If you look at Miranda Anderson’s Instagram, at first glance it might strike you as similar to many other bloggers. Her feed is filled with light-filled photos, flat-brimmed hats, smiling children, and inspirational quotes. But you won’t find a lot of what is increasingly crowding many influencer feeds: posts telling you to buy that same flat-brimmed hat, candle, outfit, or cake stand.
“STOP Encouraging Influencers,” and “DEAD END – Awkwardly Branded Captions Up Ahead #SPON,” declare street signs sprinkled around the world’s biggest marketing festival, Cannes Lions, which is held in June in France.
At its core, Facebook is a giant repository of information about the people who use it, from their age and phone number, to their music preferences, to their shopping habits, and everything else they’ve added to the platform over the years. And from Facebook status updates alone, it may also be possible to help determine whether users have certain diseases, a new study has found.
It’s not just you, it’s nearly everyone.
Answering machines have been around since the early 20th century, and many have stopped using them in favor of texting and email.
Instagram ads are known for their accuracy—sometimes eerily so. The moisturizer you talked about with your friend last night, or the movie you mentioned seeing to your dad, is likely to end up there, prompting many a paranoid concern that Instagram is literally eavesdropping on you.
On my Facebook feed today, I saw two separate people had posted a slick, well-produced video that showed all the horrifying ways in which our food is altered to be cheaper, look fresher, last longer. It’s supposed to reveal some scary truths. There’s just one little problem: a number of the claims in the video are unfounded or bogus, and had been debunked in the past.
Emblazoned in large letters projected onto the Palo Alto hotel where Facebook held its annual shareholder meeting May 30 was a simple message: “Fire Zuck.”
At a recent conference for social media influencers in Texas, a pink neon sign blared, “Let Authenticity Lead the Way.” That word, “authenticity,” appeared countless times, even at a yoga session where the instructor urged attendees to “find your authenticity” while in certain poses.
At 6:45 am on a Thursday in late April, about two dozen women lined up yoga mats in several rows on the damp, chilly concrete of the Austin Marriott deck. You could see the glistening Colorado river, and the smell of barbecue was already wafting from the city’s restaurants. The yoga class itself would be unremarkable, except for one mantra you don’t hear at your neighborhood Vinyasa session. “When you’re in ‘Warrior Two,’ you find your authenticity,” the teacher cheered on her students. “Despite all the noise, when you find your authenticity, you resonate inward and with the rest of the world,” she said. Moments later a worker wielding a leaf blower interrupted the yogic calm.
Social media influencers are often one-person businesses, but a whole ecosystem of intermediary actors has developed around them.
It started with an angelic beauty salon, white from floor to ceiling, then passed through a big display of pastel and neon-colored sweets that nobody was allowed to eat. At the end, some were able to hold a live puppy.
“What you’re doing matters” declared large lettering on a multi-colored mosaic in a central location at Mom 2.0, a well-heeled conference at Austin’s Marriott hotel where more than 1,000 women (and a handful of men) gathered to learn how to be better bloggers and influencers this April. It was a backdrop for photos, in front of which countless “mompreneurs” would take smiling shots for their Instagram feeds.
When you hear the phrase social media “influencer,” you might first think of the Fyre Festival models, who posted enigmatic orange squares to Instagram that hyped up the most spectacular event failure of this century. You might think of Olivia Jade Giannulli, daughter of actress Lori Loughlin, who allegedly got into college with the help of a bribe and cashed in on her student life through paid engagements with Amazon. Or you might think of Chiara Ferragni, the Italian influencer extraordinaire who turned her blog into an empire, and even managed to get her entire wedding #sponsored. These people, each with millions or tens of millions of followers, are the stars of the social media era. They can rack up six figures for each sponsored post they share on Instagram.
Instagram users will be able to shop directly from posts starting next week, its parent company Facebook announced during its annual F8 developer conference today (April 30).
During Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new look for its main platform, both on mobile and on desktop. It will be the biggest change in five years, he said, although arguably it’s the most drastic change to Facebook’s website since 2011, when the company introduced the timeline.
As thousands of people were watching livestreamed footage of the burning Notre Dame cathedral on YouTube, the video platform showed them an informational panel underneath about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, with text taken from Encyclopedia Britannica.
US authorities and toymaker Fisher-Price have announced a product recall for 4.7 million Rock ’n Play Sleeper rocker chairs, after they’d been linked to more than 30 infant deaths over a decade.
In two hauls just several days apart this month, Singapore seized 28 tons (25.6 metric tons) of pangolin scales from traffickers. That’s more than authorities around the world intercept in a year, suggesting that one of the world’s most-trafficked mammals is sliding closer and closer to extinction.
Facebook—or its reputation, at least—had a bad 2018, filled with scandals and scrutiny. A lot of the backlash has been focused on CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which is why, the company says, it had to double the costs dedicated to his personal security.
Possible spoiler alert! The final season of the hit show “Game of Thrones” is upon us, with the first episode scheduled to air Sunday in the United States at 9pm ET on HBO, broadcast simultaneously at 2am UK time on Sky Atlantic.
Instagram and its parent company Facebook are constantly waging a complex battle with bad content on their platforms. But the latest chapter of that fight involves them stepping onto the slippery slope to censorship, worrying artists, people with disabilities, consensual sex workers, and those who are in various ways body- and sex-positive.
Facebook is banning white nationalism and white separatism from its platforms, eliminating the controversial distinction it had historically drawn between those ideologies and white supremacy.
Tech platforms once again proved sluggish to respond when the shootings that left at least 49 dead at two mosques in New Zealand were broadcast live and then shared thousands of times.
