Category: Social Media

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Facebook targets kids and their parents’ credit cards

From The Center for Investigative Reporting:

Facebook encouraged game developers to let children spend money without their parents’ permission – something the social media giant called “friendly fraud” – in an effort to maximize revenues, according to a document detailing the company’s game strategy.

Sometimes the children did not even know they were spending money, according to another internal Facebook report. Facebook employees knew this. Their own reports showed underage users did not realize their parents’ credit cards were connected to their Facebook accounts and they were spending real money in the games, according to the unsealed documents.

I’m beginning to think that Facebook doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

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Facebook blocks ad transparency tools

You might think an organization accused of running a platform that nurtures misleading and inflammatory content would want third-party watchdogs to help it improve. You’d be wrong.

From ProPublica:

For the past year and a half, ProPublica has been building a searchable database of political ads and the segments of the population advertisers are paying to reach. We did this by enlisting thousands of volunteers who installed a web browser extension. The tool shared the ads users see as well as Facebook’s details on why the users were targeted.

And then Facebook quietly fixed some issues with their platform to “enforce its terms of service.” Mysteriously, the tools from ProPublica’s and others stopped working shortly thereafter.

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Buzzfeed Marketing Challenge

Last year I had my students compete in Scott Cowley’s BuzzFeed Marketing Challenge. The students learned a lot about the process of creating a product for a market segment, doing outreach to social media influencers, and creating a marketing plan.

Some students had their Buzzfeed articles go semi-viral with the top team getting over 200,000 views! That’s quite the accomplishment. I participated along with the students and came up with my own article and mine went viral as well, ultimately garnering 156,000 views. Not too shabby.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to my Buzzfeed article for a little bit of silliness:

Tell Us Your Drinking Preferences And We’ll Reveal Which TV Character You Are