Andy's round up: Facebook sidesteps satire, most people don't know who owns Instagram

Each week our Growth Director Andy Lambert puts together a brief overview of social media news for the past week. So what happened last week? 👀

• Most Americans don't know that Facebook owns Instagram and Whatsapp

🤔 What happened?

A new survey finds that most Americans know little about where their social media comes from

💡My take

I'd like to think this is an 'American thing', but I think Brits would give the same response. I found this a bit worrying, but it makes sense. We take things at face value, and unless these companies want to make their lack of differentiation known, it's up to the consumer to discover these details.

• Employers used Facebook to keep women and older workers from seeing job ads

🤔 What happened?

Reporters found that companies in the US could be breaching anti-discrimination laws with Facebook's targeting tools

💡My take

It has been far too easy to narrow your search to certain criteria and exclude certain groups with Facebook's tools. With this simplicity, hiring managers may not know they are acting on the wrong side of the law, so Facebook should make this more clear, or simply disable these features.

• Instagram is killing the Following tab

  🤔 What happened?

  Instagram took down its Following tab which shows what other people have liked, commented and more.

  💡 My take

  It seems like all the big social media apps are waving goodbye to legacy parts of their platform at the moment. Focus is the order of the day, and Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, are improving engagement by limiting the avenues users can explore within their apps.

• Twitter Apologises for Using Email Addresses and Phone Numbers for Ad Targeting

  🤔 What happened?

  Twitter apologises for using account information to serve users more personalised ads

  💡 My take

  When you sign up for a social platform, your agree to share a certain amount of your information with the company. That's not always clear, even when you read privacy policies, and as Twitter has shown, even social media apps don't always know what they're sharing. Though data protection laws have come a long in the past few years, in many ways it's still a wild world.

• • Facebook to exempt opinion and satire from fact-checking

🤔 What happened

Creators of opinion pieces and satire on Facebook won't be fact-checked by the tech giant

💡 My take

This is a strange move from Facebook, and seems like a step backwards. Opinion pieces and satire are an easy Trojan horse for disinformation, so bad actors could see this as an opportunity to spark misinformed discussion on climate change, and other hot button topics.

Andy does a round-up of social media news every week. Connect with Andy on Linkedin to get it first.