The creepiness that is Facebook

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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 03, 2019 2:49 pm

EU Court Says Facebook Is Subject to Worldwide Content Removal
MOLLY QUELLOctober 3, 2019

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — The European Union’s highest court ruled Thursday that nations can order Facebook to remove content from its platform worldwide.

Austrian politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek brought the case after Facebook rejected her calls to remove a 2016 post by a user who called her a “lousy traitor of the people.” The unnamed Facebook user posted the comments alongside a news article from the Austrian news website oe24.at about Glawischnig-Piesczek’s Green Party policy on refugees. The post contained a headshot of Glawischnig-Piesczek and could be viewed worldwide.

Once an Austrian court found that the post was defamatory and ordered it taken down, Facebook removed the post, but only in Austria. An appeals court upheld the ruling, and the European Court of Justice took up the case at the request of the Austrian Supreme Court.

After oral arguments in February, the Luxembourg-based court ruled Thursday that a country can request for Facebook to remove content worldwide, if that content is found to violate national law. Further, it held that Facebook must remove duplicate or identical content if the original content is deemed illegal.

Facebook criticized the ruling. “It undermines the long-standing principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country,” the company said in a statement.

EU regulators have been trying to curb the power of tech giants operating in the 28-member union.

Glawischnig-Piesczek called the ruling “a historic success for human rights against web giants.”

It was not a total loss for Facebook, however. The ruling says Facebook cannot be held liable for information on its platform, so long as it was not aware the information was illegal and that, when made aware, it removes the content “expeditiously.”

The ruling contrasts with the Luxembourg-based court’s ruling last week in favor of Google, in which the court held that the search engine did not have to remove content worldwide. The Thursday ruling does not say why the two companies are being treated differently, though the Google ruling concerned “the right to be forgotten” whereas the Facebook ruling dealt with defamation.

The ruling cannot be appealed.
https://www.courthousenews.com/eu-court ... t-removal/



and Mark just did a great ad for Elizabeth Warren :D


Facebook’s "I Voted" Button Could Be Trump’s Secret Turnout Weapon In 2020
As leaked audio shows Mark Zuckerberg worrying about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the site’s “I Voted” button could help tip the election for the president or another candidate.

Scott Lucas
As leaked audio shows Mark Zuckerberg worrying about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the site’s “I Voted” button could help tip the election for the president or another candidate.


Joshua Roberts / Reuters
The news Tuesday that Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to fight Sen. Elizabeth Warren's policies has returned the spotlight to an uncomfortable fact about Facebook’s scale and power: Its actions could help determine whether Warren, Donald Trump, or someone else is sworn into office in January 2021.

Facebook’s power to promote or block stories, lies, and personalities has been a central story over the last four years. But its greatest proven power in elections is more concrete: Facebook has shown that it can, with a campaign inside the service, drive its users to the polls.

That’s because while Facebook’s cheerful, and scientifically proven, “I Voted” button seems neutral, it isn’t turning out a cross section of Americans. It’s turning out a cross section of people who use Facebook. And as Facebook’s user base morphs into the Trump coalition — older, less-educated, and more Republican — the platform's get-out-the-vote efforts could become a powerful element of the president's reelection campaign, one that could tip the vote in battleground states in the general election.

"You cannot participate in politics one way or the other without making a political statement."
“You cannot participate in politics one way or the other without making a political statement,” said Harper Reed, the chief technology officer for Obama's 2012 presidential campaign.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on whether the platform would run a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting its users in 2020 or to disclose the volume of any planned campaign. The spokesperson, who declined to be named, said, “Facebook provides people with accurate and nonpartisan information about how to register and participate in upcoming elections as part of our defenses against interference from bad actors.”

Facebook’s role in the 2020 election has come under fire from Democrats recently. After the site’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, reaffirmed that politicians like Trump would not be subject to its fact-checking policies, Democratic National Committee CEO Seema Nanda claimed on CNN on Tuesday that the company is allowing Trump "to mislead the American people on their platform unimpeded."

But little attention has focused on its neutral-seeming get-out-the-vote plans, which could prove consequential.

There’s been no comprehensive survey of the political alignment of the site’s user base since 2015. The company has declined to share the data that would help settle this question, even though it has categorized its users as liberal, moderate, and conservative in the past.

What is clear is that button has been a proven factor in driving people to the polls — a 2012 study published in the journal Nature found it increased turnout by 0.4%.

Nevertheless, it’s becoming clear that Facebook’s profile increasingly matches the demographics of the Trump coalition. Since the 2016 election, the platform has shed millions of users in the United States, according to Edison Research, most pronounced among young people and millennials. And the share of older Americans using the site has grown. According to Pew Research, since 2012 use of Facebook has grown most rapidly among older generations. (Facebook’s aging matches the electorate — Pew expects nearly a quarter of voters in 2020 to be over 65, the highest share in 50 years.) Not only have older Americans increased proportionally on the site since 2016, their demographic is the one mostly likely to share things on it — things like the site’s “I Voted” button.

So as Facebook mulls whether to push voters to the polls this election season, as it has done in several US presidential races and in elections around the world, could its voter button tilt the election toward Donald Trump?

"It’s different now, and that difference is 2016."
“When we worked with Facebook in 2012 at the Obama campaign, there was a proactive ethos to improve civic engagement,” said Betsy Hoover, the national digital organizing director for the Obama campaign in 2012 and now the cofounder of Higher Ground Labs, an incubator for political technology startups. “It’s different now, and that difference is 2016.”

Precise data about Facebook’s impact on previous US presidential elections is hard to come by, even though the site has run get-out-the-vote programs in each general election since 2008. Estimates of its efforts that year suggested the platform has pushed an additional 340,000 voters to the polls who would have otherwise stayed home. In the 2012 election, social scientists concluded Facebook’s efforts netted an additional 270,000 voters. Given popular vote margins of around 10 million and 5 million in 2008 and 2012, respectively, even if every voter Facebook turned out were a supporter of one party or the other (which they most certainly were not), the outcome of the elections — in both cases, decisive victories for Democrat Barack Obama — would not have changed.

And some evidence suggests that in the past Facebook’s impact may have benefited Democrats. In 2016, Facebook told its advertisers that in the United States 68.2 million of its users were liberal or very liberal, 41.4 million moderate, and 54.2 million conservative or very conservative.

But as writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton argued, boomers “love” Facebook. “They share almost 20 percent more than any other demographic. The site’s user base is the only social platform that isn’t dominated by Millennials.” Those boomers are more likely to be conservative than any other demographic.

There are more clues: After its 2010 efforts, a Facebook post reviewing the data concluded that the site had pushed Republican voters to the polls more often than Democrats — and that it had affected the outcome of some races: “By looking at those users who state their political affiliation on Facebook, we can see a significant discrepancy between the Democrats and Republicans: Dems were 3% less likely than Republicans to get out to the polls. In a number of House and Governor elections, this would have been enough to flip the vote.”

As of 2014, ShareThis found that compared to Twitter or Reddit, Facebook was social media’s home for Republicans messaging each other.

Add it all up, and a GOTV operation in 2020 could be a real, if small, boon for the president’s reelection. In the eyes of Facebook's critics, there’s simply no way for the site to make a neutral decision, given its size and skewed impact.

David Carroll, a longtime Facebook critic who sued over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook’s own data showed Trump’s voters had a higher propensity to engage with the site than other voters. “While increased civic participation is necessarily good,” Carroll said, “one company controlled by one autocratic executive is not ideal when free and fair elections are being challenged on an industrial scale.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sc ... mps-secret
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 09, 2019 7:59 am

Roughly 40 state attorneys general plan to take part in Facebook antitrust probe
Tony Romm

Roughly 40 state attorneys general plan to take part in a New York-led antitrust investigation of Facebook, reflecting a broadening belief among the country’s top Democrats and Republicans that the tech giant may be undermining its social-networking rivals.

The heightened interest — confirmed Monday by three people familiar with the matter — comes weeks after New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) first announced a wide-ranging probe with seven other states and the District of Columbia to explore whether, in James’s words at the time, Facebook has “endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.”

The people requested anonymity to discuss the investigation because such inquiries are confidential. The people said that New York continues to solicit support from other states, meaning the number could grow before it is formally announced.

A spokesperson for James in New York declined to comment.

On Monday, Facebook pointed to its previous statement from Will Castleberry, the company’s vice president of state and local policy, who said the company would “work constructively with state attorneys general and we welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate.”

Exclusive: Texas AG, Google's new competition cop, says everthing is on the table

The expanding state investigation of Facebook illustrates the broad, bipartisan concerns among the country’s top law enforcement officials that some companies in Silicon Valley have become too big and powerful, harming consumers and corporate rivals. Texas is leading a probe of Google’s advertising business that has the support of nearly every other state attorney general.

The state inquiry into Facebook comes in addition to two other antitrust investigations of the social-networking behemoth taking in place in Washington, by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook has acknowledged the FTC inquiry in recent securities filings. The agency is exploring the company’s past acquisitions, including Instagram and WhatsApp, for possible violations of antitrust law.

On Monday, James and other attorneys general huddled with FTC and Justice Department officials to discuss Facebook, her office later confirmed. Axios first reported the meeting news.

Facebook, Google face off against a formidable new foe: State attorneys general

Last week, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged to “go to the mat” on antitrust during a private conversation with employees later unearthed by the Verge, a technology news site. Reflecting on the presidential aspirations of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has vowed to challenge Silicon Valley on antitrust grounds, Zuckerberg pledged the company would mount a vigorous fight in court.

“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” he said. “And does that still suck for us? Yeah.”

“I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government,” he continued. “I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... urces-say/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 14, 2019 2:32 pm

More
NEW: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting secretive talks & off-the-record dinners with conservative influencers in recent months to discuss free speech and partnerships. Among the participants: Tucker Carlson & Lindsey Graham. scoop w/@dlippman:

Facebook has come under fire recently for its ad policy, which considers politicians’ claims as "ineligible" for third-party fact checking. In keeping with that policy, FB has allowed a Trump campaign ad making false claims about Biden’s ties to Ukraine to remain on the platform.

Said 1 source: “The discussion in Silicon Valley is that Zuckerberg is very concerned about Barr's DOJ bringing an enforcement action to break up the company. So the fear is Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.”

Each dinner has been hosted at one of Zuckerberg’s homes in CA. The conversations center around “free expression, unfair treatment of conservatives, the appeals process for real or perceived unfair treatment, fact checking, partnerships, and privacy."

https://twitter.com/wendysiegelman?lang=en


Inside Mark Zuckerberg's private meetings with conservative pundits
CNN commentator Mary Katharine Ham, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, AEI fellow and former Washington Free Beacon editor Matt Continetti, Town Hall editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson, and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell have also attended the dinners, according to the person familiar with the gatherings. Washington Examiner chief political correspondent and Fox News contributor Byron York also confirmed his attendance but declined to disclose the contents of the dinner because there was a prior agreement that it was off-the-record.

A spokesman for Graham confirmed that the South Carolina senator has spoken with Zuckerberg. Carlson, Continetti, Benson, Bozell and Hewitt declined to comment. Ham and Shapiro did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Facebook, noting Zuckerberg's recent meetings in Washington with Democrats, said in a statement, “For years, Mark Zuckerberg has met with elected officials and thought leaders all across the political spectrum.”

Each dinner has been hosted at one of Zuckerberg’s homes in California, and at least one lasted around two-and-a-half to three hours. The conversations center around “free expression, unfair treatment of conservatives, the appeals process for real or perceived unfair treatment, fact checking, partnerships, and privacy,” the source familiar with the meetings said.

"My perception of him was more positive than I anticipated,” this person added, referring to Zuckerberg. “He was receptive and thoughtful.”

“I’ve always thought that he wanted to make things right by conservatives,” said another person familiar with the dinners. “I think he’s been genuine in hoping that might happen. Sometimes I think the headwinds are so strong in Palo Alto that I don’t think even he can succeed.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has engaged in similar outreach to conservatives in an attempt to gain their trust, and hosted a private dinner in Washington, D.C. with GOP political operatives and commentators in July 2018, according to the Washington Post.

Facebook changed its policies following Russia’s election interference in 2016 in an attempt to halt the spread of false news and foreign-bought ads. But the company has also been working to minimize and correct the appearance of bias in those policies ever since it was reported that the company’s employees may have suppressed stories from right-leaning publications and authors in its “Trending Topics” section.

As part of those efforts, the company launched a yearlong “conservative bias audit” in 2018, which was conducted by former Sen. Jon Kyl and a team from his law firm Covington and Burling.

Kyl interviewed 133 conservative lawmakers and groups for the audit, which ended in August and resulted in changes to its advertising policies. It’s unclear whether the Zuckerberg dinners are another facet of that project.

Allegations that Facebook censors conservatives, however, have gone largely unsubstantiated—conservative publications including Fox, Breitbart, and Shapiro’s Daily Wire were among the top publishers on Facebook as of this past May, according to data from the social media tracking firm Newswhip.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/1 ... ngs-046663



Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 15, 2019 9:49 am

So Mark Zuckerberg met with a guy who says immigrants make our country “poorer and dirtier.”

Cool cool.



How to Make a Clean Break With the Clingiest Social Networks
Breaking up is hard to do. Harder yet when there's a deactivation period.

Gordon GottsegenJosie Colt03.12.2018 06:20 PM
The major social networks don't want you absconding with your precious data so deleting your accounts requires some...
The major social networks don't want you absconding with your precious data, so deleting your accounts requires some determination.Tim
Social networks walk a fine line between being a useful tool and a crippling addiction. Whether you want your free time back or don’t like your information scattered about on the internet, you may be considering deactivating some accounts. Wanting to delete your account is one thing, but actually being able to hit the delete button is another story. Social media outlets make money off of you and your information, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they don’t want to let you go. Because of this, the biggest networks have made it overly complicated to delete your account. But if you are set on getting rid of them, here’s what you’ll have to do.

Facebook

You’ve had your Facebook account for about a decade, and in that time you’ve posted a little too much personal information. Maybe you’re just sick of all the baby pictures and slightly offensive status updates your friends are sharing. You’ve had enough.

If you’ve ever deactivated your account, you may have noticed that everything goes back to normal the next time you log in, as if nothing has happened. That’s because deactivating your Facebook account is not the same as deleting it. When you deactivate your account, you are just hiding your information from searches and your Facebook friends. Although nothing is visible on the site, your account information remains intact on Facebook’s servers, eagerly awaiting your return.

Even so, deactivating your account is still a complex process. Go into your settings and click General. At the bottom, you'll find Manage your Account. From there, click on "Deactivate your account" and type in your password. Before you're completely off the hook, Facebook shows you photos of all the "friends" you'll miss ("Callie will miss you", "Phoebe will miss you", "Ben will miss you") followed by a survey asking you to detail your reasons for leaving. Get through that, click Deactivate, and you're good to go.

Now, to permanently delete your account, you'll need to learn where the delete option resides. The easiest way to find it is by clicking the "Quick Help" icon in the top-right corner, then the "Search" icon. When you see the search field, type “delete account.” You'll see a list of search results. Click on "How do I permanently delete my account?" and Facebook will give you the obscure instructions to “log into your account and let us know.” In this case, “let us know” is code for “delete my account,” so click on that link. From here, the final steps are clear: Enter your password and solve the security captcha, and your request to permanently delete your account is underway.

Yes, you read that right—it's just a request. Facebook delays the deletion process for a few days after you submit your request, and will cancel your request if you log into your account during that time period. You know, just in case you change your mind. It's crucial that you don't visit Facebook during this waiting period. Delete the app from your phone.

If you want to delete your account but don't want to lose all your account information, download all your crucial data first. The information you can download includes everything from the photos and statuses you post, to the ads you’ve clicked and the IP addresses you’ve used. The list of what’s included is extensive, but you can view it in its entirety here. Also, due to the nature of this data, you’ll want to keep it in a safe place.

To download your account, go into Settings> General Account Settings > Download a copy of your Facebook data and then click “Start My Archive.” When your download is ready, Facebook will send you an email with a link to download. For added security, this link will expire after a few days, so download it quickly.

Instagram

Even though it’s such a mobile-first service, Instagram doesn’t let you delete your account through the app. Instead, you’ll have to log into your Instagram account via the web in order to delete it.

Like Facebook, navigating through Instagram’s settings will only give you the option to temporarily disable your account. Disabling your account will hide your profile, photos, likes, and comments from the platform. Find the disable option by clicking the person icon in the top right corner and selecting Edit Profile. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the option to temporarily disable your account.

If you want to get rid of it for good, you’ll have to enter “https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/permanent/” into your browser's address bar. Once you’re on that page, enter in your password and click “Permanently delete my account.”

In the past, Instagram users have reported that they are prompted to enter their phone number when deleting their account. Luckily, it seems like this is no longer necessary.

Twitter

It takes a lot of time and effort to maintain a well-curated Twitter account, but the good news is that deleting your account doesn’t require as much work.

Before you delete your Twitter account, you may want to download your archive. This will include all your tweets in a chronological order, which is great if you want to relive your first tweet, or see all those unanswered tweets you sent to celebrities. To download your archive, click your profile icon, go to Settings, then click on “Request your archive.” It’ll take some time for Twitter to get your archive ready, but when it is, you’ll be sent an email with a download link that will give you a .zip file.

Once you have your downloaded copy, you can proceed with deleting your account. Log in to your Twitter, go into your account settings, then scroll to the bottom and click “Deactivate my account.” After that, you’ll be prompted to enter your password, and once you do so your account will be deactivated.

Keep in mind that your data isn’t actually deleted for another 30 days. This window gives you the opportunity to revive your account if you choose. Once the 30 day period is up, Twitter will begin deleting your account. According to the company's Privacy Policy, this could take a few weeks.

Snapchat

Maybe you’re sick of seeing who’s besties with who according to the app’s Friend Emoji guide. Maybe you’re one of many Snapchat users converting to Instagram, despite Snapchat’s radically different function. In any case, if you decide to delete your Snapchat account, here’s how.

Open the app and click on your profile icon in the top left corner. From there, go to Settings in the top-right corner. Go down to Support, which is found under More Information, and you’ll be lead to a search engine. Enter “Delete my account” and you'll see the instructions as a search result. It’s pretty straightforward from there. Like Twitter, Snapchat allows you 30 days to reactivate your account before it’s deleted forever.

The Rest

While there are a lot of social media sites out there, few are as sticky as the ones mentioned above. If you are looking to delete any of your numerous accounts, the best places to start are in your user settings, or on the company’s support/FAQ page. From there you’ll be able to find the necessary path to deleting your account. Shortcuts for these web forms can be found here for LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-dele ... -snapchat/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 18, 2019 7:12 pm

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes launches $10 million Anti-Monopoly Fund
Lauren Feiner
Published Thu, Oct 17 20199:20 AM EDT

Facebook co-founder-turned-critic Chris Hughes is continuing his fight against what he sees as the company’s monopoly power, announcing a new $10 million Anti-Monopoly Fund on Thursday.

The fund, an initiative of Hughes’ Economic Security Project, will back existing and new academic research, policy and organizing work concerning market power. The project will extend its focus beyond Facebook and Big Tech to combat market dominance across industries with investments until March 2021. Partners for the initiative include the Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation and George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, among others, according to a press release.

“We are at a pivotal moment where cultural and political momentum are aligned to rein in the unchecked behavior of Big Tech,” Hughes said in a statement alongside the fund’s announcement. “In addition to the necessary scrutiny of the tech industry, there is also a need and opportunity to take meaningful action on monopoly power across industries that’s led to corporate interests in the driver’s seat of our political and economic system for far too long.”

Hughes publicly called to break up Facebook in a May New York Times op-ed, saying, “The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is [CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg]’s unilateral control over speech.” Hughes left the company to work for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and said in the Times piece that he liquidated his Facebook shares in 2012 and no longer owns shares of any social media company.

The launch comes as Facebook fields antitrust inquiries from the Federal Trade Commission, the House Judiciary Committee, several state attorneys general and potentially the Department of Justice, which has pledged to conduct a broad review of market power in the tech industry. Google also faces its own slew of probes, and Amazon and Apple have both also received questions from the House Judiciary Committee into their practices.

As the investigations get started, Facebook has continued to stir up D.C. officials with plans to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services and to launch a new cryptocurrency called libra. Zuckerberg will face lawmakers next week to discuss the company’s cryptocurrency plans and will undoubtedly be asked about how the currency could add to Facebook’s power.

Facebook declined to comment on the fund.

Concerns about Big Tech’s power have spilled over into the presidential race. At Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, the nine candidates who responded to a question about antitrust action against the industry differed on their approaches, but shared fears of tech firms’ unregulated power.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/faceboo ... -fund.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 21, 2019 3:18 pm

Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook caught Russia and Iran trying to interfere in 2020

Oct. 21, 2019, 11:53 AM CDT / Updated Oct. 21, 2019, 12:00 PM CDT
Facebook unveiled new plans Monday to fight 2020 election interference. It will clearly label news that comes from state-owned media, and will give greater transparency for the origins of Facebook pages. And it has already found interference coming from authoritarian regimes overseas.

In an interview with NBC News, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has thwarted new interference campaigns from Russia and Iran that it regards as the groundwork for future manipulation efforts.

"We continue to see their tactics are evolving," Zuckerberg said in the interview with Lester Holt, which will air Monday evening on "NBC Nightly News." "Today, what we're basically announcing is that we found a set of campaigns. They are highly sophisticated. They signal that these nation-states intend to be active in the upcoming elections."

Zuckerberg added that China has also been found to have tried to interfere in various elections, but that the company has been able to find and stop them.

"We do see today Russia and Iran and China increasingly with more sophisticated tactics are trying to interfere in elections," Zuckerberg said. "But part of why I'm confident going into 2020 is that we've played a role in defending against interference in every major election around the world since 2016, in France, in Germany, in the E.U. overall, in India, in Mexico, in Brazil."

"That we've been able to proactively identify them and take them down is somewhat of a signal that our systems are much more advanced now than they have been in the past," Zuckerberg said.

The company announced its finding in a blog post, noting that it removed four networks of accounts, pages and groups on Facebook and Instagram that had engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."

Three of the networks originated in Iran, and one originated in Russia. Facebook said it had taken down more than 50 networks around the world ahead of democratic elections in the past year.

With the 2020 election campaign ramping up, a renewed focus on Facebook and its role as a platform for political campaigns, as well as election interference, have made Zuckerberg's decisions a source of ongoing debate — most notably for choosing to allow political campaigns to run advertisements containing falsehoods.

In response, Zuckerberg has pushed back, arguing that the company is engaged in a variety of projects to address election interference while balancing a commitment to free speech.

Watch the interview on "NBC Nightly News" with Lester Holt tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT.

In the interview, Zuckerberg said his recent efforts to clarify his position on Facebook's approach to these comments, which included a speech at Georgetown University, are part of an effort to make sure people understand the company's decisions.

Those decisions loom large, because people — both foreign and domestic — who want to influence the 2020 election are already working to press their cases.

"Part of growing up for me has just been realizing that it is more important to be understood than it is to be liked," Zuckerberg said.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Holt, Zuckerberg discussed how the company has embraced automated systems powered by artificial intelligence that can help detect foreign manipulation campaigns on the company's global platform of 2.4 billion monthly users.

Zuckerberg has stood by the decision not to crack down on false information in political ads, but said there are other ways in which Facebook is looking to counter and anticipate interference in the 2020 election.

The changes announced Monday center on the larger initiatives that Facebook launched in response to the 2016 U.S. election after a Russian manipulation campaign was allowed to operate unchecked. In the aftermath of the election, Zuckerberg said the notion that fake news influenced the election was "crazy."

Zuckerberg now embraces Facebook's responsibility to prevent foreign manipulation campaigns on its platform. Zuckerberg told Holt the company now has more than 35,000 people working on security issues.

"That's going to be studied by academics and historians for a long time to come, what the overall effect is," Zuckerberg said. "There are a lot of effects. Obviously, one of the bad ones is nation-states trying to interfere in our democracy. And that's one that we need to push back on."

To that end, Facebook said Monday it will now label state-controlled media on its platform and on Instagram, which it owns. Facebook will also make fact-checking labels more prominent on news that has been rated as false or mostly false.

In addition, Facebook will bolster its political ads archive, which provides information on the advertisements bought by political candidates on the platform. The archive will now feature a tracker of the ad spending of each presidential candidate, more details on spending at the state and the regional levels, and information on whether an ad ran on both Facebook and Instagram.

The social network sits in a precarious position. After years of meteoric growth and little attention from politicians, Facebook is now poised to be not just a major platform for the 2020 election but also the subject of the campaigns themselves. Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has called to break up Facebook, while the company has also faced scrutiny from Republicans led by Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri over claims the platform is slanted against conservatives.

Zuckerberg has sought to address those claims publicly and privately, meeting with notable right-leaning figures, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who has been embraced by some on the far right.

That has led some on the left to argue that Zuckerberg has appeased the right at the expense of keeping disinformation off Facebook.

Zuckerberg called the criticism "pretty ridiculous" and stated that the company reaches out to people across political and cultural spectrums.

"We operate in a lot of different places," Zuckerberg said. "You know, I'm running a company where I'm trying to make sure that we can give everyone a voice."
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ ... 0-n1069366


Facebook takedowns show new Russian activity targeted Biden, praised Trump
The company disabled a network of accounts that posed at times as locals in swing states to post on divisive political issues and the upcoming presidential election

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Georgetown University last week. (Nick Wass/AP)
Facebook on Monday said it removed a network of Russian-backed accounts that posed as locals weighing in on political issues in swing states, praising President Trump and attacking former vice president Joe Biden — illustrating that the familiar threat of Russian interference looms over the next U.S. presidential race.

Facebook said the network bears the hallmark of the same Kremlin-backed group that interfered in the 2016 election by sowing social discord, seeking to boost Trump and attacking Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The new disinformation campaign appears to follow the same playbook.

This time, a coordinated group of Russian accounts that appears to show some links to the Internet Research Agency largely took to Facebook’s photo-sharing app, Instagram, to post content this year about U.S. politics and memes targeting Democratic presidential contenders.

The operation demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the schisms within the Democratic Party as it labors to choose a nominee to face Trump in 2020. One Russian account, which portrayed itself as a black voter in Michigan, used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to hammer Biden for gaffes about racial issues. Some of the accounts boosted one of his rivals on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The Russian network was the subject of one of four takedowns Facebook announced Monday; it also disabled three misleading campaigns originating in Iran. Researchers said the efforts demonstrated how those seeking to interfere in U.S. politics continue to exploit radioactive topics, including racial and religious fault lines. And they said it offered fresh evidence that foreign actors are pursuing new platforms that rely on a steady stream of images, making detection more difficult despite Facebook’s heightened investments in election security.

“We are seeing again that the aim of the Russians is not exclusively to favor one candidate over another but to create divisiveness within the electorate overall,” said Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. “The reason that networks of phony accounts are drawn to Instagram is because disinformation is increasingly visual in nature, and that’s what Instagram specializes in.”

The disclosure from Facebook served as more evidence of what Trump has repeatedly questioned — that Russian actors not only interfered in the 2016 election but are continuing their efforts to interfere in American democracy. The task of safeguarding U.S. elections from interference by Russia and other foreign actors has been a source of tension in the Trump administration, with the president repeatedly calling the allegations of Russian involvement in 2016 a “hoax” and top security officials being forced to tiptoe around the issue.

Multiple U.S. investigations have confirmed the extent of Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 presidential race. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III obtained multiple indictments last year of individuals affiliated with the Internet Research Agency. This month, a bipartisan report produced by Senate investigators concluded again that the Russian effort sought to boost Trump and undermine Clinton in the eyes of social media users.

Speaking to The Washington Post last week, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the problem posed by disinformation has worsened since 2016, and he attributed that in part to a poor initial response by the U.S. government to the threat. “Unfortunately, the U.S. did not have a particularly strong response to Russia after 2016,” he said, “so it sent the signal to other countries that they could get in on this, too.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in interview he fears ‘erosion of truth’ but defends allowing politicians to lie in ads

Facebook’s announcements came two days before Zuckerberg is set to appear on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are likely to press him on the company’s work to safeguard U.S. elections from foreign manipulation. Members of Congress have upbraided the tech giant for missing key warning signs of Russian interference before the 2016 election, then failing to acknowledge the Kremlin’s activities immediately after the fact.

Zuckerberg said in an interview last week that Facebook is in a “much better place now” to stop disinformation campaigns, citing the company’s investments in tens of thousands of new staff hires and artificial intelligence that can spot fake accounts and dubious posts in real time. The company further fine-tuned its policies Monday, pledging to more prominently alert users when viral content is determined to be false. Announcing the changes, Zuckerberg stressed he now has “some confidence our systems here are working.”

“Elections have changed significantly since 2016,” he told reporters, “and Facebook has changed, too.”

Researchers said Facebook — in spotting and disclosing the Russian network Monday faster than it had in the past — demonstrated it had improved its digital defenses. Companies such as Facebook are “building muscle memory around understanding malicious actors on their platform,” said Graham Brookie, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The Facebook page ‘Vets for Trump’ was hijacked by a North Macedonian businessman. It took months for the owners to get it back.

But Brookie said Facebook’s takedown showed that Russia’s tactics would continue to evolve as well. “To steal a phrase, a picture is worth a thousand words, and meme-based content is still extremely effective and much harder to detect,” he said.

The Biden campaign applauded Facebook for disabling the fake accounts but said Trump’s penchant for falsehoods posed just as great a challenge for the company, which has refused to fact-check political advertising placed by the president’s reelection campaign.

“Unfortunately, like the Kremlin, Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, [and] all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform,” TJ Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump’s ads that attempt to gaslight the American people.”

Facebook described the Russian network as a “well-resourced operation” focused on the United States and reliant on sophisticated steps to conceal the identity and location of those behind the fake accounts. It comprised 50 accounts on Instagram and one on Facebook, all of them created this year.

The network appeared still to be in an audience-building phase when it was removed by Facebook: 246,000 accounts followed one or more of the inauthentic Russian accounts, which had collectively made just fewer than 75,000 posts, according to a report from Graphika, a social media analysis firm that examined the operation for Facebook. Only one account, which addressed environmental themes, had more than 20,000 followers.

Much of the content lacked text, consisting only of memes, and the posts often drew from viral content first posted by American actors, including news organizations and prominent political figures, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The accounts had not yet developed their own voice, which analysts say is critical to achieving a mass following.

“These accounts were trying really hard to hide,” said Ben Nimmo, Graphika’s director of investigations. “The more you try to blend in, the less you stand out. And the less you stand out, the less you’re going to attract an audience. It looks like these accounts were sacrificing engagement for security. That’s a very defensive strategy.”

Nimmo said Facebook’s action was at least the fourth takedown since 2017 of operations targeting the United States that seemed to bear links to the Internet Research Agency. The apparent connection to the St. Petersburg company and “troll farm,” owned by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, went beyond overlap with the thematic focus and targets of past Kremlin-backed campaigns. Some of the accounts taken down Monday had posted memes already attributed to previous IRA efforts — but had sought to rebuild them from scratch, rather than simply reposting them, and had made attempts to remove the original IRA watermarks.

A minority of the posts focused explicitly on the 2020 election, according to Graphika’s analysis. Among the accounts posing as backers of political and social causes in the United States, the largest cluster was conservative and in support of Trump. Numerous accounts aimed their fire at Democratic candidates — namely Biden but also Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). Other issues included racial activism, Confederate pride, gun rights, LGBT issues, feminism, Islam and Christianity.

Nearly half of the accounts claimed to be based in swing states, with a specific focus on Florida.

Biden came under attack from accounts that positioned themselves on both sides of the political spectrum. One account reposted a tweet from a right-wing political commentator parroting a Trump rebuke of Biden, while another posted a meme showing a road diverging and a car swerving to choose the path representing “Bernie 2020” over “Joe Biden.” Four years earlier, Russian-backed Facebook accounts similarly promoted Sanders during the Democratic primary against Clinton, according to Senate investigators.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... es-intact/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 23, 2019 6:34 pm


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G272R50v6ww

Inside the World of Cambridge Analytica
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40900



House Lays Into Zuckerberg on Facebook Currency Project
JACK RODGERSOctober 23, 2019

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, center, is surrounded by photographers after arriving for a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019, to discuss his plans for the new cryptocurrency Libra. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
WASHINGTON (CN) — Struggling to soothe antitrust and privacy concerns over the wallet app designed for Facebook’s digital currency Libra, CEO Mark Zuckerberg found few friendly faces Wednesday at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

Against Zuckerberg’s utopic description — he said the service would help more than a billion people globally who lack access to a bank account — lawmakers struggled reconcile Zuckerberg’s statements about financial security with Facebook’s recent regulatory troubles. The Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook with a $5 billion fine amid disclosures that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had breached millions of users’ data without their consent to send targeted ads.

Representative Scott Tipton, a Colorado Republican, asked how the company planned on protecting people’s vulnerable information and data from these types of breaches.

Throughout the hearing, Zuckerberg noted the company employs 35,000 people to monitor Facebook’s data breaches and other security-related initiatives. He noted in his opening statement that Facebook specifically created its digital-payment service Calibra as a regulated subsidiary, “so that there is clear separation between Facebook’s social data and Calibra’s financial data.”

“Even though we haven’t launched the Calibra project, we do take payments for a number of things today, ranging from fundraisers to people buying ads and we have a secure tier in our data center focused on payment information and that has worked well so far,” Zuckerberg added later in the hearing.

Members of Congress noted that a digital currency like Libra could shape U.S. economic policy, such as how the U.S. applies sanctions to foreign countries. Since transactions between Calibra users would be encrypted similarly to the way Facebook secures its messages, the service would also open an avenue for the anonymous funding of bad actors or organizations.

Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, said the currency could additional enable a black-market drug trade in addition to softening the strength of U.S. sanctions.

“Right now, Turkey is stopping at 20 miles into Syria, not because of U.S. troops, we’re out, but because of U.S. sanctions because of the lowly U.S. dollar,” Sherman said. “We stand to lose all that because cryptocurrency is the currency of the crypto-patriot.”

Facebook’s policy regarding political ads was also at the forefront of conversation, Wednesday, following the company’s assurance last week that it would not ban political ads containing false statements. Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, said the policy gave politicians “a license to lie.”

Waters said the company had consistently changed its policies to benefit itself, noting that last year it banned all ads relating to cryptocurrency citing that the ads were normally deceptive. The company rolled back the ban on cryptocurrency ads while announcing Libra earlier this year — something Waters said had occurred because Facebook recognized it could dominate the cryptocurrency market.

Zuckerberg pushed back.

“Our policy is that we do not fact check politicians’ speech and the reason for that is that we believe that in a democracy, it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying,” he said. “From a business perspective, the very small percent of our business that is made up of political ads, does not come anywhere close to justifying the controversy that this incurs for our company. So, this is really not about money. On principal, I believe in giving people a voice. I believe that ads can be an important part of voice.”
https://www.courthousenews.com/house-la ... y-project/
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 24, 2019 9:41 am

How Facebook Bought a Police Force
Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by Motherboard show how Facebook is using the Menlo Park Police Department to reshape the city. By Sarah Emerson Oct 23 2019, 8:00amShareTweetSnap


Image: Cathryn Virginia

One evening in June 2015, a man left Facebook’s sprawling technology campus in Menlo Park, California with two baby-blue bicycles. They were part of a shared fleet offered as a corporate perk; employees aren’t supposed to ride them off the property, but many ignore this rule, abandoning them around town to the ire of Facebook’s neighbors.

That night, Facebook’s security guards reported the bicycles as stolen. And after pinging their coordinates on GPS trackers, they alerted the Menlo Park Police Department, saying the company intended to prosecute. A police officer quickly found a Hispanic man and arrested him for larceny.

It’s common for residents to opportunistically use Facebook’s discarded bicycles, and for years police routinely stopped people—notably young people of color, according to some community accounts—for riding them, fomenting fears about racial profiling. The bicycles became an unexpected symbol of police tension in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto, where people of color feel criminalized under the shadow of immense technology wealth.

The 2015 incident, which Facebook denies any knowledge of, is notable because of what happened after the arrest: Nothing. The man, it turned out, was a Facebook contract worker. According to Menlo Park police documents that Motherboard obtained through a public records request, “when representatives from Facebook learned that [the man] was a Facebook employee they requested that no criminal charges be brought against him,” and he was released. The dutiful compliance of the police—first chasing after Facebook property that Facebook employees left around the community as litter, then standing down when told by Facebook that the culprit was part of a special, protected class—is a minor instantiation of a broader issue: Just how intertwined Facebook and local police have become.

The Bay Area has long been a sandbox for technology giants who are no longer merely occupying communities, but building and reshaping them. In Menlo Park, an affluent, mostly white city of 35,000, Facebook at one point paid workers not to live in lower-income neighborhoods near the company’s headquarters. And now, there's a police unit that is funded by Facebook to patrol the area surrounding its campus. The bill comes in at over $2 million annually—big money in a small city.

This deeply unusual relationship has highlighted issues of policing ethics and thrown disparities between Menlo Park and neighboring East Palo Alto into stark relief. When Menlo Park police began confronting people for riding Facebook bicycles off-campus, for instance, residents of East Palo Alto, a primarily Black and Latinx community, worried that law enforcement was racially profiling people who did not appear to them as Facebook employees.

“You create a danger when you have public servants being privately funded,” J.T. Faraji, an East Palo Alto resident and founder of the activist group Real Community Coalition, told Motherboard. “It becomes the privatization of the law, and the law is supposed to work for everyone. To me, that’s a major breakdown in the system. It should be illegal for private corporations to have their own police force.”

(“Our funding is not a privatization of the law,” Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison told Motherboard. “We have a long-term commitment to Menlo Park, and we want it to remain a safe and inclusive environment for everyone who calls it home.”)
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Image: City of Menlo Park
The “Facebook Unit,” as it was nicknamed by Menlo Park police, has not gotten much attention outside of these communities, despite being one of the nation’s only privately-funded public police forces.

Public records obtained by Motherboard—hundreds of pages of notes, proposals in draft and final form, presentations, and emails between Facebook and the Menlo Park Police Department over several years—provide an unprecedented look at how the partnership was forged and how it operates, as well as at public concerns about law enforcement’s intimate ties to one of the most powerful technology companies in the world.

“This would be concerning to me as a community member,” said Chris Burbank of the Center for Policing Equity, a research consortium founded at the University of California-Los Angeles that focuses on transparency in law enforcement. “I don’t care who it is. You don’t get to buy a police department.”

Facebook in Menlo Park

Eight years ago, Facebook outgrew its Palo Alto headquarters and moved to 1 Hacker Way, an eastern sliver of Menlo Park that formerly housed the dot-com darling Sun Microsystems. There was open speculation at the time about “whether Facebook's relatively young workforce will embrace a fairly isolated campus surrounded by one of Menlo Park's more troubled neighborhoods.” But in true imperial fashion Facebook then sprawled west, spending more than $1 billion on a Frank Gehry-designed campus bursting with amenities such as pop-up shops, bike paths, redwood groves, and “green-scapes.”

Its latest conquest is a corporate complex called Willow Village just south of 1 Hacker Way. Once complete, it will become the largest development in Menlo Park’s history, with 1.75 million square feet of offices, up to 200,000 square feet of retail, 1,500 housing units, parks, a hotel, restaurants, and possibly even a town square.

As Facebook snatched up real estate, it promised a suite of public paybacks in development agreements struck with the city. The company declared in characteristically grandiose terms that its vision for Menlo Park would be one “that promotes connection and community.” (Critics likened the area to a “company town.”)

And in 2013, Facebook paid to offset a police substation in Menlo Park’s poorest neighborhood, Belle Haven, which is adjacent to Facebook’s campus and home to many of the city’s Latinx residents. One year later, the company gave Menlo Park a $600,000 grant to hire a community safety officer for the substation for up to five years. This was then believed to be the nation’s only privately funded full-time policing job.
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1571683910933-MB_INSIDE_FACEBOOKS_SECRET_POLICE_FORCE_MAP-1
Map: Niko Teitel
The nontraditional union of public and private interests was covered by outlets such as the New York Times, which wrote that the plan “evoked some disquiet.” But little rationale has been given for why Facebook is authorized to do this, and what its motivations are.

Together, Facebook and Menlo Park’s government swatted down complaints from citizens, reporters, and watchdog groups that the partnership is alarming, even sinister. They preferred to present the arrangement as a “public benefit,” and the best, most logical conclusion to a corporate behemoth transforming an urban landscape. In response to concerns about preferential treatment, the Menlo Park Police Department told NBC Bay Area in 2015 that just .02 percent of service calls that year were to Facebook headquarters.

Yet interviews and documents obtained by Motherboard inform a different truth. More than just being neighborly, Facebook is designing and building an ecosystem in its own image.

The genesis of the “Facebook Unit”

Around 2016, Facebook approached the Menlo Park Police Department about funding a new unit—comprised of five officers and one sergeant—to cover the area encompassing its current and future campuses. The zone was given the moniker “M-2” and sits kitty-corner to East Palo Alto, and would eventually become a fourth police patrol called “Beat 4.”

On February 4, 2016, Dave Bertini, who is now Menlo Park’s police chief but served as commander at the time, emailed then-police chief Robert Jonsen with a proposal for the Facebook Unit.

“Facebook Inc. has approached the Police Department regarding assigning a specific team of police officers to the Facebook campus,” it said, referring to in-person discussions between Facebook and police.

Approximately 14,674 of Facebook’s employees work in Menlo Park, and Willow Village would increase that capacity to 35,000. This presented a logistical concern for the Menlo Park Police Department, which maintains a ratio of 1 officer to 1,000 people in the city during the daytime. At one point, Facebook “proposed hiring off-duty officers from other communities” to address this issue, according to police records.
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1571685788134-Screen-Shot-2019-10-21-at-30227-PM
By city estimates, the department would need another 17 sworn officers by 2040 to maintain the status quo. “Facebook said, ‘Let’s give you a jumpstart,’” Bertini told Motherboard. “It was their way of saying, 'Let us help you mitigate the impact of us being here.'”

“We need to show how the 1 officer to 1000 serviced population will be stretched without our initial support,” Facebook’s director of global security services, Marjorie Jackson, wrote in a strategizing email to Jonsen on March 1, 2017.

But records show that policing ratios were only part of the push to create the new unit.

“In the wake of recent high profile terrorist or terrorist inspired attacks [...] Facebook and the police department are aware of the heightened need for security for the Facebook campus and its employees and visitors,” the police proposal stated. “At issue is the police personnel necessary to respond to such incidents along with a current lack of any deterrence...at the Facebook campuses.”

(A later version of this proposal swapped “terrorist or terrorist inspired attacks” for “threats against interests in this country.”)

Bertini told Motherboard he has “no doubt” that Facebook is a target. “It’s not a matter of if we’re going to have an armed intruder, it’s just a matter of when,” he said.
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Image: Jason Koebler
Bertini was among those who responded to the 2018 shooting at YouTube’s San Bruno campus where a woman injured three people before dying by suicide. Following the incident, he told the San Mateo Daily Journal that he increased foot patrols at Facebook and hoped to “normalize the officers being there.” Last year, Facebook’s headquarters were evacuated due to a bomb threat and it experienced a sarin threat this July. Officers throughout Menlo Park responded to both incidents.

Menlo Park Police Department records show that on multiple occasions it considered “specialized training” for Facebook Unit officers, including active shooter response training and “SWAT and sniper training.” Facebook has also contracted Menlo Park police time ahead of VIP events on its campus.

“I don’t want to focus on terrorism,” Bertini said. “We’re also worried about domestic terrorism or someone with a mental illness who shows up at the Facebook campus saying they have a meeting with Zuckerberg.”

How Facebook and Menlo Park negotiated a deal

Police meeting notes from September 6, 2016 mention that “Facebook has been very persistent about getting the program established,” and emails show that Facebook representatives periodically checked in about the hiring status of these officers.

On April 28, 2016, Facebook’s head of global facilities, John Tenanes, emailed the police department “requesting information regarding availability” and expressed that Facebook wanted the unit to be active as soon as July 2016.

But the Menlo Park City Council did not hold a study session about the unit until February 28, 2017. And Menlo Park Mayor Ray Mueller, who served as councilman at the time, was opposed to the idea of Facebook contributing a monetary gift, saying it was “bad public policy” to accept favors from companies in exchange for city services, reported the Almanac.
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1571685804978-Screen-Shot-2019-10-21-at-30320-PM
The optics of such an arrangement were not lost on the police department, which acknowledged that “to have a company fund a public entity, specifically law enforcement, can draw skepticism with concerns of preferential treatment.” This would perhaps be true given what negotiations had initially entailed: A draft agreement from 2016 between the city and Facebook “regarding donations to fund a community police officer positions,” for instance, states that “Facebook will make an annual donation to the City for the express purposes of funding the Position(s).”

To mitigate a “pay for play” situation, the Menlo Park City Council asked if it could “negotiate [a] general in-lieu sales tax agreement” with Facebook, according to meeting notes from April 24, 2017. Bertini said the city eventually landed on the $11.2 million figure to represent the unit’s cost over five years, with the potential for a two-year extension.

On September 26, 2017, the council agreed that Facebook would deposit the money into the city’s unrestricted general fund, reported the Almanac. This represents a bet that property tax revenue generated by Facebook’s new development will cover policing costs when the five years are up—and a way to semi-plausibly argue that the police Facebook is paying for are not in fact being paid for by Facebook.

“There was no obligation to use the in-lieu money to pay for the police force,” Mueller told Motherboard. “We could disband that unit if we wanted to.”

“The city can use it in any way it deems necessary to benefit all the citizens of Menlo Park,” Harrison said.

“Why is Facebook using a police force that has a record of abusing Black and brown residents in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto?”

Mueller stressed that Facebook’s millions do not go toward the Facebook Unit, even though the patrol was borne out of its contribution. The agreement stipulates that the $11.2 million will be spent on services “that benefit the safety of local community,” but at the city’s discretion. There is currently no way to discern whether Facebook’s money directly supports Beat 4 activities, as it is not distinguished by the general fund.

When asked if this obfuscates police spending, Mueller said it would be inappropriate “if we actually kept track of Beat 4 money,” or if officers were to believe that Facebook was footing their salaries.

In any event, the Facebook Unit became fully staffed on August 1 of this year, more than three years after its inception.

Community concerns and a history of over-policing

Throughout the process, Facebook’s neighbors expressed serious reservations about the partnership and its implications. The psychological effects of Menlo Park’s heightened police presence have demoralized residents of color, who told the Almanac about instances of being profiled by officers or searched during traffic stops.

“Why is Facebook using a police force that has a record of abusing Black and brown residents in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto?” Faraji asked.

In 2017, Faraji was among a group of community organizers who met privately with Facebook to discuss the Menlo Park police unit and other issues stemming from its rapid growth, reported Palo Alto Online.

Local housing activists also say that Facebook has accelerated gentrification and is directly responsible for displacing families, reported the Guardian. Until 2018, Facebook employees were offered a “balanced work-life” bonus of $15,000 for moving within 10 miles of its campus. But the incentive excluded East Palo Alto and Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood, both communities of color that are less than several miles from Facebook’s campus.

During development talks with the city in 2016, “city officials and community leaders had the impression that this program was contributing to gentrification of those communities and asked Facebook to exclude them from the program,” a source close to the discussion told Motherboard. “Facebook data didn’t support this conclusion, but the company decided to agree to the city’s wishes.”
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1571685822196-Screen-Shot-2019-10-21-at-30400-PM
A screenshot from one of the Facebook proposals.
The aftermath, in which Facebook essentially paid employees to avoid certain communities, while necessitating more law enforcement in others, could certainly be critiqued as social engineering—not the online sort that it has been accused of enabling in the past, but a physical and environmental manipulation of human resources and migration.

“This little area has a long history of being excluded from the wealth of the surrounding area,” Mackenzie Rodriguez, who has lived in East Palo Alto for more than a decade, told Motherboard.

One of the most obvious manifestations of this has been Facebook’s bicycles.

“You have an extremely poor community that is being flooded with toys of wealth, and these things are going to happen,” Faraji said, noting that he does not condone stealing. “People who are going without are not going to understand why one person can use something for free and another person can’t.

On February 7, 2019, dozens of residents from East Palo Alto and Belle Haven met over growing concerns that police were targeting young people of color for riding Facebook’s bicycles. A blue and yellow flyer asked community members to discuss the “challenges that have risen from the presence of FB Bikes [and the] impact this has had on residents and our youth.”

Residents said that teens in low-income areas had been singled out by the Menlo Park Police Department and the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office, and should not be detained or ticketed for, say, using a Facebook bicycle to get to school, and that police responses should be less punitive.

“We can't condone young people taking bikes,” said East Palo Alto Mayor Lisa Gauthier at the time, according to a report from the Almanac. “We don't want them to think it's OK.” But Facebook, on the other hand, had not sufficiently engaged with the community on the issue, Gauthier added.

The Menlo Park Police Department did not attend the meeting, but several Facebook representatives did, claiming that the company had never asked officers to stop, detain, or arrest people for riding Facebook bicycles. Facebook clarified to Motherboard that it never asked police to confront people off-campus.
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Facebook bikes on the campus. Image: Jason Koebler
“I suggest we get together to share actions and communication,” Facebook’s global security services manager, John Day, wrote in an email to Menlo Park and East Palo Alto police the following day.

“FYI. This is the first time Facebook has given us an answer in writing,” Bertini wrote colleagues, referring to Facebook’s email.

Motherboard obtained an internal bulletin that Bertini issued on February 11, 2019. “Effective immediately, officers are not to stop or detain anyone on a Facebook bicycle for the sole reason that they are in possession of a Facebook bicycle,” it stated.

It is unclear how many teens or people of color have been stopped by Menlo Park officers for using Facebook’s bicycles. Emails show that East Palo Alto community organizers requested this data from the department on February 20, 2019.

In East Palo Alto, where many families struggle to afford housing as the average home price hits $1 million, “worrying about their kids having a bad interaction with the police over a stupid bike? Not a thing they should be worried about,” Rodriguez said.

Police logs obtained by Motherboard detail several occasions wherein Menlo Park officers responded to bicycle related complaints by Facebook.

On July 14, 2015, “Facebook security reported that subjects came onto the property, rode Facebook bicycles around and then stole bicycle helmets. [Reporting party] did not want a crime report taken but asked to have the incident documented.”

On July 10, 2019, “several juveniles observed stealing Facebook bicycles by Facebook security were asked to leave the campus. Instead of leaving, the juveniles became hostile towards security and one subject threatened to come back and shoot the employees. Investigation ongoing.”

Bertini denied all claims of racial profiling, saying the Menlo Park Police Department requires its officers to complete training that addresses implicit bias. When police encountered someone “who was obviously not a Facebook employee, like a 12-year-old,” that person would be stopped and the bicycle confiscated in most cases.

However, Facebook’s claim that it had never requested police officers to detain or arrest people for riding its bicycles, which it recently told residents at the meeting in East Palo Alto, is complicated.

“We've never asked Menlo Park police to stop individuals riding on bikes in the community,” Harrison said. “We've tried to limit thefts of bikes on our campus and while we initially explored prosecution of in progress bike thefts, we quickly reversed that decision in favor of exploring alternatives such a public awareness campaign and community partnerships to reduce bike removal from our campus.”

But on June 6, 2019, Patrol Sergeant Aaron Dixon, who is assigned to the Facebook Unit, emailed police management stating that “Facebook has been experiencing an increase in bicycle thefts. As a result, they have called dispatch stating they will prosecute during the in progress thefts.”

Bertini explained that Menlo Park police are currently in discussion with Facebook about this, but will not be amending their policies unless Facebook states otherwise.

“They believe there are large scale organized thefts of bikes,” Bertini said. “We will look at that differently than the one-offs that were talked about in training bulletin. If there is an organized conspiracy, we will investigate.”

Today the Facebook Unit is operating on all cylinders in the tiny technotopia that Facebook has constructed for itself in Menlo Park. The company hosts a farmer’s market, “Coffee & Chat,” and sponsors neighborhood happenings like a festival and August’s “National Night Out” celebration in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. It also holds an annual appreciation lunch for local law enforcement.

But “as much as Facebook says they want to have the community involved, the real community involved is the new one that they’re building,” Faraji said.

All documents that informed this reporting can be found here.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3ak ... lice-force
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 25, 2019 4:57 pm

Facebook Scoops Up Face.com For $55-60M To Bolster Its Facial Recognition Tech (Updated)
11:57 am CDT • June 18, 2012
After about a month of speculation, Facebook has finally announced its acquisition of Israeli facial recognition technology Face.com.

We’ve heard from multiple sources that the acquisition price was around $100m, with others reporting that the price was between $80m-$100m. (Update: We’re now hearing from a source familiar with the matter that the price was between $55 and $60 million, and that it was a mix of cash and stock. The exact value of the deal will be changing depending on the price of Facebook’s stock.) This is absolutely not an acqui-hire, as Facebook will be taking full advantage of the company’s technology and the advancements it’s made on mobile — perhaps to finally include mobile tagging options for photos.

As Face.com’s speciality is mobile facial recogition, it could potentially allow you to upload a photo to Facebook while on the go, instantly receive suggestions of whom to tag, and confirm the tags with one click.

This is important to Facebook because right now there’s probably a ton of untagged mobile photos getting posted. Those are lost opportunities for engagement because when you get notified that you’ve been tagged in a photo, you probably visit Facebook immediately to check it. These tags also help Facebook understand who a photo is relevant to, so it can feature it in the news feeds of your closest friends.

Face.com’s blog post about the acquisition included a big shout out to third-party developers. “We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community.” Facebook could create some sort of API or otherwise allow app developers to build in Face.com’s facial recognition…as long as they integrated with Facebook and let users share content back to it.

The $1 billion Instagram purchase made it obvious that Facebook sees mobile photos and the communities that share them as critical to its future. Once that acquisition closes, Facebook could even port Face.com’s facial recognition to Instagram.

With Instagram and Facebook Camera on the front end and Face.com on the back, Mark Zuckerberg has the arsenal he needs to win the war for mobile photos.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/18/faceb ... tion-tech/



Dr. Jack Brown

THREAD: Body Language Analysis No. 4402: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grills Mark Zuckerberg - https://www.c-span.org/video/?465293-1/ ... -committee

1/ On Wednesday 23 October 2019, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the House Financial Services Committee. He was questioned regarding Facebook’s plan to create a cryptocurrency (known as Libra).

2/ Zuckerberg also was asked questions regarding election security. What follows is an analysis of a crucial portion of Mr. Zuckerberg's testimony — specifically with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

3/ As Representative Maxine Waters says (beginning at 4:18:17), "The gentlewoman from New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is recognized for five minutes" — ...

Image
4/ ...Mr. Zuckerberg immediately looks down to his right (gaze toward this direction/quadrant to is highly correlative with deception, shame, guilt, and sadness/grief).

5/ The Facebook CEO also clenches his jaw (4:18:19). This is caused by an adrenaline surge — here associated with Zuckerberg's anxiety and anger.

6/ He also displays a significant tightening of his mid-facial muscles - specifically in thinning of his lips, and with flaring of his nostrils. This nonverbal cluster signals anger.

7/ In this moment, Zuckerberg is experiencing a high level of cognitive-emotional dissonance — simultaneous fear and anger.

8/ Notice too, that as Representative Waters said, "Ms." ("Ms. Ocasio-Cortez"), Zuckerberg momentarily elevated slightly off his chair (4:18:19). If you're self-aware and honest, you'll recall a similar experience.

9/ This butt-adjustment movement (often, but not always accompanied by a slight elevation in one's chair) — particularly when coupled with the above mentioned nonverbal changes, signals a sudden increase anal sphincter tone (Yes, you read that correctly).

10/ As one's anal sphincter muscle tightens, the other (external) buttocks muscles tighten too (gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus). This dynamic is secondary to fear.

11/ Moreover, along with this sudden increase in anal sphincter tone, another change simultaneously occurs in men.

12/ It's a cremasteric-related reflex. In plain speak, when men get frightened, their testicles retract (pull closer to their body). Of course, we can't see this, but we know it's happening as Zuckerberg lifts off his chair.

13/ Zuckerberg then reaches for his water bottle. But curiously, a split second PRIOR to drinking we see a hard swallow.

Image

14/ The water is needed because his throat was dry. And his throat was dry because he was nervous (4:18:22). He was nervous because he was contemplating lying on camera before congress.

15/ As Representative Ocasio-Cortez says, "appreciate" (4:18:28 / "I think you of all people can appreciate"). We see Mr. Zuckerberg display a Tongue-in-Cheek display.

Image
16/ The tongue in cheek dynamic may indicate several different though-emotions depending on the other nonverbals with which it is clustered - i.e., "I just won", sadness/grief, anger, "I gotcha" (you were caught), projecting sexual interest, or deception.

17/ Notice how widely Mr. Zuckerberg's eyelids are opened here. This indicates an adrenaline surge. His forehead is also considerably elevated (although this is difficult to see due to extensive Botox treatment).

18/ Beginning at 4:18:46, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asks, "Ah, Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of Cambridge Analytica?"

19/ Immediately thereafter, during 4:18:53 - 4:18:54, Mr. Zuckerberg displays a sudden series of rapid blinking. Blinking is a non-specific signal of heightened anxiety. It can also be a manifestation of decreased eye contact and blocking (i.e., "I don't want to look at you").

Image

20/ A second later (4:18:54), Zuckerberg then displays what is known as a Loose Tongue Jut. A loose tongue jut indicates the thought-emotions of: "I've been caught", "I've been bad", "I've done a foolish thing".

Image

21/ Although not a required component of a loose tongue jut, the blink coinciding with Zuckerberg's example seen here, acts as an amplifier for these underlying thought-feelings.

22/ Zuckerberg then immediately begins to say a drawn-out, "ahhh" 4:18:54 — note as he's saying this, his lips wrap tightly around his upper and lower teeth in the initial stages of a display known as an Inward Lip Roll.

Image

23/ This particular inward lip roll is also stretched out in time (duration). An inward lip roll is a sign that the psyche is trying to suppress the growth of both the emotions (inward) as well as the corresponding facial expressions (outward).

24/ A split-second later we see the end-point of the typical, more fully manifested, inward lip roll (4:18:55) as he says (first of the two stutters), "I'm" ("ahhh, I'm not, I'm not sure of the exact — time but it was probably — around the time when it became public..."

Image

25/ "...I think it was around March of Twenty-Eighteen. I, I could be wrong though."

Zuckerberg's stuttering throughout his testimony is a nonspecific but highly reliable signal of his anxiety (It's, of course, important to exclude stuttering as a speech disorder).

26/ A second later (4:18:56) he displays a highly characteristic facial expression wherein his whole forehead (as a unit) moves downward - while, simultaneously, his central (medial) forehead is contracts together & is pulls upward. This opposite direction-dynamic is a red flag.

Image

27/ Also, crucially, there is a subtle yet profoundly significant mouth smile - that's being suppressed. Do you see it? His feigned concern?

28/ Zuckerberg's sudden head jerk-tilt together with the suppressed smile is forced and feigned. It occurs just as he says his second, "not" ("... I'm not, I'm not sure of the exact time...").

29/ Note this is not a head shake (i.e., not a side-to-side, "no"), but rather a quick jerk-tilt of the head and neck.

30/ You may have also notice that Zuckerberg looked away from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez - AND closed his eyes as he answered. Both of these are manifestations of decreased eye contact (correlative with deception).

Image
31/ Beginning at 4:19:07, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asks, "When did Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg become aware of Cambridge Analytica?"

Mr. Zuckerberg answers, "I, I don't know off the top of my head."

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez responds, "You don't know."

32/ As Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is saying, "You don't know", notice Zuckerberg's mouth. His jaw thrusts forward while at the same time his lips also pinch forward in a subtle Forward Lip Purse (4:19:15). This is a common cluster facial tell for Zuckerberg.

Image
33/ The Jaw Jut is a manifestation of an adrenaline surge (often, although not always due to anger).

34/ The forward lip purse tells us that the Facebook CEO is withholding information — a signal of a clandestine disagreement and/or a clandestine plan.

35/ It also is a sign that *he believes* he has a good chance of success with his undisclosed plan. It also shows us that *he believes* he's an alpha relative to anyone else in the room (who he deems as betas).

36/ During this Forward Lip Purse/Jaw Jut Cluster, Zuckerberg continued his significantly high blinking frequency (heightened anxiety and diminished eye contact with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez).

Image
37/ The next question (beginning at 4:19:15) Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asks is, "And did anyone on your leadership team know about Cambridge Analytica prior to the initial report by The Guardian on December 11th, 2015?"

38/ Zuckerberg's lips once again pull tightly over his upper and lower teeth (4:19:24). This dynamic demonstrates great hesitancy in wanting to talk. His psyche (and lips) are trying to hold his words in his mouth.

Image
39/ Before he answers, Zuckerberg's tongue once again juts out (another Loose Tongue Jut) — in a second nonverbal confessional display of: "I've been caught", "I've been bad", "I've done a foolish thing".

Image
40/ A split-second after this tongue jut, did you notice Zuckerberg again elevated off his chair? (displaying another, more subtle, butt adjustment/sphincter tightening/cremasteric fear reflex). Please watch the video, as the still images do not capture this dynamic.

41/ Zuckerberg then proceeds to say, "Ah, congresswoman, I [stretched-out 'I'], I believe so — that some folks were, were ah [pause, blink] tracking it internally."

42/ During 4:19:30, he stutters and pauses. Then, a split second after he says, "ah" ("that some folks were, were ah"), he blinks. This is Zuckerberg hesitating to disclose information. He's in a moment of cognitive-emotional dissonance. He's not sure what to say.

Image

43/ Zuckerberg's use of the word, "folks" in this context is theatrical. He's trying to appear disarming, humble, and simple — as if these, "folks" were just kinda moseying along and free to do what they wanted.

44/ Just after he said, "internally", Zuckerberg once again displays the cluster of eyelid closure (blocking/decreased eye contact/anxiety), forward lip purse (clandestine plan/undisclosed disagreement/I'm alpha & you're beta), together w/ a jaw jut (adrenaline surge), (4:19:31).

Image

45/ Just after Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asks, "When was this issue discussed with your board member, Peter Thiel?", Zuckerberg's eyelids opened very widely (adrenaline surge from anger), his lips thinned (anger), and his jaw jutted out once more (adrenaline surge) (4:19:46).

Image

46/ He says, "Ah, Congresswoman, I don't, I don't know that off the top of my head", and displays yet another cluster of jaw jutting, lip pursing, and eyelid closing (4:19:51).

Image

47/ Zuckerberg's repeated use of the colloquial, "I don't know that off the top of my head", is another attempt to insert plausible deniability.

48/ After he attempts to clarify his answer regarding the question about Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg again displayed significant anger (4:20:05).

Image
49/ Zuckerberg's verbal response is full of stuttering and misspeaking: "Well Congresswoman, I'm — sure we, we discuss [sic] it after — it ah, after, after we, we were aware of what happened."

50/ Note also, the wiggle room Zuckerberg allowed by saying, "I'm sure we discuss [sic] it" — rather than, "Yes. We did discuss it".

51/ After he finishes his answer regarding Facebook board member Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg looks down to his right (with both his eyes and his head/neck) — the quadrant associated with deception, shame, guilt, and sadness/grief).

Image

52/ You'll note that Zuckerberg uses the title, "Congresswoman" quite often. On its surface, this formality may initially appear to some people as a simple way to show respect (as of course, he should) — but he uses it much too often.


53/ When used excessively, such a spoken title has the opposite effect. Also, if he were sincere, he would add Representative Ocasio-Cortez's name after her title.


54/ Moreover, saying "Congresswoman" repeatedly is also a method for Zuckerberg to steal a couple extra seconds in which to formulate his answer.


55/ SUMMARY: Based on Mark Zuckerberg's nonverbal, verbal, and paralanguage behavior displayed during this portion of his recent testimony before congress, with very high probability, he lied regarding Cambridge Analytica.

continued ...

56/ With very high probability, Zuckerberg also lied about Sheryl Sandberg's and Peter Thiel's knowledge of Cambridge Analytica.

https://twitter.com/DrGJackBrown/status ... 0553453570
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 26, 2019 10:58 am

Tories hire Facebook propaganda pair to run online election campaign
Sean Topham and Ben Guerin have worked on campaigns for Australia’s rightwing coalition and Glencore mining firm

Jim WatersonLast modified on Wed 23 Oct 2019 02.01 EDT
Lynton Crosby and Boris Johnson.
Lynton Crosby, who previously employed Sean Topham and Ben Guerin, pictured with Boris Johnson. Photograph: Alan Davidson/REX/Shutterstock
Two political campaigners hired by the Conservatives to run their digital campaign at the next general election previously helped run an enormous Facebook propaganda network.

Sean Topham and Ben Guerin have been employed to improve the party’s online operations, following a disastrous 2017 election when the Tories were outgunned by Labour in internet campaigning.

This summer, it was revealed how Sir Lynton Crosby’s CTF Partners used Facebook to run a large-scale professional disinformation network on behalf of paying clients including major polluters, the Saudi Arabian government, anti-cycling groups and various foreign political campaigns.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that Topham and Guerin, while working as contractors for CTF Partners, had oversight of dozens of these pages which sidestepped Facebook’s rules on transparent political campaigning, reaching tens of millions of people on behalf of paying clients while appearing to be grassroots independent news sources. All parties have previously pointed out that they operated entirely within the law.

The new Conservative digital campaigners, both New Zealanders in their 20s, also flew around the world to promote the interests of clients such as Glencore, one of the world’s biggest miners, while concerns – which they strongly denied - were raised about some of their behaviour in the office.

The pair’s arrival comes after their success helping Australia’s rightwing coalition unexpectedly win the country’s general election, where they were praised by local media for their understanding of how to fight online campaigns. Purposefully low-quality memes based around popular shows such as Game of Thrones were used in a bid to drive interactions – good or bad – at any cost, on the basis that this would boost the reach of future Facebook posts.

“We’d make them really basic and deliberately lame because they’d get shares and lift our reach; that made our reach for the harder political messages higher,” an anonymous individual told the Sydney Morning Herald, dubbing the strategy “boomer memes” as the content appealed to older audiences.

In recent days, the Conservatives have begun purposefully posting badly-designed social media material, at one point urging MPs to back a Brexit deal using the often-derided Comic Sans font. The Tories’ political opponents lined up to mock the image, inadvertently sending it viral and ensuring it was seen by a wider audience.


Conservatives

@Conservatives
Now is the time for MPs to back the new deal and get Brexit done.#GetBrexitDone
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2,137
9:27 AM - Oct 22, 2019
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2,895 people are talking about this

The hiring of the two New Zealanders comes as transparency campaigners warned that the UK was still not prepared to regulate online campaigning during the next general election, despite lengthy investigations into the use of Facebook advertising during the 2016 EU referendum.

All political parties expect the social network to be a major battleground during the next general election, with one senior No 10 source saying “this will be Carole’s worst nightmare” – a reference to the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who has worked to expose the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Major parties are expected to dedicate a substantial proportion of their election spending to advertising on Facebook and its sister service Instagram. Individuals involved in those preparations said they expected the focus to be on using the social network, which on Monday announced a new range of transparency tools for political advertising, as a cost-effective broadcast advertising medium to promote simple messages to voters.

Sources suggested there would be less focus on microtargeting of small groups of individuals, not least because restrictions introduced since the last election on incorporating third party data from the likes of Experian has made this much harder. Instead, campaigns expect to use Facebook’s in-house targeting tools to automatically find audiences which are more receptive to their messages.

Topham and Guerin, who cut their teeth in Auckland politics, spent several years working as consultants for longtime Tory strategist Crosby’s CTF Partners lobbying company but are now focused on their own business.

The duo are reunited with Isaac Levido, another former protege of Crosby, who worked on the successful Australian campaign and is now in charge of preparations for the Conservatives’ general election campaign.

Allies and opponents privately describe Levido as a ruthlessly focused and effective campaigner. However, questions remain over whether he worked with CTF Partners when the business was supporting the party of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who was subsequently charged in relation to his alleged role in the 1MDB corruption scandal. Razak denies the claims.

Levido declined to comment when contacted by the Guardian as to whether he worked on the Malaysian contract but did clarify that he had never worked with Cambridge Analytica.

In a separate development, Crosby’s CTF Partners is being investigated for a potential breach of rules by the lobbying regulator relating to staff who did voluntary work for prime minister Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign – claims they strongly deny.

Crosby is a long-term ally of Johnson but is reported to have become increasingly detached from day-to-day operations during a power struggle with senior Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings. As a result, he is unlikely to take part in the next election campaign.

As the climate crisis escalates...

... the Guardian will not stay quiet. This is our pledge: we will continue to give global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution the urgent attention and prominence they demand. The Guardian recognises the climate emergency as the defining issue of our times.

You’ve read 5 Guardian articles in the last month – made possible by our choice to keep Guardian journalism open to all. We do not have a paywall because we believe everyone deserves access to factual information, regardless of where they live or what they can afford.

Our independence means we are free to investigate and challenge inaction by those in power. We will inform our readers about threats to the environment based on scientific facts, not driven by commercial or political interests. And we have made several important changes to our style guide to ensure the language we use accurately reflects the environmental catastrophe.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... n-campaign
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 28, 2019 2:06 pm

ᴸᵁᴸᵁ ᴸᴱ ᴹᴱᵂꜝ


Pro-Trump Facebook ads falsely told thousands of people they needed to register to vote in order to gather their information

10:03 AM - 28 Oct 2019

The ads were removed from users' feeds after the Washington Post asked Facebook about them this weekend.
Image
Contrary to what the ad claimed, there were no such official records tied to the message - the ad was purchased by a pro-Trump super PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, and directed users to enter their personal information on the super PAC's website.
Image

The ads, which are logged in Facebook's ad archive, appeared in at least five different versions and targeted tens of thousands of Arizona residents. The majority of people who were shown the ad were older than 65.

https://twitter.com/LuluLemew/status/11 ... 2441237504


Pro-Trump Facebook ads falsely told thousands of people they needed to register to vote in order to gather their information
Aaron Holmes2 hours ago
A pro-Trump super PAC bought Facebook ads that falsely told users that their voter registration was incomplete in order to get them to submit personal information to the super PAC.
The ads were removed from users' feeds after the Washington Post asked Facebook about them this weekend.
Facebook has said it will not remove ads that contain falsehoods if the ads are purchased by political candidates, but removes some political ads bought by third parties like super PACs.
Voting is a touchy subject for Facebook — following the 2016 election, congressional investigators found that Russian agents used misleading Facebook ads to discourage voter turnout.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
A Facebook ad purchased by a pro-Trump super PAC earlier this month falsely told thousands of users that they needed to register to vote in order to collect their personal information.

"Official records show that your voter registration is incomplete," the ad said, accompanied by a graphic designed to look like a ballot. "Follow the link below to complete your voter registration NOW!"

Contrary to what the ad claimed, there were no such official records tied to the message — the ad was purchased by a pro-Trump super PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, and directed users to enter their personal information on the super PAC's website.

The ads, which are logged in Facebook's ad archive, appeared in at least five different versions and targeted tens of thousands of Arizona residents. The majority of people who were shown the ad were older than 65.

Screen Shot 2019 10 28 at 9.53.16 AM
The ad that appeared on Facebook.
Facebook Ad Archive
Facebook removed the ads this weekend after Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker from the Washington Post asked about them, according to the Post. Because the ads claimed to have users' voter registration status, they violate Facebook's policies against ads that "assert or imply personal attributes."

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the ads were removed for violating the personal attributes policy. Facebook will send similar ads to a third-party fact checker to verify whether they are true or false, and will remove false ads, the spokesperson added.

Facebook has faced harsh scrutiny for its policies on misleading political ads and on ads meant to confuse voters. The social network has said it will not fact-check ads bought by political candidates, but has cracked down on misleading ads bought by third parties like super PACs.

Voting is a particularly touchy subject for Facebook — after the 2016 election, congressional investigators found that Russians used misleading Facebook ads in an attempt to influence the outcome of the election. Mark Zuckerberg faced tough questions from lawmakers regarding Facebook's policies on misleading ads when he testified before Congress last week.

The Committee to Defend the President, the super PAC that bought the ads, told the Washington Post that the ads were not misleading because its website encouraged people to register to vote in addition to collecting their personal information. It argued that Facebook's decision to remove the ads amounted to "blatant voter suppression."
https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-tru ... ta-2019-10
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 29, 2019 11:46 am

Dissent Erupts at Facebook Over Hands-Off Stance on Political Ads
By Mike IsaacOct. 28, 2019
In an open letter, the social network’s employees said letting politicians post false claims in ads was “a threat” to the company.

By Mike Isaac
Oct. 28, 2019

SAN FRANCISCO — The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network’s recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted — even false ones — in ads on the site. It asked Facebook’s leaders to rethink the stance.

The message was written by Facebook’s own employees.

Facebook’s position on political advertising is “a threat to what FB stands for,” the employees wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. “We strongly object to this policy as it stands.”

For the past two weeks, the text of the letter has been publicly visible on Facebook Workplace, a software program that the Silicon Valley company uses to communicate internally. More than 250 employees have signed the message, according to three people who have seen it and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.
Read the Letter Facebook Employees Sent to Mark Zuckerberg About Political Ads
Hundreds of Facebook employees signed a letter decrying the decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted — even false ones — in ads on the site.
Oct. 28, 2019

While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook’s 35,000-plus work force, it was one sign of the resistance that the company is now facing internally over how it treats political ads.

Many employees have been discussing Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to let politicians post anything they want in Facebook ads because those ads can go viral and spread misinformation widely. The worker dissatisfaction has spilled out across winding, heated threads on Facebook Workplace, the people said.

For weeks, Facebook has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and civil rights groups over its position on political ads. But the employee actions — which are a rare moment of internal strife for the company — show that even some of its own workers are not convinced the political ads policy is sound. The dissent is adding to Facebook’s woes as it heads into the 2020 presidential election season.

“Facebook’s culture is built on openness, so we appreciate our employees voicing their thoughts on this important topic,” Bertie Thomson, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We remain committed to not censoring political speech, and will continue exploring additional steps we can take to bring increased transparency to political ads.”

Facebook has been struggling to respond to misinformation on its site since the 2016 presidential election, when Russians used the social network to spread inflammatory and divisive messages to influence the American electorate. Mr. Zuckerberg has since appointed tens of thousands of people to work on platform security and to deter coordinated disinformation efforts.

But figuring out what is and isn’t allowed on the social network is slippery. And last month, Facebook announced that politicians and their campaigns would have nearly free rein over content they post there. Previously, the company had prohibited the use of paid political ads that “include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers.”

This month, President Trump’s campaign began circulating an ad on Facebook that made false claims about former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is running for president. When Mr. Biden’s campaign asked Facebook to remove the ad, the company refused, saying ads from politicians were newsworthy and important for discourse.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts who is also running for president, soon took Facebook to task. She bought a political ad on Facebook that falsely claimed Mr. Zuckerberg and his company supported Mr. Trump for president. (Neither Mr. Zuckerberg nor Facebook have endorsed a political candidate.)

ImageFacebook employees monitor election-related content at the company’s offices in Menlo Park, Calif. Some workers proposed new ways of dealing with political ads.
Facebook employees monitor election-related content at the company’s offices in Menlo Park, Calif. Some workers proposed new ways of dealing with political ads.Credit...Monica Davey/Epa-Efe, via Rex
Ms. Warren said she wanted to see how far she could take it on the site. Mr. Zuckerberg had turned his company into a “disinformation-for-profit machine,” she said.

But Mr. Zuckerberg doubled down. In a 5,000-word speech to students at Georgetown University in Washington this month, the chief executive defended his treatment of political ads by citing freedom of expression. He said Facebook’s policies would be seen positively in the long run, especially when compared with policies in countries like China, where the government suppresses online speech.

“People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time.

Mr. Zuckerberg also said Facebook’s policies were largely in line with what other social networks — like YouTube and Twitter — and most American television broadcasters had decided to run on their networks. Federal law mandates that broadcast networks cannot censor political ads from candidates running for office.

Inside Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to be hands-off on political ads has supporters. But dissenters said Facebook was not doing enough to check the lies from spreading across the platform.

While internal debate is not uncommon at the social network, it historically has seen less internal turmoil than other tech companies because of a strong sense of mission among its rank and file workers.

That has set it apart from Google and Amazon, which for the last few years have grappled with several employee uprisings. Most notably, 20,000 Google workers walked off the job in 2018 to protest the company’s massive payouts to executives accused of sexual harassment.

Last week, Google employees again challenged management over new software that some staff said was a surveillance tool to keep tabs on workplace dissent. At an employee meeting on Thursday, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said he was working on ways to improve trust with employees, while acknowledging it was challenging to maintain transparency as the company grows. A video of Mr. Pichai’s comments was leaked to The Washington Post.

Amazon has faced employee pressure for nearly a year to do more to address the company’s impact on climate change. Some employees worked on a shareholder resolution to push the company on the matter, and more than 7,500 Amazon workers publicly signed a letter to support the proposal. In September, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, announced the company was accelerating its climate goals, aiming to be carbon neutral by 2040.

In the Facebook employee letter to Mr. Zuckerberg and other executives, the workers said the policy change on political advertising “doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.”

It added, “We want to work with our leadership to develop better solutions that both protect our business and the people who use our products.”

The letter then laid out product changes and other actions that Facebook could take to reduce the harm from false claims in advertising from politicians. Among the proposals: Changing the visual design treatment for political ads, restricting some of the options for targeting users with those ads, and instituting spending caps for individual politicians.

“This is still our company,” the letter concluded.

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Karen Weise contributed reporting from Seattle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/tech ... l-ads.html



We are proud to work here.

Facebook stands for people expressing their voice. Creating a place where we can debate, share different opinions, and express our views is what makes our app and technologies meaningful for people all over the world.

We are proud to work for a place that enables that expression, and we believe it is imperative to evolve as societies change. As Chris Cox said, “We know the effects of social media are not neutral, and its history has not yet been written.”

This is our company.

We’re reaching out to you, the leaders of this company, because we’re worried we’re on track to undo the great strides our product teams have made in integrity over the last two years. We work here because we care, because we know that even our smallest choices impact communities at an astounding scale. We want to raise our concerns before it’s too late.

Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing.

Misinformation affects us all. Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.

Allowing paid civic misinformation to run on the platform in its current state has the potential to:

— Increase distrust in our platform by allowing similar paid and organic content to sit side-by-side — some with third-party fact-checking and some without. Additionally, it communicates that we are OK profiting from deliberate misinformation campaigns by those in or seeking positions of power.

— Undo integrity product work. Currently, integrity teams are working hard to give users more context on the content they see, demote violating content, and more. For the Election 2020 Lockdown, these teams made hard choices on what to support and what not to support, and this policy will undo much of that work by undermining trust in the platform. And after the 2020 Lockdown, this policy has the potential to continue to cause harm in coming elections around the world.

Proposals for improvement

Our goal is to bring awareness to our leadership that a large part of the employee body does not agree with this policy. We want to work with our leadership to develop better solutions that both protect our business and the people who use our products. We know this work is nuanced, but there are many things we can do short of eliminating political ads altogether.

These suggestions are all focused on ad-related content, not organic.

1. Hold political ads to the same standard as other ads.

a. Misinformation shared by political advertisers has an outsized detrimental impact on our community. We should not accept money for political ads without applying the standards that our other ads have to follow.

2. Stronger visual design treatment for political ads.

a. People have trouble distinguishing political ads from organic posts. We should apply a stronger design treatment to political ads that makes it easier for people to establish context.

3. Restrict targeting for political ads.

a. Currently, politicians and political campaigns can use our advanced targeting tools, such as Custom Audiences. It is common for political advertisers to upload voter rolls (which are publicly available in order to reach voters) and then use behavioral tracking tools (such as the FB pixel) and ad engagement to refine ads further. The risk with allowing this is that it’s hard for people in the electorate to participate in the “public scrutiny” that we’re saying comes along with political speech. These ads are often so micro-targeted that the conversations on our platforms are much more siloed than on other platforms. Currently we restrict targeting for housing and education and credit verticals due to a history of discrimination. We should extend similar restrictions to political advertising.

4. Broader observance of the election silence periods

a. Observe election silence in compliance with local laws and regulations. Explore a self-imposed election silence for all elections around the world to act in good faith and as good citizens.

5. Spend caps for individual politicians, regardless of source

a. FB has stated that one of the benefits of running political ads is to help more voices get heard. However, high-profile politicians can out-spend new voices and drown out the competition. To solve for this, if you have a PAC and a politician both running ads, there would be a limit that would apply to both together, rather than to each advertiser individually.

6. Clearer policies for political ads

a. If FB does not change the policies for political ads, we need to update the way they are displayed. For consumers and advertisers, it’s not immediately clear that political ads are exempt from the fact-checking that other ads go through. It should be easily understood by anyone that our advertising policies about misinformation don’t apply to original political content or ads, especially since political misinformation is more destructive than other types of misinformation.

Therefore, the section of the policies should be moved from “prohibited content” (which is not allowed at all) to “restricted content” (which is allowed with restrictions).

We want to have this conversation in an open dialog because we want to see actual change.

We are proud of the work that the integrity teams have done, and we don’t want to see that undermined by policy. Over the coming months, we’ll continue this conversation, and we look forward to working towards solutions together.

This is still our company.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 31, 2019 1:06 am

Russia Tests New Disinformation Tactics in Africa to Expand Influence

Facebook said it removed three Russian-backed influence networks aimed at African countries. The activity by the networks suggested Russia’s approach was evolving.

Image
The Radio Africa Facebook page, which masqueraded as a news page in Sudan, was part of a Russian-backed influence network in central and northern Africa.
The Radio Africa Facebook page, which masqueraded as a news page in Sudan, was part of a Russian-backed influence network in central and northern Africa.Credit...Stanford Internet Observatory
By Davey Alba and Sheera Frenkel
Oct. 30, 2019
Updated 6:18 p.m. ET

Russia has been testing new disinformation tactics in an enormous Facebook campaign in parts of Africa, as part of an evolution of its manipulation techniques ahead of the 2020 American presidential election.

Facebook said on Wednesday that it removed three Russian-backed influence networks on its site that were aimed at African countries including Mozambique, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. The company said the online networks were linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who was indicted by the United States and accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Unlike past influence campaigns from Russia, the networks targeted several countries through Arabic-language posts, according to the Stanford Internet Observatory, which collaborated with Facebook to unravel the effort. Russians also worked with locals in the African countries to set up Facebook accounts that were disguised as authentic to avoid detection.

Some of the posts promoted Russian policies, while others criticized French and American policies in Africa. A Facebook page set up by the Russians in Sudan that masqueraded as a news network, called Sudan Daily, regularly reposted articles from Russia’s state-owned Sputnik news organization.

The effort was at times larger in volume than what the Russians deployed in the United States in 2016. While the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency posted on Facebook 2,442 times a month on average in 2016, one of the networks in Africa posted 8,900 times in October alone, according to the Stanford researchers.

“They are trying to make it harder for us and civil society to try and detect their operations,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said of the Russian actions.

The campaign underlined how Russia is continuing to aggressively try different disinformation techniques, even as it has come under scrutiny for its online interference methods. By spreading the use of its tactics to a region that is less closely monitored than the United States and Europe, researchers said Russia appeared to be trying to expand its sphere of influence in Africa, where it has started distributing propaganda and building a political infrastructure.

Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former Facebook executive, said the campaign had implications for the United States ahead of next year’s presidential election.

He said it was highly likely that Russian groups were already using the same model of working with locals in the United States to post inflammatory messages on Facebook. By employing locals, he said, Russians did not need to set up fake accounts or create accounts that originated in Russia, making it easier to sidestep being noticed.

“We will see a model where American groups are used as proxies, where all the content is published under their accounts and their pages,” Mr. Stamos said.
Image
ImageA Facebook page for Sudan Daily, which was part of a Russian-backed influence network, funneled users to a Sudan Daily website that reposted articles from the Russian government-run news agency Sputnik.
A Facebook page for Sudan Daily, which was part of a Russian-backed influence network, funneled users to a Sudan Daily website that reposted articles from the Russian government-run news agency Sputnik.Credit...Stanford Internet Observatory
For Facebook, the evolution of Russia’s disinformation techniques means it cannot afford to lose vigilance. The Silicon Valley company faced a barrage of criticism after Russians abused the social network in 2016 to plant divisive content to influence the American electorate. Since then, Facebook has set up war rooms and hired more security experts to head off foreign interference in elections.

But Russia has kept up a steady stream of influence efforts on Facebook. Last week, the company revealed it had taken down four state-backed disinformation campaigns, three from Iran and one of which started in Russia.

Facebook is dealing with other issues related to the 2020 election. For weeks, it has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and even its own employees over how it treats political advertising. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said he will allow politicians to post any claims they want in an ad — even if they are false — in the name of free expression.

Facebook faces a difficult adversary in Russia. The country had previously indicated that its disinformation techniques were changing and that it was aiming to work with locals on online influence campaigns.

In Ukraine, which held a presidential election this year, local authorities announced in March that they had arrested a Russian agent in the capital, Kiev. The agent, they said, had been ordered by his Russian handlers to “find people in Ukraine on Facebook who wanted to sell their accounts or temporarily rent them out.”

The latest campaign in Africa is the first well-documented case of Russia “franchising,” or outsourcing, its disinformation efforts to local parties, said Facebook and the Stanford researchers. It’s unusual for a nation to try to influence so many countries at once, they said.

Shelby Grossman, one of the Stanford researchers, said that Russians in some cases set up local media organizations in the African countries to employ locals who would post the propaganda and false content on Facebook. In other cases, the Russians hired existing media groups to do so.

Facebook said it was unclear specifically when the Russian activity in Africa started because the Russians took over some existing pages on the social network. But the posts ramped up last year when the influence networks bought Facebook ads. In total, the networks spent more than $87,000 on Facebook ads.

The networks often posted about political news, including elections in Madagascar and Mozambique. They sought to drive Facebook users from the platform and into public groups on WhatsApp and Telegram, which are encrypted messaging apps, to increase interaction. And they used Facebook Live videos, Google Forms and quizzes to draw people into their Facebook pages and groups.

Some of the Facebook pages pushing Russian disinformation were not sophisticated. A cluster of pages posing as Libyan news entities posted about Libyan issues, but the page managers were in Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries, said the Stanford researchers. Some of the pages experienced unnatural jumps in followers and other telltale signs of inauthentic behavior.

Mr. Gleicher said some of the Russian-run pages and groups also used compromised Facebook accounts that once belonged to real people but had been stolen and repurposed by hackers. He said that Facebook is still building out its automated systems for detecting compromised accounts, so the company still misses some and pulls in its investigative team to catch them.

Facebook said its investigation had “connected these campaigns to entities associated with” Mr. Prigozhin, but the company declined to say how. Mr. Prigozhin controlled the entity that financed Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

In all, the social network said it took down 66 accounts, 83 pages, 11 groups and 12 Instagram accounts related to the Russian campaign. Mr. Gleicher said hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts followed the pages, groups and Instagram accounts.

Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at the social media analytics company Graphika, said Russia’s new tactics revealed the “dirty tricks and black ops that are underpinning the Russian outreach in Africa.” He called it “the new KGB playbook for foreign influence.”
Davey Alba is a technology reporter covering disinformation. In 2019, she won a Livingston Award for excellence in international reporting and a Mirror Award for best story on journalism in peril. @daveyalba

Sheera Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco. Previously, she spent over a decade in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, reporting for BuzzFeed, NPR, The Times of London and McClatchy Newspapers. @sheeraf
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/tech ... 69ing-news
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby FourthBase » Thu Oct 31, 2019 11:00 pm

Is there a Twitter Creepiness thread?

So, I recently got banned from Twitter. I could still log in and see my own posts, but when I just logged out to check out of curiosity what strangers see when they go to my profile now, I saw that it was all gone. Every word I've ever said on Twitter the last six years, well over 2000 tweets, most of which maximized the character limit, gone. I'll log back in and save my Tweet history just for records' sake, but goddamn, is that dystopian or what?

Check for yourselves. @ChandlerPablo

Can you see anything? Am I wrong?

I had no idea that's what happens. You get completely deleted. I know few here will care because you probably think that the only people getting banned are alt-right assholes posting hate speech. I posted apathy speech. I said I didn't fucking care anymore if there's a civil war. Which isn't even really true, I do care, a lot, I don't want there to be a fucking war, I don't want to see the progressives that I love die, or even all the ones I hate, or even Nazis. The sight of mass murder would make me weep, puke, and intervene. I was just fucking with the woke cultists who were swarming me, because I was trying to conjure up visions of a barbaric civil war because it's inevitable unless (paradoxically) people realize just how close we are to one*, and most importantly because I was testing to see if Twitter would punish me for expressing indifference. The results are back: Yes. Twitter will ban you for not caring. You are prohibited from not caring. You are required to care.

Image

*As soon as 13 months, if a hardline gun control Democrat is elected president and the far right gets, literally and figuratively, triggered.
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby alloneword » Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:10 am

It's commonly known as Shadow Banning:

a software engineer at twitter said: "It’s not going to ban the mindset, it’s going to ban a way of talking." ... policy manager at Twitter Trust and Policy explains it’s a way to down rank users. "We’re trying to down rank it…It’s a product thing we’re working on. We’re trying for the shitty people to not show up," she said.


It's what happens when you trade sovereignty for convenience - it's their algorithm's way of telling you to get a blog.
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