Facebook leads the way in closing down InfoWars, Facebook takes on Tinder, Instagram stories turned two! And You can no longer automatically post your tweets to Facebook

InfoWars is no more

This week, YouTube, Facebook and Apple permanently deleted Alex Jones’ channels destroying his InfoWars fake news and conspiracy theory empire. His accounts have been banned due to their repeat violations to the platforms policies on hateful and violent content. We would feel slightly bad for him; however, four of his videos last month violated the platforms policies relating to hate speech and child endangerment. And after receiving these strikes and warnings, it seems Alex didn’t learn anything.

Facebook has recently taken down the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Facebook Page, the InfoWars Page, and the InfoWars Nightly News, as they ‘repeatedly’ posted content violating Facebook’s hate speech and violent content. Facebook were cautious not to be associated with censorship, but InfoWars continuously broke the rules and breached the platform policies. A Facebook spokesperson explained in a blog post:

“While much of the discussion around InfoWars has been related to false news, […] none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this.”

The only account still standing after the social media cull is the InfoWars twitter account. Twitter has said that it does not plan to remove the account as it is not breaking any of their rules, but we will see how long that lasts!

Facebook takes on Tinder

Facebook has announced that it will not be launching its new dating feature as a standalone app, but rather as an in-app feature. But, it will only be available to those 18 years old and above in the US.

Tinder and all of the other dating apps can stop sweating now! The latest reports show that Facebook is launching their dating feature built into the main app. Now, obviously, Facebook dating will not be automatically activated, but once you have chosen to activate it, other users with the feature activated will be able to see you. You can also choose whether your dating profile can be seen by your friends, or friends of friends, however the profile will not be publically accessible.

And more importantly, Facebook has promised that activity from the dating feature will not be shared on your timeline!

When two people express an interest in one another, they will be able to speak to each other over Facebook messenger or WhatsApp. Facebook is also reportedly considering implementing a limit on how many people users can express interest in to avoid spamming, something similar to Tinder. However, Facebook does not intent on creating paid subscriptions for this feature, something that Tinder has introduced with great success.

Instagram Stories turned two!

It seems like it was just yesterday that Instagram Stories were released and no one seemed that interested! Well, now they’re THE big thing.

Today, Stories boasts 400 million users daily; from boomerangs to lip sync videos, it is the place for users to express themselves. But this is not all, it has also spread to other platforms – Facebook, Google and even Airbnb have got similar features.

Instagram Stories have really evolved a lot over these past two years. Instagram has worked hard to bring users new and exciting features to separate it from being just a Snapchat copy. Music stickers, Poll stickers, Emoji sliders, Question stickers and even shopping are some of the features that Instagram has worked to make available for their users. Now if you ask us, that is a lot of new features in such a short time, and it has definitely taken the feature away from being a second-hand Snapchat.

You can no longer automatically post your tweets to Facebook

Facebook has updated its API, and this means that users can no longer publish tweets and retweets on its platform automatically.

So, if you’re one of the few who has their tweets set up to be posted on Facebook then your luck has run out. Facebook has announced that it has deprecated its Publish actions permissions from its API, effectively shutting down auto-posting from Twitter and around 60,000 other apps.

Twitter’s support team has also announced that the feature is no longer available on its platform. Facebook confirmed the reason was its decision to deprecate the Publish actions permission feature, effective from August 1. Anyone wanting to post their content automatically to Facebook will now have to use Facebook’s Share dialogs that are available on iOS, Android, and the web.

Overall this shouldn’t make a huge difference to the experienced user, but those who think that their tweets are so important that Facebook needs to be blessed with them too are going to have to share them manually!