The creepiness that is Facebook

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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat May 12, 2018 2:08 pm

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We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here's what we found

The Russian ads, released by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, offer the public the first in-depth look at the attempts to divide the U.S. ahead of the 2016 election. USA TODAY

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

USA TODAY Network reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings:

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device.
At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.
Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017.
Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.
Interactive Graphic: Explaining Russia's Facebook campaign aimed at Americans

Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first scientific analysis of social media influence campaigns during the election, said the ads show that the Russians are attempting to destabilize Western Democracy by targeting extreme identity groups.

“Effective polarization can happen when you’re promoting the idea that, ‘I like my group, but I don’t like the other group’ and pushing distance between the two extreme sides,” Kim said. “And we know the Russians targeted extremes and then came back with different negative messages that might not be aimed at converting voters, but suppressing turnout and undermining the democratic process.”
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More: Thousands of Facebook ads bought by Russians to fool U.S. voters released by Congress

More: Here's how Russian manipulators were able to target Facebook users

More: Read the special counsel's indictment of the Internet Research Agency

Background: Special counsel indicts Russian nationals for interfering with U.S. elections and political processes

The most prominent ad — with 1.3 million impressions and 73,000 clicks — illustrates how the influence campaign was executed.

A Facebook page called “Back the Badge,” landed on Oct. 19, 2016, following a summer that saw more than 100 Black Lives Matter protests, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in August and protests over the police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Keith Lamont Scott in North Carolina.

The information analyzed by the USA TODAY Network shows the Internet Research Agency paid 110,058 rubles, or $1,785, for the Facebook spot. It targeted 20 to 65-year-olds interested in law enforcement who had already liked pages such as “The Thin Blue,” “Police Wives Unite” and the “Officer Down Memorial Page.”

The very next day, the influence operation paid for an ad depicting two black brothers handcuffed in Colorado for “driving while black.” That ad targeted people interested in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X and black history. Within minutes, the Russian company targeted the same group with an ad that said “police brutality has been the most recurring issue over the last several years.”

USC professor Nick Cull, author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, says the ad campaign is reminiscent of tactics employed during the Soviet era. His book explored how the KGB tried to disrupt the LA Olympics by faking propaganda from the KKK threatening black athletes.

"Soviet news media always played up U.S. racism, exaggerating the levels of hatred even beyond the horrific levels of the reality in the 1950s," Cull wrote in an email. "It was one reason Eisenhower decided to move on civil rights."

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Adam Schiff, the Minority Leader of the House Intelligence Committee, said he made the ads available to the public so that academics could study both the intention and breadth of the targeting.

“These ads broadly sought to pit one American against another by exploiting faults in our society or race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other deeply cynical thoughts,” Schiff said in an interview with USA TODAY Network. “Americans should take away that the Russians perceive these divisions as vulnerabilities and to a degree can be exploited by a sophisticated campaign.”

A federal grand jury in February indicted 13 individuals accused of working for the Internet Research Agency to produce the ads. The charges related to meddling in the 2016 election, the only election interference case Mueller's office has filed so far.

The indictment included emails from the Russian company's employees that left no doubt that their objectives were “to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” This effort “included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment states.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined comment on the ads this week. An attorney for two of the companies indicted by Mueller did not respond to a request for comment. One of the companies, Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, entered a not-guilty plea on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in D.C.

The USA TODAY Network analysis found that Russians effort first used a raft of viral memes referencing banal American pop culture, like Spongebob Squarepants and Pokémon, to apparently build support behind legitimate-looking connections before deploying the racially-tinged spots.

Hundreds of ads mixed race and policing, with many mimicking Black Lives Matter activists that melded real news events with accusations of abuse by white officers.
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That type of subversion only hurts legitimate efforts to calm tensions over policing and hate crimes, said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Johnson said the Russian ads likely helped to fuel “hateful, xenophobic rhetoric” throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.

“When you’re stoking fear to get a negative action directed at a targeted population based on race, and when a foreign nation uses that fear to subvert and undermine democracy, that’s become a serious problem,” Johnson said. “It’s a warning for technology companies and corporations that private citizens have entrusted with their privacy to receive factual information.”

It’s hard to measure precise impact of the campaign targeting police and their families, but it certainly didn’t help, said Jim Pasco, senior adviser to the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union.

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"There is absolutely no doubt that these ad placements further inflamed tensions in already volatile and already sensitive situations at critical times," Pasco said.

The tech tools have changed, but the themes of disruption have not, said Bret Schafer of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks activity of Russia-linked social media bots and trolls.

Social media is an effective way to target wedge issues because of the ability to micro-target ads, sending messages to confederate flag supporters at the same time as Black Lives Matter sympathizers to stoke divisions, he said.

“They are stirring up the racial pot, while then trying to connect with minority groups and saying: Look at how racist the content is online. They don’t really have to do that because the content online is racist without the Russians, to be very clear,” Schafer said.

He added that it's hard to measure how effective the campaigns were in general. Some of the ads "completely bombed," based on interactions. But stoking racial fears and tensions was often effective.

"Some of the most racist ads put out got the highest levels of engagement,” Schafer said. “It seems that when their messaging went to the extreme on some of these issues, it actually landed the hardest punch.

“If they hit 10% of the time, it's still effective for them,” Schafer said.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/201 ... 602319002/
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 13, 2018 7:44 am

Carole Cadwalladr

MPs say Facebook has misled Parliament. Again. It told MPs only $1 of Russian ads in UK. But @d1gi has now found nearly £1,000 worth. This is ads paid for in roubles inciting hate for refugees & immigrants in months before Brexit.

‘We’re waiting for answers’: Facebook, Brexit and 40 questions

Carole Cadwalladr
Sat 12 May 2018 16.30 EDT
MPs’ frustrations grow as new evidence in America reopens the issue of Kremlin influence

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, was the second executive Facebook offered up to answer questions from parliament’s select committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

He took his place in the hot seat in the wake of the first attendee, Simon Milner, Facebook’s (now ex-) head of policy for Europe, who answered a series of questions about Cambridge Analytica’s non-use of Facebook data that came back to haunt the company in the furore that followed the Observer and New York Times revelations from Christopher Wylie.

Schroepfer is Facebook’s nerd-in-chief. He was the tech guy sent to answer a series of questions from MPs about how his platform had facilitated what appeared to be a wholesale assault on Britain’s democracy, and though there was much he couldn’t answer, when he was asked about spending by Russian entities directed at British voters before the referendum, he spoke confidently: “We did look several times at the connections between the IRA [the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency] … and the EU referendum and we found $1 of spend. We found almost nothing.”

But new evidence released by the United States Congress suggests adverts were targeted at UK Facebook users, and paid for in roubles, in the months preceding the short 10-week period “regulated” by the Electoral Commission but when the long campaigns were already under way.

This is the latest episode in a series of miscommunications between the company and British legislators, which has come to a head in the week the Electoral Commission finally published the findings of its investigation into the Leave.EU campaign.

Damian Collins, the chair of the DCMS committee, said: “We asked them to look for evidence of Russian influence and they came back and told us something we now know appears misleading. And we’re still waiting for answers to 40 questions that Mike Schroepfer was unable to answer, including if they have any record of any dark ads.

“It could be that these adverts are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s just so hard getting any sort of information out of them, and then not knowing if that information is complete.”

Leave.EU supporters celebrate the Leave vote in Sunderland after polling stations closed in the Brexit referendum.

Preliminary research undertaken by Twitter user Brexitshambles suggests anti-immigrant adverts were targeted at Facebook users in the UK and the US.

One – headlined “You’re not the only one to despise immigration”, which cost 4,884 roubles (£58) and received 4,055 views – was placed in January 2016. Another, which accused immigrants of stealing jobs, cost 5,514 roubles and received 14,396 impressions. Organic reach can mean such adverts are seen by a wider audience.

Facebook says that it only looked for adverts shown during the officially regulated campaign period. A spokesperson said: “The release of the set of IRA adverts confirms the position we shared with the Electoral Commission and DCMS committee. We did not find evidence of any significant, coordinated activity by the IRA operatives directed towards the Brexit referendum.

“This is supported by the release of this data set which shows a significant amount of activity by the IRA with only a handful of their ads listing the UK as a possible audience.”

Collins said that the committee was becoming increasingly frustrated by Facebook’s reluctance to answer questions and by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing refusal to come to the UK to testify.

Milner told the committee in February that Cambridge Analytica had no Facebook data and could not have got data from Facebook.

The news reinforces MPs’ frustrations with a system that last week many of them were describing as “broken”. On Friday, 15 months after the first Observer article that triggered the Electoral Commission’s investigation into Leave.EU was published, it found the campaign – funded by Arron Banks and endorsed by Nigel Farage – guilty of multiple breaches of electoral law and referred the “responsible person” – its chief executive, Liz Bilney – to the police.

Banks described the commission’s report as a “politically motivated attack on Brexit”.

Leading academics and MPs called the delay in referring the matter to the police “catastrophic”, with others saying British democracy had failed. Liam Byrne, Labour’s shadow digital minister, described the current situation as “akin to the situation with rotten boroughs” in the 19th century. “It’s at that level. What we’re seeing is a wholesale failure of the entire system. We have 20th-century bodies fighting a 21st-century challenge to our democracy. It’s totally lamentable.”

The big picture here is it’s possible for an individual or group with lots of money to change the course of history
Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon, said it was unacceptable that the Electoral Commission had still not referred the evidence about Vote Leave from Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni – published in the Observer and submitted to the Electoral Commission – to the police. He said: “What they seem to have done, and are continuing to do, is to kick this into the long grass. There seems to be political pressure to kick this down the road until Britain has exited the EU.”

He accused the commission of ignoring what he considered key evidence, including about Cambridge Analytica. The commission had found Leave.EU guilty of not declaring work done by its referendum strategist, Goddard Gunster, but said it had found no evidence of work done by Cambridge Analytica.

“The whole thing stinks,” Kinnock said. “I wrote to the commission with evidence that the value of work carried out by Cambridge Analytica was around £800,000. The glib way it dismissed the multiple pieces of evidence about the company was extraordinary. I just think it is absolutely not fit for purpose.”

Gavin Millar QC, a leading expert in electoral law at Matrix Chambers, said: “Our entire democratic system is vulnerable and wide open to attack. If we allow this kind of money into campaigning on national basis – and the referendum was the paradigm for this – you have to have an organisation with teeth to police it.”

Damian Tambini, director of research in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics, described the whole system as broken and said there was not a single investigatory body that seemed capable of uncovering the truth. “The DCMS has found itself in this extraordinary position of, in effect, leading this investigation because it at least has the power to compel witnesses and evidence – something the Electoral Commission can’t do. It’s the classic British solution of muddling through.

“The big picture here is it’s possible for an individual or group with lots of money and some expertise to change the course of history and buy an election outcome. And with our regulatory system, we’ll never know if it’s happened.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... are_btn_tw



This chunk was too late to make the piece. But Facebook’s ‘$1’ totally misleading. They claim they were referring to the ‘regulated’ short period before referendum only. @DamianCollins & others on DCMS Committee rightly frustrated.
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3:53 AM - 13 May 2018
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/stat ... 3074358273
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 14, 2018 8:40 am

Facebook suspends 200 apps in an investigation of apps that had access to large quantities of user data

Published 1 Hour Ago
WhatsApp and Facebook apps on phone
Facebook has so far suspended around 200 apps in the first stage of its review into apps that had access to large quantities of user data, in a response to a scandal around political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

The apps were suspended pending a thorough investigation into whether they misused any data, said Ime Archibong, Facebook's vice president of product partnerships.

Facebook said it has looked into thousands of apps till date as part of an investigation that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 21.

Zuckerberg had said the social network will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before the company curtailed data access in 2014.

"There is a lot more work to be done to find all the apps that may have misused people's Facebook data and it will take time," Archibong said.

"We have large teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible."

Facebook was hit by the privacy scandal in mid-March after media reports that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to build profiles on American voters and influence the 2016 presidential election.

The incident led to a backlash from celebrities and resulted in the company losing billions in market value. Zuckerberg apologized for the mistakes his company made and testified before the U.S. lawmakers.

The company, however, regained much of its lost market value after it reported a surprisingly strong 63 percent rise in profit and an increase in users when it announced quarterly results on April 25.

Shares of the company were up 0.4 percent at $87.65 in premarket trading on Monday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/14/faceboo ... -data.html
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby conniption » Thu May 24, 2018 7:57 am

http://saltydroid.info/facebook-analytica/

Facebook Analytica

22 Mar 2018 :: by Jason Jones :: 5 Comments


miss you guys... (sorta... not really though... I guess.)
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 24, 2018 7:58 am

I have missed you ....really

I hope you are back to stay....please

we are both thinking about Cambridge Analytica this morning :)


Facebook accused of conducting mass surveillance through its apps

Company gathered data from texts and photos of users and their friends, court case claims

Emma Graham-HarrisonLast modified on Thu 24 May 2018 09.33 EDT
Facebook used its apps to gather information about users and their friends, including some who had not signed up to the social network, reading their text messages, tracking their locations and accessing photos on their phones, a court case in California alleges.

The claims of what would amount to mass surveillance are part of a lawsuit brought against the company by the former startup Six4Three, listed in legal documents filed at the superior court in San Mateo as part of a court case that has been ongoing for more than two years.

A Facebook spokesperson said that Six4Three’s “claims have no merit, and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously”. Facebook did not directly respond to questions about surveillance.

Documents filed in the court last week draw upon extensive confidential emails and messages between Facebook senior executives, which are currently sealed.

Facebook has deployed a feature of California law, designed to protect freedom of speech, to argue that the case should be dismissed. Six4Three is opposing that motion.

The allegations about surveillance appear in a January filing, the fifth amended complaint made by Six4Three. It alleges that Facebook used a range of methods, some adapted to the different phones that users carried, to collect information it could use for commercial purposes.

“Facebook continued to explore and implement ways to track users’ location, to track and read their texts, to access and record their microphones on their phones, to track and monitor their usage of competitive apps on their phones, and to track and monitor their calls,” one court document says.

But all details about the mass surveillance scheme have been redacted on Facebook’s request in Six4Three’s most recent filings. Facebook claims these are confidential business matters. It has until next Tuesday to submit a claim to the court for the documents to remain sealed from public view.

The developer is suing Facebook over the failure of its app Pikinis, which allowed users to zero in on photos of their friends in bikinis and other swimwear.

It claims the social media company lured developers and investors on to the platform by intentionally misleading them about data controls and privacy settings. As part of the January filing, it claims Facebook tracked users extensively, sometimes without consent.

On Android phones, the company was able to collect metadata and content from text messages, the lawsuit alleges. On iPhones it could access most photos, including those that had not been uploaded to Facebook, Six4Three claims.

Facebook on a phone.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Other alleged projects included one to remotely activate Bluetooth, allowing the company to pinpoint a user’s location without them explicitly agreeing to it. Another involved the development of privacy settings with an early end date that was not flagged to users, letting them expire without notice, the court documents claim.

In a submission to the court, an “anti-Slapp motion” under Californian legislation designed to protect freedom of speech, Facebook said: “Six4Three is taking its fifth shot at an ever-expanding set of claims and all of its claim turn on one decision, which is absolutely protected: Facebook’s editorial decision to stop publishing certain user-generated content via its Platform to third-party app developers.”

One court filing, referring to a period in 2013 and 2014, alleges: “Facebook made partial disclosures around this time regarding privacy settings, but did not fully disclose that it had caused certain settings to lapse after a period of time.”

The lawsuit claims the ability to read text messages on Android phones was also partially disclosed, presented to users as a way to make logging in easier, but Facebook deployed it to collect a range of other messages and the associated metadata.

It also collected information sent by non-subscribers to friends or contacts who had Facebook apps installed on their phones, the court documents claim. Because these people would not have been Facebook users, it would have been impossible for them to have consented to Facebook’s collection of their data.

“Facebook disclosed publicly that it was reading text messages in order to authenticate users more easily ... [but] this partial disclosure failed to state accurately the type of data Facebook was accessing, the timeframe over which it had accessed it, and the reasons for accessing the data of these Android users,” the complaint alleges.

“Facebook used this data to give certain Facebook products and features an unfair competitive advantage over other social applications on Facebook Platform.”

Facebook admitted recently that it had collected call and text message data from users, but said it only did so with prior consent. However the Guardian has reported that it logged some messages without explicitly notifying users. The company could not see text messages for iPhone users but could access any photos taken on a phone or stored on the built-in “camera roll” archive system, the court case alleged. It has not disclosed how they were analysed.

Facebook has not fully disclosed the manner in which it pre-processes photos on the iOS camera roll, meaning if a user has any Facebook app installed on their iPhone, then Facebook accesses and analyses the photos the user takes and/or stores on the iPhone, the complainant alleges.

Facebook has an option to “sync” photos taken on the phones with the app downloaded, which it says users need to opt into to use.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... are_btn_tw
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 9:13 am

Facebook confirms data sharing with Chinese companies

David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) said Tuesday it has data sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese companies including Huawei, the world’s third largest smartphone maker, which has come under scrutiny from U.S. intelligence agencies on security concerns.

The social media company said Huawei (002502.SZ), computer maker Lenovo Group (0992.HK), and smartphone makers OPPO and TCL Corp (000100.SZ) were among about 60 companies worldwide that received access to some user data after they signed contracts to re-create Facebook-like experiences for their users.

Members of Congress raised concerns after The New York Times reported on the practice on Sunday, saying that data of users’ friends could have been accessed without their explicit consent. Facebook denied that and said the data access was to allow its users to access account features on mobile devices.

More than half of the partnerships have already been wound down, Facebook said. It said on Tuesday it would end the Huawei agreement later this week. It is ending the other three partnerships with Chinese firms as well.

Chinese telecommunications companies have come under scrutiny from U.S. intelligence officials who argue they provide an opportunity for foreign espionage and threaten critical U.S. infrastructure, something the Chinese have consistently denied.

Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, who asked Facebook if Huawei was among the companies that received user data, said in a statement that the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee had raised concerns about Huawei dating back in 2012.

“The news that Facebook provided privileged access to Facebook’s API to Chinese device makers like Huawei and TCL raises legitimate concerns, and I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers,” Warner said.

API, or application program interface, essentially specifies how software components should interact.

A Facebook executive said the company had carefully managed the access it gave to the Chinese companies.

“Facebook along with many other U.S. tech companies have worked with them and other Chinese manufacturers to integrate their services onto these phones,” Francisco Varela, vice president of mobile partnerships for Facebook, said in a statement. “Facebook’s integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, OPPO and TCL were controlled from the get-go — and we approved the Facebook experiences these companies built.”

Varela added that “given the interest from Congress, we wanted to make clear that all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei’s servers.”

Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she would not comment on cooperation between companies and knew nothing of the situation.

“But we hope that the U.S. side can provide a fair, transparent, open and friendly environment for Chinese companies’ investment and operational activities,” Hua told reporters.

RESPONSE DEMANDED FROM ZUCKERBERG

Earlier on Tuesday, the Senate Commerce Committee demanded that Facebook’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, respond to a report that user data was shared with at least 60 device manufacturers, weeks after the social media company said it would change its practices after a political firm got access to data from millions of users.

Senators John Thune, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Bill Nelson, the ranking Democrat, on Tuesday wrote to Zuckerberg after The New York Times reported that manufacturers were able to access data of users’ friends even if the friends denied permission to share the information with third parties.

In April, the Federal Communications Commission proposed new rules that would bar purchases by government programs from companies that it says pose a security threat to U.S. telecoms networks, a move aimed at Huawei and ZTE Corp (000063.SZ), China’s No. 2 telecommunications equipment maker. The Pentagon in May ordered retail outlets on U.S. military bases to stop selling Huawei and ZTE phones, citing potential security risks.

ZTE was not among the firms that received access to Facebook data, but it has been the subject of U.S. national security concerns.

The letter asks if Facebook audited partnerships with the device manufacturers under a 2011 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It also asked if Zuckerberg wanted to revise his testimony before the Senate in April.

Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the Viva Tech start-up and technology summit in Paris, France, May 24, 2018. REUTERS/Charles Platiau
Facebook said it looks forward to addressing any questions the Commerce Committee has.

Facebook still has not answered hundreds of written questions submitted from members of Congress after Zuckerberg’s testimony in April, according to congressional staff.

The data sharing mentioned in the Times story was used over the last decade by about 60 companies, including Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Blackberry Ltd (BB.TO), HTC Corp (2498.TW), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS), Ime Archibong, Facebook vice president of product partnerships, wrote in a blog post on June 3.

The FTC confirmed in March that it was investigating Facebook’s privacy practices.

Facebook allowed Apple and other device makers to have “deep” access to users’ personal data without their consent, according to the Times.

The Times said Facebook allowed companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after it had declared it would no longer share the information with outsiders.

Archibong said the data was only shared with device makers in order to improve Facebook users’ access to the information. “These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.”

FB.O
Regulators and authorities in several countries have increased scrutiny of Facebook after it failed to protect the data of some 87 million users that was shared with now-defunct political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

Two Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee, Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal, on Monday also wrote to Zuckerberg.

Archibong said the cases were “very different” from the use of data by third-party developers in the Cambridge row.

New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said on Monday the “data-sharing partnerships with other corporations” is part of the ongoing investigation into the reported misuse of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-face ... SKCN1J11TY
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby 82_28 » Fri Jun 15, 2018 6:36 am

Video link from The Onion:

6-Year-Old Explains How Messed Up It Is That Her Entire Life Has Been Put On Facebook

https://www.theonion.com/6-year-old-exp ... 1826840659
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby Elvis » Fri Jul 27, 2018 7:12 pm

Something has scared Facebook into spending another $10 million to protect Mark Zuckerberg

Andy Meek @aemeek
July 27th, 2018 at 12:19 PM


In response to what Facebook says are “specific threats” to the safety of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his family, the company says it’s spending another $10 million on top of what’s already a record personal security budget for its chief executive and founder.

Facebook disclosed in a security filing it will pay the $10 million in cash, which surpasses the $7.3 million the company paid for Zuckerberg’s personal security detail in 2017. A figure that itself was up from $4.9 million in 2016.

On July 24, 2018, according to the filing, a Facebook board committee “approved an annual pre-tax allowance of $10 million to Mr. Zuckerberg to cover additional costs related to his and his family’s personal security. This allowance will be in addition to the continued funding of Mr. Zuckerberg’s overall security program to cover the costs of security personnel for his protection; the procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain required security measures for his residences; and the usage of private aircraft for personal travel.

It continues, “In approving this annual security allowance, the Committee considered Mr. Zuckerberg’s position and importance to Facebook and the fact that Mr. Zuckerberg has requested to receive only $1 in annual salary and does not receive any bonus payments or equity awards … The Committee believes that this allowance, together with the costs of Mr. Zuckerberg’s existing overall security program, are appropriate and necessary under the circumstances.”

Facebook, of course, doesn’t go into further detail on what or who prompted the increase in security funding for its chief executive.

For some context behind the costs, last year’s increased security budget for Zuckerberg was apparently related to him visiting every state in the U.S. as part of a personal project. In April, meanwhile, a CNBC report used executive compensation research firm Equilar to point out that Zuckerberg’s security costs exceeded those of peers “by a large margin.”

The new $10 million bump works out to an extra $27,000 a day Facebook is spending on protecting its chief. Worth noting: It costs nowhere near that much to protect the CEO of the most valuable company in the world nor the tech CEO who’s also the wealthiest person in the world.
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s security budget last year was $224,000. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’? Just $1.6 million.

It’s certainly been a tough year news-wise for Facebook, which got pulverized by the stock market this week in the wake of disappointing second quarter earnings. The company said it’s not putting as much priority on making money at the moment — indeed, that revenue is slowing down — so it can focus on other things like improving the security of the company’s product and figuring out ad monetization for newer services, along with other nettlesome challenges.

https://bgr.com/2018/07/27/facebook-zuc ... -increase/
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:45 am

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests


A Syrian refugee at her apartment in Altena, Germany, in July 2018.Credit
Ksenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
By Amanda Taub and Max Fisher
Aug. 21, 2018

ALTENA, Germany — When you ask locals why Dirk Denkhaus, a young firefighter trainee who had been considered neither dangerous nor political, broke into the attic of a refugee group house and tried to set it on fire, they will list the familiar issues.

This small riverside town is shrinking and its economy declining, they say, leaving young people bored and disillusioned. Though most here supported the mayor’s decision to accept an extra allotment of refugees, some found the influx disorienting. Fringe politics are on the rise.

But they’ll often mention another factor not typically associated with Germany’s spate of anti-refugee violence: Facebook.

Everyone here has seen Facebook rumors portraying refugees as a threat. They’ve encountered racist vitriol on local pages, a jarring contrast with Altena’s public spaces, where people wave warmly to refugee families.

Many here suspected — and prosecutors would later argue, based on data seized from his phone — that Mr. Denkhaus had isolated himself in an online world of fear and anger that helped lead him to violence.

This may be more than speculation. Little Altena exemplifies a phenomenon long suspected by researchers who study Facebook: that the platform makes communities more prone to racial violence. And, now, the town is one of 3,000-plus data points in a landmark study that claims to prove it.

Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. In each, they analyzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.


Nationwide, the researchers estimated in an interview, this effect drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence.

The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.

Other experts, asked to review the findings, called them credible, rigorous — and disturbing. The study bolstered a growing body of research, they said, finding that social media scrambles users’ perceptions of outsiders, of reality, even of right and wrong.

Facebook declined to comment on the study, but a spokeswoman said in an email, “Our approach on what is allowed on Facebook has evolved over time and continues to change as we learn from experts in the field.”

The company toughened a number of restrictions on hate speech, including against refugees, during and after the study’s sample period. Still, experts believe that much of the link to violence doesn’t come through overt hate speech, but rather through subtler and more pervasive ways that the platform distorts users’ picture of reality and social norms.

We visited Altena and other German towns to retrace each step from the site’s algorithm-driven newsfeed to real-world attacks that its users might not otherwise commit — and that hint at subtle but profound ways that the social network reshapes societies.

Separating Right From Wrong

The attic of this apartment block in Altena, Germany, was set ablaze in October 2015.CreditKsenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
When refugees first arrived, so many locals volunteered to help that Anette Wesemann, who runs Altena’s refugee integration center, couldn’t keep up. She’d find Syrian or Afghan families attended by entourages of self-appointed life coaches and German tutors.

“It was really moving,” she said.

But when Ms. Wesemann set up a Facebook page to organize food drives and volunteer events, it filled with anti-refugee vitriol of a sort she hadn’t encountered offline.

Some posts appeared to come from outsiders, joined by a handful of locals. Over time, their anger proved infectious, dominating the page.

Told about research linking Facebook to anti-refugee violence, Ms. Wesemann responded, “I would believe it immediately.”

Such links would be indirect, researchers say, but begin with the algorithm that determines each user’s newsfeed.

That algorithm is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, perform best and so proliferate.

That is how anti-refugee sentiment — which combines fear of social change with us-versus-them rallying cries, two powerful forces on the algorithm — can seem unusually common on Facebook, even in a pro-refugee town like Altena.


But even if only a minority of users express vehement anti-refugee views, once they dominate the newsfeed, this can have consequences for everyone else.
Image

Fatima Kousa, a Syrian refugee living in Altena with her son, has little contact with residents.CreditKsenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
People instinctively conform to their community’s social norms, which are normally a brake on bad behavior. This requires intuiting what the people around us believe, something we do through subconscious social cues, according to research by Betsy Paluck, a Princeton University social psychologist.

Facebook scrambles that process. It isolates us from moderating voices or authority figures, siphons us into like-minded groups and, through its algorithm, promotes content that engages our base emotions.

A Facebook user in Altena, for instance, might reasonably, but wrongly, conclude that their neighbors were broadly hostile to refugees.

“You can get this impression that there is widespread community support for violence,” said Dr. Paluck. “And that changes your idea of whether, if you acted, you wouldn’t be acting alone.”

In his office, Gerhard Pauli, a grandfatherly local prosecutor, flipped through printouts of social media posts that the police had pulled from Mr. Denkhaus’s cellphone.

Image

A social media meme found on a cellphone belonging to Dirk Denkhaus.CreditShane Thomas McMillan
“He was very interested in Facebook,” Mr. Pauli said. He paused over an image of wide-eyed, dark-skinned men, superimposed with the text, “The welfare ministry is out of money. It’s back to work.”

Mr. Denkhaus messaged near constantly with friends to share articles and memes disparaging foreigners. At first they trafficked in provocations, ironically addressing one another as “mein Führer.”

Over time, they appeared to lose sight of the line separating trolling from sincere hate. Heavy social media users refer to this effect as “irony poisoning.”

“He said to his partner one day, ‘And now we have to do something,’” Mr. Pauli recalled. Mr. Denkhaus and a friend doused the attic of a refugee group house with gasoline and set it on fire. No one was hurt.

In court, his lawyer would argue that Mr. Denkhaus had shown no outward animus toward refugees before that night. It was only online that he’d dabbled in hate.

Intended as exonerating — wasn’t the real world what mattered? — this defense underscored how Facebook can provide a closed environment with its own moral rules.

Mr. Denkhaus had little opportunity to encounter anti-refugee hatred in the real Altena, where overwhelmingly tolerant social norms prevailed. But within his Facebook echo chamber, he could drift unchecked toward extremism.

Though Altena’s residents condemned Mr. Denkhaus, his was not the last act of violence. Last year, the mayor was stabbed by a man said to be outraged by his pro-refugee policies. Mr. Pauli suspected a social media link: Local pages had filled with hateful comments toward the mayor just before the attack.

Distorted Social Norms
Image

Altena exemplifies a phenomenon long suspected by researchers who study Facebook: that the platform makes communities more prone to racial violence.CreditKsenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
And these attacks may represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg, the University of Warwick researchers said.

Each person nudged into violence, they believe, hints at a community that has become broadly more hostile to refugees. For most users, the effect will be subtler, but, by playing out more widely, perhaps more consequential.

Traunstein, a Bavarian mountainside town, is, in most ways, quite different from Altena. Its tourist economy is thriving. Young people are active in the community. Though the town leans liberal, the surrounding region is solidly center-right.

But, as in Altena, Facebook use and anti-refugee violence rates are both unusually high. Could that hint at more than a few isolated vigilantes?

We sought out a particular kind of user, known to researchers as a superposter, who is thought to embody the ways that Facebook can make a community incrementally more hostile to outsiders.

Rolf Wasserman, an artist whose studio overlooks Traunstein’s quaint central square, is not politically influential in any traditional sense. Though conservative, he is hardly extremist. But he is furiously active on Facebook.

He posts a steady stream of rumors, strident opinion columns and news reports on crimes committed by refugees. Though none crosses into hate speech or fake news, in the aggregate, they portray Germany as beset by dangerous foreigners.

“On Facebook, it’s possible to reach people who are not highly political, to bring information to them,” he said. “You can build peoples’ political views on Facebook.”
Image

Rolf Wasserman, an artist from Traunstein, Germany, belongs to a class of Facebook users that researchers call superposters.CreditKsenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
Superposters tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist.


When more casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters like Mr. Wasserman. Their exaggerated worldviews play well on the algorithm, allowing them to collectively — and often unknowingly — dominate newsfeeds.

“That’s something special about Facebook,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up getting a lot of time on the feed, you are influential. It’s a difference with real life.”

In the offline world, people decide collectively whom to listen to and whom to ignore. Professional gatekeepers such as editors or party leaders decide which voices to elevate. Facebook overrides those practices.

In a recent study, Dr. Paluck found that schoolchildren decide whether bullying is right or wrong based largely on what they believe their classmates think. But the students, as shorthand for figuring this out, paid special attention to a handful of influential peers.

Dr. Paluck, by persuading the influential students to oppose bullying, could shift social norms in an entire school, reducing bullying by about a third. Isolating students who favor bullying and elevating those who oppose it can also reduce violence. By shuffling around the students just so, a few moderating voices could be made to set norms for the whole community.

Facebook’s algorithm, engineered to maximize the amount of time spent on the site, does the opposite of this. It elevates a class of superposters like Mr. Wasserman who, in the aggregate, give readers an impression that social norms are more hostile to refugees and more distrustful of authority than they really are. Even if no one endorses violence, it can come to feel more justifiable.

Natascha Wolff has seen this firsthand, she said at a Traunstein church lunch for local Nigerian families.


Ms. Wolff, who teaches at a vocational school, has found that young people like her students often express the most anti-refugee views. They seem to draw, she said, on things they saw on Facebook — and a mistaken belief that everyone agrees.

Any rumor or tidbit about foreigners, she said, “sure gets around fast. People feel confirmed in their viewpoint.”

The ideological bubbles can be radicalizing, she added: “It’s just, ‘like, like, like.’”

Her refugee students, she said, have had coffee or other objects thrown at them from windows — casual, light-of-day violence one only braves with the assumption that it will be tolerated.

But police here aggressively pursue crimes against refugees, highlighting that some locals have a skewed perspective of their own community’s social norms.

A young woman who attends Ms. Wolff’s vocational school, but asked to not be named so she could speak more freely, described lurid stories of refugee wrongdoing she’d read on Facebook. Everyone her age uses the site to discuss refugees, she said, and everyone agrees that they are a threat.

She may have been misled by Facebook’s tendency to sort people into like-minded groups. Our interviews in Traunstein, along with voter records, suggest that the town is split but leans liberal.

Like most Germans, she is at little risk of committing violence. But her Facebook-tinged social norms show in other ways. She supported hardline anti-immigration policies, she said. When an African classmate was deported over an error in his paperwork, she’d hoped more would face similar fates.


German politics are divided. Even if only a small fraction of Germans harden their views through Facebook, that could make a difference. Here in Bavaria, polls show rising support for the far-right, leading the dominant center-right party to adopt immigration policies so hard line they sparked a national crisis in July.

Without Facebook, Violence Drops
Image

An internet cafe in Berlin. If Facebook can be linked to hundreds of attacks in Germany, its effect could be far more severe in countries with weaker institutions.CreditKsenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
Could Facebook really distort social relations to the point of violence? The University of Warwick researchers tested their findings by examining every sustained internet outage in their study window.

German internet infrastructure tends to be localized, making outages isolated but common. Sure enough, whenever internet access went down in an area with high Facebook use, attacks on refugees dropped significantly.

And they dropped by the same rate at which heavy Facebook use is thought to boost violence. The drop did not occur in areas with high internet usage but average Facebook usage, suggesting it is specific to social media.

This spring, internet services went down for several days or weeks, depending on the block, in the middle-class Berlin suburb of Schmargendorf.

Asked how life changed, Stefania Simonutti went bug-eyed and waved her arms as if screaming.

“The world got smaller, a lot changed,” said Ms. Simonutti, who runs a local ice cream shop with her husband and older son. She lost touch with family in Italy, she said, but was most distressed by losing access to news, for which she trusts only social media, chiefly Facebook.


“Many people lie and fake things in the newspapers,” she said, referring darkly to matters of war and disease. “But with the internet, I can decide for myself what to believe and what not.”
Image

Towns in which people used Facebook more than average, like Altena, experienced significantly more attacks on refugees, researchers found.CreditKsenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
Esperanza Muñoz, a cheery, freckled woman who moved here from Colombia in the 1980s, found the outage relaxing. She socialized more with neighbors and followed the news less.

“Social media, it’s an illusion,” she said.

Her daughter, a medical student named Laura Selke, said global events seemed less stressful during the outage.

“When news spreads on Facebook, it’s made more provocative,” she said.

She hadn’t realized how much anxiety social media caused her until she went for a few days without it.

“You really do notice,” she said. “It really was very comfortable, very nice.”

Ms. Muñoz added that Facebook communities in her native Colombia seemed even more prone to outrage and filter bubbles.

“It really was as if there was only one opinion,” she said, describing her Facebook feed during recent Colombian elections. “We’re only informed in one direction, and that’s really not good.”

This hints at what experts consider one of the most important lessons of the University of Warwick study. If Facebook can be linked to hundreds of attacks even in Germany, its effect could be far more severe in countries like Colombia with weaker institutions, weaker social media regulations and more immediate histories of political violence.

“People wouldn’t say these things with their own mouths,” Ms. Muñoz said, referring to the rancor she saw from Colombian Facebook users. “But it’s easy for them to share it online.”
The Interpreter is a column by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub exploring the ideas and context behind major world events. Follow them on Twitter @Max_Fisher and @amandataub.

Shane Thomas McMillan contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/worl ... rmany.html
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 26, 2018 2:40 pm

Facebook has removed over a dozen American hyperpartisan liberal and conservative pages with more than 30 million combined fans



Facebook Has Removed More Than A Dozen Big Conservative And Liberal Political Pages
Facebook said the pages were managed by a fake account and were spamming content from LifeZette, a conservative site.

Headshot of Craig Silverman
Craig Silverman
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 25, 2018, at 1:29 p.m. ET
Image

Facebook has removed over a dozen American hyperpartisan liberal and conservative pages with more than 30 million combined fans after discovering they were administered by the same fake account and were in violation of policies against spamming, a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

All of the removed pages had recently, and almost exclusively, been promoting links to LifeZette.com, the conservative website founded by Fox News host Laura Ingraham. It was sold last year to Canadian billionaire Daryl Katz, though Ingraham maintains a minority stake in the company, according to CNN. LifeZette's content continues to be heavily promoted on Ingraham’s social media accounts. (Her Facebook page and the main LifeZette page were not removed by Facebook. The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

The removals come as Facebook says it is in the midst of stepped-up efforts to detect possible policy violations on political pages in advance of the midterms. The takedowns deal a huge blow to a group of once-prominent hyperpartisan publishers on Facebook, and reinforces how much that business has declined since 2016 thanks to algorithm changes and heightened policy enforcement by the social network.

Last week, BuzzFeed News noticed that the now-removed pages had suddenly started sharing LifeZette.com content. LifeZette’s right-leaning stories were even being promoted on liberal Facebook pages such as Truth Examiner.

Image


Two LifeZette links that were shared on Truth Examiner before the page was removed.
Internet Archive/BuzzFeed Nrws / Via Facebook: truthexaminer
Two LifeZette links that were shared on Truth Examiner before the page was removed.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the coordinated sharing activity across pages helped trigger the review and ultimate removal of the pages.

“Our systems detected a set of Pages with administrators who were using fake accounts and violating our spam policies,” the spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We've reviewed and removed accounts and Pages associated with this activity."

Help us break more stories with impact. If you want more reporting like this, become a BuzzFeed News supporter.

The removed conservative pages include American News (more than 5.5 million fans), Mr. Conservative (2.1 million), Conservative 101 (2.1 million), and Proud to Be Conservative (2.2 million), along with at least three others.

The liberal pages were Truth Examiner (3.7 million fans), Liberal Americans (2.1 million), Backed by Fact (1.5 million), and We Are Liberal (1.2 million), along with at least two others. In February of this year, a study by social analytics company NewsWhip found that a writer for Truth Examiner received more engagement for his content than any other reporter on Facebook.

Facebook also removed two nonpolitical pages that were sharing LifeZette content, God Today (2.9 million fans), and Animal Amigos (1 million).

The above pages were controlled by American conservative publishers Cyrus Massoumi, Tyler Shapiro, and John Crane. Shapiro and Crane are business partners and have worked closely with Massoumi over the years. American News, the largest of all the removed pages, was one of the top-performing American politics pages on Facebook during the 2016 election, according to a 2017 BuzzFeed News analysis. It was run by Shapiro and Crane, and Massoumi had posting privileges on it when it was removed.

In an email to BuzzFeed News, Massoumi acknowledged he was working with LifeZette. He also provided a list of the removed pages.

“The only pages that survived were pages that my partners [Shapiro and Crane] owned which were not posting [LifeZette] content” he said, adding that the removals affected “17 pages, 30m fans, and all of my advertising ability went down."

In subsequent emails, Massoumi asked that information he previously sent be considered off the record and said, "I have no business relationship with LifeZette." (BuzzFeed News had not agreed to speak off the record.)

Shapiro and Crane did not respond to a request for comment.

Along with American News and Conservative 101, the pair also controlled God Today, as well as pages targeting liberals on Facebook, as detailed in a previous BuzzFeed News investigation. Like many hyperpartisan publishers, their pages experienced a significant drop in engagement after 2016, according to data accessed in CrowdTangle prior to the page's removal.

In July, BuzzFeed News revealed that American News was being rented out to men in India for $5,000 a month so they could use it share links to their US politics sites. (That practice is in violation of Facebook’s policies.)

Image
Facebook
"They are renting out their page for content marketing," said Sanal, one of the Indian men who paid for access to the page. "I thought we would just try for a couple of months and see how it works." (He agreed to speak to BuzzFeed News on the condition that his full name was not published.)

Sanal said he was generating less traffic, and therefore ad revenue, from American News than he’d hoped. He ended the relationship in August. At some point after that, LifeZette became the primary website being shared on American News, as well as the network of other pages controlled by Shapiro, Crane, and Massoumi.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/cr ... a-ingraham
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 27, 2018 8:46 pm

1. SKETCHY35 minutes ago
Facebook Confirms Giving Advertisers Access to User Phone Numbers

Joel Saget/AFP/Getty
Facebook confirmed a Wednesday report claiming it gave advertisers access to user phone numbers and contact lists. “We use the information people provide to offer a better, more personalized experience on Facebook, including ads,” a Facebook spokeswoman told AFP. “We are clear about how we use the information we collect, including the contact information that people upload or add to their own accounts.” In a Gizmodo report published Wednesday, two studies found that the social network was giving advertisers access to data sources that users did not explicitly permit could be used. For example, the studies found user phone numbers given to the social network to enable two-factor authentication were being targeted in advertisements. The studies also found that user contact lists that were uploaded to the site could be “mined for personal information,” meaning that data from friends of the user could also be available to advertisers.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook- ... ne-numbers
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:06 pm

Facebook Update: our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security



September 28, 2018

Security Update

By Guy Rosen, VP of Product Management

On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security.

Our investigation is still in its early stages. But it’s clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted “View As”, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.

Here is the action we have already taken. First, we’ve fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement.

Second, we have reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security. We’re also taking the precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a “View As” look-up in the last year. As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened.

Third, we’re temporarily turning off the “View As” feature while we conduct a thorough security review.

This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in our code. It stemmed from a change we made to our video uploading feature in July 2017, which impacted “View As.” The attackers not only needed to find this vulnerability and use it to get an access token, they then had to pivot from that account to others to steal more tokens.

Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed. We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based. We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change. In addition, if we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens.

People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened. It’s why we’ve taken immediate action to secure these accounts and let users know what happened. There’s no need for anyone to change their passwords. But people who are having trouble logging back into Facebook — for example because they’ve forgotten their password — should visit our Help Center. And if anyone wants to take the precautionary action of logging out of Facebook, they should visit the “Security and Login” section in settings. It lists the places people are logged into Facebook with a one-click option to log out of them all.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/


Facebook security breach allowed hackers to control the accounts of up to 50 million users
Facebook discovered a security issue where hackers were able to access information that could have let them take over as many as 50 million accounts, the company announced on Friday.
Michelle Castillo | @mishcastillo
Published 16 Mins Ago Updated 1 Min Ago
CNBC.com
Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018.
Facebook discovered a security issue that allowed hackers to access information that could have let them take over as many as around 50 million accounts, the company announced on Friday.

The company said in a blog post its engineering team found attackers had found a weakness in Facebook's code regarding its "View As" feature on Tuesday. "View As" lets users see what their profile looks like to other users on the platform. This vulnerability also allowed the hackers to get access tokens - digital keys which let people stay logged into the service without having to re-enter their password - which could be used to control other people's accounts.

Almost 50 million accounts were affected, and had their access tokens reset. Facebook also reset an additional 40 million accounts as a precautionary measure, for a total of 90 million accounts. This will require these users to re-enter their password when they return to Facebook or access an app that uses Facebook Login. They will also receive a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened.

In addition, the company suspended the "View As" feature while it reviews its security, fixed the issue, and has notified law enforcement.

Facebook said it has just begun its investigation, and has not determined if any information was abused. It does not know who orchestrated the hack or where the person or persons are based. The company said there is no need to change passwords.

Facebook, which was already trading down about 1.5 percent before the announcement, extended losses to as much as 3.4 percent after the disclosure.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/28/faceboo ... r=sharebar
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 09, 2018 12:55 pm

Ari Rabin-Havt

Verified account

@AriRabinHavt
Oct 7
More
Brett Kavanaugh celebrated his confirmation last night at a party at the home of Facebook’s top lobbyist.

Google is one of the Federalist Society’s largest donors.

Next time conservatives claim tech companies are biased against them, please laugh in their faces.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:54 am

Tom Cotton: 'Most likely to start World War III
https://m.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/arc ... ld-war-iii


Several people are typing

@Pinboard
Here's Facebook giving money last month to re-elect xenophobic Arkansas senator Tom Cotton in 2020

6ED4070E-674F-4605-B81A-3CBB1585AE45.jpeg

https://mobile.twitter.com/Pinboard/sta ... 3047592961

Facebook gave Senator Susan Collins a $2,500 campaign donation on September 28. Collins isn't even running in 2018—this is for the 2020 primary. (Bonus $2K donation in that screenshot for Doug Collins, who voted against the Violence Against Women Act in 2013)

B8EAB208-AD7F-4560-A2E2-AE81199AF4E4.jpeg

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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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seemslikeadream
 
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 15, 2018 10:09 am

Carole Cadwalladr

Here's the whole incredible story. Kudos to @nytimes. Without it, we'd never know @Facebook execs castigated employees for investigating Russian interference. Then smeared its critics with anti-semitic tropes that it lifted straight from the Kremlin
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/stat ... 4393305090



Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Nov. 14, 2018
Facebook has gone on the attack as one scandal after another — Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech — has led to a congressional and consumer backlash.Tom Brenner for The New York Times


Facebook has gone on the attack as one scandal after another — Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech — has led to a congressional and consumer backlash.Tom Brenner for The New York Times
Sheryl Sandberg was seething.

Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.

But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos’s briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.

“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present.

The clash that day would set off a reckoning — for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

[Here’s how Facebook failed to police how its partners handled user data.]

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has overseen an aggressive campaign to fight critics and ward off regulation.Joshua Roberts/Reuters


Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has overseen an aggressive campaign to fight critics and ward off regulation.Joshua Roberts/Reuters
When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms. Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook’s reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.

This account of how Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg navigated Facebook’s cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.

Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform.

“This has been a tough time at Facebook and our entire management team has been focused on tackling the issues we face,” the statement said. “While these are hard problems we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors.”

Even so, trust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook’s conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a yearslong struggle over the future of Facebook’s data-hungry business model.

[Despite a turbulent two years, here’s why almost no one in tech thinks Mark Zuckerberg should step down from the company he built.]

“We failed to look and try to imagine what was hiding behind corners,” Elliot Schrage, former vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, said in an interview.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, and Ms. Sandberg, 49, remain at the company’s helm, while Mr. Stamos and other high-profile executives have left after disputes over Facebook’s priorities. Mr. Zuckerberg, who controls the social network with 60 percent of the voting shares and who approved many of its directors, has been asked repeatedly in the last year whether he should step down as chief executive.

His answer each time: a resounding “No.”

‘Don’t Poke the Bear’

Joel Kaplan, right, Facebook’s vice president for corporate public policy, attended an April Senate hearing where a coached Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, largely eluded tough questions.Tom Brenner/The New York Times


Joel Kaplan, right, Facebook’s vice president for corporate public policy, attended an April Senate hearing where a coached Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, largely eluded tough questions.Tom Brenner/The New York Times
Three years ago, Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 while attending Harvard, was celebrated for the company’s extraordinary success. Ms. Sandberg, a former Clinton administration official and Google veteran, had become a feminist icon with the publication of her empowerment manifesto, “Lean In,” in 2013.

Like other technology executives, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg cast their company as a force for social good. Facebook’s lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content on the platform. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated. Many Facebook executives worried that any such efforts would backfire.

Then Donald J. Trump ran for president. He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to America, and in December 2015 posted a statement on Facebook calling for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States. Mr. Trump’s call to arms — widely condemned by Democrats and some prominent Republicans — was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, an illustration of the site’s power to spread racist sentiment.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to immigration reform, was appalled, said employees who spoke to him or were familiar with the conversation. He asked Ms. Sandberg and other executives if Mr. Trump had violated Facebook’s terms of service.

The question was unusual. Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Ms. Sandberg’s domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook’s chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Ms. Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration.

Some at Facebook viewed Mr. Trump’s 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through its platform. But Ms. Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter to Mr. Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Ms. Sandberg had recruited as the company’s head of global policy management. Ms. Sandberg also turned to the Washington office — particularly to Mr. Kaplan, said people who participated in or were briefed on the discussions.

In video conference calls between the Silicon Valley headquarters and Washington, the three officials construed their task narrowly. They parsed the company’s terms of service to see if the post, or Mr. Trump’s account, violated Facebook’s rules.

Mr. Kaplan argued that Mr. Trump was an important public figure and that shutting down his account or removing the statement could be seen as obstructing free speech, said three employees who knew of the discussions. He said it could also stoke a conservative backlash.

“Don’t poke the bear,” Mr. Kaplan warned.

Mr. Zuckerberg did not participate in the debate. Ms. Sandberg attended some of the video meetings but rarely spoke.

Mr. Schrage concluded that Mr. Trump’s language had not violated Facebook’s rules and that the candidate’s views had public value. “We were trying to make a decision based on all the legal and technical evidence before us,” he said in an interview.

In the end, Mr. Trump’s statement and account remained on the site. When Mr. Trump won election the next fall, giving Republicans control of the White House as well as Congress, Mr. Kaplan was empowered to plan accordingly. The company hired a former aide to Mr. Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, along with lobbying firms linked to Republican lawmakers who had jurisdiction over internet companies.

But inside Facebook, new troubles were brewing.

Minimizing Russia’s Role

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in November 2017, Facebook and other tech giants were asked about Russia’s election meddling.Eric Thayer for The New York Times

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in November 2017, Facebook and other tech giants were asked about Russia’s election meddling.Eric Thayer for The New York Times
In the final months of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, Russian agents escalated a yearlong effort to hack and harass his Democratic opponents, culminating in the release of thousands of emails stolen from prominent Democrats and party officials.

Facebook had said nothing publicly about any problems on its own platform. But in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Mr. Stamos.

Mr. Stamos’s team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees. Months later, as Mr. Trump battled Hillary Clinton in the general election, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.

Mr. Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.

Mr. Stamos, acting on his own, then directed a team to scrutinize the extent of Russian activity on Facebook. In December 2016, after Mr. Zuckerberg publicly scoffed at the idea that fake news on Facebook had helped elect Mr. Trump, Mr. Stamos — alarmed that the company’s chief executive seemed unaware of his team’s findings — met with Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg and other top Facebook leaders.

Ms. Sandberg was angry. Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally. Other executives asked Mr. Stamos why they had not been told sooner.

Still, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to expand on Mr. Stamos’s work, creating a group called Project P, for “propaganda,” to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Mr. Stamos’s original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former security chief, met with criticism as he investigated Russian activity on the platform.Steve Marcus/Reuters

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former security chief, met with criticism as he investigated Russian activity on the platform.Steve Marcus/Reuters
But Mr. Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by American intelligence agencies that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Mr. Trump.

If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.

Ms. Sandberg sided with Mr. Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Mr. Zuckerberg — who spent much of 2017 on a national “listening tour,” feeding cows in Wisconsin and eating dinner with Somali refugees in Minnesota — did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it waspublished that April, the word “Russia” never appeared.

Ms. Sandberg’s subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican, and Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat. Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators’ concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook.

But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia. That June, a Times reporter provided Facebook a list of accounts with suspected ties to Russia, seeking more information on their provenance. By August 2017, Facebook executives concluded that the situation had become what one called a “five-alarm fire,” said a person familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg agreed to go public with some findings, and laid plans to release a blog post on Sept. 6, 2017, the day of the company’s quarterly board meeting.

After Mr. Stamos and his team drafted the post, however, Ms. Sandberg and her deputies insisted it be less specific. She and Mr. Zuckerberg also asked Mr. Stamos and Mr. Stretch to brief the board’s audit committee, chaired by Erskine Bowles, the patrician investor and White House veteran.

Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, learned in 2016 that suspicious Russian activity on the social network had been detected internally.Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, learned in 2016 that suspicious Russian activity on the social network had been detected internally.Eric Thayer for The New York Times
Mr. Stretch and Mr. Stamos went into more detail with the audit committee than planned, warning that Facebook was likely to find even more evidence of Russian interference.

The disclosures set off Mr. Bowles, who after years in Washington could anticipate how lawmakers might react. He grilled the two men, occasionally cursing, on how Facebook had allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference. He demanded to know why it had taken so long to uncover the activity, and why Facebook directors were only now being told.

When the full board gathered later that day at a room at the company’s headquarters reserved for sensitive meetings, Mr. Bowles pelted questions at Facebook’s founder and second-in-command. Ms. Sandberg, visibly unsettled, apologized. Mr. Zuckerberg, stone-faced, whirred through technical fixes, said three people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings.

Later that day, the company’s abbreviated blog post went up. It said little about fake accounts or the organic posts created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, disclosing only that Russian agents had spent roughly $100,000 — a relatively tiny sum — on approximately 3,000 ads.

Just one day after the company’s carefully sculpted admission, The Times published an investigation of further Russian activity on Facebook, showing how Russian intelligence had used fake accounts to promote emails stolen from the Democratic Party and prominent Washington figures.

Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner introduced legislation last fall to force Facebook and other tech companies to disclose who bought political ads on their sites.Al Drago for The New York TimesTimes

Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner introduced legislation last fall to force Facebook and other tech companies to disclose who bought political ads on their sites.Al Drago for The New York TimesTimes
The combined revelations infuriated Democrats, finally fracturing the political consensus that had protected Facebook and other big tech companies from Beltway interference. Republicans, already concerned that the platform was censoring conservative views, accused Facebook of fueling what they claimed were meritless conspiracy charges against Mr. Trump and Russia. Democrats, long allied with Silicon Valley on issues including immigration and gay rights, now blamed Mr. Trump’s win partly on Facebook’s tolerance for fraud and disinformation.

After stalling for weeks, Facebook eventually agreed to hand over the Russian posts to Congress. Twice in October 2017, Facebook was forced to revise its public statements, finally acknowledging that close to 126 million people had seen the Russian posts.

The same month, Mr. Warner and Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, introduced legislation to compel Facebook and other internet firms to disclose who bought political ads on their sites — a significant expansion of federal regulation over tech companies.

“It’s time for Facebook to let all of us see the ads bought by Russians *and paid for in Rubles* during the last election,” Ms. Klobuchar wrote on her own Facebook page.

Facebook girded for battle. Days after the bill was unveiled, Facebook hired Mr. Warner’s former chief of staff, Luke Albee, to lobby on it. Mr. Kaplan’s team took a larger role in managing the company’s Washington response, routinely reviewing Facebook news releases for words or phrases that might rile conservatives.

Ms. Sandberg also reached out to Ms. Klobuchar. She had been friendly with the senator, who is featured on the website for Lean In, Ms. Sandberg’s empowerment initiative. Ms. Sandberg had contributed a blurb to Ms. Klobuchar’s 2015 memoir, and the senator’s chief of staff had previously worked at Ms. Sandberg’s charitable foundation.

But in a tense conversation shortly after the ad legislation was introduced, Ms. Sandberg complained about Ms. Klobuchar’s attacks on the company, said a person who was briefed on the call. Ms. Klobuchar did not back down on her legislation. But she dialed down her criticism in at least one venue important to the company: After blasting Facebook repeatedly that fall on her own Facebook page, Ms. Klobuchar hardly mentioned the company in posts between November and February.

A spokesman for Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement that Facebook’s lobbying had not lessened her commitment to holding the company accountable. “Facebook was pushing to exclude issue ads from the Honest Ads Act, and Senator Klobuchar strenuously disagreed and refused to change the bill,” he said.

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that’s being pushed out about your competitor.”

Facebook quickly adopted that strategy. In November 2017, the social network came out in favor of a bill called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which made internet companies responsible for sex trafficking ads on their sites.

Google and others had fought the bill for months, worrying it would set a cumbersome precedent. But the sex trafficking bill was championed by Senator John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota who had pummeled Facebook over accusations that it censored conservative content, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and senior commerce committee member who was a frequent critic of Facebook.

Facebook broke ranks with other tech companies, hoping the move would help repair relations on both sides of the aisle, said two congressional staffers and three tech industry officials.

When the bill came to a vote in the House in February, Ms. Sandberg offered public support online, urging Congress to “make sure we pass meaningful and strong legislation to stop sex trafficking.”

Opposition Research

Cutouts of Mr. Zuckerberg during a protest outside the United States Capitol in April.Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Cutouts of Mr. Zuckerberg during a protest outside the United States Capitol in April.Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters
In March, The Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian prepared to publish a joint investigation into how Facebook user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. A few days before publication, The Times presented Facebook with evidence that copies of improperly acquired Facebook data still existed, despite earlier promises by Cambridge executives and others to delete it.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg met with their lieutenants to determine a response. They decided to pre-empt the stories, saying in a statement published late on a Friday night that Facebook had suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform. The executives figured that getting ahead of the news would soften its blow, according to people in the discussions.

They were wrong. The story drew worldwide outrage, prompting lawsuits and official investigations in Washington, London and Brussels. For days, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg remained out of sight, mulling how to respond. While the Russia investigation had devolved into an increasingly partisan battle, the Cambridge scandal set off Democrats and Republicans alike. And in Silicon Valley, other tech firms began exploiting the outcry to burnish their own brands.

Alexander Nix, former chief executive of the Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook came under fire after revelations that it had allowed the firm access to the personal information of tens of millions of people.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Alexander Nix, former chief executive of the Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook came under fire after revelations that it had allowed the firm access to the personal information of tens of millions of people.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty.” (Mr. Cook’s criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones — arguing that the operating system had far more users than Apple’s.)

Facebook scrambled anew. Executives quietly shelved an internal communications campaign, called “We Get It,” meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018.

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Mr. Kaplan prevailed on Ms. Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company’s American lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.

On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians’ use of Facebook.

The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Mr. Miller acknowledged that Facebook and Apple do not directly compete. Definers’ work on Apple is funded by a third technology company, he said, but Facebook has pushed back against Apple because Mr. Cook’s criticism upset Facebook.

If the privacy issue comes up, Facebook is happy to “muddy the waters,” Mr. Miller said over drinks at an Oakland, Calif., bar last month.

On Thursday, after this article was published, Facebook said that it had ended its relationship with Definers, without citing a reason.

In public, Facebook was more conciliatory. Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to testify on Capitol Hill. The company unveiled a gauzy advertising campaign, titled “Here Together,” to apologize to its users. Days before Mr. Zuckerberg’s appearance in Congress in April, Facebook announced that it was endorsing Ms. Klobuchar’s Honest Ads bill and would pre-emptively begin disclosing political ad buyers. It also informed users whose data had been improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

But Mr. Zuckerberg’s good-will tour was bumpy. Thanks to intensive coaching and preparation, the company’s communications team believed, he had effectively parried tough questions at the April hearing. But they worried he had come off as robotic — a suspicion confirmed by Facebook’s pollsters.

Mr. Zuckerberg spoke with Representative Greg Walden during a break in an April hearing, telling him he was surprised at the tough line of questioning.Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Zuckerberg spoke with Representative Greg Walden during a break in an April hearing, telling him he was surprised at the tough line of questioning.Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock
Mr. Zuckerberg’s political instincts were no more well-tuned. During a break in one hearing, he buttonholed Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who leads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to express his surprise at how tough on Facebook Democrats had been.

Mr. Walden was taken aback, said people who knew of the remark. Facebook’s leader, Mr. Walden realized, did not understand the breadth of the anger now aimed at his creation.

Personal Appeals in Washington

Ms. Sandberg, center left, has wooed or cajoled lawmakers in Washington.Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Ms. Sandberg, center left, has wooed or cajoled lawmakers in Washington.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Ms. Sandberg had said little publicly about the company’s problems. But inside Facebook, her approach had begun to draw criticism.

Some colleagues believed that Ms. Sandberg — whose ambitions to return to public life were much discussed at the company — was protecting her own brand at Facebook’s expense. At one company gathering, said two people who knew of the event, friends told Ms. Sandberg that if Facebook did not address the scandals effectively, its role in spreading hate and fear would define her legacy, too.

So Ms. Sandberg began taking a more personal role in the company’s Washington campaign, drawing on all the polish that Mr. Zuckerberg sometimes lacked. She not only relied on her old Democratic ties, but also sought to assuage skeptical Republicans, who grumbled that Facebook was more sensitive to the political opinions of its work force than to those of powerful committee leaders. Trailing an entourage of as many as 10 people on trips to the capital, Ms. Sandberg made a point of sending personal thank-you notes to lawmakers and others she met.

Her top Republican target was Mr. Burr, whose Senate committee’s Russia investigation had chugged along. The two spoke by phone, according to a congressional staff member and a Facebook executive, and met in person this fall. While critics cast Facebook as a serial offender that had ignored repeated warning signs about the dangers posed by its product, Ms. Sandberg argued that the company was grappling earnestly with the consequences of its extraordinary growth.

She made the same case in June at a conference of the National Association of Attorneys General in Portland, Ore. At the time, several attorneys general had opened or joined investigations into the company. Facebook was eager to head off further trouble.

The company organized several private receptions, including what was billed as a conversation with Ms. Sandberg about “corporate citizenship in the digital age” and a briefing on Cambridge Analytica.

While Facebook had publicly declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and policies available. Heavy-handed regulation, she warned, would only disadvantage smaller competitors.

Some of the officials were skeptical. But Ms. Sandberg’s presence — companies typically send lower-ranking executives to such gatherings — persuaded others that Facebook was serious about addressing its problems, according to two who attended the conference.

Facebook also continued to look for ways to deflect criticism to rivals. In June, after The Times reported on Facebook’s previously undisclosed deals to share user data with device makers — partnerships Facebook had failed to disclose to lawmakers — executives ordered up focus groups in Washington.

In separate sessions with liberals and conservatives, about a dozen at a time, Facebook previewed messages to lawmakers. Among the approaches it tested was bringing YouTube and other social media platforms into the controversy, while arguing that Google struck similar data-sharing deals.

Deflecting Criticism

Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, testifying before Congress in July. Demonstrators held up signs with octopus imagery that a company official flagged as anti-Semitic.Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, testifying before Congress in July. Demonstrators held up signs with octopus imagery that a company official flagged as anti-Semitic.Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg
By then, some of the harshest criticism of Facebook was coming from the political left, where activists and policy experts had begun calling for the company to be broken up.

In July, organizers with a coalition called Freedom from Facebook crashed a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, where a company executive was testifying about its policies. As the executive spoke, the organizers held aloft signs depicting Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg, who are both Jewish, as two heads of an octopus stretching around the globe.

Eddie Vale, a Democratic public relations strategist who led the protest, later said the image was meant to evoke old cartoons of Standard Oil, the Gilded Age monopoly. But a Facebook official quickly called the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights organization, to flag the sign. Facebook and other tech companies had partnered with the civil rights group since late 2017 on an initiative to combat anti-Semitism and hate speech online.

That afternoon, the A.D.L. issued a warning from its Twitter account.

“Depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe is a classic anti-Semitic trope,” the organization wrote. “Protest Facebook — or anyone — all you want, but pick a different image.” The criticism was soon echoed in conservative outlets including The Washington Free Beacon, which has sought to tie Freedom from Facebook to what the publication calls “extreme anti-Israel groups.”

An A.D.L. spokeswoman, Betsaida Alcantara, said the group routinely fielded reports of anti-Semitic slurs from journalists, synagogues and others. “Our experts evaluate each one based on our years of experience, and we respond appropriately,” Ms. Alcantara said. (The group has at times sharply criticized Facebook, including when Mr. Zuckerberg suggested that his company should not censor Holocaust deniers.)

Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti-Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.

He was a natural target. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, he had attacked Facebook and Google, describing them as a monopolist “menace” with “neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions.”

Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros’s family or philanthropies and groups that were members of Freedom from Facebook, such as Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, as well as a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros’s son. (An official at Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but not Freedom from Facebook, and had made no grants to support campaigns against Facebook.)

Definers also circulated research about other critics of Facebook, such as Diamond and Silk, the pro-Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook.

In at least one instance, the company also relied on Mr. Schumer, the New York senator and Senate Democratic leader. He has long worked to advance Silicon Valley’s interests on issues such as commercial drone regulations and patent reform. During the 2016 election cycle, he raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Mr. Zuckerberg speaking with Senator Chuck Schumer in July. The lawmaker, whose daughter works at Facebook, has intervened on the company’s behalf.Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Mr. Zuckerberg speaking with Senator Chuck Schumer in July. The lawmaker, whose daughter works at Facebook, has intervened on the company’s behalf.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Mr. Schumer also has a personal connection to Facebook: His daughter Alison joined the firm out of college and is now a marketing manager in Facebook’s New York office, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In July, as Facebook’s troubles threatened to cost the company billions of dollars in market value, Mr. Schumer confronted Mr. Warner, by then Facebook’s most insistent inquisitor in Congress.

Back off, he told Mr. Warner, according to a Facebook employee briefed on Mr. Schumer’s intervention. Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it. Facebook lobbyists were kept abreast of Mr. Schumer’s efforts to protect the company, according to the employee.

A Senate aide briefed on the exchange said that Mr. Schumer had not wanted Mr. Warner to lose sight of the need for Facebook to tackle problems with right-wing disinformation and election interference, as well as consumer privacy and other issues.

The War Room

Ms. Sandberg with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September.Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Ms. Sandberg with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September.Tom Brenner for The New York Times
One morning in late summer, workers layered opaque contact paper onto the windows of a conference room in Facebook’s Washington office. Not long after, a security guard was posted outside the door. It was an unusual sight: Facebook prided itself on open office plans and transparent, glass-walled conference rooms.

But Ms. Sandberg was set to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee — a pivotal encounter for her embattled company — and her aides were taking no chances.

Inside the room, they labored to prepare her for the hearing. They had assembled a binder-size briefing book, covering virtually every issue she might be questioned about, and had hired a former White House lawyer who specialized in training corporate executives.

Facebook lobbyists had already worked the Intelligence Committee hard, asking that lawmakers refrain from questioning Ms. Sandberg about privacy issues, Cambridge Analytica and censorship. The argument was persuasive with Mr. Burr, who was determined to avoid a circuslike atmosphere. A day before the hearing, he issued a stern warning to all committee members to stick to the topic of election interference.

In the committee room the next day was an empty chair behind a placard labeled “Google.” Facebook had lobbied for the hearing to include a Google emissary of similar rank to Ms. Sandberg. The company won a partial victory when Mr. Burr announced that Larry Page, a Google co-founder, had been invited, along with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive.

Mr. Dorsey showed up. Mr. Page did not.

As the hearing unfolded, senators excoriated Google for its absence, earning a wave of negative news coverage for Facebook’s rival.

Ms. Sandberg’s notes from the September hearing. Facebook lobbyists had worked hard to limit the range of questions Ms. Sandberg would face.Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Ms. Sandberg’s notes from the September hearing. Facebook lobbyists had worked hard to limit the range of questions Ms. Sandberg would face.Tom Brenner for The New York Times
Ms. Sandberg spread neatly handwritten notes on the table before her: the names of each senator on the committee, their pet questions and concerns, a reminder to say thank you.

In large letters were her stage directions: “Slow, Pause, Determined.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/tech ... e=Homepage




Facebook Cuts Ties With Definers Public Affairs Following Outcry

Nov. 15, 2018
A Facebook logo reflected on an advertisement board outside the United States Capitol in Washington in October. Facebook had initially hired Definers Public Affairs, a consulting firm, to monitor news about the social network.Tom Brenner for The New York Times


A Facebook logo reflected on an advertisement board outside the United States Capitol in Washington in October. Facebook had initially hired Definers Public Affairs, a consulting firm, to monitor news about the social network.Tom Brenner for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said Thursday that it had ended its relationship with a Washington-based consulting firm, Definers Public Affairs, which spread disparaging information about the social network’s critics and competitors.

The move followed a New York Times article on Wednesday that described the kind of work that Definers did on Facebook’s behalf. Among other things, Definers worked to discredit activist protesters that were against Facebook, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tried to deflect criticism of the social network by pressing reporters to look into rivals like Google.

Late Wednesday, Facebook decided to terminate its relationship with Definers after the publication of the Times article prompted an outcry, said a person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Top Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were not aware of the specific work being done by Definers, the person said.

In a statement, Facebook said it had not hidden its ties to Definers and disputed that it had asked the firm to spread false information.

“It is wrong to suggest that we have ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf, or communicate anything untrue,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in the statement.

“The relationship with Facebook was well known by the media — not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf,” the spokeswoman added.

Facebook confirmed on Thursday that it had ended its relationship with Definers, without citing a reason.

Definers was founded by veterans of Republican presidential campaigns and specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations. Last year, Tim Miller, a Definers official and former spokesman for Jeb Bush, started a Silicon Valley chapter. He said in one interview that as technology firms mature, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that’s being pushed out about your competitor.”

Facebook initially hired Definers to monitor news about the social network. It expanded its relationship with the firm in October 2017 when scrutiny of Facebook was increasing over how Russian agents had used the social media site to sow discord before the 2016 United States presidential election.

The Times reported on Wednesday that earlier this year, a conservative website called NTK Network began publishing stories defending Facebook and criticizing Facebook rivals like Google. NTK is an affiliate of Definers.

[Read the Times investigation of how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook responded to a series of scandals.]

In addition, Definers circulated a research document this summer casting Mr. Soros, the billionaire liberal donor, as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement. Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros and groups that had criticized Facebook, including a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros’s son and Color of Change, an online racial justice organization.

An official at Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but that no grants had been made to support campaigns against Facebook.

“We are proud to have partnered with Facebook over the past year on a range of public affairs services. All of our work is based on publicly available documents and information,” a Definers spokesman said in a statement.

He added, “The document referenced in the Times story regarding the anti-Facebook organization’s potential funding sources was entirely factual and based on public records.”

Mr. Miller said late Wednesday on Twitter that he was hurt by accusations that Definers’s work related to Mr. Soros was anti-Semitic. “Im disgusted by the rise of anti-semitism including people who have falsely targeted Soros. It’s deeply deeply personal. I’ve continuously fought the alt-right & others who spread racist lies & hate & will keep doing so,” he said.

After the Times article, other organizations also began re-evaluating their relationship with Definers. One of those was Crooked Media, which runs the popular political podcast Pod Save America. Mr. Miller is a frequent contributor to the podcast.

“We need to get to the bottom of Tim’s involvement in this work, and he won’t be contributing to Crooked more in the meantime,” Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor, three of the hosts of the podcast, said in a statement published to Twitter on Wednesday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/tech ... soros.html



How Facebook Wrestled With Scandal: 6 Key Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation

Nov. 14, 2018
Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing in April.Tom Brenner/The New York Times


Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing in April.Tom Brenner/The New York Times
By Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg

For more than a year, Facebook has endured cascading crises — over Russian misinformation, data privacy and abusive content — that transformed the Silicon Valley icon into an embattled giant accused of corporate overreach and negligence.

An investigation by The New York Times revealed how Facebook fought back against its critics: with delays, denials and a full-bore campaign in Washington. Here are six takeaways.

Facebook knew about Russian interference

In fall 2016, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was publicly declaring it a “crazy idea” that his company had played a role in deciding the election. But security experts at the company already knew otherwise.

They found signs as early as spring 2016 that Russian hackers were poking around the Facebook accounts of people linked to American presidential campaigns. Months later, they saw Russian-controlled accounts sharing information from hacked Democratic emails with reporters. Facebook accumulated evidence of Russian activity for over a year before executives opted to share what they knew with the public — and even their own board of directors.

The company feared Trump supporters

In 2015, when the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump called for a ban of Muslim immigrants, Facebook employees and outside critics called on the company to punish Mr. Trump. Mr. Zuckerberg considered it — asking subordinates whether Mr. Trump had violated the company’s rules and whether his account should be suspended or the post removed.

But while Mr. Zuckerberg was personally offended, he deferred to subordinates who warned that penalizing Mr. Trump would set off a damaging backlash among Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s post remained up.

Read The Times’s investigation here.
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
Nov. 14, 2018
Facebook launched a multipronged attack and lobbying campaign

As criticism grew over Facebook’s belated admissions of Russian influence, the company launched a lobbying campaign — overseen by Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer — to combat critics and shift anger toward rival tech firms.

Facebook hired Senator Mark Warner’s former chief of staff to lobby him; Ms. Sandberg personally called Senator Amy Klobuchar to complain about her criticism. The company also deployed a public relations firm to push negative stories about its political critics and cast blame on companies like Google.

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Those efforts included depicting the billionaire liberal donor George Soros as the force behind a broad anti-Facebook movement, and publishing stories praising Facebook and criticizing Google and Apple on a conservative news site.

Cambridge Analytica raised the stakes

Facebook faced worldwide outrage in March after The Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian published a joint investigation into how user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. But inside Facebook, executives thought they could contain the damage. The company installed a new chief of American lobbying to help quell the bipartisan anger in Congress, and it quietly shelved an internal communications campaign, called “We Get It,” meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018.

Some criticisms hurt more than others

Sensing Facebook’s vulnerability, some rival tech firms in Silicon Valley sought to use the outcry to promote their own brands. After Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, quipped in an interview that his company did not traffic in personal data, Mr. Zuckerberg ordered his management team to use only Android phones. After all, he reasoned, the operating system had far more users than Apple’s.

Facebook still has friends

Washington’s senior Democrat, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress during the 2016 election cycle — and he was there when the company needed him.

This past summer, as Facebook’s troubles mounted, Mr. Schumer confronted Mr. Warner, who by then had emerged as Facebook’s most insistent inquisitor in Congress. Back off, Mr. Schumer told Mr. Warner, and look for ways to work with Facebook, not vilify it. Lobbyists for Facebook — which also employs Mr. Schumer’s daughter — were kept abreast of Mr. Schumer’s efforts.

Nicholas Confessore is a New York-based political and investigative reporter at The Times and a writer-at-large at The Times Magazine, covering the intersection of wealth, power and influence in Washington and beyond. He joined The Times in 2004. @nickconfessore • Facebook

Matthew Rosenberg covers intelligence and national security from Washington and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. He previously spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/tech ... dberg.html


George Soros' foundations blast Facebook as threat to democracy

Michael Sykes1 hour ago
Responding to a bombshell New York Times piece, the president of George Soros' Open Society Foundations, Paul Gaspard, said Facebook's "methods threaten the very values underpinning our democracy" in a letter addressed to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The backdrop: The Times article alleged — among other things — that Facebook utilized a Republican-oriented public relations group to help navigate Washington politics during its user privacy controversies. That group also reportedly singled out Soros, who is often targeted by the right, and Open Society as "the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement."

The full text of the letter:

Dear Ms. Sandberg:

I was shocked to learn from the New York Times that you and your colleagues at Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to stir up animus toward George Soros. As you know, there is a concerted right-wing effort the world over to demonize Mr. Soros and his foundations, which I lead—an effort which has contributed to death threats and the delivery of a pipe bomb to Mr. Soros’ home. You are no doubt also aware that much of this hateful and blatantly false and Anti-Semitic information is spread via Facebook.

The notion that your company, at your direction, actively engaged in the same behavior to try to discredit people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role in disseminating vile propaganda is frankly astonishing to me.

It’s been disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook’s platform. To now learn that you are active in promoting these distortions is beyond the pale.

These efforts appear to have been part of a deliberate strategy to distract from the very real accountability problems your company continues to grapple with. This is reprehensible, and an offense to the core values Open Society seeks to advance. But at bottom, this is not about George Soros or the foundations. Your methods threaten the very values underpinning our democracy.

I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this matter with you in person, and to hear what steps you might take to help remediate the damage done by this deeply misguided--and dangerous--effort carried out at Facebook’s behest.

Sincerely,

Patrick Gaspard

President | Open Society Foundations
https://www.axios.com/facebook-george-s ... 8c529.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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