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Category: Social media

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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Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

The Wall Street Journal reports: In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it. He pointed to the success of a BuzzFeed post titled “21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying,” which received 13,000 shares and 16,000 comments on Facebook, many from…

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Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt

Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The program, known…

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Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

The New York Times reports: More than three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook trumpeted a plan to share data with researchers about how people interacted with posts and links on the social network, so that the academics could study misinformation on the site. Researchers have used the data for the past two years for numerous studies examining the spread of false and misleading information. But the information shared by Facebook had a major flaw, according to internal emails and…

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How the NYPD is using post-9/11 tools on everyday New Yorkers

How the NYPD is using post-9/11 tools on everyday New Yorkers

The New York Times reports: It was an unusual forearm tattoo that the police said led them to Luis Reyes, a 35-year-old man who was accused of stealing packages from a Manhattan building’s mailroom in 2019. But the truth was more complicated: Mr. Reyes had first been identified by the New York Police Department’s powerful facial recognition software as it analyzed surveillance video of the crime. His guilty plea earlier this year was not solely the result of keen-eyed detectives…

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How a small town silenced a neo-Nazi hate campaign

How a small town silenced a neo-Nazi hate campaign

The New York Times reports from Whitefish, Montana: Richard B. Spencer, the most infamous summer resident in this town, once boasted that he stood at the vanguard of a white nationalist movement emboldened by President Donald J. Trump. Things have changed. “I have bumped into him, and he runs — that’s actually a really good feeling,” said Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent targeted in an antisemitic hate campaign that Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi…

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