This week, Facebook has faced a series of accusations about its internal workings, based on revelations in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
Much of the information comes from Facebook’s own internal documents, suggesting the company now has some whistle-blowers in its ranks.
The documents will provide governments and regulators with plenty to pore over as they consider their next moves.
However, Facebook has defended itself against all the accusations.
Facebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Mark Zuckerberg, a lawsuit has claimed.
The lawsuit alleges that the size of the $5bn settlement was driven by a desire to protect Facebook’s founder and chief executive from being named in the FTC complaint.
Facebook was fined by the FTC in 2019 for “deceiving” users about its ability to keep personal information private, after a year-long investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data breach, where a UK analysis firm harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters.
The way that Facebook controls its News Feed is often controversial and largely opaque to the outside world.
Now the social network is attempting to shine more light on the content it suppresses but doesn’t remove entirely. On Thursday, Facebook published its “Content Distribution Guidelines” detailing the roughly three-dozen types of posts it demotes for various reasons in the News Feed, like clickbait and posts by repeat policy offenders. That process, which relies heavily on machine learning technology to automatically detect problematic content, effectively throttles the reach of offending posts and comments without the author knowing.
Facebook’s oversight board is reviewing the company’s practice of exempting secret ‘whitelisted’ users from its community guidelines and allowing them to post banned content through a special XCheck program.
XCheck, also known internally as cross-check, has been a long-time subject of Facebook’s oversight board – a body not affiliated with the social media giant hired to critique how Facebook handles problematic content.
The board was created last year with a $130million trust fund from Facebook, which allows the committee to make final decisions on whether individual pieces of content can remain on the site.
Something exponential is happening now that 200,000 illegals are swarming our borders.
For sure, Joe Biden’s invitation is fueling decisions to come.
But the vehicle making it happen is important, too: Facebook, which is now hosting human smuggling rackets and worse on its pages. It’s allowing them to recruit and message freely.
“Congress is going to pass a pathway to citizenship,” said a tweet from Todd Schulte, the president of Zuckerberg’s amnesty lobby group, FWD.us. “It’s going to happen via the reconciliation bill … this is the year,” he tweeted.
The law, known as HB 20, prohibits social media platforms from banning or suspending users, and removing or suppressing their content, based on political viewpoint. The bill was introduced by state Sen. Bryan Hughes partly in an effort to combat perceived censorship of conservatives by Facebook, Twitter, Google-owned YouTube, and other major tech companies.
The complaint, dated Aug. 31, alleged that the federal government “admits to conspiring with social media companies to censor messages with which it disagrees.”
The lawsuit argued that this viewpoint discrimination, in which the federal government directs Big Tech companies to censor views that challenge a certain narrative, violated the First Amendment.
Forming an “election commission” to oversee a fair and smooth election process, until recently, used to be something exclusively reserved for nation states, but now Facebook is reported to be meddling in that domain, at least semantics-wise.
The company is embarrassed by the most popular shared content on its site
“Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook.” So begins the company’s first ever ‘Transparency Report’, covering Q1 2021, which details the most viewed posts, pages and shared links on the network.
Except when Facebook executives saw that the most shared link was a Chicago Tribune story about a doctor dying of a mysterious internal bleeding condition two weeks after his Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, they panicked. It was a credible mainstream source, but the article asserted that it was “possibly the nation’s first death linked to the vaccine”. Clearly, the reason for its popularity was as useful evidence for the anti-vax movement. Would Facebook be accused of spreading “misinformation”?
‘Prince of Pot’ Marc Emery was banned from Facebook on Friday. The 30-day ban coincides with the entire election cycle in which Emery is running as a candidate for the People’s Party of Canada in London North Centre.
Researchers studying Instagram’s algorithm said they were forced to shut down their project after Facebook threatened to sue them.
AlgorithmWatch, a German research and advocacy organization, issued a statement Friday alleging Facebook had threatened it with legal action. The group was researching Instagram’s news feed algorithm by recruiting volunteers to install a browser extension that automatically scraped their Instagram newsfeed data.
The Church of Facebook is set to capture the human soul in silicon. On July 25, the New York Times reported that since 2017 the social media giant has quietly cultivated exclusive partnerships with select religious communities. As always, money is involved.
While Facebook’s ultimate goals remain sealed behind non-disclosure agreements, the Times article does hint at things to come: “The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money.”
Not all heroes wear capes, and some of them don’t look like we think.
Facebook cannot abide by this. In their version of the world, heroes to be honored must fit their goals of intersectionality and racial equity. Especially if the hero happens to be a police officer. That’s already far enough out of their paradigm; but when the officer is white? Well…
A Detroit woman said she was temporarily banished from Facebook for “hate speech” after participating in a time-honored tradition: commenting on a meme labeling the opposite sex as “dumb.”
“At first I thought it was a joke [and] I’m like yeah right I’m blocked … what?” Candace King told Fox News of her social media timeout, which allegedly occurred after she participated in a thread entitled “why men are so dumb.”
