Facebook requires that you confirm your identity as a United States Citizen when running ads related to politics or national issues. I just went through this process to confirm my identity as a US Citizen with Facebook, and here’s what I learned, along with some background about why I needed to go through this process. [Read more…]

The social media network StumbleUpon is shutting down on June 30, 2018. StumbleUpon users are being encouraged to join Mix, another website by the makers of StumbleUpon. [Read more…]

In an effort to fight revenge porn, Facebook announced a new pilot program to encourage us to upload photos that we suspect may be out in the public. They will take those photos that are uploaded to fingerprint them and use technology to identify photos that are then uploaded by others. This pilot program is starting in Australia, Canada, the UK and US, expands on their existing tools for people to report that type of content. [Read more…]

Klout, the site that gave us our social media Klout scores, is shutting down on May 25, 2018. This is the same day that the GDPR is going into effect, so I’m assuming that it has something to do with GDPR. If you don’t know what GDPR is, and why it’s important, then you should read my What is GDPR post. [Read more…]

Due to an internal Twitter password bug, and the way Twitter stores passwords, Twitter is recommending that you immediately change your password. According to a Twitter blog post, Twitter said that they recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. Because the passwords were stored unmasked (in text format), they recommend that you immediately change your Twitter password. [Read more…]

The Hacker-News-style web site Inbound.org is being shut down, despite what appears to be a record amount of traffic to the web site. The owners of Inbound.org are shutting down the web site and launching a new web site called Growth Hub, which will reside at Growth.org. [Read more…]

Facebook allows really long posts that completely fill up a Facebook user’s feed, virtually completely taking over all posts in someone’s feed. Someone who I’m Facebook friends with shared a Facebook post by someone else, and that post completely took up the Facebook feed (timeline), making me literally scroll for almost a minute until I saw another post. Here’s an example of that post: [Read more…]

Facebook is responding to fake news posts, right in your Facebook feed, by inserting fact checker posts right after posts from your friends that they believe is fake news. If one of your Facebook friends shares an article that Facebook thinks is fake news, then right after that post they will post a fact-checker post. Here is an example of this: [Read more…]

ManyChat is a popular service that allows you to create Facebook Messenger bots.

In light of the data security issues that Facebook has had lately, Facebook is pausing the addition of all new Facebook Messenger bots. If you currently are running a Facebook Messenger bot, then you most likely won’t have any interruption of service, and your bot will continue to work as usual. [Read more…]

The United States Federal Trade Commission has issued a statement about recent privacy concerns of Facebook users. Tom Pahl, Acting Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, issued a statement about Facebook’s privacy practices. [Read more…]

Have you liked a Facebook page or post that has been built by a Russian agency spreading fake news? Or, have you liked or followed a Facebook Page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency? The Internet Research Agency has been identified by Facebook as an organization that apparently was paid to spread fake news Facebook and Instagram–in an attempt to influence the United States Presidential Election. [Read more…]

When we do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), most of the time we think about optimizing web pages and images for the Google search results. After all, we really can get traffic and sales for ranking well in the Google search results pages. But, what about Twitter? Twitter has a search box, and people really do use it. Have you thought about doing SEO for the Twitter search results page? [Read more…]

Twitter has opened up the full archive of Tweets, going back to 2006, via their premium full-archive search endpoint, for developers. [Read more…]

In what may have a change of heart (or an overzealous automated ad system), Facebook has now approved my boosted post for a news blog post that I posted earlier. I originally wrote a news type blog post that reported that Facebook was prohibiting ads on its network that promoted cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and binary options. To get more exposure of my blog post, I boosted the post on my Facebook page. However, within about a minute, Facebook disapproved the ad and didn’t allow the boosted post to run. [Read more…]

Facebook’s automated systems disapproved a boosted news post about Facebook prohibiting ads that contain cryptocurrency, ICOs, and Binary Options on their ad platforms. As you might recall, yesterday I wrote a news post about how Facebook is prohibiting ads that contain information about cryptocurrency, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), and Binary Options. [Read more…]

Facebook has taken a bold move and banned all financial products and services ads on their platform that are related to cryptocurrency, ICO (Initial Coin Offerings), and Binary Options. In a blog post today, Facebook’s Rob Leathern, Product Management Director at Facebook, explained that they created a new policy: [Read more…]

There is a new reaction on Facebook, called Rainbow Pride Reaction. Currently, Facebook defaults to a few reactions that you can make on friends’ posts: Like (thumbs up), Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. If you want to add the Rainbow Pride reaction, all you need to do is this: [Read more…]

Have you ever wondered about why or how the Facebook Like button appears on a website or web page? Well, typically the website’s owner or web designer places that Facebook Like button on the page, using code that Facebook provides them. Essentially, if you have a website, all you need is the code from Facebook (you get it here) and all you have to do is copy/paste that code. And, well, it appears like this: [Read more…]

Facebook is helping its advertisers create videos about their businesses. The videos are fairly short, typically about under 30 seconds, and are the business owner (or page owner) can customize it to their liking. From what I can tell, it’s limited to current Facebook Advertisers who have business pages on Facebook. [Read more…]

Facebook has created a competitor to Google’s AdSense program. The program, Facebook’s Audience Network, allows you to monetize your mobile app or website with ads from Facebook’s 2.5 million Facebook advertisers. [Read more…]