EU-DIGEST: Facebook

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5/22/23

Facbook Meta: EU fines Facebook EURO 1.3 billion

Commission (DPC), which acts on behalf of the European Union, said the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) had ordered it to collect "an administrative fine in the amount of 1.2 billion euros".

The DPC has been investigating Meta Ireland's transfer of personal data from the EU to the United States since 2020.

It found that Meta, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, failed to "address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects" that were identified in a previous ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

3/15/23

Social Media : Facebook META slashes another 10.000 jobs

Facebook parent Meta is slashing another 10,000 jobs, about as many as the social media company announced late last year in its first round of cuts, as uncertainly about the global economy hits the technology sector particularly hard.

The company announced 11,000 job cuts in November, about 13 per cent of its workforce at the time. In addition to the layoffs, Meta said Tuesday that it would not fill 5,000 open positions.

The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., said Tuesday it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make further cuts in its tech groups in late April, followed by its business groups in late May.

3/25/22

Ukraine Russian Invsion: As Russia bans Facebook and Instagram, what alternatives will Russian social media users turn to?

As the war in Ukraine enters its second month, hundreds of news outlets and social networks have vanished from the Russian web amid efforts to crack down on domestic dissent over the conflict.

Earlier this week, a Russian court found Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, guilty of “extremist” activity related to the company’s earlier announcement that it would permit messages urging violence against Vladimir Putin and Russian troops in Ukraine.

Meta has since narrowed the scope of the guidance, saying it would prohibit calls for the death of a head of state.

Read more at: As Russia bans Facebook and Instagram, what alternatives will Russian social media users turn to? | Euronews

2/11/22

Facebook threatening EU: Meta (FB) May Shut Down Facebook, Instagram in Europe Over GDPR Data Rules - by Jillian Deutsch and Stephanie Bodoni

Meta Platforms Inc. has once again threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe if it is unable to keep transferring user data back to the U.S., amid negotiations betwregulators to replace a scrapped privacy pact.

European Union regulators have for months been stuck in negotiations with the U.S. to replace a transatlantic data transfer pact that thousands of companies relied on, but which got struck down by the EU Court of Justice in 2020 over fears citizens’ data isn’t safe once shipped to the U.S.

In its annual report published Thursday, Meta said that if it couldn’t rely on new or existing agreements -- such as so-called standard contractual clauses -- to shift data, then it would “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.”

Read more at: Meta (FB) May Shut Down Facebook, Instagram in Europe Over GDPR Data Rules - Bloomberg

11/4/21

Facebook and Climate Change: Facebook fails to flag denial, study finds - by Rachel Schraer & Kayleen Devlin

The Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said less than 10% of misleading posts were marked as misinformation.

And the CCDH researchers linked the majority of these to just 10 publishers.

Facebook said this represented a small proportion of climate change content.

Read more at: Climate change: Facebook fails to flag denial, study finds - BBC News

10/19/21

‘Social media - Facebook: :market power and the health of democracy – by Piergiuseppe Fortunato

According to its former employee Frances Haugen, Facebook algorithms consciously amplify dangerous misinformation and privilege the most divisive content posted on the network. Such content is more frequently shared by users and foregrounding it maximises traffic on the platform—and so turnover.

This modus operandi, which became still more aggressive from 2018, is generating perverse incentives pushing even relatively moderate users to sharpen and polarise their content to obtain visibility. It is a Darwinian struggle for prominence which, given the rules of the game, leads to the survival of those users most fit for division and risks skewing public opinion and altering political outcomes. A recent working paper I co-authored shows that exposure to political information through ‘social media’ has been closely associated with the diffusion of divisive ideas in Europe in the last decade.

Read more at: ‘Social media’, market power and the health of democracy – Piergiuseppe Fortunato

10/4/21

USA: Facebook 'accountable to no one,' whistleblower will say in testimony

Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen will tell Congress Tuesday that the social media giant faces no oversight, comparing it to tobacco companies denying harm and government seatbelt mandates, according to testimony seen by Reuters.

Read more at: Facebook 'accountable to no one,' whistleblower will say in testimony

The Party is over: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down

Global users are experiencing outages on Facebook, including all social networks the company owns, which include Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. When navigating to these websites, a server error will appear — Instagram shows a “5xx server error,” which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook’s servers. Users are also unable to send messages or load new content on the mobile apps for these platforms. Even Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality platform, and Workplace, its business communication tool, are down

It appears that the outage is caused by a DNS (domain name server) fail — this is the naming structure that forms the web’s infrastructure. So, if you try to navigate to facebook.com right now, the internet won’t know where to find facebook.com..

Read more at: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down | TechCrunch

4/13/21

Politics and Social Media: Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens - by Julia Carrie Wong

Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing.

The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff.

The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico and much of Latin America.

Read more at Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens | Facebook | The Guardian

10/12/20

USA: The Gang of Four: House Report Cites Monopoly Power Of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google - by Bobby Allyn, Alina Selyukh, Shannon Bond

n a sweeping report spanning 449 pages, House Democrats lay out a detailed case for stripping Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google of the power than has made each of them dominant in their fields.

The four companies began as "scrappy underdog startups" but are now monopolies that must be restricted and regulated, the report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel says.

"These four corporations increasingly serve as gatekeepers of commerce and communications in the digital age, and this gatekeeper power gives them enormous capacity to abuse that power," a lawyer for the subcommittee's Democratic majority said in a briefing with reporters.

Read more at:
House Report Cites Monopoly Power Of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google : NPR

9/1/20

Facebook Addiction: 9 Signs and Treatment Tips

Ever close Facebook and tell yourself you’re done for today, only to catch yourself automatically scrolling through your feed just 5 minutes later?

Maybe you have a Facebook window open on your computer and pick up your phone to open Facebook without really thinking about what you’re doing.

Read more;
Facebook Addiction: 9 Signs and Treatment Tips

8/3/20

USA: Tech CEOs Invoke the American Dream to Obscure the Nightmare They Created

Getting Rich On Your Personal Data

During the recent congressional antitrust hearing, the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and , and Facebook used their opening statements to try and paint themselves—and their companies—as uniquely American success stories with humble origins, heart-warming anecdotes, and impactful lessons for the American people.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ statement wasted no time retelling his origin story: born to a single mother and adopted by a Cuban immigrant, Bezos was inspired in part by summers at his grandfather’s ranch (and a small $245,000 investment from his parents) to become a garage inventor and eventually create Amazon in 1994. Now, Amazon has 1.7 million small and medium-sized businesses selling on his platform, and has created 2.2 million jobs around the world, but Bezos was quick to remind Congress that Amazon accounts for "less than 1 percent of the $25 trillion global retail market" and "less than 4 percent of the retail in the U.S."

Bezos wasn’t alone in portraying his company as representing some aspect of what one might call the American dream, or America itself. Google CEO Sundar Pichai framed the hearing as being about “opportunity” and said that, growing up in India, he didn’t have much access to a computer until he came to America to study. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invoke the humble dorm room origin mythos that has given his company so much cover in the past, he said that “the tech industry is an American success story.” Apple CEO Tim Cook described his company as a “uniquely American company.”

While these CEOs talked a lot about America and its possibilities, and how their companies and even personal histories embody it, it is undeniable that their actions are undermining what they claim to celebrate.

For years, Amazon’s abusive work policies have made each warehouse into a “colony from hell,” as one employee put it, rife with injuries and mental breakdowns. The pandemic has made this point virtually indisputable given the many outbreaks of Covid-19 in warehouses, retaliation against workers who raised safety concerns, and labor actions by Amazon workers fed up with working conditions.

Just last week, America’s largest unions petitioned the FTC to investigate Amazon’s exploitation of the Covid-19 pandemic over concerns that it was suppressing wages, exploiting data on sellers to undermine their products, and leveraging its dominance in cloud computing to make competitors reliant on Amazon’s offerings.

The company also operates as part of the backbone of ICE’s deportation machine, offered a racially-biased facial recognition software to police departments nationwide, and transmits fear and racist paranoia to suburbs through its Ring surveillance program and its partnerships with over 600 police departments (as of December 2019). These are all functions of its incredible market power, even if they didn’t come up as topics in the antitrust hearing, and they all have the potential to destroy someone’s own shot at opportunity in America and elsewhere.

A quick glance reveals the same is true for the other companies. Apple and Google are both being sued for using Congolese child miners to secure cobalt and other minerals at minimal cost, resulting in the maiming and death of several children. Apple is also a key player in reducing opportunities for individuals and small businesses in America to repair their devices, leading to calls for right to repair legislation.

Facebook has spent years apologizing and promising to do better after facilitating a genocide in Myanmar, cratering the news industry, harming the mental health of users and content moderators, compromising elections, attempting to remake the global monetary system with it as a key player, spreading hate speech and propaganda, and more.

These companies, and the tech industry at large, are all complicit in racist police violence that has existed long before their arrival but become supercharged in underappreciated ways with their help. It is hard to imagine any company could do any of these actions unless it enjoyed market dominance in multiple industries and leveraged that into control over how each of us went about our daily lives (how we watched videos, conducted searches, carried out commerce, consumed the news, engaged in communication, etc.) —which makes it hard to understand why we should let these companies have that much power in the first place.

These CEOs insist we play on their terms—terms that are incredibly profitable for them—and return to market logic—to the American Dream and its promise of cheap goods, services, and material abudunance. But that promise has been dead for years, a fact that the pandemic has made self-evident. That the technology sector seems to be a bright spot of the American (and global) economy doesn’t actually suggest that they are success stories as much as it reveals that the rest of the world has lost.

Sure, the price we’ve paid for allowing these corporate tech giants to get so large includes real damage to our economy and democracy, but they’ve also suffocated our political imagination and left us arguing on their terms about how much exploitation and how much surveillance is necessary for the ideal levels of economic growth.

Read more at:
Tech CEOs Invoke the American Dream to Obscure the Nightmare They Created

7/1/20

How Facebook and the White House let the 'boogaloo' movement grow - by zois Beckerr

For months, in private and public Facebook groups, young American men have discussed killing federal agents and how to prepare for a coming civil war.

They have shared carefully posed photographs of their guns and body armor and posted tributes to people they see as martyrs to government oppression.

Read more at;
How Facebook and the White House let the 'boogaloo' movement grow | World news | The Guardian: Facebook on Tuesday removed extremist ‘boogaloo’ groups, but experts say the move is ‘too little, too late’

6/29/20

Facebook: Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg’s Bromance and the US's Illusion of Democracy

Ever since Donald Trump was elected, you might have been wondering if you were still living in a democracy. Now it can be told: No, not really, you’re not. A Washington Post investigation into Facebook’s dealings with the Trump administration published on Sunday afternoon reveals the damning level of collusion between the CEO of one of the most powerful public companies in the world, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and our toxic chief executive. Exhibit A: the Post reveals that after Trump posted about sending military troops to quell protests in Minnesota over George Floyd’s killing, leading to calls to remove or regulate the president’s incendiary words, Trump called Zuckerberg. According to the Post, on the call, Zuckerberg whined that “the post put the company in a difficult position.” His Washington-based staff had earlier that day pleaded with the White House to tweak the language of the post — or “simply delete it.” In other words, Facebook was telling the president that they could all avoid the controversy over imposing limits on incendiary or violent speech on the platform — with a little editing! Later in the day, Trump did just that, adding that his comments were a warning (and thus...

Read more:
Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg’s Bromance and Our Illusion of Democracy

4/4/20

Britain: How Facebook turned into a coronavirus conspiracy hellhole

The world is in the grip of two major outbreaks. The first is Covid-19, the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and has so far infected more than 93,000 people. The second is the wave of misinformation that has followed in its wake.

This second outbreak – which includes rumours about bat soup, bioweapons and 5G masts; mindfulness, garlic cloves and Vitamin C injections – has led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to create a new term to refer to the phenomenon: an “infodemic”.

This fake news has spread through “cure” books on Amazon, WhatsApp viral texts, and even the mainstream media. Now, according to data taken from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks the diffusion of viral stories, a small army of Facebook fringe groups are following suit and pivoting to a new hot topic: coronavirus misinformation.

The group Stop 5G U.K, created to air concerns about 5G, is responsible for many of these rumours. CrowdTangle shows it is the fourth ranking group in coronavirus posts over the last week – with 89 posts and 4,695 reactions.

Claims coming out of this group vary from China trialling vitamin c therapy as a Covid-19 cure and that the whole outbreak is a cover story and the deaths are really caused by 5G.

Other Facebook groups keen on coronavirus conspiracies include “We Support Jeremy Corbyn”, “I’M A BREXITEER” and the “Jacob Rees-Mogg Appreciation Group”, with hundreds of posts and tens of thousands of reactions. These posts incorporate political conspiracies – for instance, one post on the “We Support Jeremy Corbyn Facebook” group, states that “people have bugs like this all the time, the media are basically covering up the economic global crash which is coming and also the Brexit shit show.”

This post received 50 reactions and 126 comments, four times more than an average post on the
group.

12/29/19

Social Media:‘Facebook is the new cigarettes for our society,’ Marc Benioff says, calling for regulation

Salesforce founder rips Facebook and again calls for the social-network giant — which has been wracked by scandals in recent years — to be regulated or split..

Read more at:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigarettes-for-our-society-marc-benioff-says-calling-for-regulation-2019-12-29

10/24/19

AOC grills Zuckerberg over which lies are allowed in Facebook political ads

10/19/19

The Facebook Libra Currency: Major EU countries preparing to block new Facebook digital currency

European countries move to block Facebook's Libra digital currency France, Italy and Germany are together preparing measures to block Facebook's new Libra cryptocurrency from use in Europe, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire announced Friday.

8/27/19

Media: Controlled by corporations has become unreliable and is threatening democracy

The media has become gossip, clickbait and punditry. This threatens democracy, says Bernie Sanders.

For example, two Silicon Valley corporations – Facebook and Google – control 60% of the entire digital advertising market. They have used monopolistic control to siphon off advertising revenues from news organizations.

A recent study by the News Media Alliance, a trade organization, found that in 2018, as newspaper revenues declined, Google made $4.7bn off reporting that Google did not pay for.

At the same time, corporate conglomerates and hedge fund vultures have bought and consolidated beleaguered local newspapers and slashed their newsrooms – all while giving executives big payouts.

Gannett’s proposed merger with Gatehouse Media, for instance, will consolidate hundreds of publications under one mega-corporation’s control and slash $300 m worth of “synergies” – which is often corporate-speak for layoffs.

Matt Pearce, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, notes that “the new Gannett/Gatehouse chief executive is getting $4.5m in bonuses and stock just for walking in the door.”

6/20/19

Facebook: usage dropped after privacy scandals, data suggests

Facebook usage falling after privacy scandals, data suggests

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