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Category: Social media

Facebook says AI will clean up the platform. Its own engineers have doubts

Facebook says AI will clean up the platform. Its own engineers have doubts

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook executives have long said that artificial intelligence would address the company’s chronic problems keeping what it deems hate speech and excessive violence as well as underage users off its platforms. That future is farther away than those executives suggest, according to internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s AI can’t consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants and even, in one notable episode that puzzled internal researchers for weeks, the difference between…

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Instagram struggles with fears of losing its ‘pipeline’: young users

Instagram struggles with fears of losing its ‘pipeline’: young users

The New York Times reports: When Instagram reached one billion users in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, called it “an amazing success.” The photo-sharing app, which Facebook owns, was widely hailed as a hit with young people and celebrated as a growth engine for the social network. But even as Mr. Zuckerberg praised Instagram, the app was privately lamenting the loss of teenage users to other social media platforms as an “existential threat,” according to a 2018 marketing presentation….

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Why the Nobel Peace Prize award is a huge blow to Facebook

Why the Nobel Peace Prize award is a huge blow to Facebook

Nina Jankowicz writes: The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov is a big victory for free expression. In an era when attacks on the press have been increasing, Ressa and Muratov are a reminder of the critical role the Fourth Estate plays in upholding democracy. But Ressa’s win has another dimension as well: It also is an indictment of the failings of Facebook. Ressa, a former CNN journalist, is co-founder of Rappler, the…

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It’s not misinformation. It’s amplified propaganda

It’s not misinformation. It’s amplified propaganda

Renée DiResta writes: One Sunday morning in July of last year, a message from an anonymous account appeared on “Bernie or Vest,” a Discord chat server for fans of Senator Bernie Sanders. It contained an image of Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco activist challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 congressional runoff, and offered explicit instructions for how to elevate the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to the nationwide Trending list on Twitter. “Shahid Says…,” read the large print, “Draft some tweets…

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Facebook is to our minds as Exxon is to our air

Facebook is to our minds as Exxon is to our air

Bill McKibben writes: What Exxon is to our air, Facebook is to our minds: an unparalleled source of pollution. Both are giant companies with deep political power whose products at one point offered a certain kind of liberation and now threaten whatever well-being we still enjoy. Both have lied and covered-up their evil: the Wall Street Journal’s accounts of the Facebook files (artfully reprised in the New Yorker and last night on 60 Minutes) remind me of nothing as much…

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Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded

Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded

MIT Technology Review reports: One of the last messages that Vaiva Bezhan sent on Facebook Messenger on Monday afternoon, Central European Time, was a bit of a cliffhanger—and incredibly time sensitive. The Lithuanian photojournalist is co-organizer of the Afghan Support Group, one of many volunteer initiatives trying by any means possible to help evacuate vulnerable Afghans in the wake of the Taliban takeover. She was writing to ask if she could add someone to a flight manifest for one of…

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Facebook: The decline of a dying company

Facebook: The decline of a dying company

Kevin Roose writes: One possible way to read “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent series of reports based on leaked internal Facebook research, is as a story about an unstoppable juggernaut bulldozing society on its way to the bank. The series has exposed damning evidence that Facebook has a two-tier justice system, that it knew Instagram was worsening body-image issues among girls and that it had a bigger vaccine misinformation problem than it let on, among other issues….

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Facebook’s outage shows we need antitrust action now

Facebook’s outage shows we need antitrust action now

Edward Ongweso Jr writes: On Monday, a global service outage hit Facebook and took down the world’s ubiquitous social network , along with Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage, which affects billions of people, occurred just as Facebook filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s amended antitrust complaint against the company accusing it of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate anti-competitive market power. The day before the outage, on Sunday, the Facebook whistleblower behind devastating leaks that have…

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Facebook struggles to suppress uproar over Instagram’s harmful effects on teens

Facebook struggles to suppress uproar over Instagram’s harmful effects on teens

The New York Times reports: Over the past few weeks, top Facebook executives assembled virtually for a series of emergency meetings. In one gathering last weekend, half a dozen managers — including Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, and Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs — discussed pausing the development of an Instagram service for children ages 13 and under, said two people briefed on the meeting. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, weighed in to approve the decision, the…

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Facebook’s effort to prey upon children goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show

Facebook’s effort to prey upon children goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook Inc. has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed…

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Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse

Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse

Adrienne LaFrance writes: In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy. Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached…

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The problem with Facebook is Facebook

The problem with Facebook is Facebook

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: Many critics of big technology companies have been cheering as their disgruntled labor forces have risen up to challenge the rich, (mostly) white, (mostly) American men who design and run Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Palantir and others. Labor uprisings have forced bosses to confront their poor treatment of women, their complicity with the military and intelligence establishments, the general threat of surveillance and the political affiliations of the companies and their leaders. This week…

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Facebook has known for a year and a half that Instagram is bad for teens despite claiming otherwise – here are the harms researchers have been documenting for years

Facebook has known for a year and a half that Instagram is bad for teens despite claiming otherwise – here are the harms researchers have been documenting for years

Instagram’s emphasis on filtered photos of bodies harms girls’ self-image. Thomas Barwick/DigitalVision via Getty Images By Christia Spears Brown, University of Kentucky Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram – the social media platform most used by adolescents – is harmful to teen girls’ body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a Sept. 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report. Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits…

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Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows

MIT Technology Review reports: In the run up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm….

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Facebook employees flag drug cartels and human traffickers. The company’s response is weak, documents show

Facebook employees flag drug cartels and human traffickers. The company’s response is weak, documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began “Happy 2021 to everyone!!” and then proceeded to detail a new set of what he called “learnings.” The biggest one: A Mexican drug cartel was using Facebook to recruit, train and pay hit men. The behavior was shocking and in clear violation of Facebook’s rules. But the company didn’t stop the cartel from posting…

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