Apple opens talks to acquire Jay Z's Tidal

Apple is in exploratory talks to acquire Tidal, a streaming-music service run by rap mogul Jay Z, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Apple In Preliminary Talks To Acquire Jay-Z's Tidal

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Apple is in preliminary talks to acquire Tidal, a competing music streaming service founded and run by Beyoncé's husband, Jay-Z. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, sources familiar with the talks independently confirmed the report to BuzzFeed News.

Jay-Z purchased Tidal for $56 million in 2015 and launched the streaming site in April of that year with promises of providing higher quality audio and ensuring better, more lucrative licensing deals for its suite of exclusive artists like Kanye West and Beyoncé. Tidal's start was tumultuous, the service came under harsh criticism from a portion of users for its steeper $20.00 per month price point and ran through several CEOs in it's first months.

Last summer, Apple joined the streaming wars with the launch of Apple Music, securing its own costly exclusivity partnerships with artists like Drake (to the tune of $19 million).

While talks are still in very preliminary stages, the potential deal would dramatically thin out the competition in the streaming music space for Apple and bring some of music's most popular artists onto its platform for potential exclusive releases, along with Tidal's 4.2 million subscribers.

If Apple is able to pick up Tidal for the right price, it would be the second considerable acquisition in two years — the tech giant purchased Dr. Dre's Beats Electronics (and its subsequent streaming service) for $3 billion in 2014. But a potential deal with Tidal, a staunchly pro-artist service, would fit well with Apple Music's current strategy of aligning itself with creatives and paying well for exclusive contracts. However, sources also tell BuzzFeed News that Tidal has been available and open to an acquisition for some time.

But any real deal is far from complete — sources framed the talks as very exploratory — and the two companies have butted heads in the past. Last August, the companies sparred in the headlines after false reports that Apple stopped Tidal from streaming Drake's set at a Hurricane Katrina benefit concert. Though the dust-up was ultimately nothing, it showcased the high tensions in the battle for streaming supremacy.

John Paczkowski contributed reporting for this story.

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U.S. Opens Investigation After Tesla Driver Killed While Using Autopilot

Mark Schiefelbein / AP

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Tesla's Model S vehicle and its "Autopilot" feature after a fatal crash occurred, the company confirmed Thursday.

"This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated," the company said in statement, calling the fatal crash a "tragic loss."

The fatal crash involved a 2015 Model S vehicle, Reuters reported.

This is a developing story. Check back soon for updates and follow @BuzzFeedNews on Twitter.

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Here's What Happens When Your Uber Driver Gets A DUI

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When Katie Gallion’s Uber driver started swerving across the road’s rumble strips only 15 minutes into her ride near Durham, North Carolina, on June 3, she decided to give him a pass. At 10 p.m., it was dark outside and raining hard, she told BuzzFeed News. She didn’t know he’d polished off four beers before starting to drive for Uber that night.

When the car crossed over a grass median, coming precariously close to the oncoming traffic lane, Gallion began considering her options. “I was getting really scared and contemplating that maybe I should nicely ask him to pull over,” the 33-year-old pharmacist said.

“I don’t know what would’ve happened ... if I didn’t get out of the car.”

But she waited, and after turning onto a two-lane country road, the driver veered off the road and into a ditch, where the ride continued. “I was a crying mess, thinking, Oh my god, what if he doesn’t let me out of the car?” Gallion said. “Then I yelled, ‘What is going on? Let me out!’”

Finally, the driver pulled into the parking lot of a closed minimart and let Gallion out of the car. “I’m a good driver,” Gallion said he told her in a halfhearted attempt to convince her to continue the ride. Then he offered to call her another Uber.

Gallion called a friend instead, and together they called Wake County police. “I really could have died,” Gallion said. “I don’t know what would’ve happened ... if I didn’t get out of the car.”

Gallion’s Uber driver was arrested for driving while impaired at 11:09 p.m. — about an hour after her ride began. According to Wake County Superior Court records, he had a blood alcohol level of 0.15 — nearly four times the .04 legal limit for commercial drivers. The driver, who had no prior arrest record, was also charged with failure to heed a light or siren.

Reached for comment, Gallion’s Uber driver told BuzzFeed News he had accepted one other fare on the night of the incident. He said his memory of Gallion’s ride is unclear. “I remember knowing that she was uncomfortable and it was raining,” he said.

Gallion reported the incident to Uber at around 1 a.m., after reaching her friend’s house. About 12 hours later, the company responded with a boilerplate email and a refund of $69.24 for her ride. In a follow-up phone call, a company representative told Gallion it was “working diligently” to investigate the incident but could not discuss it in detail because of its privacy policy. She asked if he had been deactivated. Uber declined to tell her, citing a company mandate “to respect the privacy of all users.”

Katie Gallion

“Uber has a zero tolerance policy for the use of drugs and alcohol, and upon learning of these allegations, we immediately removed the driver's access to the platform,” an Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Uber said this driver in particular had no prior safety complaints and was “highly rated.”

BuzzFeed News reported in March that screenshots of Uber’s internal customer support platform showed the company’s instructions for how representatives should handle incidents involving alcohol and drug use. “If rider does not wish to escalate with LE (law enforcement) or media, follow strike system, issue warning, and resolve without escalating.” Under resolution suggestions, the screenshot showed that for the “1st strike,” customer service representatives were instructed to issue a “final warning,” and to permanently ban drivers at strike two.

Emails provided to BuzzFeed News show that Uber first reached out to Gallion’s driver by email at 1 p.m. the following day, about 12 hours after she reported him to the company for drunk driving. Unable to reach him over the phone (he was in jail), a company representative asked the driver when he was available discuss a “concerning report” by phone. When he checked his Uber app, he saw he had already lost access to the platform.

The next day, June 5, Uber conducted a brief interview during which Gallion’s driver was asked to review the details of the allegations against him. The driver told BuzzFeed News that he confirmed to Uber that he had indeed been arrested for driving under the influence. The following day he received an email notification from Uber saying he'd been deactivated and his "partnership" with the company ended. “They handled it quickly,” the driver said.

This isn’t the first time an Uber driver has been arrested for driving under the influence. That said, Uber notes that ride-hailing can be a wise alternative to driving after drinking. According to a study the company conducted with the nonprofit group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Uber's entry into a number of markets correlated with subsequent declines in DUI arrests.

Uber says it depends on riders to rate drivers and provide feedback, which its safety team reviews. “Uber may also deactivate a driver who receives several unconfirmed complaints of drug or alcohol use,” the ride-hail giant’s deactivation policy reads. The company told BuzzFeed it has a team of former law enforcement professionals on staff to help with police investigations. When BuzzFeed News asked if it has a system for learning about drivers’ law enforcement incidents instead of just relying on riders’ alerts, Uber said in some states background checks are “periodically” updated. Uber did not respond when asked if North Carolina is included among those states.

On Wednesday, Uber announced it is piloting app features aimed at making rides safer. In several markets across the U.S., drivers will receive daily reports on their braking, acceleration, and navigation. The goal, Uber told BuzzFeed, is to lay the groundwork to eventually create a system that gives the company real-time alerts about erratic drivers.

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Google Fit Has A Brand-New Look

The new Android Wear operating system isn't here yet — but this week, Google began rolling out some sleek new design updates for Google Fit in both app and watch form.

The idea is to give you a more detailed breakdown of your daily and weekly activities, so you can get an instant idea of how you're doing on your goals (and if you need to hit the gym ASAP).

Here's the new timeline.

Google

Here's where you pick your ~fitness goals~. (They're a lot more customizable now.)

Google

You can now see at a glance all your relevant stats for active minutes, steps, and more, for the week ...

... or just for the day.

Google

You can also check out a map to see how far you've gone (and pat yourself on the back).

Google

And you can get this info on your watch, too.

Google

Get the new app update here.

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Why Twitter Can't Even Protect Tech CEOs From Getting Hacked

It happened to Mark Zuckerberg. It happened to Sundar Pichai. It happened to Travis Kalanick. And it could happen to you, too.

Want to know how secure your Twitter account is? Here's an easy way to find out. Head to the Twitter applications settings page. There, you can see a full list of the third-party applications that have "write" access to your account: Apps that let you post to Twitter without being on Twitter dot com. A sliver of mine looks like this:

The point of giving third-party apps write access to your Twitter account is to make it easy to tweet about the stuff you do on these apps: For example, tweeting that you're listening to Justin Bieber on Spotify, or that you posted a picture of your dog on Instagram, or that you unfollowed 1,000 people in the previous week. It's supposed to make Twitter faster, more dynamic, and more open.

Over the past several weeks, however, a three-person hacking team called OurMine has made clear that years after the problem first came to light, third-party authentication is still a security nightmare for Twitter. By gaining access to apps with third-party write access, OurMine has been able to post to the Twitter accounts of tech bigwigs like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Thankfully — depending on your perspective — OurMine appears to be using these platforms to promote their fledgling security business. But it's very easy to imagine mischief of a much higher order: What would a tweet from Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter account that read, "Due to illness, I'm stepping down as Facebook CEO" do to the company's stock price? To the stock market?

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In other words, whichever write-authorized app connected to your Twitter is least secure — whether its a billion-dollar behemoth like Instagram or "Get It LIVE! by LiveMixtapes.com," which I apparently authorized at some point in 2011 so I could download a mixtape — is exactly how secure your Twitter account is.

True, these hacks usually don't give the hacker access to DMs or Twitter settings. But in 2016, when everyone from news organizations to financial firms use Twitter to make and announce important decisions, hijacked posting privileges are a big deal. And if it can happen to three of the most powerful people in tech, it can happen to anyone.

Regis Duvignau / Reuters

The scope of the problem is enormous. OurMine told BuzzFeed News that the apps it hacked to gain access to Twitter accounts ranged from the question-and-answer site Quora, to the URL shortener Bit.ly, to the social media manager Sprout Social. Though Twitter would not provide BuzzFeed News with the number of apps that can be authorized to write to accounts, practically any app can get this access. I have 29 apps that enable writing, and I hardly used Twitter before 2013. Taken together, the universe of third-party apps with Twitter write access offers hackers myriad ways to mess with users' Twitter accounts. Security experts call that an "attack surface," and for Twitter, this surface is planet-sized and full of holes.

"Any time you allow one application to post to another on your behalf, you are inviting security issues," Steve Manzuik, director of security research at Duo Security, told BuzzFeed News.

That's been true for some time, and it's hardly only true for Twitter. Any platform that allows trusted access by a third party necessarily relies on the security of that party. That's great and convenient if you're using your Google information to log into a smaller website; Google is a huge company with a massive security apparatus. It's much less good if you've given a variety of quasi-defunct (Seesmic, anyone?) or small apps lacking robust security precautions access to a major platform like Twitter or Facebook.

"When you’re dealing with large systems, it is much easier to breach them going through a weak partner," said Joseph Steinberg, CEO of SecureMySocial.

Still, the public nature of Twitter, whose main point is to share information as quickly and widely as possible, has made these attacks a much bigger issue for Jack Dorsey's company than they are for Facebook. And there's very little Twitter can do to solve the problem that doesn't defeat the incentives for third-party writing privileges in the first place: Speed and functionality. Adding layers of security — like an extra login — to access Twitter through a third-party app defeats the purpose of speedy cross-platform sharing. And disabling third-party writing would anger developers and hurt engagement, a cost Twitter probably isn't willing to bear.

If Twitter has any plans to address the problem, it isn't saying. A Twitter representative referred BuzzFeed News to the service's online help center in response to a question about third-party vulnerabilities.

There aren't a lot of obvious fixes Twitter could make, short of disabling third-party writing privileges. Culling old or defunct apps from the list of write-approved third parties might help, but Quora, the app used to hack Pichai and Kalanick, is valued at $900 million. In fact, large sites and apps are likelier targets for the data breaches where hackers find the login credentials that they then use to write to Twitter. That means the main way to stay safe from attacks like the ones against Zuckerberg and Kalanick is to revoke access to all the apps that have writing privileges to your account. That's something most users will probably not take the time to do.

The fact that Twitter allows these issues to persist may limit how seriously the public takes the service. If hacks of this kind are the acceptable price of having an open and convenient platform, a Twitter account can't really be thought of as an essential component of a person or organization's web presence the way a trusted utility, like email, is. Imagine how much more alarmed the reaction would be to messages coming from a hacked Zuckerberg or Pichai or Kalanick email account.

Indeed, the Twitter defacements have become so common in recent weeks that they're starting to hardly feel like news. That might be bad news for hackers trying to get attention. But for Twitter, which has staked its business on being the first place that people come to for information, it's even worse.

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Google's next-gen mobile OS is Android Nougat

Google announced today that Android 7.0 will officially be known as Nougat.

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Google age-discrimination lawsuit could grow

An age-discrimination lawsuit filed by two people who interviewed unsuccessfully for jobs at Google could expand to encompass other individuals if a motion filed this week is successful.

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Google Calendar now back for 'some users' after outage

Mark your calendars— actually, scratch that— Google Calendar had a notable hiccup today.

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Blind art lovers experience museums in 3D

Luc was only 7 years old when his world went dark and he became blind unexpectedly. But as he likes to say, blindness isn't very effective on him.

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Asteroids could threaten Earth, scientists say

The threat of deadly asteroids hitting our planet is real, according to Asteroid Day, an organization hoping to stop a future catastrophe.

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IBM supercomputer Watson will try to help vets beat cancer

In January, President Obama handed the reins to Joe Biden to head a "moonshot" initiative to cure cancer, and a major step toward that end has just been made.

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How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings

When news broke earlier this week that Facebook was using smartphone location data to suggest new friends to users, some people were upset about the privacy implications.

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OnePlus 3 Is a Premier Smartphone at a Great Price

Now that the big smartphone makers have solved most of the “big-enough, fast-enough, easy-enough” hurdles for consumers, there’s lots of room for less well-known manufacturers to compete by selli...

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Microsoft preps new 'upgrade experience' for free Windows 10 update

Microsoft is stepping up its strategy to move users to Windows 10 while the rollout of Apple’s renamed operating system isn’t far behind.

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Building a Better World, Together

Tackling Student Debt At Consumer Reports, we envision a day when every American can get an affordable college education and contribute to society unburdened by the pressure of excessive debt.

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All you ever wanted to know about Juno's mission to Jupiter

NASA's Juno mission is almost at Jupiter. Here's why you should care.

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Go Back to School With a Free XBox One

If you're a parent or a high school grad looking for a deal on a college laptop, you might want to check out the new back-to-school special from Microsoft.

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Facebook’s Unsettling Referendum On News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

In a turbulent week that’s been largely defined by a controversial vote, Facebook just issued its own referendum on news and publishers. Put simply, the users have spoken and news lost.

This morning, Facebook VP of product management Adam Mosseri, announced the social network is tweaking its News Feed algorithm to show more stories from friends and family members — a move that indicates Facebook is worried professional publishers are crowding out the normal people in your life you care about. The decision, according to the post, is based on “research,” which is a way to say that Facebook has been listening to the myriad signals of the real people who use its platform each day.

With 1.65 billion active humans using the platform, Facebook is among the largest, most responsive focus groups of its kind. It's a formidable tool for studying human behavior. Every day legions of regular people across the world signal their preferences — voting with their News Feeds —in the form of likes, shares, comments, and friending/following/un-friending to Facebook’s data mothership, which collects these inputs with the utmost interest to inform the evolution of its products, like News Feed. A decision to tweak News Feed away from news is, in many ways, a reflection of the Facebook constituency’s attitude toward the news it sees.

When News Feed failed almost two years ago to reflect the centrality of Michael Brown’s murder and Ferguson's protests in our national conversation, Facebook took heat for simultaneously serving up an endless buffet of algorithmically delicious Ice Bucket Challenge videos. This would’ve been fine — Facebook is a social network, not a cable news network, after all — except that the company had become a major news destination, and made considerable, very public efforts and investments to ramp up its news capabilities. Simply put: Facebook indicated it wanted to be the internet’s best destination for news, but its mechanism for delivering news is designed to do almost the exact opposite: give you what you already want.

Despite hiring trending news curators, working with publishers, and paying them to create live content (BuzzFeed is a partner) hosting their articles, Facebook is still hampered by News Feed’s algorithmic design. I wrote during Ferguson that “if your friends don’t interact with the news, by either commenting or liking it, you’re less likely to see it, meaning that a decent part of the reason people aren’t seeing a glut of Ferguson coverage is that people don’t want to see it. Or that they don’t care. Or that they’re sending some other signal that Facebook takes to mean that the story is undermining their user experience.” It’s why some concerned Facebookers took to disguising Ferguson news inside big life updates like marriage announcements, which act as engagement candy and are usually promoted to the top of News Feeds.

Today, little is different. Sharing things that are incendiary to others in your network could cause them to ignore, block, unfriend, or in some way disengage with your content, which is Facebook’s ultimate signal that you’re having a subpar experience. That and people don’t “like” bad news. As Mosseri said today in Facebook’s announcement, “If the ranking is off, people don’t engage, and leave dissatisfied.” It’s clear as day.

Looking at Facebook’s recent strategy, this all makes perfect sense. Facebook’s last two developers conferences revealed a company that’s positioned itself to slowly inject itself into every facet of your life until it becomes the entire internet, largely via its Messenger app. But Messenger is only marginally a news platform and much more of a life layer — a place for your friends and your favorite apps and for making plans at a restaurant on the fly and hailing an Uber and then splitting the bill and then buying movie tickets for the group, all without ever leaving Facebook’s ecosystem. At its heart, Messenger is a budding commerce machine in which there’s very little room for news. Take another look at Facebook’s deeply ambitious 10-year plan, delivered this year by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and you’ll see something is missing:

Facebook

News is complicated: it can entertain, it can delight, it can enrage and dismay. Facebook’s argument is likely that person-to-person sharing is the strongest and that publishers should focus on making better, richer, unique content. This is good advice! And perhaps Facebook sees it as part of their mission to tweak the knobs until publishers stop churning out so much fluff.

But, as with Ferguson, the argument is also naive. News — especially when an outlet is going for comprehensive coverage — is not always uplifting, engaging. Nor is it always eminently sharable (Hi, net neutrality!). More importantly, media operations publishing at internet-sized scale must often produce news stories in bulk to make it worth their while financially — few publications have the luxury of moving away from scale.

Facebook has made a commitment to deliver news, but only in a manner that doesn't truly interfere with the overall experience. The central tension with news — giving you what you want to see versus giving you what you need to see — is an intractable one, especially since the former is the foundation on which the world's biggest social network is based.

Today’s announcement from Facebook is full of all kinds of night sweat-inducing details for publishers. It’s a devastating neg on the publishing world, the latest in what’s come to feel like an increasingly anxious courtship: your business lives or dies with us. Rest assured, you'll always be our secondary consideration!

Which is not to excuse Facebook for its mercurial approach to news and for a stance that may have led publishers to feel they have an overly important role in the company’s ecosystem. Facebook, through a combination of investment, publicity, and luck has become a primary news source for a generation at a time when the public opinion of the media is at an all-time low, which all serves to make today’s announcement even thornier. Here, for example, is the reaction from Facebook’s former head of news partnerships:

But the most dispiriting truth Facebook shared this morning probably comes from its users, who’ve been put in a system that essentially forces them to vote on everything that crosses their screen with their attention.

It’s a 1.65 billion vote referendum on the last few years of frantic publisher scrambling to reach audiences wherever they are (Facebook) and do it harder/better/faster/however the hell people want it. After years of wooing publishers to their platform with all manner of instant articles and content creation incentives, Facebook asked the world’s largest, most responsive voting body what it wanted to see on News Feed. Put simply, the people have spoken and news appears to have lost.

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Thermal cameras to be used at Tour de France to catch riders using hidden motors

High-powered thermal cameras using atomic research technology will be used on the Tour de France to help eradicate the threat of riders using hidden motors inside their bikes.

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Is Edward Snowden Trying To Get Vladimir Putin's Attention?

Mathias Loevgreen Bojesen / AFP / Getty Images

Edward Snowden’s public fight against a new Russian surveillance bill continued Wednesday, in a series of tweets calling the proposed legislation a “Big Brother law… an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed.”

The proposed "Yarovaya law," written by United Russia party member Irina Yarovaya in response to the bombing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt in October 2015, would hand out prison sentences of seven years for writing in support of "extremism" on the Internet, criminalize failure to report "reliable" information about planned attacks, and require online providers to retain at least six months worth of users' communications, three years of "metadata," and to provide backdoors to decrypt this material.

On Friday, the legislation passed the lower house of parliament in a 325-1 vote. It now needs to pass through the upper house of Parliament and be approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Snowden has resided in Russia since leaving the United States in 2013, when he was charged with violating the Espionage Act for his leak of a trove of documents about the US’ surveillance program. The former National Security Agency contractor let loose a series of tweets this week expressing his concern that the law would impact Russia’s civil liberties, without improving their safety.

Speaking to the Interfax news agency on Monday, Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly G. Kucherena, said the tweets showed that Snowden was “a man of principles” who “criticizes Russia, too.” While Snowden has enjoyed relative freedom in Russia, appearing often at conferences through teleconferencing and tweeting to his millions of followers, he has said that he does not plan to die in Russia and hopes to return to the United States.

While some tweeted their concern that Snowden could risk losing his residency in Russia over the tweets, investigative journalist and author of The Red Web, Andrei Soldatov, said he did not think the tweets endangered Snowden. Putin has established himself as Snowden’s “protector and defender” Soldatov told BuzzFeed News, and might be pushed to respond to the tweets given Snowden’s high-profile position.

“In the past, I have been critical of Snowden for not commenting on the situation in Russia… But in this case I think his voice counts. We need his voice to talk about what is going on here, what is, in fact, a very horrifying law,” said Soldatov.

The proposed legislation, said Soldatov, had united privacy activists and internet companies in Russia.

“It is evident that this law would be impossible to implement. It would be so costly, so expensive for companies. The goal is for the Kremlin to force companies to come to them, to ask for permits, deals, etc,” said Soldatov. “Companies who have been frightened, silenced against the Kremlin have now become vocal. Now they talk. Many companies based in Russia are now speaking up. Internet users and internet companies are united against this legislation. Now Snowden is too.”

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Twitter dominated by tongue-in-cheek #HeterosexualPrideDay

What appears to be a tongue-in-cheek social media movement to mark June 29 as a day to celebrate heterosexual pride has become one of the day's top online trends.

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Power suit: Startup brings wireless charging to clothes

BauBax’s first Kickstarter campaign was a wild success, raising over $9

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Innovative Navy-funded drone is master of the air and water

A propeller-driven drone that can fly both in the air and underwater is in development at Rutgers University— a unique vehicle that has caught the eye of the U.S. Navy

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Google Earth's new mapping system provides sharpest images of the planet yet

New images released on Monday by Google Earth from the Landsat 8 satellite are giving viewers a crisp, stellar glimpse of our planet.

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Guy claims he invented iPhone, wants billions from Apple

A Florida man who says Apple ripped off his design for the iPhone is willing to let the matter drop for the modest sum of $10 billion plus 1.5% of worldwide sales of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

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Game-changing helium field found

Helium may best be known as the lighter-than-air gas used to fill party balloons, but it's also key to medical applications like MRI scans and for nuclear power.

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How I got a pilot license in 12 days

As an eight-year-old boy who dreamed of flying, the best I could do was obsessively play "Pilotwings" on my Super Nintendo.

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Facebook To Decrease Publisher Reach To Show You More From Friends And Family

Facebook is making changes to its News Feed to align with newly articulated values, and it means you will soon see more stuff from your friends and families and fewer things from publishers and brands. It’s a move meant to keep the “social” in the world’s largest social network, but one that will likely cause some pain for publishers who have become reliant on its referral traffic.

Facebook sends enough traffic to digital publishers that many depend on it to survive. By and large, these publishers have dedicated significant resources to gobbling the most out of Facebook’s great traffic trough, building large "pages" and publishing to them with intense frequency (BuzzFeed is no exception). Their efforts have become so massive, and to some extent have so come to dominate the Facebook experience, that Facebook is worried professional publishers are crowding out posts from regular people. So the company is tweaking its all-powerful News Feed to display more from friends and family and less from publishers and brands overall.

“Your average friend probably posts a few things a week, the average publisher you follow probably posts hundreds of things a day,” Facebook VP of Product Management Adam Mosseri told a small group of reporters at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters last week. “We've made some ranking changes to try to better connect people with their friends.”

The hit will likely be most significant for publishers who get large amounts of Facebook traffic from their own pages, as opposed to individuals sharing their content. If a publisher’s content is shared widely by people who want their friends to see it, then the decline is likely to be smaller, says Facebook.

“I'd expect reach for publishers to go down a small amount, but a noticeable amount,” Mosseri said. “Reach for publishers always varies a lot by publisher, so there's no specific way to know that on a per publisher basis. Some publishers may go up, some publishers may go down, some publishers may go down more.”

Facebook is responsible for 41.4% of publisher referral traffic, per the digital analytics firm Parse.ly, so a small but noticeable decline could mean serious trouble for some publishers — especially those that “may go down more.” Facebook has more or less slaughtered publications in the past with News Feed algorithm tweaks, and today’s adjustment may bring more bloodshed for those overly reliant on brand pages.

giphy.com

The changes come on the same day Facebook is publishing a set of values it says informs the way the News Feed prioritizes stories. “News Feed is a system that's designed and built by people, those people have values, and those values are reflected in how we make decisions on a regular basis,” Mosseri said. Implicit in the statement: The News Feed isn’t “neutral.” It wants certain things, and Facebook is happy to tell us what they are.

Those things, in order, are: content from friends and family first, followed by informative content, and then entertaining content. Today’s News Feed tweak can be understood through this lens. “Connecting people with their friends and family is the value proposition on which this company is built,” Mosseri said. “It's also still often what people tell us they like most, or care about most.”

In some cases, content can be in more than one category. As Mosseri said at one point, “Actually, I love it when things are multiple [categories],” naming John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight as a content type that often hits both the inform and entertain buckets.

Facebook is experiencing a decline in original sharing on the platform, per multiple reports. Some attribute this to a high quality bar people may feel they need to meet when they post to Facebook — those amateur snapshots might look out of place surrounded by so much professionally produced content. Yet Mosseri said this update was not meant to address that social media stage fright. “Is there a quality bar that's sort of internally projected? I'm not sure. I don't know. But that didn't go into the thinking of this.”

Maybe not. But regardless of whether or not this was intended to encourage people to post more casual content, or just to surface it, Facebook and its newly articulated News Feed values will likely mean more selfies and fewer stories showing up in your daily social media diet.

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