Attention to the Unseen

The Verge reports: Facebook has banned the personal accounts of academics who researched ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the social network. Facebook says the group violated its term of service by scraping user data without permission. But the academics say they are being silenced for exposing problems on Facebook’s platform. The researchers were part of NYU Ad Observatory, a project created to examine the origin and spread of political ads on Facebook. As the group explained in…

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Politico reports: Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform. The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in…

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Karen Hao writes: The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Before she was fired, Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at the company. But she had become consumed by a task she deemed more important: finding and taking down fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally. Her memo revealed that…

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Will Oremus writes: On Friday, President Biden said Facebook is “killing people” by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. On Monday, he changed his tune. “Facebook isn’t killing people,” he amended, instead blaming a handful of disinformation merchants who use the platform. Whether Facebook is or isn’t killing people depends on your definitions. What’s clear, regardless, is that Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms have played a major role in the anti-vaccine movement. And they continue to do so,…

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NPR reports: In 2021, Ben Shapiro rules Facebook. The conservative podcast host and author’s personal Facebook page has more followers than The Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the world’s biggest social networking site. An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide…

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Business Insider reports: Early drafts of a 2017 Facebook white paper on security concerns included mentions about Russia’s role before company executives decided it was “politically unwise” and told them to remove it, a new book says. The first draft of the white paper from Facebook’s then-chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and his team had “an entire section devoted to activity by state-backed Russian hackers,” according to an advance copy of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination that…

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Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden write: Our findings may reflect the fact that, more and more, political identities are driven by hating the opposition more than loving one’s own party. Out-party hate has been increasing steadily over the past few decades, researchers find, and is at the highest level seen in 40 years. Out-group hate is also more strongly related to whom we vote for than in-party love. In much the same way, who we…

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The Guardian reports: A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal. In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support…

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Evelyn Douek writes: One of the many ways that the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) is different from many courts of law, let alone the Supreme Court, is that except on the narrowest of issues (the fate of the individual piece of content or account in a case) it doesn’t have the last word. The bulk and most consequential parts of the FOB’s decisions are non-binding policy recommendations; Facebook need not abide by them but does have an obligation to respond…

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NBC News reports: Steve Bannon has a new MAGA megaphone, and Republicans eager to shine in a party still tethered to former President Donald Trump know it. Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive and one of the architects of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, has increasingly leveraged his “War Room: Pandemic” podcast into a kind of proxy primary. Ambitious Republicans are flocking there for the chance to demonstrate loyalty to Bannon’s former boss and pitch themselves to Trump’s voters…

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Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann write: Washington, we have a problem — politically, informationally and societally — when 15 percent of Americans agree with the QAnon statement that the U.S. government, media and financial worlds “are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” Or when 20 percent agree with this statement: “There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”…

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