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Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram Sends Snapchat Views Plummeting Before Snapchat IPO

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 01:08 PST, Feb 2, 2017

Mark Zuckerberg has a lot at stake in Snapchat’s initial public offering (IPO), according to Vanity Fair.

Snapchat previously dominated the market with its unique service known as Stories, in which users could post short photos or video updates that would later be deleted. However, after Mark Zuckerberg purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, he and his tech expert launched their own version of Stories in 2016, which they admitted was a blatant rip-off of Snapchat’s identically-named feature.

And now, just days out from Snapchat’s IPO, the company is suffering from its steadily dwindling fan base. Vanity Fair quoted TechCrunch, who cited social media managers who claimed that Snapchat views have declined between 15 and 40 per cent since August, 2016.

It makes sense that users would prefer Instagram’s identical version of the Stories feature over Snapchat. With Instagram and Facebook now owned by the same Mark Zuckerberg-founded company, users can seamlessly switch between the two services, connecting with friends from both services and sharing videos and photos on both social media platforms with ease.

It remains to be seen what kind of an impact the rise of Instagram will have on Snapchat’s IPO, and whether the recent events are coincidental or purposefully well timed by Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, is considered as one of the most influential and innovative entrepreneurs in the world. In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg and his philanthropist wife Priscilla Chan were named in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for the year. Through their Chan-Zuckerberg initiative, the celebrity couple aim to make advancements in the fields of personalized learning, medical research, and social networking by harnessing the human potential.

As a founder of Facebook, world’s most popular social networking site, Mark Zuckerberg wants to help teachers, students, and parents to collaborate to help students attain their personalized learning goals by working on online projects that suit their needs. The innovative technocrat also wants medical researchers around the world to collaborate in real time and speed up medical research.

Mark Zuckerberg conceptualized and started Facebook along with his roommates while he was still studying in college, and the entrepreneur’s keen insights and astute business decisions made his startup grow into a multi-billion dollar company. University Herald reports that Zuckerberg’s visionary leadership, consistency, and patience have catapulted him to a prominent position amongst other iconic leaders like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Despite receiving accolades for his achievements, Mark Zuckerberg has drawn flak from a number of Americans because Facebook has been accused of influencing the 2016 United States presidential elections by spreading false news. The false news shared on the Facebook seemed aimed at portraying Hillary Clinton in a bad light by reporting news that came from unreliable sources.

For instance, one such post by a media group claimed to be the “Denver Guardian” claimed that an FBI agent who was implicated in Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails was found dead, and was suspected to have been murdered. It soon became clear that the news was false because a media company known as the “Denver Guardian” does not exist. The false news certainly had a large impact, as it was shared more than 568,000 times in addition to receiving 15.5 million pieces of individual feedback.

When questioned about the anti-Hillary propaganda, Mark Zuckerberg, who has for some time of as a closeted Trump supporter, refuted the allegations, claiming that 99 per cent of the news circulated on Facebook is true and very accurate.

However, the Huffington Post reported that an anonymous Facebook employee admitted that Mark Zuckerberg is wrong, and that false news spread rampantly on Facebook in the final months of the election campaign.

“It’s not a crazy idea. What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.”

Furthermore, Google and Twitter have also been accused of spreading sensational news in order to gain popularity among Internet and social media users. Monika Bikert, Facebook’s Head of Policy, does not believe that paid protestors and fake-news writers used the platform to spread false news, claiming that Facebook has a strict policy of censoring any content that may be perceived as inflammatory and hateful. According to the National Public Radio, Bikert spoke about the procedures followed by Facebook to prevent any false news from being published on its platform.

“We look at how a specific person shared a specific post or word or photo to Facebook. So we’re looking to see why did this particular share happen on Facebook? Why did this particular post happen?”

However, insiders reveal that Facebook employees do not rely on stipulated guidelines to censor each and every post, because the members of the global “Community Operations Team” who censor the postings rely on their own discretion while censoring. So even though Mark Zuckerberg’s team claims to be taking the utmost care to censor false news, tighter controls may be needed so that the legitimacy of censorship does not come under question.

[Featured Image by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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