Daily Archives: January 14, 2020

Open-source developer advocate Dmitry Vinnik said in a blog post that the social networks internal engineers contributed more than 82,000 commits in 2019, while some 2,500 external contributors committed over 32,000 changes.

He added that almost 93,000 new people starred Facebooks open-source projects last year.

Vinnik shared highlights of Facebooks collaboration efforts in support of open-source projects, including two initiatives in partnership with the Linux Foundation: the GraphQL Foundation and the Presto Foundation.

Facebook expanded on its open-source deep-learning platform, PyTorch, with the debut of PyTorch Mobile, as well as the additions of CrypTen, a framework for privacy-preserving machine learning, and Captum, a model interpretability and understanding library.

The social network also added support for free Jupyter notebook environment Google Colaboratory to its PyTorch tutorials.

On the topic of web and mobile open-source offerings, Vinnik said React and React Nativeremained very active, and he spotlighted the open-source releases of Hermes, a JavaScript engine optimized for mobile applications, and Magma, a platform that enables operators to deploy mobile networks in a timely fashion.

Late in the year, Facebook released Hydra, a framework that simplifies the development of Pythonapps by allowing developers to compose and override configurations.

Finally, Vinnik touched on the social networks work on the blockchain front with the Libra Association via its Calibrasubsidiary.

He wrote, Overall, it has been an excellent year for open source, with many new projects being released and existing communities growing more rapidly than we expected. We want to end this post the same way we started itby thanking all our internal and external contributors, those who use our open-source tools and frameworks and those who give back to the community. We appreciate you and look forward to working with everyone in the years to come.

Continued here:

Facebook Shares Its 2019 Year in Review for Open Source - Adweek

Have you ever covered a friend's expenses like a good pal, but had trouble getting them to pay you back?

Fortunately, Facebook Messenger has a handy tool that lets you request money from your friend directly, so you don't have to beat around the bush anymore.

Here's how to request money on Facebook.

1. Open the Facebook Messenger app on your iPhone or Android phone and tap on the conversation between you and the person you want to request money from.

2. Once you have the conversation open in Messenger, tap the icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen that resembles four dots arranged in a square shape.

Tap the four dots. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

3. A pop-up menu will appear at the bottom of the screen. Tap on "Pay or Request."

Tap "Pay or Request." Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

4. Type in the amount of money you want to request. You can also include a note. Once you've filled out the pertinent information, tap "Request."

Tap "Request." Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

Your payment request will now appear in your conversation with the person who you requested money from. However, your payment request will expire after seven days, and you can't control whether or not the person will actually respond to your request.

Your payment request will expire in seven days. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

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How to request money on Facebook using the Facebook Messenger app - Business Insider

Facebook director of product management for business integrity Rob Leathern turned to a different social network to share further details on a change introduced last week regarding custom audiencesfrom lists.

Leathern shared a series of tweetsabout the change, which will begin rolling out later this month.

A promised thread for adtech nerds. Since we announced an important product change last week that applies to all ads (not just a subset), for Custom Audiences from a list. I wanted to give some more details. These changes start to roll out later this month (1/17)

He said that when Facebook updated its Why am I seeing this ad? and Ad Preferences tools in July, he told Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed Newsin an interview that the tools were still somewhat difficult to navigate and not as comprehensive as (people would) like.

Leathern said this months update will make it easier for Facebook to show its users the relationships between agencies, marketing partners and advertisers, adding, Many small and medium businesses do their own marketing, whereas some big companies have their own marketing affiliates and multiple agencies.

He previewed the new control screen for businesses that people will have access to, saying in his tweets, You can control the use of lists at a business level. You could disallow the use of lists by multiple advertisers at one time, if they are using lists uploaded by the same business account. You can choose whether an advertiser can include or exclude you from their target audience at a business account level. That means any advertiser using any list from that business will also not be able to include, or exclude, you in an audience. Or you could make yourself eligible for seeing the ad, if they are using a list to exclude you. In this example, a gym might exclude you from ads to sign up because youre already a member.

Leathern elaborated on the include/exclude split, saying that advertisers use it for testing purposes, and offering as an example a streaming service that a person is already signed up for not showing them sign-up ads, but showing them ads for specific new shows.

People who are not sure why they were included on a list in the first place will still have to contact the business that created the list, as Leathern said Facebook has no visibility into the makeup of these lists, and all information is hashed before being sent to the social network.

When the update is rolled out, users will be able to access it via Advertisers & Businesses in their Ad Preferences.

Leathern concluded his tweetstorm with, Im excited about the new transparency that people will get about how marketers are trying to reach them and the granular ability to make changes to that picture. Once it rolls out later this month, I would love feedback on how we continue to improve it.

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Facebook Aims to Show Users the Relationships Between Agencies, Marketers, Advertisers - Adweek

A comparison of an original and deepfake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Elyse Samuels/The ... [+] Washington Post via Getty Images)

Let the misinformation campaigns begin.

As you may know, the proliferation of altered content, fake news, videos that are intended to sway voters to one ideology over another, and outright falsehoods and lies seriously impacted the outcome of the last presidential election and the primary culprit was Facebook. (Although Twitter bots were also part of the problem.)

Millions and millions of people read posts about Hillary Clinton being the antichrist or watched videos of Donald Trump looking like a big orange pig.

Because social media is a free-for-all with a steady stream of posts about any topic under the sun, and because millions of people stick to the safe confines of Facebook, it was easy to feed misinformation on both sides of the political spectrum.

In short, it worked.

Recently, Facebook instituted a new policy that bans some deepfake videos. Its a step in the right direction in the battle against fake news.

Deepfakes tend to work. Using artificial intelligence and freely available apps, including one that just debuted this week called Doublicat that creates deepfake GIFs using only a selfie, anyone can make it look like a celebrity is advocating for a border wall or trumpeting one of the Democratic candidates.

The catch (and to be honest there is always a catch on social media), this does not include all deepfake videos. In the official announcement, Facebook noted that some fake videos that are meant for satire are still fine, along with any that have a more serious purpose. Videos that were merely edited for quality or clarity will not be banned. What the announcement really addresses are the videos that are part of a misinformation campaign, what Facebook callsmanipulated media. This would include videos that are more coercive in nature, such as those that make it appear as if a high-profile figure or a politician is saying something they did not say.

Deepfake videos have been around for a while, including an infamous one where Barack Obama speaks out about fake news.

Of course, deepfakes can be traced even further back to illicit videos, but they reached a tipping point in 2018 because of how easy they were to create. End users could download a few apps and load Photoshop-altered photos to create deepfakes in a few minutes. The artificial intelligence made it easy. Last year, FaceApp became popular because it could make you look older or younger with a few clicks.

In the upcoming election, social media will again play an even more important role. If its this easy to create deepfakes using an app, they will become even more popular.

Now for the bad news. Its admirable that Facebook is taking a stance against misinformation campaigns and will block these videos, but there are always workarounds. It will be interesting to see if videos that initially look normal and unaltered suddenly insert altered portions and if Facebook will be able to detect these more subtle deepfake videos.

And, deepfakes are only a small part of the problem. Everyone has the right to share their opinion on social media, and Facebook cant police every single post and comment to judge the accuracy of the statements. Its extremely difficult to determine what is an oddball opinion you have the right to post and what is meant as a subversive falsehood that is meant to disrupt the election cycle.

Good luck with that kind of policing, and Im not even sure if AI can help.

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Facebook Bans Deepfake Videos That Could Sway Voters, But Is It Enough? - Forbes

More broadly, you can stop some of the web activity being used to target you with ads by visiting the YourAdChoices site run by the Digital Advertising Alliance. You'll notice Facebook advertising targeting is on the list of entriestick the Opt Out box to do just that. Note that you'll need to do this separately for each browser you use; for the biggest impact, you should opt out of all the other platforms as well.

Locking down tracking in your browser is also recommended: Look out for the option to block third-party cookies in your browser settings (the sort that can track activity across multiple sites), and consider using well-respected tracker blocking browser extensions such as Ghostery or Privacy Badger.

On Mobile Devices

Much of what we've already said applies to Facebook's mobile apps as well. If you want to limit what Facebook knows about you, you're best off not installing the mobile apps at all. Doing so gives Facebook permission to log the Wi-Fi networks you connect to, the type of phone you have, the other apps you have installed, and more besides, as well as everything you do on Facebook itself.

You can't stop all of this data collection, but you can curb it. Head to the Facebook permissions pageunder Apps and notifications and Facebook in Android settings and under Facebook in iOS settingsto block Facebook's access to your phone's location, your contacts, your phone's microphone and camera, and more.

The bad news? Even with location tracking turned off, Facebook still makes note of the approximate location that you access the web from via your IP address. It's only a rough guideand Facebook says it's necessary to keep accounts secure and users verifiedbut you can't stop this from happening if you use Facebook.

More bad news: Other apps send data to Facebook as well, often automatically. Almost everyone has a Facebook account, and third-party apps want to make use of that data, whether it's to target users with advertising or to simplify the login process and get more user data as a result. Facebook isn't working in isolation here, and has many profitable partnerships with other apps and data brokers.

It's worth emphasizing that Facebook, like Google, promises to use this treasure trove of data to improve its services and make life safer and more convenient for its users, as well as generating more profitable ads across its network. You are, after all, using everything Facebook offers for free. If you don't trust Facebook's intentionswhich is by now understandablethen you really need to quit using it altogether.

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All the Ways Facebook Tracks Youand How to Limit It - WIRED

The companys separate decision not to limit microtargeting is probably welcome news to candidates of both parties, who value the ability to tailor messages based on data such as a voters age, gender, neighborhood, job or sports fandom. President Donald Trumps campaign has pushed Facebook not to limit ad-targeting, a step Google took in November, and accused Twitter of trying to silence conservatives when it banned political ads altogether in October.

Facebook also said it is taking steps to give users more control over and insight into the ads they see, as well as improving its publicly available database of its political advertisements allowing for more precise searches and filtering of ads and offering size estimates for their target audience. And the company announced it will soon allow users to control the volume of political and social issue ads they see.

Theres no change to the policy regarding fact-checking politicians in advertising, Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds said in an interview before the announcement. We made a decision, and this is a different set of issues that were tackling here regarding transparency and users controls when it comes to seeing political ads.

Asked whether the companys position on that might change, he added: As of right now, this is what the policy is going to be.

Spending on political ads could reach as much as $6 billion in the 2020 election cycle, including $1.6 billion that will be spent on digital video, according to companies that analyze the advertising market. Facebook and Google are by far the biggest platforms for online political advertising.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. | AP Photo/Susan Walsh

CEO Mark Zuckerberg made two visits to D.C. last fall to defend Facebooks refusal to fact-check candidates claims, including a speech at Georgetown University where he argued that voters should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.

Facebooks director of product management, Rob Leathern, offered a similar defense in a blog post published Thursday morning, saying the company is following the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.

This does not mean that politicians can say whatever they like in advertisements on Facebook, Leathern added, saying candidates must still adhere to community guidelines banning content such as hate speech or messages aimed at intimidating voters. We regularly disallow ads from politicians that break our rules.

Leathern also took a shot at Facebooks rivals, writing that while Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads, we are choosing to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads.

Civil rights advocates have been some of the harshest critics of Facebooks policies, pointing to a long history of false messages being used to deter minorities from voting.

The backlash to Facebooks ads policy prompted largely by a talk in September by the companys vice president of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg has reverberated from Congress to the 2020 campaign trail.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) accused Facebook of becoming a disinformation-for-profit machine. And the campaign of Joe Biden, the focus of a baseless Trump campaign ad last fall that implicated the former vice president and his family in corruption in Ukraine, hammered the platform for amplifying and profiting from debunked falsehoods.

Donald Trumps campaign can (and will) still lie in political ads. Facebook can (and will) still profit off it, the campaign's deputy communications director, Bill Russo, said Thursday in response to the policy update. Todays announcement is more window dressing around their decision to allow paid misinformation.

Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also blasted Facebook. "It is wrong to take money from political campaigns in exchange for disseminating blatant lies to the American people. It is also wrong that Facebook is immune from any liability for the reckless political ads they sell," she said in a statement.

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Clegg told POLITICO in a November interview that the company was considering limiting candidates microtargeting as part of a broader reassessment of its policies around campaign messaging.

Ultimately, it decided not to.

In contrast, Google announced in late November that it would limit audience targeting on election ads to only three general categories: age, gender and location (down to a postal code level).

Googles move, while cheered by privacy activists, drew sharp criticism from most of the political digital ad industry. Critics of the policy charged that Googles decision at the time could deeply hurt insurgent or less-well-funded candidates, while inadvertently benefiting cash-rich incumbents who had the resources to spend money on digital ads that were ultimately less effective.

Twitter, which was only a minor player in the political ad space, went a step further than Google, banning political ads altogether.

If Facebook did decide to limit political microtargeting, it could have hurt the ability of candidates to raise money and collect the contact information of would-be supporters.

The social network has been a hotbed of political advertising in 2019. Trumps reelection operation spent at least $19.4 million on the platform, making him the top-spending politician for the year. Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer spent at least $16.9 million.

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with transparency and choice, House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who is leading a probe of Silicon Valley giants, tweeted about the policy on Thursday. This is about money.

Unlike Google, Facebook has "chosen not to limit targeting of these ads, the Facebook executive Leathern said. We considered doing so, but through extensive outreach and consultations we heard about the importance of these tools for reaching key audiences from a wide range of NGOs, non-profits, political groups and campaigns, including both Republican and Democrat committees in the U.S.

Leathern said the company didnt believe that decisions about political ads should be made by individual private companies, instead arguing for regulation that would apply across the industry. He highlighted Facebooks support for the Honest Ads Acts much of which was included in H.R. 1 (116), House Democrats sweeping electoral reform bill that passed the lower chamber in March saying that policy makers need to make uniform regulations for the industry. The bill, otherwise known as the For The People Act, stalled out in the Republican-controlled Senate, as has a standalone version of the Honest Ads Act.

Frankly, we believe the sooner Facebook and other companies are subject to democratically accountable rules on this the better, Leathern wrote.

Yet Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief security security officer, called on the company to take matters into its own hands, tweeting that "targeting limits and a minimal standard on claims about opponents would represent a defensible, non-partisan and helpful position."

Excerpt from:

Facebook sticking with policies on politicians' lies and voter targeting - POLITICO

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg views AR and VR as the next platform after the smartphone, saying it will define the 2030s in his annual goal-settingletter, posted to his profile page last Thursday night.

Business Insider Intelligence

In his letter, Zuckerberg framed Facebook's focus on AR as a bid to create a tech tool for social good, underpinned by Facebook's edict toconnect people: By enabling people to be "present" anywhere, AR glasses woud provide access and social mobility regardless of a user's location.

Developing its own AR glasses also marks the social giant's latest hardware effort: Last year, Facebook advanced further into hardware, expanding its Portal screened smart speaker (Portal, Portal+, and Portal TV) and Oculus VR headset lineups (Rift, Quest, and Go).

Facebook expects that AR will eventually reach mass consumer adoption on par with mobile today and it appears the tech giant wants to lead that race.In the letter, Zuckerberg predicted that "at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology."

To that end, Facebook is hoping to make that breakthrough itself: The company is reportedly developing its own AR glasses, which could launch between 2023 and 2025,percomments by Facebook's head of AR and VR Andrew Bosworth last fall. To aid the effort, Facebook has reportedly partnered with Luxottica, the maker of Ray-Ban and Oakley, to develop AR-enabled glasses, a project internally codenamed Orion by Facebook Reality Labs, the team tasked with developing the glasses,perCNBC.

Facebook is also reportedly building its own operating system that it would likely integrate into its hardware, as it looks to wean off of its current reliance on Google's Android as it anticipates greater platform-device rivalries,perThe Information.

Developing its own AR glasses within the next three to five years would predate the expectations of Facebook chief scientist Michael Abrash, who leads Facebook Reality Labs and believes it will take five to 10 years before the AR glasses are ready for the masses though that likely won't prevent Facebook from rolling out its first generation hardware ahead of those expectations,perThe Information.

Facebook's AR hardware push will likely aim to differentiate and scale by integrating the company's communications functionality, including its social apps and services, directly into the glasses.Among the most commonly cited barriers to broader adoption of AR and VR headsets currently include a clunky user experience and lack of content or categories beyond specialized use cases, such as gaming,perPerkins Coie.

Facebook imagines that AR glasses will not only become as ubiquitous as smartphones, but that they will effectively replace them in terms of function. To that end, Facebook is likely to focus entirely on the devices' utility as a communication tool, one that can meet all the same needs as the smartphone currently does, but even more powerfully and efficiently.

By developing its own AR glasses as well as the operating system to run on it, Facebook stands to be able to easily put its services onto the devices, reimagine social sharing and advertising formats for the devices, and collect fees for any apps or services that want to gain a position on the device, in the same way that Apple (App Store), Google (Play Store), and Amazon (Fire TV, Amazon Channels) currently do. For example, the glasses wouldreportedlyallow users to make calls, share information, and live-stream their point of view on social media.

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Zuckerberg outlines Facebook's augmented reality ambitions - Business Insider Nordic

On Wednesday, Teen Vogue published an article on Facebooks efforts to safeguard political speech. It had no byline and a glowing tone.

Not long after it was posted, a line appeared, in italics, at the top of the story to signal that it was a paid advertisement: Editors note: This is sponsored editorial content.

Soon after, the sponsored editorial content label disappeared. And then, the article itself vanished.

Under the headline How Facebook Is Helping Ensure the Integrity of the 2020 Election, the lengthy Teen Vogue post included question-and-answer-style interviews with five female Facebook managers who said the platform was taking steps to avoid spreading misinformation and propaganda as another presidential election drew near. The article also included a portrait of the women.

Were a different company than we were in 2016, Katie Harbath, Facebooks director of global elections, was quoted as saying. Including when it comes to elections.

Cond Nast, the owner of Teen Vogue, said in a statement, We made a series of errors labeling this piece, and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused. We dont take our audiences trust for granted, and ultimately decided that the piece should be taken down entirely to avoid further confusion.

A Cond Nast employee with knowledge of the arrangement, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said the article had indeed been commissioned as sponsored content, meaning it was an ad.

Facebook pitched the idea for the article last year, when the social media network and the online magazine were in talks about the Teen Vogue Summit, a three-day event that took place in Los Angeles in November, with speakers including the YouTube star Liza Koshy and the film director Greta Gerwig. Facebook was a sponsor of the gathering.

We had a paid partnership with Teen Vogue related to their womens summit, which included sponsored content, Facebook said in a statement. Our team understood this story was purely editorial, but there was a misunderstanding.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebooks chief operating officer, and other executives at the company shared the Teen Vogue story Wednesday morning, before it went into the digital ether.

Great Teen Vogue piece about five incredible women protecting elections on Facebook, Ms. Sandberg wrote on her Facebook page. The post went on to plug the companys attempts to stop the spread of misinformation and fight foreign interference and voter suppression.

Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogues former chief content officer, was one of the articles critics. I am so sorry to the @TeenVogue team for whatever irresponsible sales or marketing staff pushed this article into their feed, therefore discrediting all the GOOD work theyve been doing to educate their audience about the REAL threats posed by @Facebook in our election, he wrote on Twitter.

As the debate about the article made Teen Vogue a trending topic on Twitter, another online critic linked to the article and posed the question, What is this Teen Vogue? To that, the verified Teen Vogue account replied in a tweet that was later deleted: literally idk.

Facebook has struggled to shore up its reputation after a three-year string of debacles related to its handling of election interference and data privacy. Lawmakers and civil rights groups have warned that the company seems unprepared to counter the disinformation campaigns that clogged social media during the last presidential campaign.

This week, a 2,500-word internal post by a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, set off discord at the company. In his post, which was obtained by The New York Times, he warned against the temptation to skew the platform against President Trumps 2020 re-election campaign and stood by the companys stance on not censoring politicians posts.

Teen Vogue started in 2003 as a pet project of Anna Wintour, the longtime editor in chief of Vogue and Cond Nasts artistic director. In 2017, as the magazine gained attention for adding articles on politics and social issues to its mix, Cond Nast shut down the print edition.

On Wednesday, the Teen Vogue home page included serious fare like No to War With Iran alongside lifestyle articles headlined How to Tell Your Crush You Like Them and The Best Under $100 Bags to Shop From Coachs Major Winter Sale.

For now, anyone clicking on the link to Teen Vogues Facebook article is met with this message: Uh-Oh. Unfortunately this page does not exist.

Kevin Roose contributed reporting.

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The Mystery of Teen Vogues Disappearing Facebook Article - The New York Times

Duncan Andison/Getty Images

Duncan Andison/Getty Images

If it seems that your Facebook feed is flooded with as many fundraising appeals for animal shelters, humanitarian groups and cancer researchers as your postbox was in December, you aren't imagining things.

Those birthday fundraisers you've likely seen posted by your friends, tripled over the past year, from $300 million raised for charities in 2017-18, to $1 billion a year later. It's great news for those nonprofits. But some Facebook users think it's getting to be too much of a good thing.

Vinita Kochhar, a 47-year-old marketing executive from New Jersey is one of the many who are making the fundraisers something of a new birthday tradition. When she first heard about a charity raising money for school supplies for children in India, Kochhar felt she had to help.

"It hit me in the heart," she says, "because what we take for granted every single day, I realized very quickly that there are kids that just don't have that at all. A pencil to them is a big deal."

Kochhar also realized how easily she could help; with just a few clicks on Facebook, she posted a fundraiser on her birthday right when all her friends and family would be reaching out anyway.

"I would get gift cards or clothes or whatnot. So here was my opportunity to say, 'in lieu of gifts, I'm asking for everyone to contribute to the cause that I believe in."

Before Kochhar knew it, her post raised $11,000, prompting the kids in India to send her a Happy Birthday greeting video as a thank you.

"Honestly, I probably felt more fulfilled than I did when we had a huge party," she says. "You know, it's not always just about celebration. It's about having purpose. And this gave me purpose."

Donors are apparently feeling it too.

"I guess I like the feeling that I'm putting my money where my mouth is," says Edward Grant of Berkeley, Calif. The 65-year-old finds it hard to resist when all those fundraisers pop up in his feed.

"There's the man in Colombia, who has an education group for kids who live in the garbage dumps, and there's a dancer who has cancer, and then I see the fundraiser for eradicating cervical cancer in the developing world. They're working miracles," Grant says while scrolling back through scores of causes in his feed that he's contributed to.

"Oh my goodness," he laughs. "I guess there are more than I realized."

But some Facebook users are less amused.

"It's like an avalanche," grumbles Carolyn Toll Oppenheim, a retired journalist in Northampton, Mass. "The whole thing starts to feel overwhelming."

And she says, "presumptuous."

"Don't hit me up [by saying] 'in lieu of presents,'" Toll Oppenheim says. "Who buys all their Facebook friends a birthday present?! I don't like it. There's a guilt trip to it."

Especially, she says, since everyone can see who has donated.

"That makes me cringe a little," Toll Oppenheim says. "Are they checking who gave and who didn't? I don't like Facebook making me feel lousy."

David Murphy, senior Technology Editor for Lifehacker.com agrees. He posted a "how to" for people who want to mute their fundraiser notifications.

"Those 'give me money' solicitations get a little annoying, especially when you're receiving multiple notifications about fundraisers you never actually said you were interested in," Murphy wrote last June.

There's not a way to block all fundraisers, but Murphy says silencing the notifications offers at least a bit of a reprieve.

"I feel a little Ebenezer Scrooge," he told NPR. "But it's my newsfeed, my content. I want a curated experience."

Besides, Murphy says, there's something especially off-putting about such conspicuous giving.

"It's a bit of a humblebrag," he says. "It feels a little insincere."

Lehigh Univerisity Associate Professor Jeremy Littau, who teaches about social media and social action, agrees there is an element of "slactivism" to Facebook birthday fundraisers, and it's prone to be used by those who are looking for the "flex" or who may be "doing for it the gram," in other words, for the sake of showing off on Instagram or Facebook. But Littau says the notion of "virtue signaling" is as old as giving itself.

"This is just a new evolution of something that has long existed," he says. Still he says, in the realm of social media, fundraiser fatigue is a real risk.

"Facebook cannot theoretically just infinitely grow the number of fundraisers without some sort of blowback, either in terms of users protesting, or people just getting turned off to the idea altogether," he says.

Facebook says the feedback to fundraisers is overwhelming positive, though Emily Dalton Smith, Facebook's director of Social Impact Product, says the company is constantly reviewing and updating policies, just as it did two years ago, when it eliminated fundraiser processing fees, so that 100% of birthday donations now go to the charities.

"We know that no product is ever perfect," Dalton Smith says. "We're always looking for feedback to understand what could be better, and I expect that the products will continue to change over time."

Ultimately, Facebook fundraisers such as Vinita Kochhar, say the good is far outweighed by the harm. It's better to be bombarded by birthday fundraisers than just a slew of birthday selfies, says Kochhar.

"It's refreshing to me to see that folks are not just focusing on themselves, but they're focusing on causes," she says. "At the end of the day, it matters not if someone's saying it looks like they're 'flexing' or any of that, in my opinion... I mean honestly, at the end of the day, if the folks that are in need are getting the money. That's all that matters... Those dollars are going for good."

And indeed, they are. Those who raise funds for hospitals, the homeless, the hungry, and the Humane Society are raking it in, thanks to Facebook. The Wayne County Humane Society in Wooster, Ohio, received thousands of dollars in the past year from birthday fundraisers, plus one wedding fundraiser.

Director Carrie Andrew says as important as getting the money, is the gift of suddenly having an army of fresh faces willing to solicit their friends.

"It absolutely is a relief," she says, for nonprofits who would otherwise have to keep making their usual appeals to their usual supporters. That, she says, runs the risk of getting a lot more annoying than Facebook fundraisers.

"We feel like we are constantly asking for donations," she says. "And we do feel like it gets old and stale, and people will begin to not want to support us because we're constantly asking. So when someone takes it upon themselves to raise those funds for us instead of us asking for it...it is very helpful."

Besides, Andrew says, scrolling past a few fundraisers on Facebook has to be less annoying than getting those dinner-time phone calls asking for money, or knocks at the door.

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Fed Up With Fundraisers On Facebook? You're Not Alone - NPR

In 2013, AHS Consulting founder Amna Shah started boosting her business'spresence on Facebook. She and her employees worked to build out a page with information about the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company, and posted new content multiple times a week. Toattract potential customers, staffers crafted ads and paid to boost exposure of posts.

Shah knew consumer-facing brands may be better suited for Facebook's advertising and paid marketing, but assumed hers, too, could find an audience. Some existing customers interacted with the brand, and likes piled up. But Shah says no one new from Chattanooga or the nearbyAtlanta regionseemed to be finding her consulting firmthrough the platform--only some individuals from India and China.

"Over time, we started to think these were fake profiles," she says."We got no new business out of Facebook, ever." Halfway through 2018, the company stopped putting effort into Facebook marketing.

Shah is far from alone. In a November survey, Inc. asked CEOs and other high-ranking executivesfrom fast-growing companies what they think about Facebook from a business perspective. Thirty-two percent said they are now getting less for their marketing dollars with Facebook than they used to, while 27 percent said they mistrust Facebook's use of their business data. In follow-up interviews, several of the survey takers said theyhave slowed their use of Facebook marketing and advertising. Afew, meanwhile, have pulled the plug altogether.

For years Facebook has pouredenergy into targeting and educating small businesses, growinga team of publicists and outreach employees.As of 2018, more than 140 million businesses globally used Facebook, at least 90 million of which were smalland midsize businesses, according to the company. Veronica Twombly, the head of communications for Facebook Small Business, says SMBsare a "top priority" for the platform.

"We are trying to elevate our free and paid solutions to make sure these small- and medium-size businesses know all of the tools at their disposal to help grow their customers," Twombly tells Inc. The company offers digital training for businesses, and held more than 100 in-person training sessions in the United States in 2019.

Facebook in the past has acknowledged the growing cost of its advertising for business, even as user growth has slowed. Finance chief David Wehner said in an investor conference call that in the fourth quarter of 2017 alone, the average price per ad climbed 43 percent, while the number of ad impressions served increased just 4 percent. Still, Twombly says the company is continuing to see growth in monthly active advertisers.

Several of the executives who told Inc. theyhave stopped advertising on Facebook over the past year were from business-to-business companies, which often can findcustomers more reliably on LinkedIn or through other marketing channels. Butothers outside of the B2B realmhave followed suit.One example is Jack Wight, the founder ofan electronics reseller thatadvertisedaggressively to individuals on Facebook in 2018but pulled the plug on the effort the following year.

"We weren't making any money on those people by the time we paid for the advertising," says Wight, the chief executive of Buyback Boss, which is based in Tempe, Arizona. "The marketing cost was just higher than other channels."

Wight estimates his company spent about $20,000 on Facebook ads over the course of a year,before giving up on Facebook about seven months ago. For 2020, his company is using a strategy of SEO and Adwords to find people who type in, for example, "sell my iPhone 10" on Google.

A Buyback Bossemployee who had been handling the company's Facebook presence and advertising now focuseson search marketing. Wight says he's open to resuming ad spending onFacebook--but only after he's scaled the other marketing channels he's found more effective.

"We put some money into it, we risked some money to experiment," he says, "and it just didn't work."

Published on: Jan 10, 2020

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Facebook Used to Be an Essential Marketing Tool. These CEOs Are Doing Just Fine Without It - Inc.