Legal Medical Marijuana Facebook Pages Were Banned
(Mirror Daily, United States) – According to the latest news, legal medical marijuana Facebook pages were banned by the social media platform. The reason that the company invoked was the fact that the pages were in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
When people tried to access the page of a medical marijuana dispensary from Washington, Maine or New Jersey they only encountered the message:
“It looks like content on your page does not follow the Facebook Community Terms and Standards”
Facebook’s actions angered both patients and dispensary owners. And even though the social network could not be reached for further explanations, one of the owners of the pages that were forcefully removed from the social media platform says that Facebook only managed to do a disservice to the page owners and the clients that were expecting updates.
The federal law dictates that dispensaries of medical marijuana are allowed to set up Facebook pages as long as they promote their services, not their products. The people that administered the banned pages said that they were using them to give instruction to their potential customers.
In the present moment, the cultivation and selling of the cannabinoid plant are prohibited and highly illegal, with the exceptions of dispensaries from a number of states that sell medical marijuana legally. There is no exact number of how many pages were taken down by Facebook.
It seems that Facebook doesn’t actually care about the individually of the accounts and they erased everything, even though dispensaries of medical marijuana function legally in states like New York, Maine and Washington.
It’s funny how legal medical marijuana Facebook pages were banned by the social network, but there is still a lot of personal profiles with thousands of followers that feature scarcely dressed women doing things that are barely legal.
And let us not forget the fact that there are also underaged girls with very popular Facebook and Instagram accounts where they post pictures of themselves wearing next to nothing.
But a Facebook page of a dispensary that legally sells medical marijuana was a public threat and needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.
The CDC recommends women to stop drinking altogether, Facebook is banning legal medical marijuana pages and there is a virus just south of our country that is wreaking havoc because women there are not allowed to have an abortion.
Maybe the climate is changing because we are going back to the dark ages.
Image source: www.flickr.com
The store officially declared on Monday that the $200 coupon promise is a scam.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – It seems that the $200 Wegmans coupon is a scam and people are urged to stop clicking on the Facebook post because the authorities are not yet sure whether the link was created to steal sensible information, or if actually contains a virus that could damage the device from which it is accessed.
A spokesperson from Wegmans has declared officially that the store has no affiliation with the post that has been circulating on the social media platform and it urging the customers to stay away from it. The grocery store, which is based in Rochester and has stores in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, says that it never intended to give away $200 coupons and that even if they do, it will not happen via Facebook.
Wegmans’ spokesperson also stated that they store chain is actively trying to remove the post from the social media platform, but it is difficult since the source of the post is unknown and the high number of shares made it spread faster than it could be removed.
The official statement that the $200 Wegmans coupon is a scam was made on Monday, the 1st of February by the store chain’s spokesperson. The victims of the scams will not be receiving any form of gratuity from the Rochester-based chain of stores.
This is not the first Facebook scam that involved some sort of gratuity won by the participants. A few months ago there were some posts that promised gift cards from Walmart, Macy’s and Best Buy if you shared and comment to a post, or if you clicked on a link that redirected you to a site where you had to give sensible information such as the e-mail address or phone number in order to access it.
Another scam, from a few years back, had tremendous success. The post promised people that if they completed a quick on-line questionnaire they will receive a crate full of Jack Daniels. The promise seemed too good to be true, but people didn’t want to miss the opportunity of getting six bottles of the famous drink, so they clicked on the link and filled out the survey.
Fortunately, the link did not contain any viruses that could harm the user’s computer, but it was a way in which somebody managed to make some quick money because of the overwhelming number of people that accessed the domain in a small amount of time. The survey was there only to prolong the time spent by the victims on the site.
So next time you see a post on your Facebook news feed that promises some form of gratuity in exchange for a like, a share or a click ignore it, or better yet, report it as spam so it won’t get to other uninformed individuals.
Image source: www.wikimedia.org
Facebook modified the algorithm of the News Feed, again, in order to provide a better customer experience.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – According to a post on its official blog, Facebook modified the algorithm of the news feed, again. This time, the news feed will not show you what you previously clicked on, or enjoyed, but it will try to bring to your feed things that it considers should be of interest to you.
Facebook managed to keep the attention of a generation that just can’t concentrate. Teens are more focused on their news feed than they are in class, or when engaging in real life conversations. This is because the company uses complex algorithms that bring to the attention of the user only certain posts from people or pages he has interacted with before.
Until now the algorithm was based on the likes and comments a person gave to a post from a friend or a page, but now, after testing a new, more complex, and more efficient technique, Facebook will decide what to bring to your newsfeed according to everything you have clicked on in the past.
They are trying to make the “home page” more attractive by choosing only stories that could be of interest to the user. The company will continuously monitor the likes and comments a person gives in order to better decide what to bring to the top of the newsfeed and what to hide.
If this sounds a bit scary, don’t despair. Facebook will also allow users to pick who they see on their newsfeed. For the moment, this feature is only available for iOS users, but it seems it will be adapted for other platforms pretty soon.
The section is called “News Feed Preferences” and it will allow the owner of the social media account to choose the people and pages that will have a priority on appearing on the news feed. The user will be able to select up to 30 different accounts. Every time that a post of one of the accounts will appear on the feed, it will be accompanied by a star, to remind the user that the account was prioritized.
It seems that Facebook wants to decide what we should see, and what not. And things will get even more controlled after the new “reactions” buttons will be made available to the general public. Facebook will not only know what things we find interesting, but they will also know how we feel about them.
The reactions will give them an easier way of calculating our desires. Also, it will give it an opportunity to select the ads that will best appeal to the user because let us not forget that 80 percent of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertisements.
Facebook modified the algorithm of the news feed, again, so it can offer a “better experience” to the users. The “reactions buttons” fall into the same category.
Image source: www.flickr.com
According to professor Dunbar, an average of 4.1 friends are the kind a person wants to keep.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – Ever since 2004 social media has only flourished. People have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder and many other platforms. And with these accounts come a large number of friends and acquaintances in the so-called “friends list”. But are Facebook friends real?
The average social media user has a large number of friends in the so-called “friends-list”, but are Facebook friends real? Will they really act like friends when we will need them to? Are those virtual friendships worthy of the name, or are they more of an “acquaintances list”?
Robin Dunbar, a British professor of psychology has conducted a study in order to answer all of those questions. The name sounds familiar because he is the scientist behind the “Dunbar number”. The number that bears his name is actually a calculation model that theorized the maximum number of stable relationships an individual could have.
According to the “Dunbar number”, a single person could maintain a maximum number of 150 relationships. All that surpasses the limit falls in the “acquaintances” category.
The famous British professor of psychology analyzed a sample of 3,375 Facebook users with ages between 18 and 65. The average number of actual real-life friends that a single user had was 150. Out of these 150, only 4.1 would prove to be dependable and 13.6 would express feelings of sympathy if the user expressed having an emotional crisis.
Dunbar declared that the study revealed the fact that the two kinds of friendships did not differ in the virtual environment from the off-line study that the professor of psychology completed a few years ago when he devised the “Dunbar number”.
Furthermore, the researcher discovered that a large amount of friends in a “friend-list” did not make a significant difference, the number of real friendships that the user had remained the same as the one of an average user with fewer virtual friends.
The professor of psychology explains that by adding more people, users do not enlarge their friends circle, but rather that of acquaintances. And there is no scientific evidence to point that fact that users with a larger friends list are more sociable.
Dunbar also adds that the fewer people a user has in the “friends list”, the better. Because virtual friendships cannot be cultivated only in the on-line environment. They need a significant amount of time invested by the user, and time is scarce these days.
So are Facebook friends real? It seems that they aren’t.
Image source: www.flickr.com
A recent market analysis performed by the social network revealed that Facebook news feed leads to echo chamber, filter bubble effects.
The results of the study published on early Friday morning have strengthened the belief that Facebook’s news feed structure is isolating people.
This occurs because Facebook’s users are exposed only to those news or ideas that generally comply with their preferences. Thus, it becomes all the more difficult for Facebook users to get access to other viewpoints, especially those that do not reflect their own beliefs.
The phenomenon was described by behavioral scientists as an “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” because people hear and read only the subjects they are interested in, without getting other contradictory opinions.
The research was performed by comparing the social network behavior of Republican and Democratic Facebook users.
The analysis has revealed that Republicans and Democrats, respectively, are more exposed to information pertaining to their favorite political party because Facebook posts links on their news feed based on their past Internet preferences and behaviors.
The social network has, nevertheless, defended itself by saying that this online behavior is not entirely influenced by them. Facebook users are exposed to contradictory opinions, as well, but they prefer to read only those stories that reflect their opinions. According to Facebook, it is the users’ fault and they should be more open-minded about contradictory stories, if they want to get a comprehensive understanding of a certain matter.
The study was performed with the help of a system, intentionally created by Facebook to carry out the current research.
The system identified all the news articles that were shared at least 100 times during the last months of 2014. The query managed to identify 226,000 news articles showing users’ preferences in terms of politics, world affairs and economy.
Researchers outside Facebook criticized the study because, they say, it has too many limitations.
First of all, the analysis has focused primarily on political viewpoints and perspectives, taking into account only liberals and conservatives’ behavior. These two categories are devoted to their political parties and they rarely seek to get other contradictory opinions.
Second of all, the percentage of liberal and conservative Facebook users does not go higher than 1%. This number is too small, therefore, it cannot stand as a proof that most Facebook users live in an “echo chamber”, researchers say.
Facebook should try to study the “echo chamber” effect on other categories of users to determine the exact extent to which the social network is isolating people in a “filter bubble”.
Moreover, further studies should take a deeper look at the way in which the identified news articles have, indeed, changed users’ political behaviors and beliefs.
Image Source: Media Salon
According to new statistics, WhatsApp has officially reached 800 million active users, a milestone which proves its popularity as in the world of messaging apps.
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum commented on Facebook on Friday to say that the messaging app has passed the 800 million active user mark this month. Facebook had bought WhatsApp in 2014 for a reasonable $22 billion, and given the time of Koum’s statement, this is suggesting the app has added more than 100 million active users every four months since August 2014. WhatsApp had 600 million users at that time, while in January 2015, the messaging app announced its 700 million user.
WhatsApp’s popularity has increased significantly over the past few months, as it is now the most popular enterprise on the messaging apps market, including Facebook’s very own Messenger. As WhatsApp allows users to send text messages trough the app, it has become a cheap and viable alternative to traditional texting. It is also a choice when compared to traditional voice calls, because WhatsApp now allows its users to receive calls on the app itself.
It is possible that WhatsApp may soon hit another milestone: one billion users. The step is not at all inconceivable, and if it will happen, as it is expected, that would turn WhatsApp into a faster-growing application than its own parent company. The messaging app is also more popular than Twitter, which announced 288 million active users per month in February, but also than Instagram, which released a statement in December in which it says it has 300 million active users.
Facebook needed around eight years to reach one billion, WhatsApp will get there more rapidly. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long said that WhatsApp will only turn into a big player in its parent company once that one billion milestone is crossed.
“What I’d say around messaging is we’re pretty early in that cycle. We are about where Facebook was in around 2006 or 2007, where, at that point, Facebook is really just a consumer product. There were no businesses in the ecosystem,” said Mark Zuckerberg recently.
WhatsApp has released an update to its Android app that offers clients the possibility to backup their conversations to Google Drive, a service that had been long demanded by users.
Image Source: I Know Today