Media Perception Of Social Workers

More leaked documents suggest Facebook is aware of its problems | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s own internal research found 1 in 8 of its users reported compulsive social media use that interfered with their sleep, work, and relationships— what the social media platform calls “problematic use” but is more commonly known as “internet addiction,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The social media platform had a team focused on user well-being, which suggested ways to curb problematic use, some of which were put into place. But the company shut down the team in 2019, according to the WSJ . Pratiti Raychoudhury, a vice president of research for Meta, Facebook’s new parent company, writes in a blog post that the WSJ misrepresented the research (a claim the company has made about some of the other articles the WSJ has produced based on Facebook’s internal documents). She says the company “has been engaged and supportive throughout our mul...

Image: Clay Banks / Unsplash Today let’s talk about how two of the world’s most important social networks settled an ancient grudge, and what it tells us about the prospects for a more open internet as tech giants work to build a metaverse. On Wednesday, Instagram delivered an announcement nine years in the making . Since 2012, Instagram photos shared to Twitter have appeared only as plain text links. From now on, Instagram links will include a preview of the image — just as they did before Instagram sold to Facebook, and competitive pressures and professional rivalries combined to worsen our collective user experience. “They said it would never happen,” Instagram tweeted Wednesday. And indeed, this reversal was one that few saw coming. The path to peace involved wine, pizza, and backyard dealmaking — but to really appreciate what happened, you have to start at the moment everything fell apart. When it launched in October 2010, Instagram was maybe the easie...

An Instagram link preview on Twitter. | Image: Instagram The ice is thawing on a nine-year internet feud. When you share Instagram links on Twitter, you’ll see a preview of the link that includes an image instead of just the URL text starting on Wednesday. The feature is rolling out on Android, iOS, and the web. I didn’t see a preview when I tried sharing an Instagram post on my Twitter feed, so it might not work for you just yet. Both Instagram and Twitter are promoting the change. They said it would never happen… Twitter Card previews start rolling out TODAY. Now, when you share an Instagram link on Twitter a preview of that post will appear. pic.twitter.com/XSZRx9dzd1 — Instagram (@instagram) November 3, 2021 If you want to share your latest Instagram post on the Twitter timeline too, you’re in luck: now when you share a link to an IG post in a Tweet, it’ll show up as a card with a preview of the photo. Rolling out on Android, iOS, and web. —...

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called Facebook a “cancer to democracy” in a tweet on Thursday shortly after the company announced that it was changing its corporate name to Meta to better represent its focus on building the metaverse . “Meta as in “we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!” said Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday . Meta as in “we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!” https://t.co/jzOcCFaWkJ — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 28, 2021 Ocasio-Cortez is one of Facebook’s loudest critics in Congress and has called the company a threat to democracy before. When lawmakers first started to critique Facebook’s market dominance in 2019 , she tweeted, “F...

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new name will be “Meta.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now, and is still closely linked to one product. “But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.” Zuckerberg owns the Twitter handle @meta (whose tweets are protected as of this writing) and meta.com , which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook outlining the changes. The site previously redirected to meta.org , a biomedical research discovery tool that was a project of the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative. That’s part of the...

The stickers appear in Stories posts, and can link out to external sites. | Image: Instagram Instagram’s link stickers, which let you include hyperlinks in Stories in the form of stickers, will now be available to everyone on the platform, the Facebook-owned social media network has announced. Instagram started testing link stickers in June , but until now the feature has been limited to verified accounts or accounts with a large number of followers. According to the social network, link stickers are useful for anyone from businesses linking out to their products to activists linking out to external resources. But Instagram concedes that anyone can benefit from link sharing to engage with their followers. It also says that accounts repeatedly sharing misinformation or hate speech will lose access. The successor to the swipe up To add a link, head into the sticker tool from the top navigation bar after uploading content to your story, tap the “Link” sticker ...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A second Facebook whistleblower has come forward with a new set of allegations about how the social media platform does business. First reported by the Washington Post , the person is a former member of Facebook’s integrity team and says the company puts profits before efforts to fight hate speech and misinformation on its platform. In the affidavit, copies of which were provided to The Verge , the whistleblower alleges, among other things, that a former Facebook communications official dismissed concerns about interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election, assisted unwittingly by Facebook. Tucker Bounds said, according to the affidavit, that the situation would be “a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement and we are fine.” The whistleblower alleged differences between Facebook’s public sta...