What’s MGHappening in Social Media: Apr. 24, 2019

The Verge – Last month, Facebook revealed that “tens of thousands of Instagram passwords” were stored in plain text, opening up potential exposure to employees with access to certain internal systems. Now, Facebook has discovered that more passwords were stored this way than initially realized, and as such, it has increased its estimation to “millions.” The issue was also not unique to Instagram as “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users” and “tens of millions of other Facebook users” were also included. (Full Story)

The Verge – Facebook has recently admitted to accessing and storing the email contacts of as many as 1.5 million of its users without their consent. Dating back between May 2016 and March of this year, Facebook asked some new users to verify their email address by providing the password to their email account. Completing this task would automatically import the user’s contacts to Facebook, and there was no option to opt out. Facebook has had email verification well before May of 2016, however during that month it removed the disclaimer stating that this upload would take place. The social network has now stated that this process was unintentional and that it fixed the underlying issue. (Full Story)

CNBC – A pair of democratic U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg to be held personally accountable for Facebook’s privacy issues, following a report that stated the Federal Trade Commission is considering how to tie more of Facebook’s blunders to the CEO. The legal structure in the U.S. does not necessarily allow for Zuckerberg to be blamed, however pressure to hold him accountable is growing as more privacy mishaps continue to make headlines for the company. (Full Story)

Forbes – Facebook has confirmed that it is working on an AI voice assistant that could work on the Portal device and the Oculus headsets, along with potential future hardware. The project reportedly began in early 2018, but no potential launch has been revealed as of yet. Interestingly, Facebook Portal currently runs Amazon’s Alexa. (Full Story)

TechCrunch – Instagram is testing a change that would make post likes only visible to the creator of that post, rather than their friends. Instagram wants to shift the focus of content on the platform away from being validated by likes, encouraging users to share content they truly appreciate rather than what they think will get the most likes. If this change is implemented, there would likely be a mental health benefit for many users, as there will be less of an inherent comparison between how many likes different posts receive. Viewers included in the test will still see a few friends who have also liked a post, but will not see the overall like count. (Full Story)

Fast Company – According to a recent report from eMarketer, 2019 will be the first time Snapchat is expected to lose users. The report estimates the user count will fall by 2.8% this year, from 79.7 million users to 77.5 million users. Furthermore, eMarketer expects Snapchat’s growth to slow over the next few years with only 600,000 new U.S. users to be added between now and 2023. On the flip side, Instagram is estimated to reach 106.7 million U.S. users (+6.2%) in 2019, with another 19 million expected by 2023. Notably, Snap has pointed out flaws in the report by eMarketer, stating that it did not factor in the various tools and changes Snap has recently added. (Full Story)