This week in social media, Facebook tried to reassure conservatives, Reddit introduced post embedding, and Twitter may stop counting photos and links against its character limit.

It's time for Social Media Sunday!

Facebook

Talking About Trending Topics

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a private meeting on Wednesday with top conservative media figures to reassure them about Facebook's commitment to ideological diversity.

As Latin Post previously reported, the world's largest social media platform's Trending Topics news experiment was accused of suppressing right-wing news topics and sources in a report based on anonymous former workers in the project last week.

The meeting seemingly went well, with some of the 16 conservative pundits saying Zuckerberg gave them a strong sense of concern about the problem and curiosity about their viewpoints. Whether meeting with a few top conservatives will quell suspicions about Facebook by the rank-and-file right is still up for debate.

Messenger Privacy Suit 

Facebook is the target these days of a lot of privacy lawsuits, and another one against the company received class action status this week. The suit, taking place in Northern California's District Court, is based around Facebook's scanning and logging of web addresses sent through Messenger.

It's a practice that, as The Verge noted, is aimed at preventing spam and malicious links, along with scanning for child pornography as part of an industry standard, but the lawsuit alleges that Facebook is saving scanned data in a searchable form, in order to target users for advertising. I

f true, the practice violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California's Invasion of Privacy Act. Facebook meanwhile maintains that the URL data is anonymized and not maintained in a searchable database.

Twitter

More Usable Characters

Twitter's quirky 140-character limit seems to be going nowhere, but according to a Bloomberg report this week, it may get a little more flexible for users soon.

Based on an anonymous source, Bloomberg reported that in as soon as two weeks, links and photos in tweets will no longer count in any way against the 140-character limit.

Currently, links (even short URLs) typically cost you 23 characters. So far, the rumored change to a limit of as much as 10,000 characters doesn't appear to be happening, but as anyone who's found themselves spending 10 agonizing minutes trying to edit down a single tweet to fit the limit knows, every extra character counts.

Reddit

Now You Can Embed Anywhere

Reddit has always been a strange, somewhat insular social media community. For the uninitiated, prepare to start seeing more of Reddit's special brand of social media posting and commenting throughout the Internet, because now Reddit's posts are embeddable.

According to TheVerge, Reddit users can embed a post by clicking the share button next to the comment link, and then click on the embed icon on the far right. You'll get a preview of the post and an embed code. It works with GIFs, photos, any other media, and comment threads. I, for one, welcome Reddit's invasion of the rest of the Internet.