Its latest crackdown on ‘misinformation’ proves the tech giant hasn’t learnt its lesson
Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
In a recent op-ed published by CNBC, Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg outlined the values that Facebook believes it must promote worldwide. Clegg stated that Facebook focuses on promoting American values such as “free expression,” a statement many would find ironic considering the allegations of censorship Facebook has faced in recent years.
Facebook was today accused of ‘showing its true and ugly colours’ and smothering free speech to cosy up to China as it scrapped its ban on posts debating whether Covid-19 could be man-made – but only after Joe Biden ordered the CIA to probe if the virus came from a Wuhan lab.
Mark Zuckerberg’s global policy chief Nick Clegg, the former British MP and Liberal Democrat leader, has also been branded ‘feeble’ for allowing months of censorship on the social network.
Critics told MailOnline that Facebook’s behaviour had been ‘contemptible’ and hope they will now respect free speech rather than ‘ingratiating’ themselves with states such as China, which has banned the website but remains a $5billion-a-year ad market.
Makes you wonder why social media was so Trump deranged and where their loyalties lie.
“Two Facebook Insiders have come forward with internal company documents detailing a plan to curb “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) on a global scale.”
“The stated goal of this feature is to “drastically reduce user exposure” to VH comments. Another aim of the program is to force a “decrease in other engagement of VH comments including create, likes, reports [and] replies.”
Alpha News is Minnesota’s scrappy alternative news service. Scott serves on Alpha’s board, and my organization both supports and collaborates with Alpha. Today Alpha reported that Facebook has threatened to ban its page for posting a cartoon that Facebook found offensive…
The campaign against the page started last week. Anti-Israel activists claimed that Facebook made them follow the page without their consent, and began flooding it with serious anti-Semitic comments – which also include photos and quotes by Hitler. The comments may have caused Facebook’s mechanisms to block the page, but Dr. Evans and his team claim that the activists, who posted more than a million abusive comments, also reported it and led to its removal.
Supposedly engaged in a struggle against misinformation, Facebook and its fact-checking partner spread their own.
At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out, and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events. But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?
“We are a force for good,” says Nas Daily, the popular Facebook video site that boasts: “With 60 members, we reached 3.2% of the world’s population, 10 billion video impressions, 35 million followers, 100% organic views.” Nas Daily videos tend to be heartwarming and inspiring tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and a video posted Saturday seemed to be more of the same: it profiled a man who adopted eighty children, portraying him as an unalloyed hero.
Facebook’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump was upheld by Facebook’s oversight board on Wednesday.
“Trump’s posts during the Capitol riot severely violated Facebook’s rules and encouraged and legitimized violence,” the board said in a statement.
The Facebook “Supreme Court” will announce its final decision on former President Trump’s Facebook account on Wednesday morning, according to a recent announcement.
Far-left groups, including racial activists and socialists, used Facebook to organize 14 protests in eight days over the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial. The site previously sheltered far-left Antifa-related activist organizations such as “All Out DC” that reportedly spread posters with the personal information of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in an effort to “Block the Alt-Right.” Smash Racism DC allegedly broke Carlson’s door and frightened his wife. Both pages remain functional on Facebook.
Facebook’s private force is half the size of the San Francisco Police Department.
It was a love story made in the start-ups of San Francisco when Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, proposed to Kaitlyn Trigger, a former product manager at TaskRabbit.
Instagram is where celebrities go to post their vacation photos and TaskRabbit is the gig economy app where random people labor to perform menial tasks for a few bucks. While both of these apps are a blight on the world, it’s different for the wizards behind the curtain.
The plan is to digitally segregate vaccinated and unvaccinated people on Facebook to highlight who the “good vaccinated citizens” are, and contrast them with the “bad unvaccinated citizens.”
In a Facebook group dedicated to McGill University students, many have recently taken to creating posts and polls about issuing student-led consequences for those that have defied Quebec’s Public Health decree.
The personal data of more than half a billion Facebook Inc. users reemerged online for free on Saturday, a reminder of the company’s ability to collect mountains of information and its struggles to protect these sensitive assets.
The leak includes personal information on 533 million Facebook users, such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios and in some cases email addresses, Business Insider reported.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
That is an asinine response by FB. It’s like saying we rebuilt the dam after the break so everything is A-OK as before!
