In a country where the censorship rates are pretty high and where journalists have been imprisoned for writing articles that speak out against the government, it seems ironic that China’s largest search engine, Baidu, has recently fired four members of their staff for reportedly deleting user content in exchange for cash. As we’re sure that some of you guys are aware by now, there are blogs out there that do reviews for gadgets (like us), food, travel destinations, services and etc. Some of these reviews are sponsored which means that the content is usually biased, while some reviews are done simply because the blog wanted to give a fair and unbiased opinion. Unfortunately this can result in bad reviews for certain restaurants or businesses who might have provided unfavorable services or products.
Dubbed “professional post-deleting”, this basically deletes blog posts and user content that might have been construed as negative by the company that was written about. Thanks to cross-referencing, Baidu has managed to uncover the employees who did the deletions and has fired them. So how much does this “professional post-deleting” service cost? According to The Global Times, a forum post can be deleted for $150, $450 for a news story and fees can go as high as $30,000 a year for a “maintenance service” whereby negative posts are deleted immediately upon sighting.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple and Baidu expected to share advertising revenue from searches made on the iPhone, Apple expected to announce Baidu iOS integration next week,
Facebook is showing no signs of decline following its decision to go public this year. This week alone, we witnessed a lot of things going on in the platform – Facebook Stories, McAfee Social Protection for Facebook, the global expansion of its App Center, and more. But the social networking giant isn’t stopping there. Today, Chuck Rossi of Facebook’s engineering team announced that the team will be rolling out updates to the site twice a day. Rossi noted that the decision came after the opening of Facebook’s new engineering office in London last week and the recent hiring of a release engineer in their New York office.
Google has rolled out a few updates on YouTube, particularly in the homepage feed. Google hopes that these updates will provide an even better viewing experience to its users. The update brings a couple of improvements to YouTube’s video thumbnails. Now users can enjoy bigger and better quality thumbnails with more information related to the videos. “If an uploader has commented, posted, or added a video to a playlist, we surface this information so you can get a better picture of all the activity related to the video,” Google said.
To celebrate the impact of Facebook on our day to day lives, the social network is introducing a new site dedicated to “sharing the extraordinary, quirky and thought-provoking stories and ideas” from more than 950 million people around the world. Facebook seems to have taken a page from Twitter’s Stories and Tumblr’s Storyboard. But unlike what both platforms are currently offering, Facebook promises a new theme and a new collection of extraordinary stories each month. For this month, Facebook is kicking off the new site with the theme “Remembering”.
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Facebook recently filed its 
