As quarantines are implemented throughout the world, users are spending more time on the Internet looking for entertainment options. This makes it, without doubt, the golden age of streaming services and online gaming outlets. But it is also an exciting time for grassroots initiatives, which are flooding the Internet. As the competition for the audience’s […]
How Covid-19 is feeding into the fake news problem
Since early February, fake news content surrounding Covid-19 has flooded the Internet. Citizens all over the world, trying to figure out how to face the crisis and protect their families, are turning to WhatsApp, Facebook, and videos/audios shared by friends with information on healthcare. While social media giants and news outlets try to tackle the […]
Fleets will change Twitter’s fate
On March 4, Twitter made its most significant announcement since its inception, much more consequential than the 280-character extension. The tech company started to test Fleets in Brazil last week, a version of the Stories’ feature already present in the other social media platforms. Fleets will consist of temporary posts that will appear on the […]
TikTok, Facebook’s worst nightmare
More than a year has passed since Facebook launched its Tik Tok-like platform Lasso, with mild success. CNBC reported that during its first three months of existence—from November 2018 to January 2019,—the short-video sharing app was downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play by 70,000 users in the United States. The numbers sound […]
Subscriptions work, especially for the NYT
Last week, The New York Times disclosed in the fourth-quarter earnings report it had broken a record of its own—its subscription numbers. The paper has added over one million digital-only subscribers in 2019, in what Mark Thompson, the Times’ CEO, described as “a record-setting year for The New York Times’s digital subscription business, the best […]
Facebook’s “Supreme Court” will change very little
Back in September, Facebook announced the creation of what is now known as Facebook’s Supreme Court—an oversight board to review appeals to the tech company’s content policy decisions. Around forty independent experts will form the committee later this year, making decisions over the company’s content policy. For Facebook, the board is the perfect ‘scapegoat’ to […]
The verticals’ chess game—how news outlets are reworking their brands
While generalist outlets fight for survival, a new type of news brand is taking over the Internet—the verticals. Before the digital era, verticals were just called news sections. It was as simple as that. With the print product, the reader would go through the whole paper—call it New York magazine, for example—before turning its attention […]
Social media decentralization reaches 2020
Just a couple weeks ago, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the company was setting up a team to create a decentralized standard for social media. With it, Twitter is joining the existing efforts to develop decentralized frameworks through which the platforms themselves do not hold the information or the power to act as referees. […]
Tik Tok, the video app that’s defining our zeitgeist
If you have not checked out Tik Tok, it’s about time you do. The 15-to-60-second video feel-good app has fascinated United States adolescents in a way that’s only comparable to Snapchat in 2014. The Chinese app already has 1.5 billion users, and with its fun and entertaining offer, it is changing the way social media […]
Advertisers are coming to your favorite messaging app, WhatsApp
Most of our dear social media services belong to one single company, Facebook. Facebook owns its “blue” platform, Facebook, the picture app it bought for $1 billion in 2012, Instagram, and its more recent $19 billion acquisition: WhatsApp, bought in 2014. However, these social media services differ in one fundamental thing—while Instagram and Facebook present […]
