"Facebook Decides Which Killings We’re Allowed to See" →

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Joseph Cox and Kason Koebler writing for Motherboard:

A video of the aftermath of a fatal shooting of a black man by a police officer was temporarily removed from Facebook. The company has said the removal was due to a “technical glitch.”

“We're very sorry that the video was inaccessible,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Telegraph. “It was down to a technical glitch and restored as soon as we were able to investigate.”

They go on to say:

The video has since been restored, but with a “Warning—Graphic Video,” disclaimer.

“Videos that contain graphic content can shock, offend and upset. Are you sure you want to see this?” the disclaimer continues.

Judging by the timestamps on tweets, the video was restored within around an hour of being removed.

Facebook did not respond to a series of questions about the apparent glitch, or if the video was flagged by a user or by Facebook itself.

This is problematic. Just last week, Facebook announced that they were going to change their news feed algorithms to favour content generated and uploaded by users rather than news sites like Upworthy and CNN. Here we have someone attempting to make sure the world sees the injustice she believes that her lover and her are facing and Facebook essentially silences her for a time.

Now it could be that of the millions of users who viewed the video, thousands or tens of thousands flagged the content as inappropriate. If that's the case, then they should just say so. 

Given the aforementioned algorithm change and the recent kerfuffle about the Trending News suffering from liberal editorial bias, Facebook is in jeopardy of losing the trust that it's re-gained over the last several years after multiple privacy issues. 

The bottom line is that while the social media giant is clearly a private company with its own processes, Facebook needs to come up with a clear set of guidelines for those within and without to work with. That would cease this confusion, as well as build and maintain trust.

MS Acquires LinkedIN for $26,000,000,000.00 →

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That's right, Microsoft ("MS") seems to have picked up $26 billion dollars.

Why? Well, aside from Cramer's musings about "cloud strategy" LinkedIN, a silicon valley based social network, focused on building and maintaining business relationships, and has a few key features that can help the Redmond technology giant:

  • Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIN has paying users rather than relying solely on advertisers.
  • A base of users which are constantly sharing information about what makes them money
  • An ungodly amount of data on businesses eager to share information on how they succeed
  • A human resources recruiting tool that allows them the inside track on talent like none-other.

It occurs to me that by using MS's Cloud services, mining LinkedIN data can lead MS to the inside track on innovative and even disruptive emerging companies. This would allow their strategy teams to identify opportunities for (1) lucrative partnerships and (2) promising investments. Despite the incredible cost of this acquisition,** such actions can lead MS to some very lucrative VC and strategic partnership concerns in the future, and that's very, very exciting. 

MS has had some mixed success with recent, large acquisitions. While Skype (2011 for $8.5 billion) seems to be doing fine, Nokia (2013 for $7.2 billion) turned into a disaster, as did their earlier attempt at mobile, Danger (2008 for $1/2 billion). In the online ad services game, which LinkedIN ties to, MS has had pretty poor success. Their earlier push for a presence in this market took the form of a 2007, $6.3 billion acquisition of aQuantive, the parent company of digital ad agency Razorfish owned by Publicis Group and Atlas Solutions, an adserver now owned by Facebook. MS wasn't able to make the subsidiary work and took a $6.2 billion write down of the acquisition in 2007 before selling the pieces off to the above-mentioned companies.

The LinkedIN acquisition also allows something else-- an ability for MS to expand it's deterministic unique identifiers of online activity. While LinkedIN will remain independent for now, MS will certainly add the user data to its existing Microsoft Account user interaction data and perhaps eventually combine the two, following users from recreational activities like gaming on Xbox and home video streaming, to their workplace activities like using LinkedIN and MS office. This means less tracking by less accurate, probalistic tracking identifiers like browser cookies, wifi netowrks, IP address tracking.

We'll be watching this closely.

**looks like $2+ billion over the current LinkedIN market cap of $24+ billion.