By its own reckoning, Facebook is getting better at spotting spam, bogus accounts, fake news, con jobs, and other types of misinformation. Of late, "We've made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity ... without assessing the content itself," Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager on Facebook's Protect and Care Team, notes in a new blog post.

Stories -- with lets people share moments from their day in slide-show form -- is proving to be a big success for Instagram. Since January, the number of people using the feature every day has ballooned from 150 million to 200 million, Instagram revealed on Thursday.

Messenger now boasts more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook announced on Wednesday. Considering that the messaging app surpassed a billion MAUs last July, that means it's currently experiencing more than 20% annual growth.

At least for the moment, apps appear to be beating out browsers in the battle for mobile users' attention. This year, the average U.S. adult will spend 2 hours and 25 minutes a day using mobile apps -- up 10.3% over last year, eMarketer finds. That means mobile app time will reach 19.9% of total daily media time this year.

You'd better put Unlockd on your radar, if it's not already. To date, the Australian startup has attracted investment from the likes of Lachlan Murdoch. It's also pioneering a new mobile ad model, which involves subsidizing your phone bill in exchange for viewing some ads on your "lock screen." Now, the company is bringing on Aliza Knox -- Twitter's former Asia Pacific head -- as its chief operating officer.

Under pressure from anxious investors, Snap is courting Madison Ave. with ever fancier ad offerings. Take Snapchat's new "Engagement Audiences" initiative, which invites brands to target those users who previously interacted with their ads on the app.

Following Facebook's lead, Twitter is rolling out a "Lite" version of its flagship app. Around the world, the struggling social network knows that slow mobile networks, costly data plans, and lack of storage on mobile gadgets are all reasons why people may be missing out on its service.

What does a company worth around $430 billion care about $70 million or so? Likely asking itself that exact question, Amazon just dropped an appeal against last year's count ruling, which found the tech giant guilty of illegally billing users for their kids' in-app purchases.

The fresh feed -- represented by a rocket ship icon on Facebook's mobile interface -- picks posts based on a different algorithm than Facebook's flagship feed.

It's the end of era. Yes, for the first time ever, Android has bested Microsoft Windows as the world's most popular operating system, according to fresh findings from Web analytics firm StatCounter.