Top News:
Daniel Funke / Poynter:
Snopes fact-check of a satirical story led Facebook to flag it as false, flag removed after complaint; Snopes says it received several inquiries about the story — A recent debunk from Snopes exposed a grey area for Facebook's fact-checking tool. — It started as a joke.
Discussion:
@krazy_cat_katy, @prageru, Snopes.com, The Babylon Bee, Splinter, Washington Post, The Daily Caller, Jon Swerens and Mediaite
CNNMoney:
Brands like Nike, Expedia, Acer suspend ads on Infowars' YouTube channels when contacted by CNN; some wonder why YouTube filters failed to block ads on Infowars — Facebook, YouTube fail to blunt conspiracy theories — Some of the biggest brands in the U.S. had ads running on the YouTube channels …
Discussion:
Media Matters for America, The Hill, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, The A.V. Club, Mashable, Engadget, Motherboard, @kylegriffin1, The Verge and Mediaite
Ricardo Bilton / Nieman Lab:
BuzzSumo study of 100M articles posted in 2017 shows social sharing halved since 2015 and Google sites drove 2x more referrals to publishers than social media — Publishers may be getting dinged — and in some cases destroyed — by Facebook's move to decrease the amount of publisher content …
Discussion:
BuzzSumo, @seldo, @torystarr3, @skgreen, Search Engine Journal and Social Media Today
Cara Buckley / New York Times:
E! producer Aileen Gram-Moreno says she was fired for allowing a clip that criticized the network over gender pay disparity to air during Golden Globes show — With accusations of sexual harassment dogging its star host, Ryan Seacrest, and celebrities reportedly planning to steer clear …
Discussion:
Variety, The Wrap, @shannoncoulter, Hollywood Life, Refinery29, @tvwiththinus, @caranyt, Deadline, East Bay Times, Mediaite, TV Tattle, The New York Observer, Yahoo! News, Glamour, Hollywood Reporter and Vulture
Andy Bechtel / The Editor's Desk:
Interview with Lisa Tozzi, global news director at BuzzFeed News, about curating breaking news, headline writing, and advice for journalism students — Lisa Tozzi is global news director at BuzzFeed News, a position she has held since 2013. She previously worked at The New York Times …
Discussion:
@tjdoyle and @sulliview
Issie Lapowsky / Wired:
Facebook says it doesn't know how many followed Russia's IRA accounts on Instagram; researcher finds that 27 of 170 deleted accounts had ~2.2M followers total — FOR MORE THAN a year, Jonathan Albright has served as something of a one-man General Accounting Office for the tech industry.
Discussion:
@rasmus_kleis, @justinhendrix, @wired and @benioff, more at Techmeme »
Zoë Beery / Columbia Journalism Review:
Journalists say the editing tests they're given during the hiring process amount to too much unpaid work and often receive no feedback — In the spring of 2015, GQ asked freelance writer and editor Beejoli Shah to produce a four-page front-of-book section for the magazine.
Discussion:
@janine_j, @alexwexelman, @wxdam, @angryblacklady, @srussellkraft, @octonion, @shafldn, @katzish, @britnidlc, @theronalisa, @michelleruiz and @andyrichter
Pew Research Center:
Study: in the US, 78% of 18-24 year olds use Snapchat, 71% use Instagram, 45% use Twitter; nearly 75% of US adults and 94% of 18-24 year olds use YouTube — A majority of Americans use Facebook and YouTube, but young adults are especially heavy users of Snapchat and Instagram
Discussion:
@pewinternet, @pewresearch, @pewresearch, Forbes, Social Media Today, The Verge and Pew Research Center, more at Techmeme »
New York Times:
Advertisers complain Facebook is inconsistent and gender biased in its process of determining whether images should be rejected for being sexually suggestive — Advertisers, especially smaller ones, complain of inconsistency and gender bias in the process that determines whether images are rejected for being sexually suggestive.
Discussion:
@oliviasolon, @nytimestech, @andrewtshaffer, @sapna, @stockroom_com, @nytimesbusiness and TechCrunch
Shan Wang / Nieman Lab:
Interview with Anna Veduta, one of two people running the English-language version of Latvia-based Meduza, an independent Russian news site — The English edition of the three-year-old Russian news site now gets an average of 100,000 monthly unique visitors and can count among its readers everyone …
Discussion:
Meduza.io and New York Times
Rick Gladstone / New York Times:
World's longest-imprisoned journalist, Yusuf Ruzimuradov, has been freed in Uzbekistan after spending 19 years in jail — Uzbekistan has freed a reporter who was incarcerated for nearly two decades on sedition charges, the longest-known prison term served by a journalist, human rights advocates said Friday.
Discussion:
@nytimesworld, Human Rights Watch, pulse.ng, The Express Tribune and Committee to Protect …
Max Willens / Digiday:
Publishers like ViralNova, 9gag, Bored Panda, Diply see engagement drop precipitously after Facebook algorithm changes; Distractify saw traffic decline 78% YoY — LittleThings shut down after Facebook's algorithm change cut its organic reach by 75 percent, but it's not the only social publisher that's …