Social Media Daily News Roundup 31.07.19
Today’s social media news, rounded up in one place so you don’t have to go anywhere else.
🌻 New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling
🌻 Snapchat launches major new ad campaign around the theme of connecting friends
🌻 Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind
🌻 Mark Cuban says Facebook’s Libra is ‘dangerous’
New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling - The Verge
Snapstreaks, YouTube autoplay, and endless scrolling are all coming under fire from a new bill, which is sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), targeting the tech industry’s “addictive” design.
Hawley’s Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, or the SMART Act, would ban these features that work to keep users on platforms longer, along with others, like Snapstreaks, that incentivize the continued use of these products. If approved, the Federal Trade Commission and Health and Human Services could create similar rules that would expire after three years unless Congress codified them into law.
Snapchat launches major new ad campaign around the theme of connecting friends - Social Media Today
While Facebook has focused on global domination, and connecting as many people as possible through its family of apps, Snapchat has always maintained its focus on close relationships, which has long been its differentiating factor - its 'anti-Facebook' approach, as many have called it.
Snapchat was never designed for public broadcast, for sharing every moment with everyone. Instead, Snap was made to help people stay in touch with their closest connections, in a more intimate, and less permanent, way. That, in many ways, likely limits Snapchat's broader growth capacity, but as overall social media trends have shifted away from public sharing, with private groups and messaging now on the rise, Snap has also benefited in many ways from being ahead of the trend.
Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind - Technology Review
In 2017, Facebook announced that it wanted to create a headband that would let people type at a speed of 100 words per minute, just by thinking.
Now, a little over two years later, the social-media giant is revealing that it has been financing extensive university research on human volunteers.
Today, some of that research was described in a scientific paper from the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers have been developing “speech decoders” able to determine what people are trying to say by analyzing their brain signals.
Mark Cuban says Facebook’s Libra is ‘dangerous’ - The Verge
Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban called Facebook’s launch of Libra and its foray into cryptocurrency a “big mistake” in a recent interview with CNBC. This week, he joined Vergeeditor-in-chief Nilay Patel to further discuss his views on Libra and why he regards the new venture as “dangerous.”
Patel and Cuban also discuss artificial intelligence, net neutrality, breaking up Big Tech, investment opportunities that Cuban’s excited about right now, and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast. Below is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.
Mark Cuban: I’m not against cryptocurrency at all. I’m not against the distributed nature of cryptocurrency. I think the idea that there’s no central control is kind of overblown because there are so many forks and there are so many changes and administrational issues that you know there’s always some external factor forcing control. But the problem I have with Facebook is that Facebook is in a unique position with over 2.2 billion worldwide users.
