11/01/2018

Facebook Sketches a Future With a Diminished News Feed

Many users will be lost as it focuses more on video and less on conversation

For most of the past year, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to convince the world that Facebook was fast becoming a very different company—one that accepted its enormous role in shaping public opinion worldwide and would spend what it took to exercise its power responsibly. Many still have trouble believing him, and it's easy to understand why.

Every time it seems as if Facebook is making progress against the hackers, spammers, and trolls hell-bent on turning it into a cesspool of hate speech and fake news, new problems surface. It's gone to huge lengths, for example, to tout its work to bring more transparency and reduced fraud to political ads. But Tuesday, just before Facebook released its results, Vice News reported that it had attempted to place ads on Facebook while posing as each of the 100 US senators. Facebook approved them all.

Screwups like this have felt like a twice-a-month event for the past year, seemingly unending. Zuckerberg and his executives and engineers at Facebook are some of the smartest, most experienced and well-funded talent in the world tackling these problems. Yet they keep looking like villagers who are using their fingers to keep their dam from leaking.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.