Social Media Saturday: Facebook Is Creepy [and Mostly White Men] While Twitter's Better at World Cup News
This week in social media, Facebook released a diversity report in line with the rest of Silicon Valley -- i.e., its employees are mostly white men. It also announced two secret projects: one that's impressive, and another that will make you feel like a lab rat. Meanwhile, Pinterest added a fun location-based feature, and Twitter beats Facebook at live World Cup updates. It's time for Social Media Saturday!
Not Very Diverse...
Facebook followed the likes of Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn by publishing its diversity statistics this week, as we previously reported. In the press release, Facebook Global Head of Diversity Maxine Williams admitted the company had "a long way to go" but said Facebook was "serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics." The company only released statistics on gender and race though.
According to the statistics, it indeed does have a long way to go: 57 percent of all Facebook were white, while Hispanic and Black minorities only made up a total of 6 percent; 31 percent of Facebook are women, but in technology-related positions, a whopping 85 percent of employees were men. On the senior level, about three out of every four Facebook employees were white men.
Read our in-depth report for more information on Facebook's diversity statistics and strategy.
...And Kind Of Creepy
The same week, Facebook announced details of two secretive projects you didn't know the company was working on.
In an exclusive report, Wired detailed how a small team of engineers moved the photos of some 200 million Instagram users from an Amazon cloud computing service into a Facebook-owned data center -- all without any Instagram users being the wiser.
"The users are still in the same car they were in at the beginning of the journey," Instagram's Mike Krieger said to Wired. "But we've swapped out every single part without them noticing." It's really quite impressive, considering there was only one major outage in April -- and the team insists it was unrelated to the data relocation. Be sure to check out Wired's exclusive for the full story, in depth.
Facebook Knows How to Make You Happy or Sad
But moving tens of billions of photos without a detectable change in quality of service for users isn't the only secret project publicized by big blue.
Scientists at Facebook published a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, this week (via A.V. Club). It describes an experiment they carried out on hundreds of thousands of unknowing Facebookers that will probably give you the willies.
Facebook's (presumably) white men in lab coats manipulated the News Feed content of more than 600,000 unknowing lab rats, distorting the number of positive or negative terms seen by the users (who were randomly selected for the experiment).
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