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Category: Social media

What Facebook did for Chauvin’s trial should happen all the time

What Facebook did for Chauvin’s trial should happen all the time

Evelyn Douek writes: On Monday, Facebook vowed that its staff was “working around the clock” to identify and restrict posts that could lead to unrest or violence after a verdict was announced in the murder trial of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In a blog post, the company promised to remove “content that praises, celebrates or mocks” the death of George Floyd. Most of the company’s statement amounted to pinky-swearing to really, really enforce its existing community standards,…

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The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts

The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts

Jana Winter reports: The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News. The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and…

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China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories, reports says

China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories, reports says

Michael Isikoff reports: Foreign-based actors, principally in China and Russia, are spreading online disinformation rooted in QAnon conspiracy theories, fueling a movement that has become a mounting domestic terrorism threat, according to new analysis of online propaganda by a security firm. The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators. An…

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What QAnon documentaries reveal about how conspiracies flourish

What QAnon documentaries reveal about how conspiracies flourish

Derek Robertson writes: A media suddenly bereft of the eye-popping right-wing extremism once peddled daily by the 45th president has found its methadone: a seemingly endless stream of QAnon-centric documentaries, books and essays. There’s Vice’s “The Search for Q” series; CNN’s “Inside the QAnon Conspiracy”; Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer’s announcement of his forthcoming book based on the topic; and the buzziest of them all: “Q: Into the Storm,” HBO’s six-episode documentary miniseries produced by Adam McKay, the Oscar-winning auteur…

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Why humans find it so hard to let go of false beliefs

Why humans find it so hard to let go of false beliefs

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska writes: There’s a new virus in town and it’s not fooling around. You can catch it through face-to-face contact or digitally – that is, via a human or bot. Few of us possess immunity, some are even willing hosts; and, despite all we’ve learned about it, this virus is proving more cunning and harder to eradicate than anyone could have expected. Misinformation isn’t new, of course. Fake news was around even before the invention of the printing press,…

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Facebook planned to remove fake accounts in India – until it realized a BJP politician was involved

Facebook planned to remove fake accounts in India – until it realized a BJP politician was involved

The Guardian reports: Facebook allowed a network of fake accounts to artificially inflate the popularity of an MP from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), for months after being alerted to the problem. The company was preparing to remove the fake accounts but paused when it found evidence that the politician was probably directly involved in the network, internal documents seen by the Guardian show. The company’s decision not to take timely action against the network, which it had already…

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The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

The Guardian reports: Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to…

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How social media turns online arguments between teens into real-world violence

How social media turns online arguments between teens into real-world violence

Comments and livestreams can lead to physical fights, shootings and even death. Photo illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Caitlin Elsaesser, University of Connecticut The deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January exposed the power of social media to influence real-world behavior and incite violence. But many adolescents, who spend more time on social media than all other age groups, have known this for years. “On social media, when you argue, something so small can turn…

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Amazon isn’t anyone’s friend

Amazon isn’t anyone’s friend

Ian Bogost writes: On social media, brands have been evolving from public-relations automatons to your cool friends. When Walmart posts about a “moment of zen … brought to you by our spring stock up essentials,” it’s just doing vanilla-flavored marketing. But when Slim Jim, the beef-stick company, sasses Steak-umm, the frozen-beef-sheet seller, over supposedly subliminal 69s in a post, it is striving to embody a personality that might resonate with customers. Amazon’s straight-up aggression [in its social media campaign against…

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Hundreds of far-right militias are still organizing, recruiting, and promoting violence on Facebook

Hundreds of far-right militias are still organizing, recruiting, and promoting violence on Facebook

BuzzFeed News reports: When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces Congress on Thursday, to testify about extremism online, he will do so as hundreds of far-right militias, including some whose members were charged in the deadly insurrection on the US Capitol, continue to organize, recruit, and promote violence on the platform. More than 200 militia pages and groups were on Facebook as of March 18, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit watchdog…

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Racist anti-Asian hashtags spiked after Trump first tweeted ‘Chinese virus,’ study finds

Racist anti-Asian hashtags spiked after Trump first tweeted ‘Chinese virus,’ study finds

The Washington Post reports: As the coronavirus spread across the globe last February, the World Health Organization urged people to avoid terms like the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus,” fearing it could spike a backlash against Asians. President Donald Trump didn’t take the advice. On March 16, 2020, he first tweeted the phrase “Chinese virus.” That single tweet, researchers later found, fueled exactly the kind of backlash the WHO had feared: It was followed by an avalanche of tweets…

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Your face is not your own

Your face is not your own

Kashmir Hill writes: In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was…

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The misinformation campaign was distinctly one-sided

The misinformation campaign was distinctly one-sided

Renée DiResta writes: On the morning of September 21, 2020, three trays of United States mail were discovered in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The local sheriff’s office reported that the mail dump included several absentee ballots. When a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson made a similar assertion two days later, a local Fox affiliate, WLUK, reported the statement on its website. And then a national network of conservative commentators and influencers did something that happened again and again last fall:…

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Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem

Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem

BuzzFeed News reports: Facebook has created a ”playbook” to help its employees rebut criticism that the company’s products fuel political polarization and social division. The document, which cites a range of academic studies but does not include recent data from the company’s own research teams, was posted to Facebook’s internal Workplace discussion forum by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president of research, earlier this week. During a Thursday webinar for employees, Cox said the document would…

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How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

Karen Hao writes: Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience. It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, had surreptitiously siphoned the personal data of tens of millions of Americans from their Facebook accounts in an attempt to influence how they voted. It was the biggest privacy breach in Facebook’s history, and Quiñonero had been previously scheduled…

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Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy

Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy

Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev write: To read the diary of Gustave de Beaumont, the traveling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, is to understand just how primitive the American wilderness once seemed to visiting Frenchmen. In a single month, December 1831, Tocqueville and Beaumont were on a steamship that crashed; rode a stagecoach that broke an axle; and took shelter in a cabin—one of them bedridden from an unidentified illness—while the nearest doctor was a two-day hike away. Yet they…

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