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Category: Social media

Facebook’s strategy for fending off Congress: Divide and rule

Facebook’s strategy for fending off Congress: Divide and rule

The Wall Street Journal reports: The day after former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen went public in October, the company’s team in Washington started working the phones. To lawmakers and advocacy groups on the right, according to people familiar with the conversations, their message was that Ms. Haugen was trying to help Democrats. Within hours, several conservative news outlets published stories alleging Ms. Haugen was a Democratic activist. Later, Facebook lobbyists warned Democratic staffers that Republicans were focused on…

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Curtailing anonymity is a first step towards reducing online abuse

Curtailing anonymity is a first step towards reducing online abuse

Stephen Kinsella writes: We have come a long way from the optimism that surrounded the internet in the early 1990s. As Tim Berners-Lee has remarked several times, there was a ‘utopian’ view of its potential to democratise news and reinforce social cohesion. Indeed, only 10 years ago, we were celebrating the role that online communications played in the Arab Spring. Now, when the subject of social media is mentioned, it is far more often associated with organisations such as QAnon…

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Some say QAnon is losing its power. But I see the opposite

Some say QAnon is losing its power. But I see the opposite

Jitarth Jadeja told Anastasiia Carrier: I left QAnon back in 2019, but I don’t seem to be able to walk away. I talk about my experience a lot — to the Washington Post, CNN and Rolling Stone magazine among many others. I even apologized to Anderson Cooper on his show for having once thought that he ate babies. I’m one of the few former followers willing to go on the record with their story, which means I’m a source for…

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Birds Aren’t Real: ‘Fighting lunacy with lunacy’

Birds Aren’t Real: ‘Fighting lunacy with lunacy’

The New York Times reports: In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.” On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo. The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits…

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Trump’s new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, is a $1.6 billion mirage

Trump’s new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, is a $1.6 billion mirage

Judd Legum writes: On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) will be retiring from Congress to become the company’s CEO in January. Nunes has no experience in the media business and once sued a fictional cow for making fun of him on Twitter. Writing in Bloomberg, Matt Levine concludes there is “almost no sign that TMTG is actually building a social network or a streaming platform or anything else.” Nevertheless, TMTG projects 121…

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How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

MIT Technology Review reports: In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a program publishers could use to monetize their content. One year after that rollout, legitimate publishers accounted for only two of the top 10 publishers on Facebook in Myanmar. By 2018, they accounted for…

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Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned

Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it, the tech giant’s researchers warned in internal memos. About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according to a research report that year by Facebook senior data scientist Jeff Allen, one of a dozen internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal….

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We already live in Facebook’s metaverse

We already live in Facebook’s metaverse

Kyle Chayka writes: Last Thursday, the same day that Facebook’s parent company rebranded under the new name Meta, Mark Zuckerberg gave a meandering tour of the metaverse—the as-yet-hypothetical next phase of the Internet, a unified space that mingles digital and physical reality—in a video presentation for the Facebook Connect 2021 event. The metaverse, which Zuckerberg has previously touted in earnings calls, will be “an embodied Internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” he said, as he…

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Is Facebook bad for you? It is for about 360 million users, company surveys suggest

Is Facebook bad for you? It is for about 360 million users, company surveys suggest

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform, which all seek to keep users…

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Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Jaron Lanier writes: [W]hat we need to talk about is the dominant business model. This model spews out horrible incentives to make people meaner and crazier. Incentives run the world more than laws, regulations, critiques or the ideas of researchers. The current incentives are to “engage” people as much as possible, which means triggering the “lizard brain” and fight-or-flight responses. People have always been a little paranoid, xenophobic, racist, neurotically vain, irritable, selfish and afraid. And yet putting people under…

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How to fix social media

How to fix social media

Nicholas Carr writes: There are several ways to decipher intent in social media communications. Some are straightforward. Certain platforms, like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Clubhouse, operate largely as broadcasting channels, while others, like Messenger, Zoom, and Facetime, are used mainly for personal conversation. Many platforms, Snapchat being a prominent example, offer users different modes of communication, some geared to personal speech, others to public speech. On platforms where personal and public speech are intertwined, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram,…

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Facebook understands the metaverse all too well

Facebook understands the metaverse all too well

Ian Bogost writes: In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it. And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do…

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Facebook’s rebrand ‘does not affect how we use or share data,’ says Zuckerberg

Facebook’s rebrand ‘does not affect how we use or share data,’ says Zuckerberg

The Verge reports: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now,…

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Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

The New York Times reports: Facebook has told employees to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016” that pertain to its businesses because governments and legislative bodies have started inquiries into its operations, according to a company email sent on Tuesday night. The move, known as a “legal hold,” follows intense media, legal and regulatory scrutiny over the social network’s harms. Lawmakers and the public are up in arms after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, provided thousands…

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Facebook has treated most of the planet with all the care of an invading imperial force

Facebook has treated most of the planet with all the care of an invading imperial force

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: Facebook, like the internet itself, is supposed to be a global phenomenon. It’s designed, its leaders say, to unite the world, transcend difference, and collapse distance. Its global reach and influence is undeniable. Nothing in human history has connected more than 3 billion human beings. Nothing has had such a profound set of effects in such a short period of time as Facebook has had everywhere—except, more or less, the People’s Republic of China—over the past decade….

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More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it

More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it

Nieman Lab reports: As if there wasn’t enough Facebook news to digest already, another deep dive from The Washington Post this morning revealed that Facebook engineers changed the company’s algorithm to prioritize and elevate posts that elicited emoji reactions — many of which were rolled out in 2017. More specifically, the ranking algorithm treated reactions such as “angry,” “love,” “sad,” and “wow” as five times more valuable than traditional “likes” on the social media platform. The problem with this plan…

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