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• Rates of testing were 45 percent higher in intervention communities than control communities, especially among men and young people. 

If you’re on Twitter, you know that users there have some pretty strong opinions on what’s currently going on in the world. But a new study from Pew calls into question the reliability of Twitter as a true gauge for public sentiment.

In the study, Pew looked at eight different major news events over the past year. They compared each event in terms of positive and negative opinions – on one side stemming from public opinion polls and on the other side Twitter reaction. What they found was that most of the time, the sentiment expressed by Twitter users didn’t align with the sentiment expressed by Americans in national polls.

Take for instance the times in which Twitter reaction was much more “liberal” than public opinion polls showed. When President Obama was reelected, 52% of those asked in public opinion polls were “happy” about it, as opposed to 45% that were “unhappy.” But on Twitter, his reelection generated 77% positive feedback.

And in February 2012, when the California gay-marriage ban was deemed unconstitutional, only 8% of Twitter users had a negative reaction to it. Public opinion polls showed that 44% did.

Twitter doesn’t always lean more liberal, however. Take for instance Obama’s recent inaugural speech. Although 48% of the public opinion poll respondents reacted positively toward it, only 13% of Twitter users did.

In only two of the eight cases studied did public opinion match well with Twitter sentiment.

But in general, Twitter users tend to lean more Democratic and younger.

Twitter users are not representative of the public. Most notably, Twitter users are considerably younger than the general public and more likely to be Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party. In the 2012 news consumption survey, half (50%) of adults who said they posted news on Twitter were younger than 30, compared with 23% of all adults. And 57% of those who posted news on Twitter were either Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 46% of the general public.

One final thought from Pew:

“At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative. Often it is the overall negativity that stands out.”

So we can’t always count on Twitter to accurately depict the views of all Americans. But one thing we can count on is that, more often than not, Twitter users are going to give you the cynical side of things.

Continue reading…

It appears that the Earth may be attempting to swallow Tampa Bay, Florida.

Less than one week after a sinkhole reported to be 30 feet across pulled a man named Jeffrey Bush to his death, Reuters is reporting that a second sinkhole has appeared in the Tampa area. The new sinkhole opened up underneath a fence and no injuries have been reported. It is only around 5 feet deep and 12 feet wide, but it still has residents concerned for their lives and property.

According to the Reuters report, Tampa officials have stated that this new sinkhole is unrelated to last week’s deadly one.

The sinkhole that caused the death last week opened up underneath Bush’s bedroom, swallowing Bush and his bedroom furniture. That hole was 60 feet deep and authorities have stated they do not expect to be able to recover Bush’s body. The house in which the sinkhole appeared has been demolished, and residents near the house have been evacuated as a precaution.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection states that limestone in the state is porous and vulnerable to acidic water. As the water dissolves the limestone, caverns form, which can then collapse to form a sinkhole.

Imagine a squid so big that, when sprawled out, it is the size of a two-story house. Edith Widder has now seen this enormous ocean creature, once the stuff of nautical legend, six times.

Edith Widder: How we found the giant squidIn today’s talk, Widder shares how we now have filmed proof of the giant squid’s existence, thanks to a mission conducted by herself, Tsunemi Kubodera and Steve O’Shea and financed by the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation, NHK. While many previous missions failed to capture evidence of the giant squid, Widder and her fellow scientists used novel approaches — a camera platform that moves silently through the ocean, a bioluminescent electronic jellyfish to attract large sea creatures and a submersible able to take high definition footage from afar — to give us a glimpse of this mythical creature. In fact, they filmed it in action multiple times.

“How could something so big live in our ocean and remain unfilmed until now?” asks Widder on the TED2013 stage. “We’ve only explored about 5% of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there — fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways we can’t even imagine. Yet, we’ve spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we’ve spent on space exploration.“

To see the giant squid for yourself, and to watch footage of the crew as they caught their first glimpses of it, watch this talk — a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Discovery Channel documentary, Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real. And here, more talks on incredible oceanic creatures:

• Mike deGruy: Hooked by an octopus
• Tierney Thys swims with the giant sunfish
• Edith Widder: The weird, wonderful world of bioluminscence
• David Gallo: Underwater astonishments
• Brian Skerry reveals ocean’s glory — and horror
• Jim Toomey: Learning from Sherman the shark
• Margaret Wertheim: the beautiful math of coral
• Edith Widder: Glowing life in an underwater world

Ever since Facebook added voice messages as part of their Messenger service, we knew that the next eventual step would be voice calling or VoIP. They already start VoIP through Messenger for iOS users in the U.S., but nothing was available for Android users until now. The latest Android update added it, but only for our friends up north in Canada. Canadian users can now make calls over WiFi or their mobile data connection to other Facebook friends in Canada or even those in the U.S. provided they are on iOS. They can also start and name group conversations.

At some point in the future we will probably only need a data plan from our mobile providers and Facebook is making it that much closer. Utilizing VoIP on our mobile phones makes sense, but it probably won’t take off until the major carriers stop forcing us to have calling plans.

source: ca.ibtimes

Come comment on this article: Canadian users get voice calling via Facebook Messenger for Android

On February 4, 2012, ocean filmmaker and educator Mike deGruy was killed in a helicopter crash while on assignment in Australia, along with pilot and filmmaker Andrew Wright. DeGruy (pronounced “degree”) was an Emmy-winning science documentarian and a mainstay of Shark Week; he also worked on James Cameron documentaries about the Titanic and Bismarck and life in the deepest oceans. He swam and scuba-dived in oceans around the world … survived a shark attack himself … and brought back footage of unseen underwater worlds that will continue to amaze and educate for as long as there are curious girls and boys.

Edith Widder: How we found the giant squidFascinated by oceanic cephalopods (like octopus and squid), deGruy and his team were the first to film two rarely seen creatures — the nautilus and the vampire squid — in their home oceans. So it’s only fitting that when he met Edith Widder aboard the Mission Blue Voyage in 2010, their talk quickly turned to squids. As Widder details in her new TED Talk, deGruy was the reason she found herself on a Japanese expedition to waters south of Tokyo, where she helped film the giant squid for the first time. She has dedicated this talk to him.

Below, watch Mike deGruy’s TED Talk from Mission Blue, as well as two more TEDx talks from this wonderful storyteller.

Mike deGruy: Hooked by an octopus
In this talk from Mission Blue, deGruy tells the moving story of his love for filming the oceans.

Mike deGruy: Lost in the Crowd: A Simple Biology Problem
In 2010, Mike spoke about his passion for the planet in a great talk from TEDxAmericanRiviera that stemmed from his work in the Gulf after the oil blowout.

Mike deGruy: The Evolution of a Spark
In this six-minute film from TEDxAmericanRiviera, meet 10 passionate young people from Santa Barbara who show us how they live big and go after their dreams. They inspire their peers, and even our adult generation, to take pause, wonder, remain curious and playful, and feel that contagious spark that comes from unbridled youth

A small update to iBooks on Tuesday has some pretty big implications for Apple customers in Japan: with iBooks 3.1 they can now purchase ebooks rather than just download free or public domain content.

The update notes for 3.1 say, “The iBookstore in Japan now has hundreds of thousands of books available for purchase, including fiction, manga, light novels and more.” In addition, the update says there are reading improvements for “a number of Asian languages,” though the specific languages are not specified.

The iBooks update is out now and can be downloaded via the App Store.

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Here are two certainties about big data. One is that companies need good data scientists. The other is that identifying good data scientists ain’t easy. That’s why Kaggle, the data science competition platform, is launching Kaggle Connect to link proven data science performers with companies willing to pay for their expertise.

Everyone calls himself a data scientist now — and there’s a reason for that. The title “gets you 40 percent more money,” says Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom. ”The problem is that it’s hard to know how good someone really is until six months down the road when you realize they haven’t done anything.”

His argument is that folks who have done well in Kaggle competitions over the past two years — insurance actuaries, mathematicians, students, chemists — have proven they have what it takes.

And Kaggle bona fides are becoming currency. This job posting for a New York Times data scientist lists participation in a Kaggle competition as a key criterion.

Connecting the right data scientists with the right problems

With Kaggle Connect, the company is making its two top tiers of competitors — it’s an invitation-only list — available to companies on an individual basis. “If Pfizer comes to us with a problem that is maybe not well specified enough and needs more iteration than a competition would allow, we can provide a data scientist that suits that problem,” Goldbloom said.

The customer pays a subscription cost of somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000 per month to gain access to appropriate data science resources. Kaggle gets a cut of that money and the data scientist gets the rest — although Kaggle is not breaking out the percentages.

In the interactive chart below, click on the map to bring up the name, picture and profile of the Kaggle Connect member.

What Kaggle brings to the table is a roster of people who have performed well in its competitions. What the companies provide is a juicy problem to solve and data to use in that quest. In some ways this is an extension of what Kaggle has already done with EMC’s Greenplum division, although that project required the use of Greenplum’s Chorus toolset.

The top two of eight total tiers of 80,000 contestants will initially serve as the invitation-only talent pool for Kaggle Connect. That’s about 1,500 Kagglers (if that’s a word). Kaggle began running data science competitions in early 2012 and started publishing its leaderboard of top big data problem solvers last September.

We’ll see how this all proves out, but if Kaggle success is really a predictor of big data chops writ large, expect to see a lot more Kaggle boasts on resumes going forward.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Dirk Ercken.

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When I speak to audiences of sales professionals and ask, “How many of you sell value versus price?” everyone raises their hand. But my next question “So how do you do that?” is frequently followed by an uncomfortable silence. Many consider themselves to be value sellers but few are able to articulate what that really means.

In the simple economics 101 definition, value equals benefits minus cost: V=B-C. If you follow the logic of that equation, then, selling value means creating some benefit through the sales process beyond that provided by the product or service itself. My former boss and sales guru Neil Rackham has a simple test for this: He asks, “Would your customer write you a check for the sales call?” That is, did your salespeople do something on the call valuable enough for your customers to pay you for?

If they didn’t, the only way you can profit from your sales operation is by reducing costs. That’s why all my efforts to make sales teams more effective have focused on increasing not just the value of the offering but the value of the sales call itself. To do that I encourage them to move down the continuum from transactional to consultative relationships. Here’s how:

Help clients see issues they hadn’t considered. The best salespeople I’ve worked with do an extraordinary job of this. And they don’t do it simply by lecturing the client about the problems they see. They do it through a process of mutual diagnosis. In these instances, the seller leads a dialogue with the client about her business, offering diagnoses as the conversation progresses.

Help clients examine issues they thought were benign, but aren’t. When I interview clients about their sales relationships, they frequently tell me that they greatly value the ability of their reps to help them make a case for change. They do that by helping clients see the effect of a problem on the organization. A seller may help a client to see that a morale problem, for instance, which right now is only causing modest employee turnover, is having a tremendously negative impact on recruitment and productivity that will eventually become highly problematic. Again, this is not done through lecturing, but rather through the course of conversations in which seller and buyer explore the impact of a given situation together to determine the implications for the business.

Help clients see opportunities they’d missed. Sales-training programs rightly focus on finding clients’ “pain points.” But great salespeople also know there’s value in pointing out successes waiting to be exploited. Surely, creating value in the sales process is as much about raising the bar as it is about solving problems. In fact, untapped opportunity may be even more important as organizations seek to grow in this perpetually tough economic environment. Jointly discovering such opportunities through the course of back-and-forth conversation makes it less likely that a client will react defensively to something he perhaps should have already known and more likely that he will embrace both the opportunities — and the messenger that helped to uncover them.

Help clients address problems with solutions they hadn’t considered. Of course, at some point your, products and services have to come into the picture. When they do, the best sellers position them, not as a series of features and benefits, but as solutions that address the expressed needs of the client. Positioning products and services as a solution is not a new idea by any stretch, but the key to creating value is to do so in a way that the client has not considered. I bought a new air-conditioning system last year. I hadn’t considered upgrading the heat pump in my system. But with the help of the representative, I came to realize that the new system wouldn’t lower my winter heating bills without one. The power of the a-ha moment here can’t be understated when the client says, “I hadn’t thought about it that way!” Few clients will know everything your offering can do or all its potential applications, so finding a way to uniquely address their expressed need is a powerful thing indeed.

Help clients connect with additional support resources. As the old saying goes, “When you sell hammers, every problem looks like a nail.” But you can’t win ’em all; not every client will actually be a good match with what you’re offering right now. Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t create additional value for them. Perhaps you can provide connections to others in your organization that could help a client think through a complex issue, or make referrals to outsiders who can get her what she truly needs. You’ll still get the credit for helping the client — and this can help both of you over time.

At the end of the day, selling is about improving the client’s condition with your organization’s products and services. The sales professionals who understand how to do that — who help buyers find real value through the selling process using these methods — sell more and command a premium for their offerings.

After years of trying to crack the mobile market there are still relatively few smartphones with the “Intel Inside” branding. Last year was a bit of a breakthrough, however, as Intel silicon powered the Motorola Razr i handset. Yet few other handset makers have followed suit, leaving Intel with few places to put a mobile foothold. The situation could be changing.

On Tuesday, Chinese handset maker ZTE announced a strategic collaboration with Intel on the chipmaker’s latest Atom processor. The Intel Atom Z2580, announced at last month’s Mobile World Congress event, is the focus of the strategy, adding a few small but important improvements over the current Atom chip used in ZTE’s Grand X IN handset last year. More important is the fact that ZTE is a fast growing handset maker, currently the No. 4 seller of mobile phones in the world.

That data point alone is good news for Intel because it’s not likely the company will get its chips inside devices made by Samsung, Apple, Nokia — although that would be an interesting WinTel mobile play — or many of the other household name mobile device makers. Even better for Intel is ZTE’s base of China: The handset maker’s home country is expected to see big growth in smartphone sales thanks to its large population, improving mobile broadband networks and current lack of smartphone penetration compared to the U.S. and Europe.

As a result, depending on how many smartphones come from this agreement, Intel has a key hardware partner in an important mobile market. This new Atom chip is just a slight refresh of the prior one, but does show promise: a second processing core is housed in the Z2580 and the graphics capabilities are increased; an area where ARM solutions still have an advantage. Intel has switched the GPU to a PowerVR SGX 544MP2 at 533 MHz from the older PowerVR SGX 540 running at 400 MHz, notes AnandTech.

Note that ZTE isn’t going with an all-Intel strategy for its smartphones. Last month, Nvidia announced that its first big partner that will use the Tegra 4 chip will be ZTE. Even so, Intel getting any kind of traction in the mobile market is good for the company, which has missed out on most of the mobile revolution to date.

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“Could you make me nachos? / Well, you’re in a bad mood / I got cramps.”

And with that little back and forth begins the Amazing Spider-Man saga you didn’t see in theaters.

[BadLipReading]

“Some molecules are painted with a no export sign. Other molecules are painted with the OK to export sign, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some molecules are OK and some aren’t.”

– …

Continue reading…

Sci-fi bars usually have a robot bartender, and for good reason. The algorithmic mixtures of the robot ensure that each drink is always perfect. Now two engineers is making the robot bartender a reality, sans the ability to empathize with your drunken whining.

Meet Bartendro, a “cocktail dispensing robot” from the folks at Party Robotics. The machine is being billed as the ultimate drink maker as it can easily and quickly make any drink you can think of. It’s extremely portable and easily programmable so you can serve any kind of drink at any party.

Bartendro will become a reality if it’s able to raise $135,000 on Kickstarter in the next 26 days. The project already has 124 backers pledging $37,008, but it’s gonna need a lot more support before our robotic alcohol overlords become a reality.

So, how much is this thing going to cost? The base Bartendro, called the Shotbot, comes with a single dispenser and costs $249. Things get a bit more expensive as you move to more custom built dispensers. The Bartendro 3 will cost $499, the Bartendro 7 costs $1,199 and the Bartendro 15 goes for $2,499.

The most exciting part about this project, however, is Party Robotics plans to build a drink database. The team is collecting recipes from all over the world so that Bartendro can perfectly create any drink. It would be a huge help for those of us who are terrible at following drink recipes. I always unwittingly add too much alcohol, thus overpowering any semblance of sweetness found in the drink. The $499 asking price might be worth it if it means I never have to waste any more alcohol on botched recipe experiments.

[h/t: CNET]

LED chip and parts maker Cree has launched a line of low cost LED bulbs that will be sold at Home Depot, and one even retails for under $10. Some of the cheapest LED bulbs out there sell for $20, and Cree calls its new ultra cheap LED line “the biggest thing since the light bulb” (and trade-marked that phrase, too).

Cree makes the bulk of its revenues off of selling LED chips and components to other LED bulb and lighting makers. The company is profitable and doing well.

On Tuesday Cree also announced a better-than-expected earnings, raising its guidance for its fiscal third quarter, and reported better than expected profit and revenue for the current quarter. Cree earned $20.4 million on revenue of $346.3 million for the most recent quarter. Along with those strong earnings Cree saw its shares jump 12.5 percent in morning trading (as much as 19 percent earlier this morning).

Cree is selling three new LED bulbs: 1). a 40-watt, warm white replacement for $9.97, 2). a 60-watt, warm white replacement for $12.97, and 3). a 60-watt day light for $13.97. Cree says the bulbs save 84 percent of the energy that would be used by comparable incandescent bulbs, last 25 times longer, and come with a 10-year warranty.

As we explained in our research report for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), the LED market has hit a turning point, particularly for commercial and industrial building owners who are installing LEDs because it makes financial sense. Check out our report on LEDs (digest here), written by Ucilia Wang, and here’s our podcast discussion about the report.

It’s been a harder sell to get consumers to buy LEDs, but with new cheap products like this line from Crees that will slowly change. Still, consumers expect super cheap bulbs — compact fluorescents can sell for a buck or two, and incandescents for well under a $1.

Other companies that sell low cost consumer LEDs include GE (which bought LED startup Albeo last year), Philips and Lemnis Lighting, which introduced a bulb last year for under $5. Worldwide sales of LEDs rose 2.1 percent to $13.7 billion in 2012 from $11.3 billion in 2011, and will grow to $16.4 billion by 2017, according to Strategies Unlimited.

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In 1984 there was the Ferrari 288 GTO. Housing a mid-engine twin-turbo V8 that produced 400 hp and 366 lb·ft of torque, it was one of the first, truly modern Ferrari’s. In 1987 came the F40, a car that some consider to be one of the greatest cars ever build and the last pure Ferrari. It used a derivative of the engine used in the 288 GTO, and made 478 hp and 425 lb·ft of torque. The F50 debuted in 1996, and with a naturally aspirated 4.7-liter V12, power was bumped to 513 hp and 347 lb·ft of torque. It was also capable of taking the car to a top speed of 194 mph. In 2002 the Ferrari Enzo tore into the motoring press. It looked like nothing else on the road and like the F50 before it, utilized a V12 making 651 hp and 485 lb·ft of torque.

It’s now 2013 and Ferrari has just pulled the curtain back on its newest creation, the LaFerrari. It utilizes a HY-KERS system and a carbon-fibre chassis and is stunning from just about every angle. Click through to check out Ferrari’s newest creation.

Source: FerrariWorld.com

E! News is reporting that Brody Jenner, son of olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, will be joining the cast of the reality show Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Jenner is the stepbrother of the Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé Kardashian and the half-brother of Kendall and Kylie Jenner. Jenner is most known for starring on reality shows and for dating singer Avril Lavigne. Lavigne and split in January 2012.

Jenner produced and starred in the show The Princes of Malibu and also made appearances in the MTV reality show The Hills. He will appear in the Eighth season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which is scheduled to begin sometime in June.

In May of 2012, Facebook unveiled a brand new feature for page owners. It was called “Promoted Posts,” and it allowed admins to pay a small to medium fee (depending on the follower base) in order to hoist their posts to a more prominent placement in users’ news feeds. Basically, it allowed page owners to make sure their most important posts were seen by more people, and provided a great revenue opportunity for Facebook.

A few months later, Facebook extended the Promoted Posts functionality to individual users. By October, anyone with an account could pay to promote their witty status, cool new article, or cute new baby photo.

Ok, cool. So far so good. You may think that the entire Promoted Posts concept is wacky, but hey, to each his own. As a page owner, you could simply choose not to participate in Promoted Posts and go about your business as usual – simply posting away.

As a page owner, have you seen your average engagement decrease since the launch of Promoted Posts? Have you used Promoted Posts? Let us know in the comments.

Of course, that zen-like mentality could quickly disappear if, let’s say, Facebook was rigging the game. And that’s exactly what some page owners began accusing Facebook of late last year: one giant bait-and-switch.

The “Bait-and-Switch”

Reports emerged that Facebook was deliberately decreasing the reach of regular, non-promoted posts in order to force people into paying for the Promoted Post product. In fact, that was the whole point of unveiling the feature – to cast un-promoted posts into oblivion so that people would see such a small return (likes, comments, and shares) that they would have no choice but to pay to promote.

Most of the claims hinged on the simple observation by the accusers that posts published on their Facebook pages were not driving the traffic that they used to – which naturally meant that not as many people were seeing the posts in their news feeds. How could my likes be increasing, but my traffic from Facebook be decreasing?

The common conclusion from people like Richard Metzger at Dangerous Times and even popular Facebook celebrities like George Takei (who hopped on the bandwagon) was that Facebook was turning down the volume on their regular posts.

Although the accusation gained plenty of steam inside the tech media circles, Facebook maintained its innocence in the matter. The company said, point blank, that they did not decrease the visibility of page posts in order to force people into buying Promoted Posts.

And there was some pretty compelling evidence to support Facebook’s innocence. Facebook has admitted that only around 16% or so of a page’s followers even see their posts in the news feed. It’s always been like this. Facebook has never been able to show 100% of followers 100% of posts from pages and people they subscribe to. There’s simply too much competition for real estate in the news feed. As users begin to friend more and more people and like more and more pages, their overall engagement with each individual person and page is going naturally decrease.

Josh Constine over at TechCrunch suggested that a move that Facebook made to fight spam had actually been one of the root causes of the so-called “visibility decreases” that many page owners were reporting.

“We made a relatively large ranking change in September that was designed to reduce spam complaints from users. We used [spam] reports at an aggregate level to find Pages or apps generating a lot of reports [and decrease their reach]. We’ve also added personalized attempts to reduce presence of posts you’re likely to complain about,” said Facebook.

In short, the less engaging your posts were, the less likely they were to show up in your followers’ news feeds.

And the push to control spammy posts is simply one news feed algorithm tweak that Facebook made – and they make a bunch, all the time. Facebook is constantly changing the way its algorithms decide what shows up in whose news feed. The bottom line, according to those who believed Facebook, was that sure, your post reach could be fluctuating (or even simply decreasing), but it’s not because Facebook is pulling a bait-and-switch with Promoted Posts.

Still, page owners continued to complain that for them, personally, they were seeing less return from their posts. Sure, you can throw graphs and excuses at the issue, but you can’t explain that the decrease in visibility coincided with the dawn of Promoted Posts. Although Facebook has been adamant that they are not pulling this “bait-and-switch,” many page owners and public figures with many subscribers have remained unconvinced.

New Accusations

Fast forward to a couple of days ago and to an article by Nick Bilton in the the New York Times’ “Bits” tech blog. It begins, “something is puzzling on Facebook.”

What it asserts is the same argument that we discussed above: Facebook is screwing you. Hard.

His story picks up soon after Facebook first allowed users to “subscribe” to public figures back in 2011. At that point, he had about 25,000 subscribers and his average article post on Facebook would receive a few hundred likes and at least a few dozen shares (535 likes and 53 shares or 323 likes and 88 shares, numbers like that).

Today, he has over 400,000 subscribers. If you think that means the number of likes and shares per post will have increased 16-fold, you’re wrong.

“From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred,” says Bilton.

So, he tested out a Promoted Post. After paying $7 to get one of his article posts promoted by Facebook, he says that he saw a 1,000% increase in interaction in a few hours.

“It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for,” he concludes.

Fact Check

Although Facebook has been denying this claim for months and months, this week was the first time that they published a lengthy “fact check” post on the topic.

In it, Facebook unequivocally states that it’s a false allegation.

“There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true.”

Facebook says that in reality, engagement has increased among people who allow subscribers – 34%, in fact. That means likes, comments, and shares.

“News Feed shows the most relevant stories from your friends, people you follow and Pages you are connected to. In fact, the News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm in that we don’t replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones,” says Facebook.

The “fact check” post seems to stem directly from and come as a pointed rebuttal to Bilton’s NYT article. Twice, Facebook makes a point to say that you can’t just compare anecdotal evidence from separate posts that occurred years apart.

The argument here is based on a few anecdotes of one post from one year to a totally different post from another year.This is an apples-to-oranges comparison; you can’t compare engagement rates on two different posts year over year.

For early adopters of Follow, we do see instances where their follower numbers have gone up but their engagement has gone down from a year ago. When we first launched Follow, the press coverage combined with our marketing efforts drove large adoption. A lot of users started following public figures who had turned on Follow. Over time, some of those users engaged less with those figures, and so we started showing fewer stories from those figures to users who didn’t engage as much with their stories. The News Feed changes we made in the fall to focus on higher quality stories may have also decreased the distribution for less engaging stories from public figures.

Read: that aforementioned spam adjustment. Facebook is saying that yes, we adjust the news feed algorithm to show users more relevant posts, but we are in no way decreasing organic reach to force our Promoted Posts product on people.

All this being said, Facebook is taking it head on. For many Facebook users, trust in Big Blue isn’t a common emotion. For page owners and popular figures who have seen their engagement decline, it may be hard to swallow that there’s not something malicious going on here.

Do you believe Facebook when they say that they are not decreasing visibility of non-promoted posts in order to generate revenue from Promoted Posts? Let us know in the comments.