Facebook adds new suicide prevention feature

Starting on Wednesday, Facebook is rolling out a new feature for suicide prevention.

The social media site is partnering with Now Matters Now, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Save.org and Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention, a nonprofit operating out of the University of Washington's School of Social Work, to give users more options when they see a friend post something that is concerning. It works on both desktop and mobile.

If a Facebook friend posts something that you feel indicates he or she could be thinking about self harm, you'll be able to click the little arrow at the top right of the post and click "Report Post." There, you'll be given the options to contact the friend who made the post, contact another friend for support or contact a suicide helpline, the University of Washington reported on Wednesday.

After that, Facebook will look at the post. If Facebook feels like the post indicates distress, it will contact the person who posted it. That person will be greeted with the following pop ups when he or she next logs in:



Then they'll see options to reach out to a friend or get tips and support.

If he person decides they'd like to talk to someone, they'll be prompted to call a friend, send a friend a Facebook message or contact a suicide helpline. They can either call or message a suicide prevention expert. Facebook also provides videos that use true stories of people who have dealt with suicidal thoughts.

There's also a section that recommends simple relaxation techniques like baking, drawing, going for a walk or visiting a library.

Facebook will even help someone find a self-care expert.


Facebook has had a way to report potentially suicidal content since 2011, but this is the first time this support will be built directly into posts. Until now, you had to seek out Facebook's suicide prevention page and upload a screenshot or URL of the post.

The new reporting feature is currently available for 50 percent of Facebook users in the U.S. and will roll out to the rest of the country in the next few months, a spokesperson for Facebook told The Huffington Post in a phone interview on Wednesday.

"We have teams working around the world, 24/7, who review any report that comes in," Rob Boyle, Facebook Product Manager and Nicole Staubli, Facebook Community Operations Safety Specialist, wrote in a post for Facebook Safety on Wednesday. "They prioritize the most serious reports, like self-injury, and send help and resources to those in distress."'

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How Facebook will influence the next election

At some point in the next two years, the pollsters and ad makers who steer American presidential campaigns will be stumped: The nightly tracking polls are showing a dramatic swing in the opinions of the electorate, but neither of two typical factors — huge news or a major advertising buy — can explain it. They will, eventually, realize that the viral, mass conversation about politics on Facebook and other platforms has finally emerged as a third force in the core business of politics, mass persuasion.

Facebook is on the cusp — and I suspect 2016 will be the year this becomes clear — of replacing television advertising as the place where American elections are fought and won. The vast new network of some 185 million Americans opens the possibility, for instance, of a congressional candidate gaining traction without the expense of television, and of an inexpensive new viral populism. The way people share will shape the outcome of the presidential election. Even during the 2014 midterms, which most Americans ignored, Facebook says it saw 43 million unique individuals engage in the political conversation. Now a rawly powerful video may reach far more voters in a few hours than a multimillion-dollar ad buy; and it will reach them from trusted sources — their friends — not via suspect, one-way channels.

And so we at BuzzFeed News are deeply excited to have nearly exclusive access (it’s shared with a broadcast partner, ABC News) to a powerful new window into the largest political conversation in America. This data will be drawn from a Facebook project working in the tricky field of “sentiment analysis,” the attempt to analyze people’s feelings based on what they write, which we think may be the most important new source of political data in the 2016 elections. This project will allow BuzzFeed News reporters to ask Facebook for data on, for instance, how Iowans feel about Hillary Clinton, or which Republican candidate appears to be best liked by women.

The field of sentiment analysis is as famous for its pitfalls as for any successes. Sentiment analysis has been bad at detecting sarcasm, for instance. But there’s good reason to think that if anyone can pull this off, it will be Facebook. First, it has access to a far, far larger sample of natural language than any other social network. What’s more, that carries with it contextual data that can serve as a point of departure for sentiment analysis — the field, in particular, that allows people to include how they’re feeling or what they’re doing when they post status updates. And third, Facebook quite simply has some of the best data scientists in the world, and has built a company on a deep and comprehensive understanding of user data. We’re also comfortable with Facebook’s approach to its users’ privacy with this data, which is anonymous and aggregate, with no data available for groups of interactions under 1,000.

The Facebook sentiment data BuzzFeed News will have access to is a new window into not just what Americans are talking about, but which way their sentiment is moving.

Some details from the first simple cut of sentiment data we got, spanning Oct. 26 to Nov. 5: Clinton, the most discussed Democrat on Facebook, and Warren have almost identical sentiment ratings — 57% positive and 40% negative for Clinton; 56% positive and 40% negative for Warren.

Fascinatingly, Joe Biden, though subject of just a quarter Clinton’s volume of conversation, is also viewed in a warmer light, with 67% of the conversation about him positive — a hint of the sort of politician, raw and authentic and occasionally stumbling, who thrives in this new medium.

On the Republican side, Chris Christie is the most discussed figure, but the results are far more mixed: 47% of the sentiment is positive, 45% negative. The twist: The conversation about Christie is far more negative inside his home state of New Jersey than outside it — just 33% positive in the state, but 52% positive outside it. The most warmly viewed Republicans are Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan. Sentiment about Jeb Bush, meanwhile, is underwater.

BuzzFeed News’ staff, led on this project by political editor Katherine Miller and data editor Jeremy Singer-Vine and their teams, will be diving deep into this data over the next two years. We anticipate bringing our readers and the broader web both daily updates and more complex news and analyses, always treating the data with analytical rigor, and comparing it with public polling and other sources of information. The data will be granular enough to see trends among and between states, between men and women inside states, and among age groups.

The Facebook sentiment data isn’t a substitute for polling, in part because the huge sample of Americans on Facebook still isn’t co-extensive with the electorate, but the sentiment data has the potential to be an important and telling complement to it.

We are devoting resources to this sentiment data set because of its place in the broad and evolving shift in American politics toward the social web.

This shift is not just about Facebook. First, starting about 10 years ago, political organizing and small-dollar fundraising moved to email, a good channel for politicians to communicate directly with their most loyal supporters. Then the inside conversation moved to the social web first, with the abrupt shift from the political blogosphere to Twitter in 2009 and 2010.
Candidates, however, have struggled to take the third and most vital element of politics — mass persuasion — to the web, and remain reliant on the dusty 30-second television ad, blasted out to voters in the least targeted way imaginable.

Buzzfeed

What is beginning to dawn on campaigns is that persuasion works differently when it relies on sharing. It is a political truism that people are most likely to believe what their friends and neighbors tell them, a truth that explains everything from sophisticated and earnest door-knocking efforts to malign email-forward whispering campaigns. And the social conversation favors things that generations of politicians have been trained to avoid: spontaneity, surprise, authenticity, humor, raw edge, the occasional human stumble. (Joe Biden!) As mobile becomes increasingly central to the social web, I suspect that more voters in 2016 will be persuaded by a video in their Facebook mobile browsers than by any other medium.

This isn’t a change in how the same politicians and campaigns distribute the same old media. It’s a deeper change in which politicians will thrive. Platforms have always shaped presidential politics — think of John F. Kennedy’s native grasp of television — and the 2016 election has the potential to be another turning point.

A few modern politicians appear to have a real feel for the raw emotion and, sometimes, (apparent) spontaneity that people will want to share. Elizabeth Warren’s blunt and casual economic 2011 tirade and Ted Cruz’s theatrical confrontations (and even his own low-production-value cell phone videos) are the beginnings of that viral populism for which the social web has opened a real space.

BuzzFeed News’ new project with Facebook sentiment data will tell us and our readers how this new viral politics affects the Americans it reaches. And the stakes, the presidency, are as high as they get.

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The facebook baby invasion might be a figment of your imagination

Getty Images

Last year, I experienced a Facebook trauma that made me question if I could ever trust my News Feed again. There I was, scrolling away and minding my own business, when the photo of a sonogram popped up: “The arrow is pointing at baby’s scrotum/peepee!!” the caption exalted. “That’s our boy!!! Mommy and Daddy love you soooo much!!!!” For some reason, I hadn’t registered that this would be my News Feed’s natural progression after all of those engagement ring, “OMG I SAID YES, NOW CHECK OUT THIS ROCK!,” photo shoots. And like that, I started seeing baby Facebook photos everywhere.

Or maybe, like many other Internety 20-somethings, I was just being melodramatic. Because according to a piece on Wired,which enlisted the help of Microsoft Research computer scientist Meredith Ringel Morris, there really aren’t that many baby photos out there.

After a child is born, Morris discovered, new mothers post less than half as often. When they do post, fewer than 30 percent of the updates mention the baby by name early on, plummeting to not quite 10 percent by the end of the first year. Photos grow as a chunk of all postings, sure—but since new moms are so much less active on Facebook, it hardly matters.

New moms undershare. I’m probably more likely to see someone taking a selfie with Crab Cakes Eggs Benedict than their progeny. But I am probably less prone to be shocked by bacon and eggs than I am by a peer entering the parenthood stage of life.

Morris said that another reason why baby photos might seem to show up more frequently could be because they get a disproportionate amount of likes and, thus, get promoted on feeds. I’ll admit, I panicked and liked the “Peepee” shot… I’m part of the problem!

So what it all comes down to is, we all need to chill out and stop whining about the baby pictures. Even though some people definitely do overshare—a Twitter employee recently live tweeted her own labor—it’s not that big of a deal.

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Five things not to do on social media on April Fool's Day

Flickr/Lovecatz

Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day. Once a pleasant and happy day full of goofy newspaper articles and maybe the occasional whoopie cushion, social media has turned it into a world-spanning 24-hour crappy open mic night. So, if you’re going to play a prank on social media, for the love of God, don’t do any of the following.


Don’t Announce You’re Pregnant, Even If You Really Are Pregnant
Tomorrow is the worst day of the year to announce an actual pregnancy, because every uncreative, dimwitted couple on your Wall will be announcing the same thing. The only time I’ve ever seen this gag work was when an entire family was in on it, and the “pregnancy” announcement was just the start of a very long, elaborate bit that unfolded throughout the entire day. By the end of it, the “father” had narrowly escaped to Canada and the “mother’s” family had posted an event they invited everyone to for hunting him down.

Don’t Encourage Bullies
April Fool’s Day has always been a day that brings out the total jackass in some people, and social media has just made that worse. Crushing some poor sucker’s hopes and dreams just isn’t funny, and encouraging the jerk who inevitably posts a video of somebody doing this is even worse. If you need a yardstick for something being awful instead of funny, people breaking down crying is a good one.

Unless it’s children. The tears of children are always hilarious.

Don’t Assume Your Friends Are Idiots
Sure, right, we’ll click the link leading to a site where you have to squint closely at the image to see the “hidden secret.” Because we’re all in high school, and we all have IQs of thirty or lower. It’s not a prank if we can see it coming, and will post Goatse on your Wall for your trouble. Speaking of which…

Don’t Use A Rickroll or Goatse
Again, this is less a matter of taste, albeit Goatse is eternally tasteless, and more about creativity. If you’re going to trick people into watching something terrible, there are endless options for that. Really, just punch in “10 hours” into YouTube: You’ll have plenty of options. Just don’t crib from Paul Rudd.

Don’t Half-Ass It
This is probably the most annoying thing: People just write an obviously fake status and post it. Back it up: Choose a link for your claim that seems credible, for example, or spend a few minutes with Photoshop to create a convincing picture. Remember, nobody likes anything half-assed, so if you have to go, go full-assed this April Fool’s Day. Or wear assless chaps. It’s what I do.

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Facebook secrets you need to see

Facebook goes beyond 'male' and 'female' with new gender options

You don't have to be strictly a man or a woman on Facebook anymore.

In a nod to the "it's complicated" sexual identities of many of its users, the social network on Thursday added a third "custom" gender option for people's profiles. In addition to Male or Female, Facebook now lets U.S. users choose among some 50 additional options such as "transgender," "cisgender," "gender fluid," "intersex" and "neither."

Users also now have the ability to choose the pronoun they'd like to be referred to publicly: he/his, she/her, or the gender-neutral they/their.

"When you come to Facebook to connect with the people, causes, and organizations you care about, we want you to feel comfortable being your true, authentic self," Facebook said in a post on its Diversity page.

"An important part of this is the expression of gender, especially when it extends beyond the definitions of just 'male' or 'female,' " the post continued. "So today, we're proud to offer a new custom gender option to help you better express your own identity on Facebook."

Facebook said it worked with a group of leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy organizations to come up with the new gender categories.

"Facebook users from across the country have been asking for the ability to reflect their gender accurately, and today Facebook showed they have been listening," said Allison Palmer, a former GLAAD vice president, who worked on the project with Facebook.

To edit your gender status (or other personal information), Facebook offers these instructions:

Go to your Timeline (which we sometimes refer to as your profile).

Click Update Info at the bottom of your cover photo.

Click Edit in the top right of the section you'd like to change. (The new gender options are only accessible within an autocomplete drop-down menu, so you have to begin typing to see them appear.)

Enter your new info and click Save.

Among other new gender options identified on Facebook so far: Trans Female, Trans Male, Trans Person, Gender Variant, Gender Questioning, Bigender, Androgynous, Pangender and Transsexual.

Facebook also tweaked its privacy settings to let users control with whom they share their custom gender.

Reaction on social media Thursday was largely positive, although some people joked they would need a dictionary to look up many of the gender-identity terms.

The social network did not say Thursday when the new gender options might be available to users outside the U.S.

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Can Facebook tell when you should get married?

Real-world social networks exert an enormous influence over our attitudes about marriage. This is one reason that Facebook makes some people so unhappy. Watching the parade of our friends’ major life events makes us both envious and lonely.

Given that envy and loneliness are Valentine’s Day’s two chief exports, TIME presents an app that analyzes your Facebook feed to see exactly when your friends are tying the knot—and when it might be time for you to take the plunge.

Methodology
This application measures the median age of your married friends, meaning the person for whom half your married friends are younger and half are older. Because you are probably friends with a lot of people close to your age, this figure will theoretically identify whether you have passed the point where many of your contemporaries start tying the knot. It will work better for some than others.

For the purposes of this tool, “married” refers to anyone who lists his or her relationship status as “married,” “engaged,” “in a domestic partnership,” or “in a civil union.” We’re aware that some people use this status facetiously. Since the distribution of your friends’ ages tends to form a bell curve centered on your own age, a few jokesters shouldn’t throw off the figure drastically.

This app only counts friends who list their date of birth, including the year. In testing, TIME found that this amounted to about 25 percent of all profiles, but that will vary from user to user.

Many people who are not in a serious relationship simply do not list a relationship status. It is not possible to distinguish these people from those who are married but choose not to report that fact to Facebook. As a result, the percentage of married friends that this app reports is probably lower than the actual figure, though not by a huge margin.

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Mom creates facebook page to wish a happy birthday to her friendless son

Facebook

When a Michigan mom heard her 10-year-old son say he didn't want a birthday party because he didn't have any friends to invite, her surprise solution went viral.

The mom, Jennifer, who lives near Kalamazoo, Mich., created a Facebook page for her son - "Happy Birthday Colin."

The page had a simple request: please send Colin virtual birthday wishes so that on his 11th birthday, March 9, Colin can see how much he is loved.

"I thought if I could create a page where people could send him positive thoughts and encouraging words, that would be better than any birthday party," Jennifer, who asked that her last name not be used, wrote on February 2. "Please join me in making my very original son feel special on his day."

Jennifer, who also has a daughter, Ella, says it was actually not Colin's birthday that inspired her to turn to Facebook but the actions of fellow parents at Colin's school.

"The main thing was finding out that a lot of parents were trying to get their kids out of Colin's class and the teacher told him," Jennifer told GoodMorningAmerica.com. "His peers don't understand him but every adult who meets him loves him so I thought I would go to a place where adults and my friends are, Facebook, and have them write nice messages to Colin so I could share them on his birthday."

According to Jennifer, many of the posts on the page have come from moms who have experienced the same thing with their own children as Jennifer has with Colin, whom Jennifer describes as having a condition similar to Asperger's syndrome that causes him to struggle with facial expressions and verbal cues.

"I think that this is a big problem right now, that kids are being misunderstood and don't have friends and I think it speaks to a lot of people," Jennifer said of the response. "I think too many parents are allowing their kids to exclude others because of weirdness."

Just one week after Jennifer's post, and one month before Colin's actual birthday, the Facebook page has more than 40,000 likes and Jennifer purchased a P.O. box in response to the hundreds of people asking if they could send Colin a birthday card.

"I'm so completely overwhelmed," Jennifer said. "A woman today sent me $200 on PayPal to take him to dinner and I heard from someone with the Corvette industry who said they're going to send a car to take Colin to school the day after his birthday."

The unexpected problem Jennifer is facing now is how to keep the outpouring of love a surprise from Colin, whose last birthday party was when he was in kindergarten and only one classmate showed up.

"I've been reading and catching up with all of the posts, messages and comments on this page, all the love and support is causing me to just cry, and Colin keeps asking me, 'Are you okay mom, what's wrong?!,'" Jennifer wrote on February 4. "He doesn't know about this page yet, so I've been telling him I'm watching sad videos."

The original plan was to take Colin, a fifth-grade student who loves Nintendo 3DS, Pokemon and "Doctor Who," to a local McDonald's with WiFi and show him the messages on Jennifer's laptop.

"Now that it's gotten so big, I don't know what we're going to do," Jennifer said.

There's still time to wish Colin a happy birthday on the Facebook page here.

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How to keep your annoying facebook friends out of your newsfeed

In Facebook terms, “Let’s just be friends” now means “I’m not going to unfriend you, but I am blocking your posts from showing up in my News Feed.”

Because, yes, online breakups are hard, but that doesn’t mean you want to sift through everyone’s self indulgent posts day in and day out. Oh, you had chicken salad for lunch? Fabulous.

Anyway: Here’s how to keep the posts from your not-so-close, or just plain annoying, friends out of your News Feed on Facebook.

First, for the easiest way to make sure that all posts from a particular person are vanquished from News Feed, you can visit his or her Facebook page and click the Following button (turned on by default when you become friends). The checkmark from the button should now be gone and will say Follow, which means you’re no longer following him or her. You two will still be friends, of course, and the person you’re unfollowing will not be any the wiser that you are no longer regularly seeing his or her posts.

The more advanced approach, which is an attempt to ban certain typesof posts from your feed, is different. While scanning your Facebook News Feed, you can simply hover over the top right hand side of any post you don’t care to see, and a small box with a downward arrow will appear. Click it, and options for Unfollow and I don’t want to see this will appear in a drop down menu. Selecting Unfollow will essentially do the same thing as clicking the Following button on the person’s page. Selecting I don’t want to see this, referring to the particular post, will push you to a series of questions that Facebook will use in an attempt to figure out which posts from this person you may want to see.

Some of the canned responses to the “Why don’t you want to see this?” question are designed for squashing spam. But, to be clear, we want to get rid of these posts on the merits of how truly uninteresting they are — nothing to do with spammy or advertorial content — so you’ll want to click the It’s annoying or uninteresting selection.

Next you’ll be offered one more set of responses to fine-tune a reason as to why you want to ban this type of post. You’ll want to select the It’s too silly, I don’t care about posts from this person or, if it applies, Something else.

Finally, you’re given a message from Facebook telling you that it will try to show you “better posts,” meaning the service will attempt to detect which posts from this person you might want to see. Again, if you’re not convinced and would rather not have this left up chance, you’re given another shot to click the Unfollow button.

After you’ve cut the fat, you can begin enjoying your scrolls through News Feed while sparing yourself all the eye rolling. Of course, if you’ve elected to allow Facebook to regulate which posts from these friends you’ll see, there will still be a decent chance of some muck sneaking through. In the event of further problems, we recommend just getting new friends.

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Facebook losing teen users to Snapchat, Twitter to avoid parents

Older teenagers are leaving Facebook in favor of Twitter and Snapchat, a study has found.

The social network giant has apparently become "uncool" and is "dead and buried" as far as 16 to 18-year-olds in the UK are concerned, according to professor Daniel Miller, who worked on the Europe-wide Global Social Media Impact Study.

"Facebook is not just on the slide - it is basically dead and buried," Miller claimed.

"Mostly they feel embarrassed to even be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives."

Instead, many teens across Europe are apparently flocking to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp in search of privacy from their parents.

"What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person's decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mom sends you a friend request," Miller continued.

The fear of parents looking in on their Facebook activity was named the age group's biggest concern ahead of other invasive activity such as information being used for commercial purposes or governmental surveillance.

A total of 80% of teens in the study indicated that they "were not concerned or did not care" if their personal data was available to others.

Many also said it does not matter if rival services are less sophisticated.

Miller added that Facebook "has become the link with older family, or even older siblings who have gone to university".

"It is nothing new that young people care about style and status in relation to their peers, and Facebook is simply not cool any more," he concluded.

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Facebook considering adding a "sympathize" button

Facebook is considering adding a less cheery alternative to its “like” button: a “sympathize” button.

The social network has been toying with this option, which was devised at a Facebook hackathon, a Facebook engineer said Thursday, according to The Huffington Post. Here’s how it could work: if you were to tag your status with a negative emotion (from Facebook’s lists of feelings), the “sympathize” button would automatically replace the “like button.”

And as much as we all want one, it seems Facebook is just never going to add a “dislike” button. (Basically, we are all Gretchen Weiners and Mark Zuckerberg is Regina George and he’s saying, “Stop trying to make a “dislike” button happen. It’s not going to happen.”)

The “sympathize” feature isn’t making its way to the site “yet,” said a Facebook spokesperson. Until then, we’ll just carry on with awkward silences.

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Facebook knows if you're going to break up before you do

If your relationship is Facebook official and you're still getting ads for JDate and Plenty of Fish in your news feed, the social networking site may have realized something you haven't: You and your significant other are headed for Heartbreak Hotel.

A new paper co-authored by Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg and Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom suggests Facebook data can not only predict who you're in a relationship with, but if the relationship will go kaput.

Using the rather enormous sample size of 1.3 million Facebook users, Kleinberg and Backstrom set out to devise an algorithm for figuring out how to successfully determine if two people were in a relationship.

It turns out the number of annoyingly cutesy selfies you post together or even the amount of friends you have in common aren't the prime predictors. In fact, what they discovered was that the best indicator of a relationship is how many of your mutual friends are not connected to each other.

This metric is called dispersion and it "measures mutual friends, but also friends from the further-flung reaches of a person's network neighborhood," says Steve Lohr at the New York Times.

Having high dispersion, or "when two people have widely dispersed clusters [of friends] that are linked mostly via the couple," writes Jim Edwards at Business Insider, is the best predictor of whether those two people are in a relationship. In fact, Kleinberg and Backstrom were able to correctly predict a user's spouse 60 percent of the time and a non-married partner one-third of the time using this algorithm (a pure guess would produce two percent accuracy).

While cluster graphs and nodes of data may make it sound complicated, it's actually pretty intuitive when you consider the hallmarks of a strong relationship. Allison P. Davis at New Yorkexplains:

If you're friends with Joe, and share many mutual friends within the city you live in, and Joe is also friends with your childhood best friend, you and Joe are probably sleeping together. [New York]

This concept makes sense even without Facebook telling us. As Kleinberg tells the New York Times, "a spouse or romantic partner is a bridge between a person's different social worlds." They're the ones who go to annoying family events, office cocktail parties, and homecoming games at your alma mater. Basically, they meet and interact with a lot of your friends and relatives.

Of course, just as intuitively, it goes the other way for a bad relationship. Let's say Joe has no connection to your first cousin in Toledo, your bestie from sleep-away camp, your closest friend from study abroad; then you probably aren't in a particularly strong, long-term relationship. And when couples in a relationship don't have a high dispersion rate, they are 50 percent more likely to break up within the next two months.

Again, none of this is so shocking, except for the fact that Facebook has the frightening ability to detect all of these patterns before you take off the rose-colored glasses and realize that the Grand Theft Auto addict who doesn't take you to his uncle's birthday party or refuses to attend your high school reunion isn't your soul mate.

But who knows? With a little bit of time, Facebook may find that person for you, too.

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This video will have you completely rethink how you conduct yourself online and in person

We, as human beings, think that through social networks, we’ve somehow become more social creatures.

The problem with this theory is, the more we “connect” online, the less actual human interactions we have, making us actually fairly unsocial.

A new video breaks down exactly how the social aspects of human beings have evolved and transformed, showing how we’ve regressed from a social standpoint.

Shimi Cohen shows exactly what’s wrong with our social structure now, and how we manipulate how we want to be presented to peers, family members, and potential mates on social media, rather than having vulnerable and genuine conversations in real time.

Check out this video below, and take a moment to truly assess how you conduct yourself, both online and in person.


The Innovation of Loneliness from Shimi Cohen on Vimeo.

Facebook's worst case scenario: Becoming Yahoo!

It's 2020 and you're 13 years old. There is very little delineation between real life and the Internet. Your face computer ensures that an IM, text, photo or video is only a blink away. Your friends are nearly always accessible and you can hang out virtually just as easily as you can IRL.

You have no need to engage in a public forum, except on your terms. Social networking is baked into your everyday experience the way the web was synonymous with computers and mobile devices back in 2013.

Where does Facebook fit in in this scenario? It's still hugely popular and influential — with your parents. In other words, Facebook has become Yahoo.

Snicker if you must. Yahoo these days is that '90s throwback Marissa Mayer is desperately trying to resurrect. At one time, though, Yahoo was as dominant on the web as Facebook is today. Fifteen years ago, Yahoo was the No. 1 destination on the web with 40 million monthly visitors. That may sound like pocket change compared to Facebook's 1.1 billion, but consider that there were only 140 million people on the web at the time.

True, Yahoo at its peak wasn't as dominant as Facebook is today. Back in 1998, about one-third of web users visited Yahoo. Today, with a global audience of 2.4 billion, Facebook has about half. That said, from a raw numbers standpoint, Yahoo is still no slouch. About 700 million people each month visit Yahoo's sites, and in the U.S. at least, Yahoo gets more visitors than Facebook.

So why is Facebook still considered a much hotter company than Yahoo? Demographics. Facebook overindexes on users under 18 and especially on 18- to 24-year-olds, according to Quantcast. Yahoo underindexes on those below 18 and only slightly overindexes on 18- to 24-year-olds.

Can Facebook maintain that dominance in the youth market? It's certainly possible. As Rob Callender, director of youth insights for The Futures Company, a Chicago-based researcher notes, Apple and Nike have managed to be cool with teens year after year.

That said, Callender's latest research shows that teen use of Facebook has plateaued. Despite reports to the contrary, though, they aren't abandoning the platform in droves. "It's been a decline that isn't significant," he says. Part of the issue is the oft-cited phenomenon of kids being spooked by elder family members suddenly friending them. "Once people found out that aunts and grandfathers followed them, their enthusiasm went up in a puff of smoke," Callender says. (Seeing a 50-year-old with an iPhone apparently doesn't have the same effect.)

Ruby Karp, a 13-year old, explained the problem in a recent piece about Facebook onMashable: "All of our parents and parents' friends have Facebooks. It’s not just the fact that I occasionally get wall posts like, 'Hello sweetie pie!' But my friends post photos that get me in trouble with those parents."

Luckily for Facebook, there's no social media behemoth there to take its place. Instead, teens are being siphoned away by Snapchat and messaging apps. Given teens' penchant for privacy, these closed-loop networks represent a potent threat to Facebook, which is taking steps to become a more public platform.

The wild card in this mix is Google Glass. If such wearable computing becomes popular and within a few years filters down to teens, it could drastically change the way they consume media. Facebook has shown it can adapt to mobile, but bringing that experience to something like Google Glass will be a challenge on top of a challenge. Just as with mobile, Facebook's aesthetic advantage will be lost; on Glass it will be just another app. Here, Facebook's key selling point — its huge user base — will work against it as teens seek more intimate experiences.

In such a doomsday scenario, Facebook won't disappear. Like Yahoo, it will stick around along with its huge, aging user base. Still making money, but with its glory days behind it, Facebook will once again prove the maxim that demographics is destiny.

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Ten everyday situations are (supposedly) costing the economy

1. HANGOVERS

If you think you feel bad after a bender, consider the economy. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that hangovers cost the U.S. about $1.37 in lost productivity per drink, which adds up to more than $220 billion per year.

2. DISTRACTED DRIVING

Is distracted the new drunk? According to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis Study, haphazard multi-tasking on the road costs $3.58 billion per month in injuries, property damages, lawsuits, and more.

3. DELAYED FLIGHTS
A 2010 Federal Aviation Administration report claimed that delayed flights cost the U.S. economy $32.9 billion per year. The aggravation, however, can't be quantified.

4. FOOD POISONING
According to a study out of Ohio State University, food poisoning costs more than $77 billion each year. Talk about eating a loss.

5. SLEEP DEPRIVATION
You don't always lose when you snooze. Tired workers are a liability, and Harvard researchers estimate they cost U.S. companies $63.2 billion annually.

6. COLD SEASON
There's no such thing as a paid sick day. The University of Michigan put a $40 billion annual price tag on the common cold.

7. LOOKING FOR A BATHROOM
In 2012, the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program attributed nearly $500 million in Africa's economic losses to not being able to find a clean, safe place to use the bathroom.

8. DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME
Springing forward each year doesn't just cost you sleep. It also leads to more workplace injuries, lower productivity, and even an increase in heart attacks. Chmura Economics & Analytics says it all adds up to about $433,982,548.

9. MARCH MADNESS
This one might not happen every day, but basketball fans—and economists—cried foul when the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated that March Madness costs U.S. businesses some $3.8 billion in worker productivity each year.

10. SOCIAL MEDIA DISTRACTIONS
Using sites like Twitter and Pinterest all day could cost the U.S. economy up to $650 billion—roughly $4,452 per company—in worker productivity. (Check out the Mashable infographic.) But don't worry, that won't keep these companies from asking you to Like them on Facebook.

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Facebook's creepy new search feature

Facebook will be rolling out an improved search feature Monday to millions in the United States. And while this new function will make searching on the social networking site much easier, it can also be creepier—a lot creepier.

Coined “Graph Search,” the tool allows a user to enter more precise searches using commonly-known Facebook terms, such as “friends who live nearby and like rap music.” You can use terms like “likes,” “lives,” “is interested in,” “is friends with,” and so on. What makes this new search process slightly alarming are the combinations of terms the search allows.

The Tumblr “Actual Facebook Graph Searches” compiles some of the more eerie or comical searches a Facebook user can make by using the new feature. Some of the more memorable include:

“Mothers of Jews who like Bacon”

“Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and who like Getting Drunk!”

“People who like Focus on the Family and Neil Patrick Harris”

What is even worse is that all of your graph searches are stored within Facebook. Those embarrassing and personal searches will be saved in your “Only Me” activity. Facebook of course wouldn’t advertise this, but it is very easy to clear for those who know about that hidden feature.

Graph Search has been around since January in the Beta stage, and if you can get past creepy search capabilities and privacy qualms, it actually does some pretty cool things.

You can search for photographs with specific friends (even taken at certain locations) which makes finding those hidden photographs from a few months back more accessible.

The search function also paves the way for Facebook to cut into Yelp, the leading Internet rating and review service. A Facebook user can now look up companies that their friends like if they are seeking a similar service. If you need a new doctor or dentist, just simply search and see what offices your friends like.

Pros and cons together, it seems like Graph Search is here to stay. And if you don’t like it—just wait a few months. If history shows anything, Facebook will probably change again.

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Another Facebook security breach

Really … another security breach? We thought Facebook would have things all figured out after it once mislabeled “phone number” as “email address”, confusing a lot of people and app developers in the process. But the major mishap of unwittingly unleashing users’ phone numbers into the Internet wild has happened yet again: Facebook just announced that a bug may have unveiled personal information provided by over 6 million Facebook users.

The bug reportedly caused some of the information usually sent by Facebook to make contact suggestions and lessen the number of friend invites – like the user’s phone number or email address – to be accidentally stored as part of the user’s public contact details. As a result, if a person decided to use the Download Your Information (DYI) tool to access a full archive of their Facebook account, it would include all the emails and phone numbers of all their friends, whether they intended to share it or not.

The social networking site was made aware of the security bug by its own White Hat program, an initiative that financially rewards developers who successfully report weaknesses in the Facebook system. Facebook temporarily took the tool down and put it back online a day after the bug was initially reported. “There were other email addresses or telephone numbers included in the downloads, but they were not connected to any Facebook users or even names of individuals,” Facebook assured users on its official Security page. “For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice. This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person.”

Facebook ended their notice with the assertion that no evidence has been found proving that the vulnerable information was used in a malicious manner and that no user has filed a complaint for unusual account activity. The company tried to lessen the blow a tiny bit by noting that the bug’s effect is probably negligible, since the people who likely received their friends’ personal information could have already had access to the contact info in the first place. Nonetheless, Facebook was right to apologize to the public and promised to “work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again.”

Facebook is currently in the process of notifying the 6 million individuals who were affected by the breach via email.

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Which internet companies have our backs?

This list only accounts for efforts to prevent government data seizure — some companies, such as Dropbox, have less-than-stellar records in data security. But at least these companies are trying. Others, like Verizon, seem to have just given up.

Facebook ads are moving to your news feed

Facebook continues its plan to basically be nothing but ads by this time next year. This go-round, they’re bringing those ads to the right that you always ignore front and center on your Feed.

To be fair, Facebook says this won’t change the number of ads that you see: Essentially it’s just changing the link redirect to take you to another site instead of a Facebook page. The difference may seem relatively minor but it’s apparently a big deal to advertising buyers:

Previously, Facebook allowed advertisers to run FBX-delivered ads on the right-hand side on the desktop. This unit’s format, called “Page post link ads” in Facebook speak, is more familiar to traditional display ad buyers than Facebook’s own native ad unit, the Sponsored Story, because advertisers can tap their own user intent data for targeting purposes and direct people to outside landing pages, instead of Facebook Pages, for conversion-tracking.

Why is Facebook doing this? Why else? Money. Facebook still has a lot to prove to Wall Street about how it can grow revenue and be worth lots of money, and introducing a new ad strategy that, like it or not, will be more effective for your ad buyers is a pretty good way to do that.

Of course, this is far from the only ad strategy Facebook is pursuing, so you might want to keep an eye out for when Facebook decides to just go all ads, all the time.

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How Facebook knew a man was gay before he came out

If you pull back the blue banners and innocuous "like" buttons adorning the front-end of Facebook, you'll come face-to-face with a jaw-dropping trove of consumer data that contains a stupid-scary amount of information about you.

No one learned that lesson harder than a man who simply calls himself Matt. In an email to BuzzFeed, he tells a story about how Facebook's algorithms somehow figured out he was gay, despite Matt relaying his closely guarded secret to just one friend over the phone.

What did Facebook do, exactly? In his news feed, Facebook targeted Matt with a suggested page for Rick Clemons, an author who describes himself as "the coming out coach."

What's weirder, though, is that Matt didn't leave any obvious clues about his hidden sexual preference. His only "liked" pages included a politician and a local bar he enjoyed drinking at. Naturally, Matt was more than a little creeped out. Here's what he wrote to BuzzFeed:

As many LGBT individuals know, for a time, the most closely held secret we have is our sexuality. Several nights ago, I texted a close and dear friend for advice on revealing such sensitive personal information. The next morning, I woke up to a "sponsored story" on my Facebook page that asked "Coming Out? Need help?" How did Facebook know such a specific ad would apply to my profile? [BuzzFeed]

The answer may have had to do with his commenting history. Many websites use Facebook's API to power their comment sections. A quick investigation of Matt's Activity Log showed he had commented twice on a BuzzFeed article called "Ohio senator Rob Portman announces support for marriage equality."

Of course, that's just the part of the story we're privy to. (What other websites had he visited? Etc.) Like Matt, if most people knew the extent of Big Data's tab-keeping on would-be customers, they too would be mortified.

In the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg tells a story about a pregnant teenager who hadn't yet told her parents about her situation. One day, Target began mailing her coupons for diapers and cribs, determining she was due in August. Her parents caught on, and she was forced to tell them that, yes, she was with child. The retailer's sophisticated algorithms had apparently tattled on her based on what she was buying in the checkout line.

Scary? You bet. It should be noted, however, that Big Data isn't always so bad. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that researchers have successfully used Google, Bing, and Yahoo's internet search data to discover dangerous, unreported side effects of prescription drugs — information that may not have been revealed any other way.

The moral of the story, though, is that Facebook, Google, Target, and innumerable faceless corporations know a whole lot about you — whether you like it or not. Matt's story is unnerving, yes. And unless we all pack up and move to a deserted island somewhere, it most certainly won't be the last.

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