Tag: Facebook

‘Meta’ Science Company is killed off on Day of Facebook becoming “META”

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Are we supposed to believe Zuckerberg Inc didn’t make the decision to become META back before they bought the company which owned the rights to the name?

Thursday marked a new chapter in Facebook’s ongoing attempt to deal with the fallout from recent revelations about its inadequate content moderation role in sparking a mental health crises, decisions to prioritize engagement over safety, facilitation of genocide, and more: it changed its name to Meta Platforms, Inc—”Meta” for short…

As it turns out, changing Facebook’s brand to Meta required sunsetting an identically-named academic software company…

Meta is a Canadian scientific literature analysis company that was founded in 2009, bought by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in 2017, and on the day of Facebook’s rebrand the Initiative announced it will shut down by 2022. Meta was the first acquisition of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and controls the URL meta.org. Notably, Facebook—er, Meta—owns meta.com.

Jeff MacGregor, CZI’s vice president of communications for science, told CNet that the organization’s assets were being transferred to Facebook but didn’t offer any specifics about the deal…In a statement explaining why its reasoning for shutting Meta, CZI alluded to “focusing” the energies of its staff, bringing “immediate value” and “greater opportunity for outsized impact” to the table.

Folks who believe these explanations, rationales, are also likely to be sitting around next April waiting for the Easter Bunny. Yum! Chocolate Meta-eggs.

Facebook acts like a hostile foreign power: time to treat it like one.

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In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy.

Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations — China and India — combined.

To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.

[Zuckerberg] introduced in a blog post the concept of a Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, inviting people to share their feedback—but only if they signed up for a Facebook account.

“More than 175 million people use Facebook,” he wrote. “If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world.”

Zuck has changed the name of Facebook to META. For “Metaverse” most people say. Governing principles aren’t the democracy he prattles about in defense of the Facebook style. It’s MEGALOMANIA.

Whistleblower confirms Facebook’s crap profiteering ideology

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The 37-year-old whistleblower named Frances Haugen liberated “tens of thousands” of pages of documents from Facebook and even plans to testify to Congress at some point this week. Haugen has filed at least eight complaints with the SEC alleging that Facebook has lied to shareholders about its own product.

Fundamentally, Haugen alleges there’s a key conflict between what’s good for Facebook and what’s good for society at large. At the end of the day, things that are good for Facebook tend to be bad for the world we live in, according to Haugen. We’ve pulled out some of the most interesting tidbits from Sunday’s interview that highlight this central point.

1) Facebook’s algorithm intentionally shows users things to make them angry

2) Facebook is worse than most other social media companies

3) Facebook dissolved its Civic Integrity unit after the 2020 election and before the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection

4) Political parties in Europe ran negative ads because it was the only way to reach people on Facebook

5) Facebook only identifies a tiny fraction of hate and misinformation on the platform

6) Instagram is making kids miserable

7) Employees at Facebook aren’t necessarily evil, they just have perverse incentives

8) Haugen even has empathy for Zuck for some stupid reason

9) Haugen believes she’s covered by whistleblower laws, but we’ll see

RTFA. If you’re interested in Facebook. I only maintain a listing of posts on this blog over there because of the traffic it represents. I’ve been online since the early 90’s…like and appreciate the level of communication and information sources that have developed over the years on the Web. Facebook doesn’t offer the best of anything, IMHO.

Academics who researched misinformation on Facebook…are banned by Facebook

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Facebook has banned the personal accounts of academics who researched ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the social network. Facebook says the group violated its term of service by scraping user data without permission. But the academics say they are being silenced for exposing problems on Facebook’s platform.

The researchers were part of NYU Ad Observatory, a project created to examine the origin and spread of political ads on Facebook. As the group explained in a blog post in May, their aim is to uncover who pays for political ads and how they are being targeted. Such work has important implications for understanding the spread of disinformation on Facebook, as the company does not fact-check political ads.

Fact-checking doesn’t have to be some all-inclusive guidebook through the meanders of Facebook. One or a few essential points…clear even to collegiate AI is sufficient to demonstrate the intent to maintain honesty. Advances can and would be made by the growing number of geeks in this land who are concerned with misinformation. Associating profiteering from lies with technology defeats many of the premises of an “open internet” that most of us began with.

What, me worry?

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A user in a low level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. INCOMPETENT.

Facebook blocked news pages as a negotiating tactic in Australia

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Facebook may wait up to a week before unblocking some of the pages of hundreds of non-media organisations caught up in its news ban, while anti-vaccination content and misinformation continues to run rampant on the social media platform.

Content designated as news was blocked on Facebook in Australia on Thursday morning in response to the federal government’s news media code, which would require the tech giant to negotiate with news publishers for payment for content…

Tim Hanslow, head of social at Preface Social Media and who also helps run the Australian Community Managers group on Facebook, told Guardian Australia he had heard from a couple of community managers who had been contacted by their Facebook representatives and were told an appeals process would be put in place for people to plead their case…

“An appeals process for the ban will launch on Feb 25 and you can request your page be assessed as outside the news ban. All of the government pages/sites caught up in this should be reinstated.”

So, just wait around for a spell and Facebook will decide who is banned, who isn’t…and apparently what is news.