Technext Social Media Review – Daily Stormer Faces Storm and Instagram is Becoming Facebook

Here is a round-up of the major activities that had taken place in the social media space this past week:

Comment Thread is Coming to Instagram

Instagram is daily evolving into a more conversational platform, following in the steps of its parent company – Facebook.

The company has announced the rolling out of comment threads – which helps keep track of conversations more easily, on its iOS and Android Apps and will be made available globally in the coming weeks.

With threads; when you reply to a comment on a post, your response gets automatically grouped underneath the comment you’re responding to as against the old layout where all comments and responses are on the same line.

The thread will be a good addition for ease of readability and post conversation on Instagram.

Facebook to Sanitise News Feed

The biggest social media platform announced during the week, that it is increasing its efforts at ridding the platform’s news feed of misinformation and click bait advertisements.

The company is set to roll out a re-branded News feed for users with two updates that will reduce the spread of illegitimate information on the platform. The updates will ensure that videos of only static images and images with fake play buttons embedded in them are demoted.

Click bait – contents that are usually misleading and send users to advertising, usually low quality or spam websites are still rampant on Facebook despite the social network’s continued efforts at ensuring the legitimacy of information promoted on the published on the platform.

The platform has advised publishers to follow its Publishing best practices to ensure authenticity which is one of the platform’s News feed core values.

#Charlottesville: Neo-Nazi Website Goes Dark-web

Daily Stormer was a Neo-Nazi website, one that was used to mobilise for the Charlottesville, Virginia white supremacists protest that turned violent on August 19 and left a 32-year old woman dead and 19 others injured when a man rammed his car into a group of people objecting to the protest.

The website’s internet registration was cancelled by GoDaddy Inc. and Alphabet Inc. – the parent company of Google after it was accused of violating the terms of service the website had agreed to, part of which prohibited using the website to propagate hate or incite violence.

“We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service,” GoDaddy wrote on its official Twitter page.

Supporters of the pulled-down website however took to twitter to announce that people could still gain access to the website on the Dark web a portion of the Internet that exist on an encrypted network that is not indexed by popular search engines and can only be seen with a special browser, which hides the identity and location of the users.

The battle between the extremes of acceptance and phobia, between separatists and pacifists is raging on the internet space. The questions: Will Daily Stromer win?