Furthermore, independent fact-checkers brought in by Facebook to flag fake stories have said efforts to stem the tide of disinformation are falling short.

Outside of Facebook’s walls, trust is a contract between the audience, who gives an investment of time and the publishers’ ability to match that with quality journalism. Handing all of that power to the “community” creates dangerous opportunities for propagandists and purveyors of fake news to exploit the platform to further their own agendas.  During the French elections, special interests organized on platforms like Discord to orchestrate social media events on Facebook and Twitter. More recently, following a November 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a false story spread across Facebook saying Antifa terrorists were the perpetrators.

At Storyful, we spent the last two years mapping and understanding the pathways that “fake news” travels. Our work makes it clear that Facebook is a well trod avenue for disseminating dubious information from private or semi-private platforms and communities to the masses. Following the tragic events in Las Vegas last year, we detailed false claims made by questionable entities on Facebook. In the UK, we highlighted the efforts of a special interest group to affect elections and advance an agenda.  And, on our podcast, we discussed the impact of social media and disinformation in India.

What happens in the following weeks and months may have very serious implications for the news industry and the world. Upcoming elections in Eastern Europe, Brazil, Pakistan, Cambodia and the United States (among others) are prime opportunities for those who seek to spread disinformation via an increasingly siloed social media population who are most likely to trust sources they agree with.

Users the world over flock to Facebook to discuss happenings big and small, local and global, factual and fictional. Left alone, these would be the very same users that would assess the value and reach of stories generated by newsrooms that endeavor every day to report facts and vital information.

We at Storyful will watch for any further developments on these changes and hope industry experts will have a seat at the table to influence the fate of news on Facebook.

[This post was originally published on Storyful’s blog]

 

Are Facebook’s Social Reader Apps on the Decline – and Why?

The past couple of days have been a whirlwind of conversation between journalism thinkers over a reportedly huge drop in users for many news leaders’ Facebook social sharing apps in the month of April.

Some tech watchers and news app experts blame this drop in users’ fatigue with the “frictionless sharing” these apps encourage on Facebook – thus telling all your friends you read that HuffPost article about Kim Kardashian. On the other hand, many of those sites who are running these apps cite a recent rejiggering of how Facebook displays these social sharing results in the newsfeed for the decline.

As I’m still trying to wrap my head around how real these user numbers really are and exactly what could be behind them, all I can offer here is a look at my own ongoing research on the subject. Here’s the best articles dissecting this subject I’ver found so far (in reverse-chronological order). I hope this might help those of you who, like me, are just trying to keep up with What This All Means.

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How news brands can get started on Facebook Timeline

On Wednesday, Facebook debuted Timeline for pages. This new design and setup has been available on profiles for awhile and now it is coming to your news account pages. While this is an optional changeover for now, all pages will convert to this new design on March 30, so it gives you a little bit of time to get your pages ready for primetime.

 What does Timeline change?

Timeline brings a whole new look and feel to your Facebook page on the front and back ends. The biggest change in appearance is the addition of the cover photo – an 851 x 315 pixel banner image across the top of the page. Converting to this new design will also rearrange your page in a timeline format, with all status updates and important milestones ordered in a tree fashion by date.

There are changes on the admin side of these pages as well. In the top right of your screen, you’ll see a button that says “Admin Panel” – click it to find your analytics and page controls. You’ll also have a few new options on this admin panel, including an ability to see banned users from your page, a log of user and admin activity on your page and (finally!) a place to send and receive private messages from your users.

 

What you need to do now

Ivan Lajara, a community engagement editor at Digital First Media and Life Editor at the Daily Freeman in Kingston, N.Y., offered a great deal of the following steps and tips for local news outlets to get started on Timeline.

 

1. Select a cover image

With an image this big (dimensions are 851 x 315 pixels), you have a lot of options. You might opt to include an insider photo of your newsroom or employees, as the New York Times did (above). This might also be a good spot to highlight an excellent local photo from your staff photographers or a historic image from your archives.

You might also opt to ask your fans what they’d like to see in that space — or even ask them to submit photos to feature there, as the Daily Freeman has on their Facebook page.

Note: This image isn’t set in stone, so you can change it as often as you’d like. One thing you shouldn’t do is use your brand’s logo or masthead here – that’s what the square profile photo (which will still show up as your image around Facebook) is there for. Also, Facebook’s TOS prohibits using this place for advertising or to shill for Likes, not that you’d do that anyway.

 

2. Write a good description for your page

Your description is a bit more prominently featured now, so be sure to write a snappy bit about your publication here. Edit this space by clicking on About.

 

3. Arrange your apps to highlight the most important ones

Your photos, likes, videos and any apps/contests you had are now displayed as images below your cover photo. You have the ability to feature 10 apps in total, but only four are displayed above the fold. In this space, you should highlight Photos, Likes and two apps.

You can move these featured apps around by hitting the arrow hovering near them on the right. Hover over the app you want to move and click the pencil button that shows up in the top right corner. From here, you can select what app you want to swap in.

Note to Digital First newsrooms: Ivan suggests you highlight SeeClickFix, Obituaries (Legacy has built-in app) Ustream/Livestream, etc.

 

4. Add a milestone or two to your Timeline

You can do this by going to the status update box (now on the left instead of the top) and clicking Milestone. An obvious one to start with might be when your publication began. Fill in the date and any info you’d like, along with an image if you have it. You might also add in some big events that occurred in your area in the past, such when you launched your website or notable local happenings just to get started. Upload an image of your publication’s old front pages or a historic photo to mark the occasion.

You can highlight photos or stories from the page or fans by making them fill both sides of the timeline. Do this by hitting the Star button on any post. This looks great with photos!

Ivan’s tip: Go back and add dates to the images you’ve already posted to the page by clicking the pencil icon on the image. You can’t tag a current image with a date older than when the Facebook page was created. At least not from the photo. You have to go to the Timeline date, add and event and THEN tag a photo (or cover or front page) to it.

 

5. Pin a top post

You can pin any of your postings to the top of the page by clicking on the top right of the post on the pencil icon and hitting ‘pin to top’.

Ivan’s tip: This is a great way to highlight stories that haven’t gotten as much attention as you’d like or to bring attention to the biggest item of the day.

 

 6. Hide embarrassing, outdated, or negative posts by you and your fans

One major upside/downside of Timeline is that is makes it easier to find past posts by you and your fans. Check over your timeline for past posts you might want to hide from view for any number of reasons. To hide one from view, click on the pencil icon and select “hide from timeline”.

Right now, page administrators can hit Preview (on the top of your page) to make all these changes without anyone seeing them. If you are a page admin, you’ll see the new page, but you can see how everyone else sees it by clicking into “Until you publish your Page, you can see your old design any time” at the top of the preview screen (below).

 

Publish your changes along the top of the page when you’ve completed the basic steps. Have fun!

 

For more info on Facebook Timeline for Pages, check out this helpful post from TechCrunch.

 

 

Holy engagement, Batman! How HuffPost blew up the State of the Union on Facebook

How did The Huffington Post get 32,694 Likes, 2,525 comments and 4,268 shares on Facebook for Obama’s State of the Union address? I mean, every news outlet in the U.S. and beyond has posted something about it, so how did one outlet get so much engagement?

How about a sort of Facebook take on live-tweeting? It was an experiment, to be sure, but it seemed to work out well.

Disclosure: Although I work on HuffPost’s social team, I had nothing to do with this. I’m just passing it on as an example.

Here’s a look at the posts and how much engagement each post received (as of today at about noon).

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What does this show (besides a lot of reaction)? It shows experimentation can be worth it. I’m not suggesting this would work for every big live event or for every brand, but it was well worth the adventure.

On what other occasions do you think this could work? What other experiments have you seen to increase engagement on Facebook?

How to Maintain a Safe, Positive and Public Facebook Life

So you’ve turned on Facebook Subscribe. Now what? Here’s some suggestions from someone who’s been doing it awhile. What would you add? Leave suggestions in the comments.

Set up friends lists to help direct posts.

Click on ‘Friends’ on the left side of your profile. Here you can sort, search and assign friends into lists of your choosing. Take the time to create lists based on the sort of things you share. Maybe you have a list for family and friends to show off photos of your kids/pets/self. Maybe you have one just for coworkers or work-related purposes.

Be selective about who you share with.

You can direct individual status updates, photos, videos, notes and galleries to very granular groups (based on those friends lists you made). Your subscribers likely don’t care about your dinner plans with friends, so maybe those sort of updates should be directed to friends only. Also take the time consider the privacy of those you tag or feature in posts or images, they may not want to be exposed to your public audience.

Be smart.Don’t share where you live or details about your schedule on public posts. And ladies, consider what your public posts say to the sexual harassers, stalkers and all-around creeps who hang out on Facebook. I’ve encountered some real weirdos who’ll respond in an uncomfortable fashion to just about any post – I try not to encourage them.

Manage your comments.If you have comments turned on for subscribers, keep an eye on them. People will sometimes spam you, say horrible things or pop into a conversation thread like a bull in a china shop with a “So hottt. C me in Turkiye”. You need to delete stuff sometimes, your friends and subscribers are depending on you to keep the comments cleared. Do this by hovering over the right side of their comment until you see an X. Click to delete the comment.

Don’t be afraid to block people.

If someone is spamming you or being abusive to you or your commenters, don’t hesitate to block them from your page. Do this by first deleting the comment, then you’ll get an option to block the user.

 

What else would you add?

How To Set Up Facebook Subscribe For Journalists

When Facebook launched its Subscribe feature in mid-September, quite a few journalists sighed in relief. This, we thought, is what we needed: A way to communicate with a larger audience of readers while maintaining a somewhat private personal life behind a friend wall. I’m sure it’s a great option to other professionals, celebrities and wannabe celebrities as well.

I enabled subscriptions the day they launched, mostly to test it out. After all, who would be interested in reading the occasionally inane updates of a non-famous non-reporter? More than 9,000 subscribers later, I found out.

In the six weeks since, I’ve found some things I like and dislike about the feature. This ongoing experiment has helped me to formulate a few tips that may help anyone who wants to use this feature.

Getting It Set Up

1. Customize your profile information.

Your profile will be open to the public when you turn on Subscribe, so this is the place to lure people in (and possibly turn others away). Click on “Edit Profile” on the top right of your profile page. Use the ‘about me’ space to describe who you and and what you do.

For the sake of transparency, you should identify yourself as a journalist, including your job title (or description of what you do) and the name of your publication. I’d suggst you do this even if you don’t plan to use your profile for work.

This is also a good space to lay out what subscribers can expect from you. Do you frequently share links or start discussions on sports or politics? Say so. Will you talk about your personal life? What is your policy on friending?

I also use this are to put down a couple of ground rules, particularly “Don’t be a creep.” (More on that later)

2. Adjust the privacy settings on all aspects of your profile.

If you adjust nothing here, it could very well be visible to the entire Internet. You can adjust whether areas such as your location, connections, contact info and interests should be publicly visible or shown only to friends (or certain groups of friends).

Keep in mind, while you might consider your life to be an open book, your friends and family may not be as comfortable. Think about their privacy when adjusting the ‘Friends and Family’ settings and remember whoever finds you will be able to find them.

3. Decide what to do about those past posts.

In your privacy settings, there is an option to limit the visibility of past posts. If you have any doubt about the updates, photos and other stuff you’ve shared on Facebook in the past (including those crazy college photos), you might want to check this so new subscribers can’t dig back through your possibly sordid history.

You may also want to look at your photos page and set individually which past albums and images can be seen by the public.

4. Set how people can find and contact you.

If you want to be easily found on Facebook (and why would you turn on Subscribe if you didn’t?), you need to be sure you’ll come up in searches. In your privacy settings, select ‘How You Connect’. Here is where you can set how strangers will find and contact you. If you’re actively looking to reduce friend requests, you should limit those who can send them to at least ‘Friends of Friends’.

5. Turn on Subscribe.

Do this with the button on the top right of your profile page. This is also where you want to decide if those who subscribe to you can post comments on your posts. Your comment numbers will go up – and they will require work (see below), but consider this: Why would you read something you can’t comment on? Weigh this option carefully.

6. Take a look at how the public sees your page.

At the top right of your page, click “View As”. Click “public” to see what subscribers will see or check how certain friends see your page by entering their name.

 

More: Tips for maintaining a safe, positive and public Facebook life.

Facebook comments can’t guarantee a lack of anonymity

There’s a conventional wisdom out there in the online journalism world that: 1.) News site comments will automatically be better if people have to use real names, and 2.) Using Facebook for your comments will accomplish this.

I’ve said many times before that I don’t think anonymity is the problem. My campaign on that seems to be a lost cause so far. As a former comment moderator and current manager of social media accounts, I know for a fact that people have absolutely no problem spouting hateful views and violent rhetoric under their real name. I see it every day.

Aside from that, there’s also all kinds of evidence that Facebook comments aren’t the end-all, be-all answer on this front.

As my friend Jeff Sonderman recently wrote at Poynter, Facebook comments can be a boon to news sites in lots of ways: Increased Facebook traffic referrals, fast page load times, an easy out-of-the-box comment solution.

One thing Facebook doesn’t do, however, is prevent anonymity (as the same article and several others insist).

While there is a rule on Facebook that one has to use their real name, it’s not always followed. I have several Facebook friends who use false names for various personal reasons – and they are all, essentially, anonymous. That said, they are still identifiable to their friends, which still keeps some people in check with their online comments. (Though this certainly doesn’t apply to everyone.)

The biggest threat to the alleged transparency and decency of Facebook-powered commenting lies in the same tool many news organizations use to communicate with readers: Facebook Pages.

Just speaking anecdotally here (if you have stats to back me up, please help), I’ve seen an uptick of abusive posts and trolling on Facebook ever since it rolled out its new pages in February. That rollout included the new ability to use Facebook as a page.

This change made it possible for just anyone to set up a fake character on Facebook – and then use Facebook as that character. On The Huffington Posts’s pages (on which I am an administrator) and the pages of other groups and news organizations, I’ve seen these fake accounts spreading spam, trolling the page’s regular users and making hateful statements under the guise of a made-up character.

Here’s a view examples of some alias accounts I found on news pages (or skip below if you want):

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Even before this change, there was a history of false profiles spamming and trolling Facebook, the addition of Use-As-Page to the toolbox only gave trolls a new way to stay in business. Facebook has staff that deals with those accounts when they are found or reported, but it certainly can’t be easy for them to keep up with people who are dead set on being trolly.

(Related aside: When I worked as a comment moderator for the Cincinnati Enquirer, a troublesome site user with many usernames emailed me to say, “I’m retired and have nothing else to do but create new accounts every time you block me. I can make your live miserable.” This is just a sampling of the mentality of trolls, folks. Here’s another.)

Now, I’ve got no doubt that some news sites have seen higher quality discussion after installing Facebook commenting; it’s definitely better than many of in-house or other out-of-the-box solutions I’ve seen on news websites. It likely is the best option for those sites that don’t have the technical expertise and manpower to host and manage a heavy flow of onsite comments day in and day out – so long as they don’t mind handing a big part of their community to Facebook.

I’m just warning that news sites shouldn’t assume that Facebook on its own will solve their commenting problems. Users can and will still be anonymous (or even identifiable) hateful trolls. To make it work, you still need a daily moderation workflow and a newsroom-wide commitment to not only reading story/blog comments, but responding to them.

 

Creating one Facebook page for both sides of your life

Thanks to Facebook’s near-constant changes to their privacy settings, it’s tough to keep documentation on them up to date. In preparation for staff training here at TBD, I’ve completely overhauled these resources for anyone wishing to use Facebook for their professional journalism uses as well as their personal lives. I hope you’ll find these useful.

Intro to Facebook for journalists (and any professionals): A guide that explains the basics of Facebook with a glossary or terms and a look at demographics.

Setting up an All-Purpose Facebook Account: Setting up a Facebook page you can easily use for personal and professional contacts.

Sharing Your Content on Facebook: Using your newsfeed to promote content, blogs and social media accounts.

More resources on Facebook you should check out:

Facebook friends: Please stop spamming me

Whatever happened to Facebook friends actually being friends?

At one point not all that long ago, my Facebook friends were all people who I may not have considered “friends” in real life, but they at least knew me in some fashion. Whether we worked together at a past paper or went on the same school at some point, we had some binding life experience that brought us together on the social network. At the very least, we’ve met at least once – or maybe we follow one another on Twitter.

Lately, my Facebook friends are making me feel like just another number – even the ones who I consider real friends in the “real life network”.

A great deal of them are marketers – by profession, hobby or as a transitional job following a journalism layoff. Somehow, this means our Facebook friendship is little more than that of a spammer to spamee these days.

Every single day a Facebook friend of mine suggests I fan some client or employer of theirs. It used to be, I’d get fan suggestions about bands we both loved in school or groups based around inside jokes from “Arrested Development”.

Now, those same friends are asking me to fan companies I would have no obvious interest in (like Mommy sites), that are way out of my geographic area and aren’t even meant for people in my field (like political groups).

These former friends likely got their jobs based on their number of Facebook friends – and they spam each and every one of us with these stupid invites. I must have missed the marketing conference where they instructed everyone to sell their high school classmates, college friends and family members to anyone who shows them the money.

Social networking is supposed to be about connecting with old friends and making new ones. It can involve marketing products, but it takes individualized recommendations to be anything but spam.

I tolerate a lot from my Facebook friends – borderline-pornographic pregnancy photos, updates from parties I wasn’t invited to and constantly-shifting relationship statuses – but I won’t tolerate spam anymore. I’m going to start unfriending anyone who uses me to spam for their employers and clients. That’s not why I joined Facebook.

Marketing friends, I offer you an easy solution: Take ten minutes to set up friends groups in Facebook.

Go to Friends in the top menu of your Facebook home page and click on All Friends. On that page, click Create New List. Why don’t you be honest and name it the spam list? Look over your friends and select those to whom you actually want to market your product or business. Make sure your mom, your friend who now lives across the country and I are not on it.

Now when you send messages or invites, you can type in the name of that list and send it just to those people.

And finally, if you can’t make this decision about who to spam and who not to spam, maybe you shouldn’t be on Facebook at all. At the very least, you should do your real friends and family a favor and remove  all of them from your lists. You aren’t a real friend, anyway.

Your Facebook fan page might not be in your control

In the past year or so, tons of media companies have been setting up their Facebook fan pages (with varying degrees of success). In this time, media companies have also been shedding staff members by the hundreds.

If any of those companies are like mine, chances are they have allowed staff members to create these fan pages using their own personal Facebook access. After all, it is the easiest way to do it. Chances are, these companies have also let go at least one person who created a Facebook fan page for their organization. Unlike user access to your in-house publishing systems and intranets, you have very little control over who has admin access to your Facebook fan pages unless you yourself created the page.

If the ex-employee in question as the creator and only admin on the page – there’s really nothing you can do except ask them to make you an admin as well. If they are feeling charitable, they might actually do it. But then there’s another issue.

As of right now, it seems there is no way to permanently remove admin privileges from the creator of a fan page. Tons of Facebook business users have been trying to get an answer to this issue to no avail. As of right now, whoever created your fan page, whether they work for you or not, has full control. If the employee parted ways with the company in a negative fashion, imagine what they could do: Post nasty or libelous status updates, send messages to all fans, delete the page altogether. Yikes, right?

Until Facebook decides to answer this long string of help requests, the best thing you can do is to not allow employees to create Facebook fan pages from their personal accounts. Instead, set up a universal staff account can be set up to create and administrate fan pages. That way a mere password change once an employee leaves your company will solve this issue.

How much does Facebook know about you?

Just how much do you tend to share on Facebook? Probably more than you think.

Facebook has recently been called onto the carpet by Canada (the country!) for violating their privacy laws. In particular, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner took issue with the social network’s often confusing privacy agreement, their retention of users’ personal data even after they’ve left the network and how third-party apps use members’ private info.

Facebook agreed to implement changes that would affect all users, but would get Canada off their backs. After the changes take place, FB will change their privacy policy to better explain to users how and why their info is used – and it will require apps to explain the same each time a user accesses them.

And it’s a good thing too. Recently, the ACLU has been trying to raise awareness about Facebook quizzes. Sure, they might seem harmless – after all, you’re just finding out what Simpsons character you are, right? Wrong. Actually these quizzes, in particular, can find out a ton of info about you  – like your political affiliations, sexual orientation, religious background, etc. – based on fairly innocuous questions (not to mention the info they are allowed to pull from your account when you activate them).

It’s great that Facebook will be forcing apps to explain what info will be taken and how it will be used – otherwise, where could private info about you end up? In the hands of your employer? The government? A debt collector? The possibilities are frightening to consider.

Even with these changes, Facebook will continue to expand the info it asks users to give up in efforts to expand their “real time search”, which allows you to search the entire network, including news feeds, status messages, groups and more. Just over the past few months, they’ve instituted changes that, depending on your privacy settings, can make your info available to anyone (not just those in your network like before). Even if you’ve got your privacy settings where you want the, take another look to see what’s changed. Need help? Here’s a guide for arranging your privacy settings.

Aside from Facebook’s policies and your privacy settings, you should always ask yourself  exactly what info are you sharing when you update your status or share a photo? Just think – when you share on Facebook or Twitter that you’re going on vacation for two weeks – who might find that interesting? A burglar of course! It wouldn’t bee too hard to figure out where you live (especially if you’re in the phone book), or even what house is yours (ever posted a photo online that shows your home?).

Now that I’ve got you all freaked out (I hope), get back to work.

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