Snopes is no longer part of Facebook’s fact-checking program

Snopes is looking beyond the walls of Facebook’s fact-checking initiative and its funding to serve the larger online community. Facebook began this program at the end of 2016—after the US presidential election and Russia’s reported meddling on social media came into focus—with the goal of battling misinformation on its platform. With data taken from its fact-checking partners—like Snopes, The Associated Press, PolitiFact, and ABC News, to name a few—Facebook would try to let you know about false or questionable “news” items showing up on your feed.

Now, Snopes announced it wasn’t renewing its contract with Facebook. The organization said it is “evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff.”

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Facebook finally optimizes apps for iPhone XS Max, XR, and iPad Pros

It’s taken them a few months but it’s finally here. Facebook has updated its iOS apps to support the higher resolutions of the bigger iPhone XS Max and XR as well as the newest 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models. The iPhone versions now run at their native resolutions, instead of having to use a scaled up version of the iPhone XS app. For the iPad version, the black bars that the app used to show are now gone. But as The Verge notes, the usable space of the app is still the same on the iPad.

Facebook to shut down its controversial market research app on iOS

TechCrunch

It’s been evident in the past few months that Facebook isn’t the champion for its users’ privacy and data. And it seems the company has reached a new kind of low in the name of market research purposes.

TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that Facebook has been paying volunteers aged 13 to 35 monthly US$20 gift cards for near-total access to data from their phones. They needed to install an app called Facebook Research on iOS and Android, which monitors phone and web activity and sends this back to Facebook. The app needs users to install custom root certificate, which gives Facebook access to the volunteers’ information. Apple has called foul and says Facebook is violating Apple’s policy. The social network responds by taking it out of iOS—but it’ll remain available for Android users.

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Facebook’s looking to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger chats

BBC

Facebook is looking to compete with the likes of Google and Apple with its newest plans. The social media company is considering integrating its messaging services on Instagram with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The three services will remain as standalone apps, but each will be linked in a way that will let messages travel between the services. Facebook is said to be at the start of what it considers a “long process.” If successful, this means a Facebook user can communicate directly with someone who has a WhatsApp or Instagram account. The timeline to complete this project is end of 2019 or early next year.

What Facebook can gain with this project is it’ll no longer need to develop competing versions of new features (like Stories) or allow businesses to reach more potential customers across the different platforms with its ability to share data easily. Facebook wants people to spend more time on its products, and this is one way they think that could happen. "We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private," said Facebook in a statement. "We're working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks." But this also raises a lot of questions, which Wired has detailed in this story.

Source: BBC