Google and Facebook have been taking steps to curb the number of false news articles propagated across their sites. On Wednesday, the Silicon Valley companies showed that they were still in the early stages of their battle to limit misinformation online.In a blog post, Google said it had permanently banned nearly 200 publishers from its AdSense advertising network near the end of last year, after putting into effect a policy in November to choke off websites that try to deceive users from its online ad service.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/technology/google-facebook-fake-news.htmlAlso see:Google Increases Regulation Of False Ads And Fake News
In a report on Wednesday, Jan. 25, Google announced its increased regulation of advertising and linked-to websites about a week after President Donald Trump vowed to cut Federal regulations by 75%.Google must have figured that if Trump’s administration wasn’t going to care as much as President Obama’s administration did about protecting consumers, it had better step up its efforts to protect people from dishonest advertising such weight-loss schemes, fake news, pay-day loans, porn, “trick-to-click” ads and many other online scams.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/charleswarner/2017/01/25/google-increases-regulation-of-false-ads-and-fake-news/Facebook Updates Trending Topics To Highlight Important News
In another push to improve the scope and quality of news users see on Facebook FB +1.62%, the company unveiled several updates to its prominent “Trending” topics feature on Wednesday.Prior to Wednesday’s update, users saw about a dozen trending topics based on many factors such as their personal interests and which articles were getting the most buzz on the social network. Now, trending topics will no longer be personalized, and every user in the same region will see identical topics. And instead of creating a trending topic based on high engagement around a single post or article, which may not be a widely relevant, quality story, Facebook is now weighing the number of publishers posting articles about the same topic and the engagement around the group of articles as a whole. Facebook is also giving users more context on trending topics by displaying a publisher’s headline alongside a topic. Before Wednesday, users could only see a short topic title and needed to hover over the topic to see a headline. The changes begin rolling out this week and will be available to all U.S. users in the coming weeks, Facebook said.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2017/01/25/facebook-updates-trending-topics-to-highlight-important-news/Facebook tests putting its news feed ads in Messenger to make app more plug-and-pay for brands
Facebook is about to max out the amount of ads it can slot into people’s Facebook feeds, so it’s been ramping up its roll-out of ads elsewhere: to Instagram, to others’ apps and sites through its ad network, to Groups and now to Messenger.
http://marketingland.com/facebook-tests-putting-news-feed-ads-messenger-204586