Weekly Rewind: Our favorite stories from around the web

Photo Credit: The Economist
Photo Credit: The Economist

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to put my feet up! The pre-Thanksgiving work week has been quite busy making sure all business is taken care of before we leave to inhale turkey, laugh with family and definitely drink wine. But there will be no relaxing until we’ve talked about how social media platforms took over the headlines this week in our Weekly Rewind.

Tweet Out Bullying

Twitter is ramping up efforts to stop harassment on the platform by focusing on three areas of improvement. First, the “notifications” section will now let users “mute keywords, phrases and even entire conversations you don’t want to see notifications about.”

Second, the company tweaked its “hateful conduct policy” to make reporting someone who’s spreading vicious words related to “race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease,” a lot more accessible and easier to do. And last but not least, Twitter sped up reaction time to handle reports of bullying. We think it’s great Twitter is stepping up and taking a stand against the Internet trolls who live for propagating hate. We’ll see how effective their new plan is at reducing the amount of online bullying, but it’s a great start.

Facebook Can’t Catch a Break

Mark Zuckerberg tried hard to dismiss Facebook’s role in the Presidential election, but the social platform is still in hot water with some critics. A BuzzFeed News investigation reveals “fake clickbait headlines” received more attention than factual stories during campaign coverage. In fact, “during the last three months of the presidential campaign, of the top 20 fake-election related articles on Facebook, all but three were all anti-Clinton or pro-Trump.” These stories were shared, liked or commented on more than 8.7 million times!

After originally calling the idea that Facebook swayed the election “crazy,” we’ve seen Zuckerberg slowly change his tune. Facebook joined Google in announcing plans to prevent fake stories from going viral by “restricting advertising with websites that spread fake content.” We think it’s a good PR move for Facebook to be proactive about looking for ways to stop hoaxes. Zuckerberg is usually in the news for his philanthropic ways, but this would have been a totally different media narrative had he continued to downplay the influence of fake news. Especially since President Obama has been so vocal about how fake stories can weaken the political process.

Russia Again??

Yes, Russia again, but this time it’s not Donald Trump and President Putin making headlines. Russia’s communications regulator has ruled to block LinkedIn to protect Russian internet users’ data after they found the firm guilty of violating data laws. LinkedIn confirmed the block and part of their statement says the block, “denies access to the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their business. We remain interested in a meeting…” We can’t imagine not having access to LinkedIn connections for networking opportunities for our clients. We’ll be interested to see how this plays out.

And the Word of the Year Goes to….

On a slightly different note, Oxford Dictionaries has named “post-truth” as the “Word of the Year” for 2016. The word spawned from the Presidential election and is defined as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The fact that the truth is being regarded as mostly irrelevant is frightening, as is the fact that the term was used 2,000 percent more frequently between this year and last.

Why should PR people care? Because knowing all the ins and outs of the English language is what keeps us from getting fired.