Social Media Saturday: Facebook Starts Listening and Reminds Us of Privacy, While Twitter Is Dying on Wall Street
This week in social media, Facebook added a Shazam-like feature that can automatically tag music, TV or movies in status updates, just by listening in to your life. Speaking of listening in, Facebook also changed some of its privacy settings for the better, with a reminder for users what privacy level their status updates are set to. Also, Twitter's having a bad week on Wall Street (again) while both it and rival Instagram are meeting resistance abroad.
Facebook announced earlier this week that it would be rolling out "a new, optional way to share and discover music, TV and movies." There seems to be a new emphasis on "optional" at Facebook, but more on that in a bit.
The new audio recognition feature will be baked into the Facebook app. The way it works is that, once you turn it on, it'll automatically listen to the audio around you. When it's hearing something that it can identify, you'll get an icon of equalizer bars in the corner of your screen.
A New, Optional Way to Share and Discover Music, TV and Movies from Facebook on Vimeo.
While writing a status update, just go to the "What are you doing" tag page, and Facebook's Shazam-like software will pull up the appropriate song, TV show or movie. It's more than just a way to quickly tag your status -- if you're sharing music, your friends can see a 30-second preview of the song.
Facebook emphasizes that no audio from your surroundings is ever kept, and you can decide whether or not to have the feature on. That's part of Facebook's attempt to seem less invasive to users. According to The New York Times, Facebook is starting to worry about user engagement and losing users to more anonymity-friendly services, so (very) ironically, it's putting privacy as a top priority.
On Thursday, the company said it was going to do a "privacy checkup" for every user account. A friendly cartoon dinosaur (seriously) will lead you through a simple choice of privacy options the next time you're logged in and chose to post something. And the default option for new users will now be "friends" only. This initiative goes along with Facebook's previously announced roll out of "anonymous logins" in a double-edged ironic move to make users feel more comfortable while encouraging them to use Facebook much more often (and, therefore, give up more data about themselves). For example, while "anonymous logins" allows you to withhold your data from third-party websites or apps that you're connecting to with your Facebook account, Facebook, of course, still gets to track your activity.
Speaking of user engagement, Twitter hasn't had enough of it, and it's scaring investors away. Twitter's stock had a terrible run on Wall Street with its stock losing value nine days in a row and making it the longest losing streak since its IPO in November of last year, according to Forbes. However, there's a silver lining in Twitter's almost two-week losing streak: it's not the lowest dip the company's stock has ever taken. In all, it's down in the single digit percentages.
In other bad news for Twitter, the company agreed to block "blasphemous" or "unethical" tweets in Pakistan, after a member of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority requested that Twitter follow the country's religious censorship laws. Twitter has previously met ban threats from Turkey and Russia because of the fact that users in the country can freely share information, something that bothers some authorities in each country. But this is the first time Twitter itself has agreed to withhold content in Pakistan, according to The New York Times, and obviously free speech advocates are upset about it.
In fact, the International New York Times ran an Op-Ed calling it "Pakistan's Tyranny of Blasphemy" - an article, which was subsequently censored in Pakistan. How did we find that out? Someone tweeted it, of course.
Pakistan' edition of International New York Times @etribune censored blasphemy related article pic.twitter.com/HkZTFynNcN v @AsadKharal
— Raza Rumi (@Razarumi) May 21, 2014
Facebook-owned Instagram is having its own problems with conservative foreign authorities. On Friday, an Iranian court ordered that Instagram be blocked in the country's restrictive internet space, according to The Associated Press.
The court said the ban was over "privacy concerns," but judging by the other sites already banned in that country -- including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube -- it probably has to do more with the western cultural influence that seeps in from social media. This is the same government that arrested six young Iranians for posting a video where they joyfully dance to the Pharrell song "Happy."