Facebook Has Been Extremely Busy Lately – But to What End?

We brought you an article this past week, which outlined the notion that Mark Zuckerberg was conceding to the idea that Facebook needs regulation. But Facebook is getting hit hard with a ton right now, and we have all the updates for you:

Live Stream Restrictions

Late last week, Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg announced that they company was “exploring restrictions on who can go Live depending on factors such as prior Community Standard violations.” The decision came less than three weeks after a terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, where 50 people were killed, and the entire event was livestreamed on Facebook. Facebook, along with others, like YouTube, were having a hard time stopping the video from being uploaded and distributed to their platforms.

The original thought for Facebook Live would be to “create new opportunities for people to come together.” It was around that time that the company invested millions of dollars to encourage publishers like Buzzfeed to experiment with Facebook Live. After the attack in Christchurch, Facebook is reexamining who should have the ability to share live video, but this is likely to prove difficult for the company to moderate.

Disappearing Posts

It was also reported that some of Zuckerberg’s public Facebook posts had disappeared somehow. What’s interesting is that the missing posts included everything that he wrote in 2007 and 2008, as well as some posts that Zuckerberg made in 2012, which was around the time that Facebook acquired Instagram. According to the company, the posts were deleted as a result of technical errors. While the company is working to bring the posts back, this isn’t the first time that Zuckerberg’s content has gone missing. Last April, it was reported that some of the messages that Zuckerberg had sent as private messages had disappeared.

News Feed Update

If you had ever wondered what content is chosen to appear in your News Feed, you’re not alone. This past weekend, Facebook quietly announced that they will start to give users more information about why they see one particular post over another. In fact, Facebook is going to soon launch a “Why am I seeing this post?” button, which is similar to the one that it launched in 2014 for advertisements. This feature is expected to launch this week and will be available for all Facebook users by the middle of May.

Paying Publishers?

Zuckerberg also announced this week that Facebook might be creating a new section of the platform dedicated to “high-quality news”. We don’t have a ton of details on this particular feature, but it might feature content where Facebook pays publishers directly to share. This comes about a week after Apple announced that they were launching a $10/month paid news aggregation service, called News+. Unlike Apple, Facebook doesn’t appear to be getting into the subscription business.

This kind of venture hasn’t been successful for Facebook in the past, but without knowing more of what this is, it’s hard for us to comment as to whether or not this will be any better and/or any different.

It’s hard to imagine so much has happened to Facebook over the last couple of days.