The platform briefly blocked some of Warren’s ads attacking it. Her response: ‘Curious why I think FB has too much power?’
Elizabeth Warren could not have asked for a better illustration for her point.
The US senator and Democratic candidate for president took aim at Facebook on Monday evening after the social network briefly blocked her campaign from running advertisements that just happened to call for breaking up Facebook.
Continue reading...The titans of the new Gilded Age must be busted and the idea has bipartisan support. It’s time big tech was brought to heel
The presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren announced on Friday she wants to bust up giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
America’s first Gilded Age began in the late 19th century with a raft of innovations – railroads, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber barons” like JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, and William H “the public be damned” Vanderbilt.
Continue reading...Britain’s Future has spent £340,000 promoting hard exit – but no one knows who’s funding it
The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain’s Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of “dark money” in British politics.
The little-known campaign group has spent more than £340,000 on Facebook adverts backing a hard Brexit since the social network began publishing lists of political advertisers last October, making it a bigger spender than every UK political party and the government combined.
Continue reading...Amnesty says social media firm must do more to support users who report harassment
Human rights campaigners have called for action after a survey revealed that more than half of the reports that women lodge about harassment on Facebook are met with no action from the social media company.
The Survation poll, commissioned by the feminist campaign group Level Up, found that 29% of the 1,000 women who took part had been harassed on Facebook.
Continue reading...Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.
The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of how Facebook:
Continue reading...Commissioners demand hard numbers from firm ahead of European parliament elections
Facebook has repeatedly withheld key data on its alleged efforts to clamp down on disinformation ahead of the European elections, the EU’s executive has said.
Related: Anti-vaxx propaganda has gone viral on Facebook. Pinterest has a cure
Continue reading...Communications between senior figures, including Mark Zuckerberg, shed new light on data use
Documents posted online Friday appear to be confidential internal Facebook communications that reveal new details of the company’s treatment of user data.
About 60 pages of un-redacted exhibits from a lawsuit between Facebook and Six4Three, an app developer, were posted anonymously on GitHub on Friday. They include emails between various Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and a “highly confidential” 2012 memo detailing various policy matters.
Continue reading...As site grapples with flood of fake news, former Snopes editor says CEO’s crowdsourcing comments show he has ‘learned nothing’
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he is considering crowdsourcing as a new model for Facebook’s third-party factchecking partnerships.
In the first of a series of public conversations, Zuckerberg praised the efforts of factcheckers who partnered with Facebook following the 2016 presidential election as a bulwark against the flood of misinformation and fake news that was overtaking the site’s News Feed.
Continue reading...Damian Collins warns of ‘deepfake films’ showing doctored footage of politicians
Online disinformation is only going to get more sophisticated, the chair of the committee investigating disinformation and fake news, Damian Collins, has warned.
Related: Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news
Continue reading...The latest World Health Organization report on measles epidemics shows that cases jumped by 50% last year. In one of the poorest and least connected countries in the world, Madagascar, nearly a thousand children are reported to have died after a measles outbreak in the countryside. The real figure is likely to be much higher, because of difficulties of reporting. An emergency programme of vaccination seems to have contained that epidemic for the moment but it is a reminder of how devastating the disease can be against unprepared populations. In the rich world, meanwhile, previously prepared populations are having their defences dismantled from the inside.
The discovery of ad campaigns against vaccination on Facebook that are carefully targeted at pregnant women is unusually worrying. It shows how the widespread availability of sophisticated advertising techniques is going to give considerable power to people who previously had no way of getting their message across to large numbers. In the most recent US campaigns against vaccination, 147 different advertisements have been used and some viewed more than 5m times. There is an arms race under way, whether we like it or not.
Continue reading...News site says it wants to ensure its efforts are a ‘net positive’ for community, as some journalists doubt program’s effectiveness
Facebook’s controversial factchecking program has lost one of its major US partners. The news website Snopes.com announced on Friday it was cutting ties with the social network.
The departure of Snopes, which has collaborated with Facebook for two years to debunk misinformation on the platform, doesn’t come as a surprise. Numerous journalists working for Facebook’s factchecking initiative have said the partnership was failing to have an impact.
Continue reading...The Facebook accounts had garnered about 2 million followers and researchers say they amplified anti-west views
Facebook and Twitter both announced on Thursday they had taken down hundreds of accounts believed to have been part of coordinated influence operations from Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
Related: Apple cracks down on Facebook after it paid teens for access to their data
Continue reading...In 2004, the social network site was set up to connect people. But now, with lives increasingly played out online, have we forgotten how to be alone?
‘Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: search for people at your school; find out who are [sic] in your classes; look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your social network.”
On 4 February 2004, this rather clunky announcement launched an invention conceived in the dorm room of a Harvard student called Mark Zuckerberg, and intended to be an improvement on the so-called face books that US universities traditionally used to collect photos and basic information about their students. From the vantage point of 2019, Thefacebook – as it was then known – looks familiar, but also strange. Pages were coloured that now familiar shade of blue, and “friends” were obviously a central element of what was displayed. However, there was little on show from the wider world: the only photos were people’s profile pictures, and there was no ever-changing news feed.
Continue reading...Staff discussed what to do with high-spending children before deciding to refuse refunds
Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that had accused it of allowing children to run up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards as part of a concerted effort to maximise revenues.
Court documents obtained by the US-based Center for Investigative Reporting, initially sealed as part of a lawsuit filed in 2012, revealed Facebook staff discussed what to do with the “whales”, as they referred to the high-spending children, before deciding to refuse refunds.
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