Browsed by
Category: Social media

Facebook’s path to global domination: Take over the internet, then the world’s financial system

Facebook’s path to global domination: Take over the internet, then the world’s financial system

Comments 0 Comment

Thomas Claburn writes: Facebook – the global ad business pilloried repeatedly over the past 15 years for privacy disasters – on Tuesday announced a scheme to allow account holders to buy credits and spend the digitized funds online through a network of partners, under a “strong commitment to privacy.” The antisocial network’s blockchain-tracked currency, Libra, will reside in a digital wallet named for the company’s newly formed financial services subsidiary Calibra. This coin-storing code will be available initially in WhatsApp…

Read More Read More

YouTube’s new policy on hate speech risks increasing ignorance about fascism

YouTube’s new policy on hate speech risks increasing ignorance about fascism

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: YouTube has blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they are breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech. The video-sharing website announced on Wednesday that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism. Scott Allsop, who…

Read More Read More

Russian disinformation on YouTube draws ads, lacks warning labels, say researchers

Russian disinformation on YouTube draws ads, lacks warning labels, say researchers

Comments 0 Comment

Reuters reports: Fourteen Russia-backed YouTube channels spreading disinformation have been generating billions of views and millions of dollars in advertising revenue, according to researchers, and had not been labeled as state-sponsored, contrary to the world’s most popular streaming service’s policy. The channels, including news outlets NTV and Russia-24, carried false reports ranging from a U.S. politician covering up a human organ harvesting ring to the economic collapse of Scandinavian countries. Despite such content, viewers have flocked to the channels and…

Read More Read More

Facebook is an enemy of the effort to avert catastrophic climate change, scientists say

Facebook is an enemy of the effort to avert catastrophic climate change, scientists say

Comments 0 Comment

Joe Romm reports: ThinkProgress asked some experts what Facebook’s latest actions mean for the national conversation on climate change. “Facebook is complicit in spreading outright falsehoods and misinforming the public about matters of public concern,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle wrote in an email. The company’s “refusal to take down this blatant distortion of Speaker Pelosi shows that they are an irresponsible actor, and contributing to the decline of public discourse.” Brulle explained that Facebook’s actions are particularly disastrous since there…

Read More Read More

Twitter is eroding your intelligence. Now there’s data to prove it

Twitter is eroding your intelligence. Now there’s data to prove it

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate. But new evidence shows that the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless. The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain…

Read More Read More

Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy

Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy

Comments 0 Comment

CNN reports: On a recent afternoon in Helsinki, a group of students gathered to hear a lecture on a subject that is far from a staple in most community college curriculums. Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image and video manipulations, half-truths,…

Read More Read More

A path for regulators to break up Facebook remains unclear

A path for regulators to break up Facebook remains unclear

Comments 0 Comment

April Glaser writes: Facebook is big. Possibly too big. Which is why the chorus of experts and former Facebookers who think it’s time to break the company up is getting louder. Last Thursday, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wrote a mammoth op-ed in the New York Times about why the company that made him very wealthy should be less powerful. In his view, the way to do that is to make the market more competitive. To do that, Hughes recommends (among…

Read More Read More

Trump’s social media bias reporting project is a data collection tool in disguise

Trump’s social media bias reporting project is a data collection tool in disguise

Comments 0 Comment

Casey Newton writes: Three years ago this month, Mark Zuckerberg gathered together a group of influential conservatives to defend Facebook against allegations of political bias. The company had found itself under pressure after Gizmodo reported that the editors who then worked for Facebook “routinely suppressed conservative news” from its since-abandoned Trending Topics module. It hoped that a roundtable discussion with Glenn Beck, Fox News host Dana Perino, and others would quell the growing panic that Silicon Valley liberals were stifling…

Read More Read More

Trump administration balks at global pact to crack down on online extremism

Trump administration balks at global pact to crack down on online extremism

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would not sign an international accord intended to pressure the largest internet platforms to eradicate violent and extremist content, highlighting a broader divide between the United States and other countries over government’s role in determining what content is acceptable online. Citing free speech protections, the administration said in a statement that “the United States is not currently in a position to join the endorsement.” It added that…

Read More Read More

Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections

Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections

Comments 0 Comment

The Associated Press reports: Facebook said Thursday it banned an Israeli company that ran an influence campaign aimed at disrupting elections in various countries and has canceled dozens of accounts engaged in spreading disinformation. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the tech giant had purged 65 Israeli accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts. Although Facebook said the individuals behind the network attempted to conceal their identities, it discovered that many were linked…

Read More Read More

Should the media sever their ties to Facebook?

Should the media sever their ties to Facebook?

Comments 0 Comment

Mathew Ingram writes: With all that has transpired between Facebook and the media industry over the past couple of years—the repeated algorithm changes, the head fakes about switching to video, the siphoning off of a significant chunk of the industry’s advertising revenue—most publishers approach the giant social network with skepticism, if not outright hostility. And yet, the vast majority of them continue to partner with Facebook, to distribute their content on its platform, and even accept funding and resources from…

Read More Read More

Now for sale on Facebook: Looted Middle Eastern antiquities

Now for sale on Facebook: Looted Middle Eastern antiquities

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Ancient treasures pillaged from conflict zones in the Middle East are being offered for sale on Facebook, researchers say, including items that may have been looted by Islamic State militants. Facebook groups advertising the items grew rapidly during the upheaval of the Arab Spring and the ensuing wars, which created unprecedented opportunities for traffickers, said Amr Al-Azm, a professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and a former antiquities…

Read More Read More

Co-founder of Facebook says it’s time to break up the company

Co-founder of Facebook says it’s time to break up the company

Comments 0 Comment

Chris Hughes writes: The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. We met at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We talked politics mostly, a little about Facebook, a bit about our families. When the shadows grew long, I had to head out. I hugged…

Read More Read More

Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data

Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data

Comments 0 Comment

Nature reports: Facebook is giving social scientists unprecedented access to its data so that they can investigate how social-media platforms can influence elections and alter democracies. The first group of projects selected for funding involves more than 60 researchers split into 12 teams. They will tackle questions such as how fake news spreads, who distributes it and how to identify it. Their projects, announced on 28 April, will focus on countries including Germany, Chile, Italy and the United States. The…

Read More Read More

Facebook’s banning of Alex Jones and other bigots misses the real problem

Facebook’s banning of Alex Jones and other bigots misses the real problem

Comments 0 Comment

April Glaser writes: [After banning Infowars, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, and other inflammatory figures like far-right personalities Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos, white supremacist politician Paul Nehlen, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan] Facebook didn’t share what rules specifically were violated or what the process was for reviewing its rules. Presumably, if Thursday’s actions reflect a new approach that Facebook is now taking—or at least a new sense of urgency—then far more than seven accounts would have been…

Read More Read More

Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day, study finds

Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day, study finds

Comments 0 Comment

Media Matters reports: Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump’s misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump’s misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per day. The data shows that news outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition:…

Read More Read More