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Facebook compensates its users while Twitter morphs into Facebook - the week in social

By Iona St Joseph

August 29, 2013 | 4 min read

A Facebook and Twitter themed column for you this week social media fans! Enjoy.

Twitter's new-look conversations

Facebook compensates

Over 600,000 Facebook users are to be compensated after their personal details appeared in ads on the site without their permission.

Roughly 150 millions Facebook members were used in the sponsored ads, but only those who replied to an email from the site earlier in the year will be compensated.

It doesn't look like Zuckerberg and co. are going to be out of pocket though, as the payout is a total sum of £9.65 each. Maybe don't give up on the Euromillions just yet...

Twitter changes

Twitter has been rolling out a number of new changes, which apparently make it easier to follow conversations.

Many people have noted that conversations will now be shown together, rather than in a strictly reverse chronological order, which will be more like Facebook's status comments feature.

Apparently the easier-to-follow conversations may encourage users to stay longer on the site, and allow them to get involved with conversations they might have previously missed.

It will be interesting to see how the changes work, and whether it does make Twitter more like Facebook's news feed (fingers crossed it doesn't).

Government requests

A new report has revealed that, in the first six months of this year, governments from around the world requested information about over 30,000 Facebook users.

Released on Tuesday for the first time, Facebook's Global Government Requests Report offered details about requests from 74 countries.

Rather creepily, a break-down of why the requests weren't made, instead the data was just divided by country. The US were way ahead with between 20,000-21,000 users/accounts requested, compared to just 2,337 from the UK.

We can now expect a report of this nature from Facebook every six months, and whilst it's purpose is clearly positive on the one hand, it's hard to see that it will help to wage the war against privacy.

The obvious conclusion for those who are kicking up a stink about their right to privacy is to review what information they put out there on the internet. We know that everyone should have the right to have a Facebook page and that their pictures should be un-viewed by government eyes, but governments are having to move with the changes in technology, so it's only right that citizens should too.

Trolls targeted

Twitter has finally unveiled a 'report tweet' button so that users can instantly flag abuse that they may have received on the site.

Supporters of last month's campaign for something to be done about the abuse and trolling that happens on Twitter have had some of their wishes granted, at least in the first instance.

Whilst it's great that Twitter is beginning to take a stand against abuse, I will be interested to see how the 'report abuse' button is used; will it really help to make a difference, or will people who are offended by the slightest thing just get a bit trigger happy and clog up the system? Hopefully we'll be able to find out.

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