Bloomberg Debuts Twitter Streaming News Service; Facebook Demotes 'Engagement Bait'

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The Time Is Now

Bloomberg went live Monday with TicToc, its 24-hour streaming news service on Twitter. The channel will stream a mix of original Bloomberg newsroom programming and curated video and other content drawn from Twitter users. Rather than selling ad space like a TV broadcast, TicToc plans to weave sponsorships and branded content into the programming. So far, AT&T, CA Technologies, CME Group, Infiniti, SAS and TD Ameritrade are on board. “We have been looking really closely at how one replaces or disrupts a traditional TV news outlet like CNN,” says Bloomberg media CEO Justin Smith. “We see the answer as an amalgamation of digital, social and television.” WSJ has more.

Cutting Bait

Facebook is rejiggering its algorithm to demote posts that use “engagement bait,” like requests to like and share substanceless posts, in an effort to weed shoddy content from the news feed. The platform has “assigned teams to review and categorize hundreds of thousands of posts that can better inform a machine learning model to detect when pages post things just for the ‘like,’ share or comment,” reports Axios. Facebook must walk a tightrope with its machine learning since it doesn’t want to demote some posts that call out for shares and likes – such as users circulating missing person reports or raising money for a cause. More.

Re-identification Down Under

You may not expect a minor controversy at the Australian Department of Health to mean much to data-driven marketers. But a report published Monday by researchers from the University of Melbourne demonstrated how an anonymized online data set could be tied back to individuals based on information they’ve shared on social media (like gender, birth year, state and certain health events). The encrypted patient data had been published by the government as part of a transparency initiative. “What on paper looks like ‘reasonable’ de-identification steps can actually cause problems,” says Dr. Trent Yarwood, a member of the technology policy group Future Wise. More from the Australian Broadcasting Company.

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