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As Facebook battles a report accusing it of suppressing conservative news, CEO says he plans to ‘invite leading conservatives ... to share their point of view’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he plans to invite “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to talk with him about accusations of political bias at the social media company. Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday evening in a Facebook post that continued to deny the allegations of bias and the claim that the Facebook trending topics team suppresses conservative news. “We have found no evidence that this report is true,” he wrote. “If we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it.” On Monday, Gizmodo reported that contracted workers at Facebook “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers” and artificially “inject” stories into the trending topics section, citing anonymous former “news...

In April, Zuckerberg talked of ‘fearful voices building walls’ – but Facebook insists that sponsorship of Republican convention is not an endorsement Facebook will sponsor the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer providing “financial and other support” – despite pressure from progressive organizations and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own veiled criticisms of presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric. “This support allows Facebook to facilitate an open dialogue among voters, candidates and elected officials during the conventions, just as it has during other critical moments in the US elections and in elections around the world,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement. Facebook maintains that its sponsorship of the GOP convention, which will reportedly include a “lounge”, does not constitute an endorsement, but the announcement has angered a coalition of organizations that have launched campaigns urgi...

The future of apps is chatbots, and it’s going to be terrible Have you heard? Apps are dead: chatbots are the new apps. And they will soon be doing everything, from taking your pizza orders to scheduling your meetings. This is the future and it’s going to be terrible. The rise of the chatbot has been foretold for some time but only in the past few weeks with Facebook’s Messenger bots, chat app Kik’s bot store and the rise of subversive artbots have they really hit the public consciousness. So how did we get here? In many ways, it’s the perfect convergence of almost every tech trend of the past five years. Trend one: the hybrid command line Remember Peach? Probably not. At this stage, four months after launch, it seems unlikely that even Peach’s developers remember Peach. The app, a social network from the co-founder of Vine, tried to live somewhere between a Twitter-style social network and a WhatsApp-style messaging platform. It was fun for about three days, and then it died a qu...

Company is likely to let its co-founder and CEO push that little bit further, given that it’s making more money, from more users Mark Zuckerberg has dominated the desktop internet. He’s dominated the mobile internet. Now he’s going to dominate Facebook itself, and the company is probably going to let him. The big news that came out of Facebook’s quarterly earnings report is that the company is making more money, from more users, being shown more adverts – and more profitable adverts at that. The numbers are, well, big. Its userbase grew from 1.44 billion to 1.65 billion. Once upon a time, the number of people on Facebook grew fivefold over the course of a single year; it can’t do that anymore, because there aren’t enough people on the Earth. It can’t even double any more, because there aren’t enough people with internet access. Which lends some necessary context to the company’s philanthropic efforts to push low-cost connections to the developing world through its Internet.org pro...

Social network went from digital directory for college kids to communications behemoth – and it’s planning for prosperity with its global takeover It’s late afternoon on a blustery spring day on the waterfront at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base that’s now hired out for corporate functions. Vast warehouses, once used to store army supplies, are awash with sleek signs, shimmering lights and endless snacks. Behind them is an Instagram-ready view of Alcatraz island. In front, a fleet of Uber and Lyft cars lines up in the car park, while inside one of the warehouses Scottish synthpop band Chvrches take the stage. For the first few songs there’s only a small group of hardcore vocal fans at the front of the stage, flanked by a subdued mix of backpack-wearing dad types politely bobbing their heads, drinking cocktails out of plastic cups. The shindig has been put on by Facebook for the benefit of delegates attending its F8 conference. The event, which has run most years s...

Another algorithm change has been announced by the social network, focused on enhancing reading time Facebook is changing its algorithm yet again, and this time it wants to show you more things that you’ll actually spend time reading or watching. The social network looks at a wealth of data when deciding which posts you actually see on News Feed, but until now it hasn’t cared too much about what you actually do when you click away from Facebook. It says that’s going to change. “We’re learning that the time people choose to spend reading or watching content they clicked on from News Feed is an important signal that the story was interesting to them,” said software engineer Moshe Blank and research scientist Jie Xu in a post on the company’s website . As a result, the site will now attempt to pick links which have a higher reading time. But don’t think that you’ll have a News Feed filled with 30,000 word New Yorker epics. “We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshol...

Being dominated by Internet Facebook images is what is in front of them which is the introduction of a system that images can be "read" and can say to the people having vision problems. The Internet is changing. In the middle was completely text based Internet now the picture is now in the form. Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook every day, according to an estimate, other social networks, including an 80 billion photos are uploaded. This is good news for individuals who want to photography, while bad news for people with blind or partial vision, often could not say what is in the picture. But Facebook is going to introduce a new service Tuesday by which tried to rectify the problem will be. Blind navigation software to work on the computer screen, called readers. This allows software on the computer screen material is made by the combination of the format of audio or Braille (a system for blind and non-written characters that emerged the name upbeat points). But you can only re...