Silver Beacon Spotlight #199

10 Second Takeaway: Facebook implements advertiser education and requires that advertisers affirm housing and other ads are non-discriminatory. Bing, meanwhile, reports on their 2016 efforts to clean up bad advertising. We also have great news from Twitter about their donate button, and we look at how to spot data chart distortions and other tricks in Digital Citizen.

Spotlight on Advertising

Following a similar announcement from Google two weeks ago, Bing this week announced that it had conducted a comprehensive advertising cleanup effort during 2016. The company rejected 130 million ads and banned 175,000 advertisers from using its services. Google reported that it had rejected 1.7 billion ads during 2016. The search companies are finding that criminals are using ads for fraud, scams, and to sell counterfeit goods.

Facebook announced this week that it has taken steps to require advertiser education and other measures that would assure that housing, employment, and other ads do not discriminate by excluding users by race. The ability to do so in Facebook ads was written about by ProPublica.com last October. Advertisers will now have to affirm that they have reviewed the appropriate information about discriminatory advertising and that their ad complies with all laws.

Read more: Bing’s ad report, Google’s ad report, Facebook announcement.

Our Take: We applaud the Facebook actions even though it is surprising that they took more than three months to implement this change. Advertisers who discriminate are the problems, not Facebook, but the social media company should have had stronger measures in place and reacted faster.

Google and Bing tout their automated systems which can sometimes yield a false positive about an ad’s content. But with 1 million ads on Bing attempting to sell counterfeit goods and and another 17 million ads that were placed for tech support scams, we don’t mind the occasional false positive.

Spotlight on Social Media

New data released by Statista shows that people overwhelmingly choose Facebook’s Messenger and the company’s other apps over similar offerings from other companies. The number of monthly average users for Facebook’s two messaging apps has grown by 500 million users in just two years.

During that same time, Instagram’s monthly users grew 300 million, Snapchat’s grew 87 million, and Twitter grew only 31 million.

Twitter also is confirming that it is ending its ecommerce program that allowed advertisers to include a “Buy” button in tweets. Great news for our nonprofit clients: the donate button will still be supported!

Read more: Statista data and Twitter coverage by TechCrunch

Our Take: Pundits wondered if the president’s use of Twitter would save the dying network, but nothing seems to resuscitate Twitter. We’re happy about the donation buttons staying, but until Google figures out social, the entire social media and messaging landscape for anyone over 30 years old belongs to Facebook. 

Digital Citizen: How Data Charts Can Lie

We are huge fans of Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog. (Ed note–George is. Data blogs aren’t for everyone)

Yau published a series of charts this week that showed how data visualizations can be used to misrepresent or present biased information. This is an accessible article for everyone. There are lots of friendly diagrams and comments that show how the graphs supporting the data can be misused–deliberately or by accident.

Read How to Spot Visualization Lies by clicking this link or their logo above.

This week’s news includes some eye-raising social media financials & links to new tools to help your org.

10 Second Takeaway: Half of all searches will be by voice or image within four years according to tech guru Mary Meeker. But there is a growing trend for alternative search sites that can’t be ignored either. Search is still Google’s game, but Google alone is no longer the only path to search prominence or profit.

Spotlight on Google Competitors

Google’s continuing dominance in search is based in part on the phones people carry with them even though people often ask about search competitors. The desktop search market continues to attract competitors, but no company is remotely close to Google’s dominance in mobile search. More than 90% of all searches on mobile devices happen on Google properties. But new entrants are again threatening the desktop market since Yahoo’s collapse.

DuckDuckGo prides itself on offering anonymous searches and claims to have served four billion searches in 2016. That’s a big number, but still only a little more than Google’s daily output. Still, more than 10 million searches a day starts creating an interesting site.

Privacy is also the benefit touted by French search engine Qwant. The company is hoping its mix of search and curated material plus being embedded in some European versions of the Firefox browser will help it score against Google. Qwant says that 21 million people in 30 countries are using the service and that search results are the same for everyone worldwide.

Our Take: Meeker’s point is well made. If there will be a significant change in search, the time is likely to be around a shift in devices. No one has made a serious play for Google’s mobile market share. Meanwhile, the search giant’s trust numbers are way up. Nearly half of Gen Y respondents would consider banking with either Google or Amazon according to a recent Accenture study. (opens PDF)

Warning issued about Meitu Photo Filter App

Chinese smartphone company Meitu is a privacy nightmare according to some well-respected industry watchers. The company’s photo filter app was popular in China, but only averaged a few hundred downloads in the US daily according to ReCode. That changed this week when the app began to be downloaded 100,000 times per day in America.

Some experts say that the phone collects personal information as well as GPS, calendar, and other data. 

Our Take: Plenty of apps get too much information already. Until the industry vets this newly popular app, it’s probably best to use something more established. Android Authority published this list several weeks ago. iPhone users can consult this list at Cult of Mac.