Browsed by
Category: Social media

New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

The Guardian reports: To overseas eyes, going into national lockdown over a single case should have been a hard sell, even for an extraordinarily popular prime minister such as Jacinda Ardern. But a disastrous outbreak of the Delta variant in Sydney has helped galvanise New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” – and across the country, the government’s tough strategy on Covid-19 has enjoyed widespread popular support. On Tuesday, New Zealand was plunged into a national, level 4 lockdown – the…

Read More Read More

Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

The New York Times reports: In late July, Andrew Torba, the chief executive of the alternative social network Gab, claimed without evidence that members of the U.S. military who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus would face a court-martial. His post on Gab amassed 10,000 likes and shares. Two weeks earlier, the unfounded claim that at least 45,000 deaths had resulted from Covid-19 vaccines circulated online. Posts with the claim collected nearly 17,000 views on Bitchute, an alternative video…

Read More Read More

Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

The Guardian reports: Facebook failed to enforce its own rules to curb an oil and gas industry misinformation campaign over the climate crisis during last year’s presidential election, according to a new analysis released on Thursday. The report, by the London-based thinktank InfluenceMap, identified an increase in advertising on the social media site by ExxonMobil and other fossil-fuel companies aimed at shaping the political debate about policies to address global heating. InfluenceMap said its research shows the fossil-fuel industry has…

Read More Read More

Facebook killed research into the Capitol riot to protect itself — not its users

Facebook killed research into the Capitol riot to protect itself — not its users

Dell Cameron writes: When the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for deceiving its users on privacy, it celebrated the fine as “record-breaking and history-making.” Two years and $200 billion in revenue later, Facebook has found a way to turn lemons into lemonade, deceiving its users once again and using a seemingly powerless FTC to do it. Facebook’s Tuesday night crackdown on research into the dangerous falsehoods perpetuated by its platform was predicated on the lie that the FTC…

Read More Read More

Facebook is an ad tech company. That’s how we should regulate it

Facebook is an ad tech company. That’s how we should regulate it

Nathalie Maréchal writes: Another day, another Facebook accountability scandal. On Wednesday, Facebook shut down the accounts of NYU researchers Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy on the grounds that their Ad Observer tool violated Facebook users’ privacy. At first blush, this seems absurd: the users in question voluntarily installed the Ad Observer plug-in in their browser for the express purpose of sharing targeting info related to the political ads they see on Facebook with the researchers. Dig a little deeper, and…

Read More Read More

Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

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…

Read More Read More

Pro-Trump social network flooded with ISIS propaganda

Pro-Trump social network flooded with ISIS propaganda

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…

Read More Read More

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

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…

Read More Read More

Facebook pledged to bring the world together but wound up pulling us apart

Facebook pledged to bring the world together but wound up pulling us apart

Jill Lepore writes: Facebook has a save-the-world mission statement—“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share…

Read More Read More

The doctor who creates and profits from misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines

The doctor who creates and profits from misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines

The New York Times reports: The article that appeared online on Feb. 9 began with a seemingly innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next 3,400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease. Instead, the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.” Its assertions were easily…

Read More Read More

Facebook and YouTube’s vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems

Facebook and YouTube’s vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems

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,…

Read More Read More

How Ben Shapiro is using Facebook to create an empire built on outrage

How Ben Shapiro is using Facebook to create an empire built on outrage

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…

Read More Read More

Inside Facebook’s data wars

Inside Facebook’s data wars

Kevin Roose reports: One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate…

Read More Read More

Facebook staffers felt like ‘we were part of a cover-up’

Facebook staffers felt like ‘we were part of a cover-up’

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…

Read More Read More

Why Facebook really, really doesn’t want to discourage extremism

Why Facebook really, really doesn’t want to discourage extremism

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…

Read More Read More

Trump’s social media lawsuits feature a mashup of arguments courts have already rejected

Trump’s social media lawsuits feature a mashup of arguments courts have already rejected

BuzzFeed News reports: Former president Donald Trump’s latest attempt at getting back on mainstream social media platforms came in the form of lawsuits on Wednesday against Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — each featuring a series of claims that multiple courts, including the US Supreme Court, have rebuffed. Trump was suspended from Facebook and Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots at the US Capitol and blocked from YouTube a few days later; all three companies cited posts…

Read More Read More