We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.
— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018
Last week, Dorsey and other leaders at Twitter took a further step in those efforts when they hosted a live stream to answer questions about the social network’s health.
Admitting that Twitter has taken on serious issues it must resolve, Head of Product Health David Gasca remarked that the network has to overcome them and examine health “in such a way that is public and accountable,” but goes beyond such basic figures as retweets and followers.
A conversation on #health https://t.co/Il8Mtx1JOs
— jack (@jack) March 8, 2018
The live stream took place a day after Twitter issued a statement emphasizing that it would be taking measures to prevent cryptocurrency scams on its network, noting that it’s “aware of this form of manipulation.”
To address it, the statement said, Twitter will be able to detect certain “signals” that indicate an account might be engaging in this activity.
The live stream also coincided with the release of new research from MIT that found false news to be 70% more likely to be retweeted.
Dorsey noted that Twitter is likely to host future live streams on the topic. Check out our full coverage of this one here.
3. Messenger Could Be Issuing Updates to Emulate Snapchat (Again)
Over the weekend, messaging blog WABetaInfo released new information indicating that Facebook has plans for major changes to Messenger — which could include disappearing photos and videos.
According to the post, the rumored update not only includes an overall new design and features like auto-translate, but also may allow users to send disappearing — or ephemeral — visual content.
Source: WABetaInfo
If true, this move would be the latest in a Facebook’s long history of attempting to emulate Snapchat’s features since its failed attempt to acquire the platform in 2013.
“The Facebook platform saturated the market with stories on its portfolio of products — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger,” said Connor Cirillo, HubSpot’s conversational marketing manager, when the story first broke. “And now, with its emphasis on things like video calls and filters, Messenger continues to push to be the way users build one-on-one relationships.”
The sentiment of Messenger being leveraged by individual consumers and brands alike has been echoed throughout SXSW during a number of conversations about the platform and how businesses are — and should be — using it.
“Over time,” said Niveus CEO and co-founder Tim Cutting during a panel discussion, bots should be built “so that it’s more of a dialogue back and forth.”
“Folks are letting this into their lives,” he continued. “It’s a train moving toward comfort, and feature, and benefit.”
4. Speaking of Snapchat …
Last week, it was reported that the somewhat troubled ephemeral content app would be cutting over 120 engineers from its staff.
According to Reuters, the app’s parent company, Snap Inc., has a staff meeting scheduled for today to discuss a reorganization, as well as answering lingering employee questions.
Confirmation of the Snap layoffs totaling 120 and Hunter’s full email to employees here: https://t.co/8zE8smvKBT pic.twitter.com/L5LX6IAjZI
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) March 8, 2018
The announcement came after disappointing results and revenue a year after the company’s IPO.
For many, the sustainable value or monetization potential for an app like Snapchat remains unclear. While it was a pioneer in the realm of ephemeral content — and certainly attracted the attention of Facebook, as per above — it’s lingered behind other social networks in terms of providing tools for analytics and measuring ROI for marketers and brands.
Discussions at SXSW also implied that it even causes some confusion for best use cases among consumers.
“One core problem on Snapchat is deciding what should be shared just with friends and family, and what should be public,” Taygerly said. “What is the demarcation between those two worlds?”
5. YouTube Will Add Information From Wikipedia to Conspiracy Videos
At a Tuesday night SXSW panel, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the video-sharing platform will be adding topical information to videos about conspiracies.
The goal of this move is to provide additional information around controversial topics — the soure of which will be Wikipedia.
“When there are videos that are focused around something that’s a conspiracy,” Wojcicki said, “we will show a companion unit of information from Wikipedia showing that here is information about the event.”
There’s an issue, however: Wikipedia is thought by many to be a less-than-reliable source of information.
Its content is crowdsourced, and much of the time, entries can be edited by anyone without requiring citations. That’s one reason why, for example, when I was in graduate school, Wikipedia was not a permitted source of information for research.
But as Wired reporter Louise Matsakis pointed out, floating Wikipedia as a source of information isn’t new for Google.
but it’s important to note that Google has been pulling from Wikipedia in its search results for a long time now—this isn’t exactly radical from a Google company
— Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis) March 13, 2018
Information from the site is often used in featured snippets, or some of the highest-ranking pages in its search engine results. After all, here’s what a search for the query “moon landing” yielded:
It’s possible that YouTube could face a backlash from this move — but as for whether or not it will reconsider its sources of information for such content remains to be seen.
That’s all for today — but we’ll be at SXSW all week. While we’re here, feel free to weigh in on Twitter to ask us your tech news questions, or to let us know what kind of events and topics you’d like us to cover.
