Category Archives: Facebook

Facebook and Google to be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies

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Mandatory code being developed by ACCC will create ‘level playing field’ in media landscape, Josh Frydenberg says

Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

In its response to the landmark digital platforms inquiry in December, the federal government asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to develop a code between media companies and digital platforms including Google and Facebook.

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‘I haven’t laughed so much in my life’: the Australians dressing up to celebrate bin night

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Weeks into quarantine, we must find joy in the little things – like wheeling out the garbage in a giant inflatable penis

A 74-year-old woman in a fluffy purple dressing gown pulls a wheelie bin down her driveway. As she walks, she tugs suggestively on the zipper in a pretend striptease, kicking up her leg and singing to the tune of Right Said Fred: “I’m too sexy for my bin”.

This is the sort of content you can find in Bin isolation outing, an Australian Facebook group that’s amassed almost half a million members in under two weeks. Its premise is that with social distancing measures in full force, the country’s wheelie bins spend more time outside than we do – so why not dress up for those weekly walks to the curb?

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WhatsApp to impose new limit on forwarding to fight fake news

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Restrictions on frequently forwarded messages intended to disrupt false Covid-19 claims

WhatsApp is to impose a strict new limit on message forwarding as the Facebook-owned chat app seeks to slow the dissemination of fake news, the company has announced.

If a user receives a frequently forwarded message – one which has been forwarded more than five times – under the new curbs, they will only be able to send it on to a single chat at a time. That is one fifth the previous limit of five chats, imposed in 2019.

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Trump’s deluge of Facebook ads have a curious absence: coronavirus

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Campaign ads continue to focus on the southern border even as pandemic has killed hundreds of Americans

As the reality of the coronavirus crisis took hold in the US, Donald Trump’s Facebook campaign remained focused on a different “crisis” – the supposed threat of immigrants entering the US through the southern border.

Related: Facebook to remove misleading Trump 'census' ads

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‘Go home!’: Italian mayors rage at coronavirus lockdown dodgers — video

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Town, city and regional mayors across Italy are pleading with residents to stay indoors after witnessing people flouting the lockdown by going jogging, playing ping-pong and taking 'exhausted dogs' for long walks.

The Italian government has banned any travel inside the country and closed all non-essential businesses as it desperately tries to stem the spread of coronavirus.

This is what the mayors of Bari, Messina, Lucera, Gualdo Tadino, the governor of Campania, and the mayor of Reggio Calabria had to say

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Facebook says spam filter mayhem not related to coronavirus

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Social network restores posts that were wrongly removed as system went haywire

A Facebook spam filter that went haywire on Tuesday evening and began removing many perfectly acceptable posts was unrelated to coronavirus, the company has said.

All the removed posts have been restored, a Facebook executive said, attributing the removals to an automated system. Despite the fact that many of the removed posts were related to the coronavirus, the company says that was simply a coincidence owing to the fact that so many posts on the site are related to the pandemic.

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British American Tobacco circumventing ad ban, experts say

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BAT seems to be running accounts to promote e-cigarettes after crackdown on hiring influencers

British American Tobacco (BAT) is marketing e-cigarettes and heated cigarettes with pictures of attractive models and using hashtags such as “I dare you to try it”, despite a crackdown last year after it paid social media influencers to promote its products.

BAT had come under fire after hiring young models to sell its products despite having an explicit policy banning under-25s from appearing in adverts.

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Russian-led troll network based in west Africa uncovered

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Fake Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts seemed to aim to inflame divides in US

A newly discovered Russian-led network of professional trolls was being outsourced to Ghanaian and Nigerian operatives, according to Facebook and Twitter, who removed the network’s accounts on Thursday.

The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question. But it marks the first time that a Russian information operation targeting the US has been found to be run from Africa.

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Zambia: boy arrested for allegedly defaming president on Facebook

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Teenager’s arrest adds to fears Edgar Lungu is becoming increasingly authoritarian

A 15-year-old boy has been arrested in Zambia for allegedly defaming the country’s president in Facebook posts, as critics accuse the administration of turning increasingly authoritarian.

The unnamed teenager, based in the small central town of Kapiri Mposhi, was arrested on Monday and charged with three counts of libel against Edgar Lungu. He will appear in court soon, police said.

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Facebook will ban certain ads to prevent efforts to exploit coronavirus fears

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Tech company will temporarily ban ads for medical face masks on the social network and Facebook marketplace

Facebook is temporarily banning advertisements for medical face masks as part of an effort to prevent use of its social media platform to exploit people’s concerns about the coronavirus outbreak.

Related: Coronavirus: US deaths rise to 19 as New York declares state of emergency

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Facebook users would tell social media platform their bank balance for $8.44 a month

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Study of people across six countries finds German users would charge most for sharing personal data

German Facebook users would want the social media platform to pay them about $8 per month for sharing their contact information, while US users would only seek $3.50, according to a study of how people in various countries value their private information.

The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina.

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Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook must accept some state regulation

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Co-founder says site sits between telephone company and newspaper as content provider

Facebook must accept some form of state regulation, acknowledging its status as a content provider somewhere between a newspaper and a telephone company, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said.

He also claimed an era of clean democratic elections, free of interference by foreign governments, is closer due to Facebook now employing 35,000 staff working on monitoring content and security.

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‘Can you post a meme?’: Facebook changes ad rules after Bloomberg exploits loophole

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Policy change involves what Facebook calls ‘branded content’, sponsored items posted by ordinary users who are typically paid by companies

Facebook decided on Friday to allow a type of paid political message that had sidestepped many of the social network’s rules governing political ads, in a reversal that highlights difficulties tech companies and regulators have in keeping up with the changing nature of paid political messages.

Facebook’s policy change comes days after the Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg exploited a loophole to run humorous messages promoting his campaign on the accounts of popular Instagram personalities followed by millions of younger people.

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Facebook and Twitter reject Pelosi’s request to remove edited Trump video

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President posted video of House speaker tearing State of the Union address interspersed with clips of Trump lauding honorees

Facebook and Twitter have refused House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s request to remove a video posted by Donald Trump that was misleadingly edited to show her repeatedly tearing a paper copy of his State of the Union address while he was honoring a Tuskegee Airman and other attendees.

“The American people know that the President has no qualms about lying to them – but it is a shame to see Twitter and Facebook, sources of news for millions, do the same,” Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s chief of staff, said on Twitter. “The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people, and every day that these platforms refuse to take it down is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders’ interests than the public’s interests.”

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Algorithms on social media need regulation, says UK’s AI adviser

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Report also urges government to consider making firms such as Facebook share their data

New regulation should be passed to control the algorithms that promote content such as posts, videos and adverts on social networks, the UK government’s advisory body on AI ethics has recommended.

As part of a forthcoming overhaul of regulation covering the internet, the government should also consider requiring social media platforms to allow independent researchers access to their data if they are researching issues of public concern, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) suggested. That could include topics such as the effects of social media on mental health, or its role in spreading misinformation.

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Facebook commitment to free speech will ‘piss people off’, Zuckerberg says

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CEO defended Facebook’s decision not to ban political ads and said company will ‘stand up for free expression’

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, has unveiled a new approach to political advertising which he described as a stand for the principles of free speech, but also one that will “piss off a lot of people”.

In a candid discussion at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2020 in Salt Lake City on Friday, Zuckerberg said that since his company is criticized for both what it does and does not do in terms of monitoring use of its platform, it will now support free speech “because in order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for”.

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Poverty-stricken Hungarians are easy pickings for traffickers on Facebook

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Promises of a better life in many social media posts are often a trap for marginalised communities such as the Roma

In the village of Bag, north-east of Budapest, the houses along the main street are smart and well-kept. Tucked behind, up a slight hill, where the buildings become bare brick and the tarmac road turns into a dust track, people sit on the ground in the afternoon sun, talking and playing cards.

These are the Roma, or the Roma who remain in Hungary, where they live on society’s edge, clinging on in the outskirts of towns and villages, shunned and stigmatised as potential criminals.

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‘I was hacked,’ says woman whose account claimed hospital boy photo was staged

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Woman denies posting false information that photo of four-year-old was political stunt

A medical secretary has claimed her Facebook account was hacked after it was used to post false information claiming that a photograph of an ill boy on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary was staged for political purposes.

The woman denied posting the allegation that four-year-old Jack Willment-Barr’s mother placed him on the floor specifically to take the picture which became symbolic of the NHS’s troubles after it appeared on the front page of Monday’s Daily Mirror.

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Leaked NHS papers ‘put online by posters using Russian methods’

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Questions about dissemination of documents do not mean they are fake, but poses new puzzle

Leaked documents said by Labour to prove that the NHS was “on the table” in trade talks with the US were initially disseminated online by anonymous posters operating in a way similar to a Russian information operation known as Secondary Infektion, according to a social media research firm.

A 19-page report published on Monday by the consultancy Graphika said that while it could not conclusively prove a Russian origin to the leak, the early distribution of the cache of files via Reddit, three German-language websites and an anonymous Twitter account reflected a method of operation seen repeatedly over recent years.

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12 EU states reject move to expose companies’ tax avoidance

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Proposal would have forced firms to reveal profits made and taxes paid in each EU country

Twelve EU countries, including Ireland, have blocked a proposed new rule that would have forced multinational companies to reveal how much profit they make and how little tax they pay in each of the 28 member states.

The proposed directive was designed to shine a light on how some of the world’s biggest companies – such as Apple, Facebook and Google – avoid paying an estimated $500bn a year in taxes by shifting their profits from higher-tax countries such as the UK, France and Germany to zero-tax or low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.

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