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Cofounder Gabor Cselle says his upstart social network can offer a “2007 Twitter” community vibe that Elon Musk’s platform no longer supplies.

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In a meeting and an unusual report, activist groups that instigated an ad boycott of the social media company say it has not responded adequately to criticism.

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Instagram isn’t the only company that is attempting to remove publicly available engagement metrics from their platform. Facebook (which owns Instagram), YouTube, and Twitter have all experimented with removing engagement metrics from their platforms. As WIRED previously reported, social media researchers have argued that when users tailor their content to whatever garners the most engagement (or outrage), the result is a radicalized environment that makes healthy, happy conversations almost impossible.

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Monday, October 14, 2019. By Jeremy Nguyen, with cartooncollections.com. Information about you, what you buy, where you go, even where you look is the oil that fuels the digital economy. WIRED’s Guide to personal data collection explains it all. www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-personal-data-collection/

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Twitter plans to test a feature that will let tweeters hide replies, but allow other users to view them.

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Facebook begins publicly testing its online-dating product, called Dating, in Colombia today. The service was first announced at the annual F8 conference in May this year, and will likely be available in other locations in the future. For now, users aged 18 and older in Colombia will be able to create dating profiles and, once those reach a critical mass, find some matches. WIRED got to preview an early version of the service, and it looks promising—especially for users looking for meaningful long-term relationships rather than hookups.

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The makers of the Flipboard, a news aggregator with 100 million monthly active users around the world, noticed the same thing: more people are reading the news. Since last summer, the app’s engagement numbers have doubled, both in terms of "page flips" (the app's signature page-flipping motion) and the amount of time spent in the app. But Flipboard is hardly immune to the thorny issue of fake news, which the company’s editorial director once likened to "living in a hellish, ranting, Tower of Babel, with no one speaking the same ideological language and each of us in near-violent disagreement."

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How a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all. ----- ONE DAY IN late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter.” Zuckerberg wanted whoever was responsible to cut it out. “ ‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote. “We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls,” the memo went on. But “crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.” The defacement, he said, was being investigated. All around the country at about this time, debates about race and politics were becoming increasingly raw. Donald Trump had just won the South Carolina primary, lashed out at the Pope over immigration, and earned the enthusiastic support of David Duke. Hillary Clinton had just defeated Bernie Sanders in Nevada, only to have an activist from Black Lives Matter interrupt a speech of hers to protest racially charged statements she’d made two decades before. And on Facebook, a popular group called Blacktivist was gaining traction by blasting out messages like “American economy and power were built on forced migration and torture.” So when Zuckerberg’s admonition circulated, a young contract employee named Benjamin Fearnow decided it might be newsworthy. He took a screenshot on his personal laptop and sent the image to a friend named Michael Nuñez, who worked at the tech-news site Gizmodo. Nuñez promptly published a brief story about Zuckerberg’s memo. A week later, Fearnow came across something else he thought Nuñez might like to publish. In another internal communication, Facebook had invited its employees to submit potential questions to ask Zuckerberg at an all-hands meeting. One of the most up-voted questions that week was “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?” Fearnow took another screenshot, this time with his phone. Fearnow, a recent graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, worked in Facebook’s New York office on something called Trending Topics, a feed of popular news subjects that popped up when people opened Facebook. The feed was generated by an algorithm but moderated by a team of about 25 people with backgrounds in journalism. If the word “Trump” was trending, as it often was, they used their news judgment to identify which bit of news about the candidate was most important. If The Onion or a hoax site published a spoof that went viral, they had to keep that out. If something like a mass shooting happened, and Facebook’s algorithm was slow to pick up on it, they would inject a story about it into the feed.

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Workers of the world, unite---around your consoles.

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