Tag Archives: social network

‘Secret’ life of sharks: Study reveals their surprising social networks

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sharks have more complex social lives than previously known, as shown by a study finding that gray reef sharks in the Pacific Ocean cultivate surprising social networks with one another and develop bonds that can endure for years.

The research focused on the social behavior of 41 reef sharks around the Palmyra Atoll, about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) southwest of Hawaii, using acoustic transmitters to track them and camera tags to gain greater clarity into their interactions.

Far from being solitary creatures, the sharks formed social communities that remained rather stable over time, with some of the same individuals remaining together during the four years of the study.

The researchers documented a daily pattern, with sharks spending mornings together in groups of sometimes close to 20 individuals in the same part of the reef, dispersing throughout the day and into the night, and reconvening the next morning.

“Sharks are incredible animals and still quite misunderstood,” said Florida International University marine biologist Yannis Papastamatiou, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

“I like to talk about their ‘secret social lives’ not because they want it to be a secret, but because only recently have we developed the tools to start seeing and understanding their social lives,” Papastamatiou added. “Not all sharks are social and some are likely solitary.”

The reef shark is medium-sized, reaching about 6 feet (2 meters) long. Its sociality bore similarities in terms of stability over time to certain birds and mammals but differed in that it did not involve nesting, mating, making vocalizations or friendly interactions.

The researchers suspect the sharks hang out together because it may help ensure that the various individuals find prey.

“For some time we have known that sharks are capable of recognizing particular group mates and having social preferences,” said marine biologist and study co-author David Jacoby of the Institute of Zoology in London.

“Our study reveals for the first time that they are actually capable of maintaining social partners for multiple years. Further we offer a possible mechanism for such long-term social structure – namely that social groups likely operate as information centers from which individuals can follow one another to offshore feeding areas.”

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Ahead of U.S. election, Facebook gives users some control over how they see political ads

By Katie Paul

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc said on Thursday it was making some changes to its approach to political ads, including allowing users to turn off certain ad-targeting tools, but the updates stop far short of critics’ demands and what rival companies have pledged to do.

The world’s biggest social network has vowed to curb political manipulation of its platform, after failing to counter alleged Russian interference and the misuse of user data by defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica in 2016.

But ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, Facebook is struggling to quell criticism of its relatively hands-off ads policies. In particular it has come under fire after it exempted politicians’ ads from fact-checking standards applied to other content on its network.

Facebook said that in addition to rolling out a tool enabling individual users to choose to see fewer political and social issue ads on Facebook and its photo-sharing app Instagram, it will also make more ad audience data publicly available.

In contrast, Twitter Inc banned political ads in October, while Alphabet Inc’s Google said it would stop letting advertisers target election ads using data such as public voter records and general political affiliations.

Other online platforms like Spotify, Pinterest and TikTok have also issued bans.

In a blog post, Facebook’s director of product management Rob Leathern said the company considered imposing limits like Google’s, but decided against them as internal data indicated most ads run by U.S. presidential candidates are broadly targeted, at audiences larger than 250,000 people.

“We have based (our policies) on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all,” Leathern wrote.

The expanded ad audience data features will be rolled out in the first quarter of this year and Facebook plans to deploy the political ads control starting in the United States early this summer, eventually expanding this preference to more locations.

CUSTOM AUDIENCES

Another change will be to allow users to choose to stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s “Custom Audience” and that will apply to all types of advertising, not only political ads.

The “Custom Audiences” feature lets advertisers upload lists of personal data they maintain, like email addresses and phone numbers. Facebook then matches that information to user accounts and shows the advertiser’s content to those people.

However, Facebook will not give users a blanket option to turn off the feature, meaning they will have to opt out of seeing ads for each advertiser one by one, a spokesman told Reuters.

The change will also not affect ad targeting via Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool, which uses the same uploads of personal data to direct ads at people with similar characteristics to those on the lists, the spokesman said.

Leathern said in the post the company would make new information publicly available about the audience size of political ads in the company’s Ad Library, showing approximately how many people the advertisers aimed to reach.

The changes follow a New York Times report this week of an internal memo by senior Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth, who told employees the company had a duty not to tilt the scales against U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

Bosworth, a close confidant of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg who subsequently made his post public, wrote that he believed Facebook was responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, but not because of misinformation or Trump’s work with Cambridge Analytica.

Rather, he said, the Trump campaign used Facebook’s advertising tools most effectively.

(Reporting by Katie Paul; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Twitter tumbles on fear of conservative backlash

A 3D printed Twitter logo is seen in front of displayed stock graph in this illustration picture made in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, February 3, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Shares of Twitter Inc tumbled 6 percent on Thursday after reports that Fox News had not tweeted for three weeks sparked fears of a backlash by conservatives protesting a perceived liberal bias by the company.

Twenty-First Century Fox Inc’s Fox News has not tweeted to its 18.3 million followers since Nov. 8, an apparent boycott of the social network, Politico reported on Wednesday.

It stopped tweeting after activists used Twitter to post the home address of prominent news host Tucker Carlson, media news site Mediaite reported on Nov. 9. Demonstrators targeted Carlson’s home in Washington with a protest and shouted threats, he told the Washington Post.

Fox News and Twitter declined to comment.

Facebook and other social media networks are facing calls for increased regulation and criticism of their handling of user data and the role their platforms have played in a divisive U.S. political climate in recent years.

Still, analysts viewed Thursday’s stock drop as an over-reaction.

“I think the people who want to be alarmist will say this is the first step toward losing the conservatives, and that this could snowball. But at this point, I think that’s overly alarmist, and I don’t see it as a big deal. So I see this as a buying opportunity,” said FBN analyst Shebly Seyrafi, who has an “outperform” rating on Twitter’s stock.

Last month, Twitter posted quarterly results that far exceeded Wall Street’s estimates even after it purged millions of fake accounts used for disinformation and other abuses.

Conservatives in the past have complained about having their accounts unfairly closed by Twitter, and about alleged political bias in the California company’s rules.

Twitter this week reinstated the account of conservative commentator Jesse Kelly after U.S. Senator-elect Josh Hawley said that Congress should investigate the company after it closed Kelly’s account, and the account of Canadian feminist Megan Murphy.

The company said on Wednesday that it had suspended an account for impersonating Russian President Vladimir Putin.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)