You can barely keep up with your own Facebook News Feed, so it’s okay if you’ve fallen behind on the network’s updates – because we’ve summed it all up for you. This week, Facebook takes on hate speech and killed your iPhone, among other things.
Facebook gets strict with hate speech
Facebook has an algorithm that detects hate speech and automatically takes posts down, but with so much content coming in, the social network has been pressured by feminist groups to do a better job of identifying and removing Facebook pages that encourage violence on women.
The New York Times reports that Women, Action & the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project, and activist Soraya Chemaly started a campaign urging Facebook to “ban gender-based hate speech” on Facebook. In fact ABC News says that 60,000 tweets containing the hashtag #fbrape and 5,000 emails were submitted to Facebook in solidarity.
In addition to the petition nabbing Facebook’s attention, Nissan also announced that it would discontinue advertising to make sure that Nissan ads wouldn’t pop up next to the Facebook pages that publish content that these feminist groups want to have taken down. Companies including Down Easy Brewing and eReader Utopia, The New York Times reports, joined in on discontinuing ads.
Note that Facebook doesn’t have a policy against controversial and offensive content, as long as it abides by its community standards.
The social network eventually acknowledged that its algorithm hasn’t been up to the task of sorting through content well enough to find hate speech. Although, aside from Facebook’s algorithm, it’s has also been up to its users to flag inappropriate content. To act on the matter quickly, Facebook says that it has agreed to work closely with feminist organizations to remove hateful content directed at women.
Ads promoting lie-for-hire service are against Facebook rules
Forbes writer Jeff Bercovici discovered something peculiar in a Facebook ad – a lie-for-hire service. Long-story short, someone at a company called Paladin Deception Service will pose as anyone you want and lie for or on behalf of you to whomever you request – with the exception of lying to someone from the law enforcement and healthcare industries.
Well, Bercovici dug a little deeper as his curiosity was piqued at that point, and wasn’t too surprised to find that a sketchy business like this might not have been legitimate by Facebook’s standards to merit a space on the ad sidebar. It’s suspected that this pay-for-a-lie service broke the “unacceptable business model” guideline, which frankly is rather vague. Regardless, Facebook has confirmed that the ad has been removed entirely.
Want free Pepsi? Like Pepsi on Facebook
What’s better, Coca-Cola or Pepsi? Well maybe Coke loves will switch sides when they figure out they can get free sodas.
In Belgium, where Pepsi has set up some customized vending machines, the soda company doesn’t want your money. Instead it wants your likes – your Facebook likes that is. If you happen to stop by one of these machines if you’re in Belgium, make sure you like Pepsi and snag a free can.
Blame Facebook for iOS battery drain
Apple gets a lot of bad rap for its battery life. If you’re an iOS user, you know you’ll be lucky to get through half the day on a full charge. A potential culprit, Hagga.net has found, quite possibly might the Facebook app that you probably have on your phone right now.
He points out that this discovery was made by checking out the apps that have been running the longest on the iPhone. Before you jump to conclusions and say that he was probably just using Facebook for an extended period of time, he argues that this isn’t a reasonable argument because of how apps actually work on iOS devices.
If you have iOS 4 or higher, Apple introduced a multitasking feature that enables apps to run in the background even if you close it for up to 10 minutes. Before this, apps would simply be frozen when closed therefore using up zero CPU power.
There are exceptions to the 10 minutes, meaning that if an app meets certain criteria it can even run indefinitely even if you close it. Facebook, the post explains, takes advantage of this. VoIP and audio are two of these exceptions that the social network uses, which grants Facebook the power to run in the background. When closed, Facebook’s app doesn’t exactly stay active every waking second. What Facebook actually does is become active for 10 seconds every few minutes for the entire day.
Now if you want to stop Facebook from turning on every few minutes even with the app closed, Hagga.net writes that you’ll either have to delete the app or manually close the app in the iOS task manager.
Now that you know this, turning off Facebook might add a couple of hours to your battery life.
Like a Facebook Page? Share it
AllFacebook has reported that Facebook is encouraging users to “Share this Page with more friends.” The social network has been trying figure out a way to aid in the discovery of new Facebook Pages – page discovery is one area that the social network is lacking when you compare the platform to Twitter. It has been stepping up page discovery efforts however starting with “More Pages You Might Like,” which was a feature that was rolled out earlier this year that recommends other Facebook Pages when you hit “like.”
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