Frances Haugen was frustrated that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging the harm its platforms could cause
Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind a series of damaging revelations about Facebook, is adamant that she wants to help the social media company and not foment hatred of it.
The 37-year-old leaked tens of thousands of internal company documents after becoming frustrated that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging the harm its platforms could cause.
Continue reading...Former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes
A whistleblower at Facebook will say that thousands of pages of internal company research she turned over to federal regulators proves the social media giant is deceptively claiming effectiveness in its efforts to eradicate hate and misinformation and it contributed to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.
The former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes ahead of a scheduled appearance at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Company suspended former president’s account in January following the attack on the US Capitol
Donald Trump has asked a federal judge in Florida to force social media giant Twitter to restore his account, which the company suspended in January following the attack that month on the US Capitol in Washington DC.
Trump’s use of the platform was a signature mark of his run for the presidency in 2016 and one he continued to use in office. He wielded it to attack enemies and dominate news cycles.
Continue reading...Inspired by hit podcasts and documentaries, ordinary people are trying to track down fugitives and reopen cold cases. But should they be?
Although the story you are about to read involves a fugitive, law enforcement and a six-month chase across Mexico, for Billy Jensen it was just another day on the job. In 2017, Jensen was on the hunt for a pale, ginger, tattooed California killer hiding out in Mexico. Jensen uploaded a photo of the fugitive to Facebook. “¿Has visto a este hombre?” he asked, using Facebook’s targeted ad tools to ensure the post was seen by people living near American bars. Tips came flooding in. One tipster snapped a photo. In just 24 hours, Jensen had his guy.
Unfortunately, the killer was on the move. It took half a year of similar posts for the 49-year-old Jensen to finally get the suspect apprehended by the Mexican police – for Jensen isn’t a police officer himself, or a detective, or an FBI agent. He is a podcaster, author, journalist, and self-described “citizen sleuth”.
Continue reading...Strong’s role as the self-destructive media heir takes commitment – and the actor goes all in
• Plus: inside the Succession writers’ room
Earlier this year, Jeremy Strong left his apartment in Brooklyn, walked across the bridge to Manhattan and headed towards the far west side of the island, where he was filming the third season of the feverishly adored and heavily accoladed HBO series Succession. Strong plays Kendall, the alternately bullied and rebellious son of the vilified, Murdoch-esque media tycoon Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and Succession follows the jostling among the patriarch’s four children for his affection and respect, both of which he generally withholds. None of them is as visibly crushed by this as Kendall, who bears more than a slight resemblance to James Murdoch, even down to the dabblings in hip-hop. With every timid step Strong makes on screen, every apologetic dip of his chin when he starts to talk, he captures the pain of a son who knows he has failed to live up to his father’s expectations from the first time he cried. He won an Emmy last year for the role, beating, among others, Cox, in neatly Freudian style.
Strong likes to walk while learning his lines, so on that day in New York as he was walking he was also talking, reciting a speech he would soon be saying to Cox, in which Kendall tries to curry favour with his father, but also to be seen as his own man. “Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a ghost-grey Tesla rolling to a stop, so I looked in it, and there was James Murdoch,” Strong says when we meet in a London hotel. “He looked at me and I looked at him, and there was a flicker between us. Then he was gone. So we had a moment.”
Continue reading...The request follows the former president suing Twitter, Facebook and Google in July accusing them of censoring conservative voices
Donald Trump, the former US president, has asked a federal judge in Florida to force Twitter to reinstate his account.
In July Trump sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, as well as their chief executives, alleging they unlawfully silence conservative viewpoints.
Continue reading...Ozy faced questions about its viewership figures and claims that its co-founder impersonated a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs
Ozy, a digital media startup, is shutting down less than a week after a New York Times column raised questions about the organization’s claims of millions of viewers and readers, while also pointing out a potential case of securities fraud.
The story triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company.
Continue reading...Taliban deny Morteza Samadi, 21, has been sentenced to death but family concerned for his safety after he was detained while covering women’s protests in Herat
Fears are growing for a photojournalist who has been detained by the Taliban for more than three weeks after being arrested while covering the women’s protests in Herat.
Morteza Samadi, 21, a freelance photographer, was one of several journalists who were arrested at street protests at the beginning of September. All were quickly released except Morteza, whose whereabouts is not known. Some of those detained in Kabul have alleged they were badly beaten and tortured.
Continue reading...Melanie Chisholm, Boyzone’s Shane Lynch and S Club 7’s Hannah Spearritt latest to allege voicemail interception
A group of 1990s pop stars are among the latest individuals to launch phone-hacking cases against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, as the scandal that has dogged the company for more than 15 years continues to rumble on at the high court.
Melanie Chisholm from the Spice Girls, Shane Lynch from Boyzone, Hannah Spearritt from S Club 7, and Steps’s Ian Watkins and Lee Latchford-Evans have recently filed claims against the company.
Continue reading...Host dismisses Anti-Defamation League after organization urges network to drop him
After the Anti-Defamation League renewed its call for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News for voicing the racist “great replacement” theory about immigration, the primetime host had a pithy response: “Fuck them.”
Related: ‘Rudy is really hurt’: Giuliani reportedly banned from Fox News
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges settlement in Cambridge Analytica case driven by desire to protect founder
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.
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges Mary Trump and NYT ‘were motivated by personal vendetta’ against him and a desire to push political agenda
Former US president Donald Trump has sued his estranged niece and The New York Times over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s reporters.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in state court in New York on Tuesday, accuses Mary Trump of breaching a settlement agreement by disclosing tax records she received in a dispute over family patriarch Fred Trump’s estate.
Continue reading...As a child in Afghanistan, she pretended to be a boy in order to get an education, before starting her own women’s news agency. Now living in Britain, her fight continues
Just over a month ago, Zahra Joya left her house in Kabul to walk to her office, as she had been doing every day. From this small office, Joya, a journalist, ran Rukhshana Media, the news agency she founded last year to report on the stories of women and girls across Afghanistan. By the time she returned home in the afternoon, however, men with guns were on street corners and her sisters were shut inside their house, shaking with fear. In just a few hours, normal life had been obliterated.
“Right to the end, on that afternoon of 15 August, I couldn’t believe what was happening,” she says. “It was like a bad dream. Even on that day, it just seemed impossible that the Taliban could come to power so quickly, wipe away 20 years and drag us all back to the past.”
Continue reading...Content deal over author of children’s classics such as Matilda and The BFG is firm’s biggest to date
Netflix has acquired the works of Roald Dahl, the author of children’s classics including the BFG, Fantastic Mr Fox and the Witches, in the streaming company’s biggest content deal to date.
The agreement struck by Netflix, which already has a deal in place with the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC) to license 16 titles, will help it build its content arsenal in the streaming wars against rivals including Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max.
Continue reading...Dániel Németh’s phones infected with Pegasus software while reporting on one of Hungary’s richest men
Dániel Németh, a Budapest-based photojournalist, has tried to keep a low profile in his groundbreaking work investigating and documenting the luxury lifestyle of Hungary’s ruling elite.
While his name is not well known, the 46-year-old has managed to use his drone, and public flight and ship tracking data, to find and photograph politicians and pro-government business figures, exposing their hidden luxuries such as yachts in exotic locations.
Continue reading...The career of the Observer’s former China correspondent who died last week, was marked by a willingness to review his convictions
Jonathan Mirsky, the Observer’s former China correspondent who has died aged 88, was acutely aware of the mounting danger from the bullets criss-crossing Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 as units of the People’s Liberation Army were sent in to break up the protests. He was aware too that he desperately needed to get his copy to London.
Writing about the experience 30 years later, Mirsky admitted that few at first had any sense of the scale of the violence that was being unleashed either on the students in the square. All that, however, was to change quickly.
Continue reading...Household names may have unwittingly helped spread fake news, investigation reveals
Dozens of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike, Amazon, Ted Baker and Asos, have been advertising on websites that spread Covid-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories, it has emerged. The companies, as well as an NHS service, are among a string of household names whose ads appear to have helped fund websites that host false and outlandish claims, for example that powerful people secretly engineered the pandemic, or that vaccines have caused thousands of deaths.
Analysis of nearly 60 sites, performed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and shared with the Observer, found that ads were placed through the “opaque” digital advertising market, which is forecast to be worth more than $455bn (£387bn) this year.
Continue reading...Since its creation in late 1988, the Guardian’s Saturday supplement has been lauded for front covers and features that have caught the eye and sparked joy or sometimes controversy. As its final edition is published, some of the team who worked on it explain how they brought the magazine to life
In 1988, Guardian editor Peter Preston was feeling jealous. The recently launched Independent had a new supplement on Saturday. Edited by the late Alexander Chancellor, it was shot artfully in black and white, and was receiving praise for its inventive use of photography. Meanwhile, the Guardian had barely any feature writers; interviews usually ended up buried in the middle of the paper.
“Saturday had traditionally been the weakest day of the week in terms of circulation,” says former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who was, at the time, the parliamentary sketch writer. “The Guardian had experimented with some not very successful newsprint sections – one called Friday had flopped. The Independent had broken the mould with their magazine and it had given them a massive boost in circulation. Something had to be done.”
Continue reading...Sources say presenter was in legal battle with rightwing channel’s bosses over his £700,000-a-year contract
When Andrew Neil took a leave of absence from GB News a fortnight after its 13 June launch, the rightwing news channel and its star presenter spent weeks insisting he was taking a long break to “recharge [his] batteries”.
The reality, sources have told the Guardian, is that rather than merely being on holiday Neil was locked in an increasingly fierce legal battle with the channel’s bosses from mid-July, with the station in turmoil as their lead presenter attempted to renegotiate and then exit a four-year contract believed to worth about £700,000 a year.
Continue reading...CBS says it will drop X-Factor-style competition from celebrity-fronted show after widespread criticism
A reality TV show that planned to pit activists against each other in an X-Factor style contest judged by celebrities is to be drastically “reimagined” after it sparked a backlash from campaigners.
The Activist, which had been due to air in the US in late October, prompted incredulity among many campaigners and elsewhere when its format was revealed last week, with many labelling it a “tone-deaf” distortion of true activists’ values.
Continue reading...