By Tracey Dowdy

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s safe to assume Snapchat is feeling pretty good about itself today.

This week Facebook rolled out some new features and they probably look pretty familiar to many of us as they are dupes for features on Snapchat. Although Facebook has far more daily users, Snapchat is more popular with teens.

The new features include camera tools – masks, filters, and frames – as well as Facebook Direct and Facebook Stories. Not only are the features familiar – Facebook Direct mirrors Snapchat Snaps and Facebook Stories mirrors Snapchat Stories – the way they behave is also the same.

Here’s a closer look at what’s available:

Facebook Stories = Snapchat Stories: Facebook introduced Stories to its sister app Instagram back in August of 2016. Stories are a collection of photos and/or videos that disappear after 24 hours. Now, that same functionality will be available in the main Facebook feed.

Facebook Camera Effects = Snapchat Filters: Not only will it offer masks, filters and frames for your photos, Facebook has leveraged its massive user base to partner with Hollywood studios. Users will have access to filters featuring “Minions”, “Despicable Me 3” and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”

Facebook Direct = Snapchat Snaps: One of the most popular features of Snapchat – photos disappear from user’s feeds after 24 hours – is now a feature for your Facebook photos as well.

Why, when Facebook already has such an enormous audience and owns Instagram, would it bother to add these features? The answer is simple – the more time users spend on Facebook scrolling through their feed, the more ads they can be shown. It all comes down to marketing.

Instagram’s “Stories” grew to 150 million daily users in five months – that’s a big number, especially from a marketing standpoint. Think about it – how much do you use your mobile device as a phone vs. accessing social media?  Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s co-founder and CEO says, “We believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones.”

Facebook knows Spiegel is right, and they’re making sure that while your newsfeed is probably still going to be your primary focus, keeping pace with trends in photo sharing can only work in its favor.

Tracey Dowdy is a freelance writer based just outside Washington DC. After years working for non-profits and charities, she now freelances, edits and researches on subjects ranging from family and education to history and trends in technology. Follow Tracey on Twitter.

By Tracey Dowdy

When I was a child, news was something my parents watched after dinner or read in the newspaper. From my perspective, it had nothing to do with me or my interests. Oh, how things have changed. With easy access to the Internet and social media, the ways kids access and perceive news has been completely transformed.

Common Sense Media recently released a study that looks at how kids engage with the news. They created an online survey that polled 853 children age 10–18, asking questions about how kids access news, their awareness of fake vs. real news, and their level of trust for various media sources.

The purpose of the study was to get a better understanding of how children access and process news. “We want our children to be good citizens, and to the extent that being a good citizen requires an accurate awareness of what’s happening in the world and a desire to be well-informed, it is critical to understand children’s relationship with the news.” Michael Robb, Director of Research, Common Sense Media.

Their key findings were as follows:

• Kids value the news. Most access it and care about it, and overall they feel smarter when they’re informed.
• Kids feel neglected and misrepresented. They don’t feel like the media covers what’s important to them, and they feel misrepresented when they are covered.

• Kids see racial and gender bias in the news. Of particular note is the fact that half of U.S. kids say that when they see non-white kids in the news, it’s negative and/or related to crime and violence.
• What kids are seeing scares them and makes them feel depressed.
• Kids also often are fooled by fake news. This may be why many are extremely skeptical and distrustful of the news media.
• Kids trust their families and teachers for news more than any other source, but they prefer to get news from social media.

They found that most kids get their news through their family members (45%), followed by social media (38%) television (37%) and their teachers (35%).

One of the more interesting finds was the number of kids who have confidence in traditional media outlets. Only 25% of kids say they put “a lot” of trust in what they see coming from news organizations – the same amount of trust they put in information coming from their friends.

Parents can access the full report by creating a profile on the Common Sense website.

Tracey Dowdy is a freelance writer based just outside Washington DC. After years working for non-profits and charities, she now freelances, edits and researches on subjects ranging from family and education to history and trends in technology. Follow Tracey on Twitter.