One week, five stories #7

More conscious habits with Coca-Cola

The famous soda company, Coca-Cola, just launched a new campaign called ‘Round in Circles’ to promote recycling for Recycle Now’s Recycle Week. With its print and outdoor campaign, and its new focus on producing more sustainable packaging solutions, the company wishes to show and reinforce its commitment to sustainability and to help develop a green economy. A strong message from such a big company at the forefront of the FMCG industry promotes the importance of sustainability and shows that Coca-Cola wants to remain relevant in a world in constant evolution.

Twitter is trying to settle down

With very strong opinions and people using their ‘freedom of speech’ left, right and centre, Twitter is often considered as quite a violent and argumentative social platform. But Twitter wants to focus on quality content, keeping away violent or even insulting discussions between users. With this intention in mind, they offered users a new feature giving them the possibility to hide replies they judge offensive, irrelevant or just unintelligible. For now, the feature is only available in Canada, the U.S. and Japan. Canadian users were the first to try it, and the early results seemed to be convincing. A survey conducted by Twitter showed that many people found the new tool useful, giving them more control over their content, and people whose replies were hidden were found to consider changing and improving their interactions on the platform.

Wellbeing, the new top priority for Instagram

After trialling the removal of the number of likes on its content in some countries, Instagram is taking a step further in its new priority to support mental health and wellbeing. The social platform decided to restrict posts promoting diet products or cosmetic procedures for users under 18 years old, and even to completely ban posts making ‘miraculous’ claims about a product. This decision might shake the influencers’ community, especially the ones targeting a younger audience with so-called miracle products. Instagram definitely keeps up the momentum on focusing on the wellbeing of its users and it feels good!

So what will your Chinese business score be?

The decision from the Chinese government to establish a social credit system with a rate given to their citizens based on their behaviour has already caused a backlash. This project should most definitely generate even more criticism, as the country decided to extend this very system to businesses, local or international. The credit score will be based on about 300 requirements, covering subjects such as tax, customs authentication, environmental protection, e-commerce or product quality. With the rise of the digital economy, China feels the need to get more transparency from businesses benefiting from their very large market. If some see this decision as a way for China to better manage foreign competition on their own territory, it can also be a way to reinforce their ideological control.

Facebook is undertaking a great purge

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has been performing an ongoing investigation to check all applications that could present security issues for its users. The social network has decided to suspend thousands of apps, not necessarily because they present major issues, but because they didn’t provide enough information or because they could potentially represent a threat for users’ personal data. To complement this purge, Facebook has also developed new rules to better control apps’ access to users’ data. These investigation and new rules aim to show Facebook’s transparency and will to better respect its users’ data and security.