The real-world mayhem many predicted for the 2020 election never quite materialized. But there has been plenty of online mayhem before and after – much of it on Facebook.
With powerful forces sowing confusion and chaos across every major platform, our collective rage, mistrust, and anxiety just keeps on burning hotter. As the world’s biggest social media platform (and now, a verified social media monopoly,) Facebook needs to be a leader in dousing the flames. Instead, as the German Marshall Fund recently put it, the company seems only capable of “extinguishing the fire after the fact.”
Facebook has to do better. It just has to – the health of our nation, and the world, depends on it. Which is why we just keep on calling out the fires as we see them – on our Facebook Timeline of Scandal and Strife.
Check out the latest updates below. And then be sure to read on for the full timeline.
TIMELINE UPDATES
September 23, 2020
Facebook’s Biggest Market is in India, So Of Course it Has a Hate Speech Crisis There
If it feels like every day on Facebook is a hellscape of disinformation, hate speech, and political strife here in America – well, it is. But also, hey, at least we’re not alone. In India, Facebook’s biggest market, the company is dealing with what CNN Business today calls a “hate speech crisis.” The report comes after Facebook appealed to India’s Supreme Court to exempt it from being investigated for its role in religious riots in New Delhi earlier this year, and also after Facebook allowed a prominent Indian politician to remain on the platform “even though his anti-Muslim posts flouted its rules against hate speech”. And India is only the beginning: “A former Facebook data scientist outlined several instances when the company was slow to clamp down on abuse of its platform by politicians in countries such as Honduras, Azerbaijan and several others.” Facebook’s abuses are happening everywhere, and often in areas with even less regulation than we have in America.
October 4, 2020
Online Violence Against Women ‘Flourishes’ Online, and Especially on Facebook
You already knew that the internet is a cesspool of escalating online violence against girls and women – but did you know those attacks are most common on Facebook? Today, The Guardian reports on a study from Plan International that surveyed more than 14,000 teenagers and young women across 22 countries. The poll found that 58% of total respondents had been exposed to “a spectrum of online violence”, and 39% of total respondents have been directly harassed on Facebook. As Plan International’s chief executive put it, online platforms like Facebook are “where the worst of humanity has manifested.”
October 6, 2020
Antitrust Committee to Facebook: You Are a Monopoly
Today, a report from the House Antitrust Subcommittee confirms the obvious – as CNBC’s coverage puts it, Facebook “is a social network monopoly that buys, copies or kills competitors”. The report’s juiciest piece of evidence for this claim? An exchange in which Mark Zuckerberg suggested to Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom that “refusing to enter into a partnership with Facebook, including an acquisition, would have consequences for Instagram.” Dictators take many forms…
October 12, 2020
Facebook Bans Holocaust Denial but Denial of Other Genocides is Still Just Fine
Hate-mongers and conspiracy theorists (who are often one and the same) love to claim that the state-sponsored mass murder of some 6 million European Jews – and millions of other people – never happened. Bloomberg today reports that, after many years of unrelenting criticism of Facebook’s decision to not remove such content from its platform, the company will ban posts that deny the Holocaust. But the arc of justice at Facebook is pretty short – the company also told Bloomberg that the new policy “doesn’t apply to the denial of other genocides, such as the Armenian or Rwandan genocides.” So, hate-mongers espousing those despicable beliefs still have a home on Facebook.
October 18, 2020
Ireland Investigates Facebook for Instagram Breach of Children’s Data
Big Tech’s war on children has no borders. Today, U.S. News & World Report reports on Ireland’s launch of two inquiries into Facebook “after concerns were raised about the social network giant’s handling of children’s personal data on Instagram.” According to The Telegraph, Instagram exposed the email addresses and phone numbers of millions of users under 18 – which is bad for its users of any age, let alone its youngest and most vulnerable users. As one source told the publication, “Instagram had enormous resources at their disposal, but this incident shows they had woefully low levels of empathy, safety awareness and care for their users”. At this point, that statement might as well be Facebook’s company motto.
October 22, 2020
Facebook Free Speech Hypocrisy on Full Display in Vietnam
Facebook loves nothing more than to tout its love of free speech – and to use that professed love as a reason for letting stand everything from misinformation to piracy. But the company’s ardent commitment for free expression is very much a marriage of convenience, one that Facebook is happy to annul whenever it’s convenient – and by “convenient” we mean, “a threat to earnings”. For powerful evidence, look no further than Vietnam, where Facebook “routinely restricts posts that governments deem sensitive or off-limits,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “trying to placate a repressive government that has threatened to shut Facebook down if it does not comply.” The company has shown a similar bent toward censorship in “countries including Cuba, India, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey”.
October 27, 2020
Facebook on List of Tech Platforms Accepting Payments to Hate Groups
Facebook has explicit policies preventing its users from using the platform to facilitate hate or violence – but it’s happy to accept payments to hate groups through its donation tools. “Among the 19 hate groups with access to Facebook’s donation tools,” reports NBC News, “is VDARE, an anti-immigration group that promotes white nationalist views, even though Facebook removed pages associated with the group in May.” Italics added by us – because sometimes, somehow, Facebook’s staggering hypocrisy still manages to shock us.
October 29, 2020
Facebook Charges Biden More than Trump for Campaign Ads
Federal laws require television stations to charge political candidates the same price for ads. In many states, newspapers cannot charge one candidate a higher price than another. But on Facebook? Political ad pricing is a Wild West where, according to The Markup, the Biden presidential campaign paid more than $8 million more for ads than it would have if it “had been paying Trump’s average price.” Political preferences aside, fair is fair – and what’s more, this wildly inconsistent model adds further strain to an election process whose integrity is already stretched way too thin. Candidates who can figure out how to game the platform’s ad system, or have friends on the inside, “get an advantage that other candidates wouldn’t get,” writes The Markup, “because it’s opaque”.
November 5, 2020
Facebook Groups Become ‘Vectors of Disinformation’ Around Election Results
As of this day, the presidential election is over, but the results remain unclear – which means the misinformation machine on Facebook is firing on all cylinders, spreading doubt and chaos around ballot counting. “Private groups in particular,” reports Axios, “can easily escape notice because only certain content review teams at Facebook can see inside them, as compared to the wide-open visibility of public groups.” Facebook has tried to crack down, shutting down public groups like Stop the Steal for unfounded claims of voter fraud, vote tampering, and other dangerous falsehoods. But their effort is akin to “playing whack-a-mole with disinformation,” says one source from the German Marshall Fund. “They’re extinguishing the fire after the fact.”
November 10, 2020
Biden Campaign Staffer Accuses Facebook of “Shredding the Fabric of Our Democracy”
Among the societal impacts Facebook hoped to have ascribed to it by the incoming Biden presidential administration, “shredding the fabric of our democracy” likely ranks very low. So said Biden campaign staffer Bill Russo today, in a tweet lamenting the post-election disinformation assault that Facebook has entirely failed to rein in. “The criticism could be an early indication of President-elect Joe Biden’s approach to the social media platform and even the tech industry at large,” reports CNBC. We can only hope.
November 24, 2020
Facebook Employee Morale Hits New Low
Awash in election-related battles and criticism, beleaguered Facebook workers feel “less pride in the company compared to previous years,” The New York Times today reports. In an internal employee survey, about half also “felt that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down from roughly three-quarters earlier this year.” Their “intent to stay” dropped as well, “as did confidence in leadership.”
It seems that Facebook’s “break the glass” efforts to help curb election-related misinformation were not enough to lift employee morale – and claims by executive Guy Rosen that there was “never a plan” to make those changes permanent haven’t helped much either. It seems that Facebook is committed to its democracy-harming business model – high-paid workers and the greater health of individuals and society be damned.
November 26, 2020
Britain Plans a Big Tech Watchdog to Police the Likes of Facebook
The U.K. government will establish a “Digital Markets Unit,” FOX Business today reports, “to enforce a new code of conduct governing the behavior of tech giants that dominate the online advertising market.” Under the new code, tech companies like Facebook would have to be more transparent about how they use consumers’ data and would no longer be allowed “to make it harder for customers to use rival platforms.” The department might even have the power to “suspend, block or reverse decisions” made by Zuckerberg and Co. The decision feels like yet another wall closing in on the Facebook social media monopoly.
FULL TIMELINE
March 17, 2018
The Big Bang. Facebook has had their fair share of crises. But nothing – not even enabling abuse by a foreign power so pervasive that it may have swung an election – could ever put a dent in the company’s meteoric ascent… until now. On this day, a bombshell expose of Facebook’s involvement with an “upstart voter-profiling company” called Cambridge Analytica was published, and the online universe was forever changed.
Aiming to influence the behavior of American voters like never before, the British firm utilized a Russian-built app to harvest the private information of more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent. Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting for years, yet never felt the need to disclose what it knew to the general public, or apparently the government or anyone else.
CreativeFuture had been ringing the alarm bells for months at this point – but the Cambridge Analytica scandal made millions of people, across all industries, recognize that Facebook’s behavior was out of control.
The Cambridge Analytica story caused Facebook to lose $120 billion in stock market value in a single day, put Facebook in the spotlight of regulators around the world, and led to a precipitous decline in user trust. After years of fawning coverage by the press, something suddenly and significantly changed, as journalists started to seriously scrutinize the social network, uncovering tale after tale of questionable business practices fueled by a grow-at-any-cost mentality.
March 21, 2018
WhatsApp Founder #DeletesFacebook
In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, the growing “delete Facebook” movement garners one of its most damning members: WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, who left his position with the messaging service over a year earlier. In 2014, WhatsApp became one of Facebook’s most important acquisitions, and has since more than tripled its user base to 1.5 billion worldwide. But today, Acton expresses his disgust and tweets, “It is time. #deletefacebook.”
April 4, 2018
Oops… Actually, it Was 87 Million
Hey, remember just a couple of paragraphs ago when Facebook told everyone that Cambridge Analytica had information on around 50 million users? Today, Mark Zuckerberg tells reporters that figure is actually, probably closer to, oh, 87 million users. You know, only about 40 million more than the original disclosure. “I’m quite confident, given our analysis, that it is not more than 87 [million],” Zuckerberg adds. Well – consider us reassured.
April 10-11, 2018
Washington finally gets Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to come to Capitol Hill for two days of grilling on the Cambridge Analytica incident. Questioned by both the Senate and the House in separate hearings, Zuckerberg remains chillingly cool and collected as he takes questions on topics ranging from regulation, to content moderation, to the future of artificial intelligence. His tone – respectful, self-admonishing, yet entirely confident in Facebook’s ability to fix what ails them – is right out of the company’s PR playbook, setting a discomfortingly nonchalant tone for what’s to come.
May 10, 2018
Even as the Mueller investigation of Russian involvement in our elections continues, there was much more blatant Russian meddling occurring right out in the open – across the vast, endlessly exploitable expanse that is Facebook. Today, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee publish more than 3,500 ads from Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) linked to the “Internet Research Group,” a sinister Russian propaganda network.
Designed to divide Americans through targeted misinformation campaigns, the ads took on topics such as Black Lives Matter, immigration, Islam, and guns, disguising themselves through phony events, fake news stories, or provocative memes. “They tear at the parts of the American social fabric that are already worn thin,” writes Wired, “stoking outrage about police brutality or the removal of Confederate statues.” Ah, outrage… the rotten beating heart of the Facebook business model.
June 3, 2018
Dirty Data Deals with Device Makers
Fresh on the heels of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook finds itself facing another data scandal, with the Times reporting today that the company allowed phone and device makers access to its users’ personal information. “It’s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,” said former FTC chief technologist Ashkan Soltani.
July 4, 2018
As Americans spend the day celebrating their hard-won freedoms in the United States, Facebook continues to show the perils of its “free” business model in other countries. Namely, in India, where Facebook’s shiny, $16 billion toy, WhatsApp, has come under fire for helping spread misinformation leading to brutal killings. In most cases, innocent bystanders were beaten to death by mobs fueled by rumors of child kidnappings, organ harvesting rings, and other lies spread on WhatsApp. “The abuse of [platforms] like WhatsApp for repeated circulation of such provocative content are equally a matter of deep concern,” said India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in a statement, adding that the messaging service could not “evade accountability” for its role in the proceedings.
July 11, 2018
Cambridge Analytica Deemed Criminal
Had you forgotten about Cambridge Analytica already? Well, Britain sure hasn’t – today the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office announces that, in failing to tell tens of millions of people how Cambridge Analytica harvested their information for use in political campaigns, Facebook broke British law. They fine the company a whopping £500,000, which Zuck could probably find between his couch cushions. But, it’s not so much the payout as it is the precedent – in this ruling, the UK signals to the world that the extent to which Facebook failed to safeguard its users wasn’t just callous – it was illegal.
August 6, 2018
This one’s really embarrassing. After happily hosting the accounts of InfoWars founder and notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for years, Facebook finally deems it appropriate to ban the man who used his popularity to aggressively frame the Sandy Hook shootings as “completely fake” and publicly vilify the families of its victims, among other crimes against humanity. After an incident in which Jones, with no evidence whatsoever, refers to Robert Mueller as a pedophile on his show, then threatens the Russia investigation special counsel with violence, Facebook decides that enough is enough.
Of course, we all know that Jones has been spewing such vitriol for some time, so why now? Only after increased public pressure forced other companies to ban Alex Jones did Facebook finally decide to stop taking the ad revenue he generates. They ban this racist hate-monger because he has become bad for business – not because it’s the right thing to do.
August 22, 2018
“If you were on the edge of your seat wondering what Facebook’s next major consumer privacy headache would be, the wait is over,” begins today’s TechCrunch story about Onavo Protect. The Facebook-owned app provided data insights that led Facebook to, among other things, purchase WhatsApp for $19 billion. It also, we learn today, was banned from the Apple App Store.
Why? Here’s Apple’s own explanation: “With the latest update to our guidelines, we made it explicitly clear that apps should not collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing, and must make it clear what user data will be collected and how it will be used.” Will a slap on the wrist from Apple be enough to force Facebook to clean up its act? If you’re still on the edge of your seat, you really haven’t been paying attention.
August 27, 2018
Too Little, Too Late in Myanmar
After years of helping foment ethnic and religious tensions that led to serious human rights abuses in Myanmar, Facebook finally admits that maybe, just maybe it was “too slow” in preventing the spread of “hate and misinformation” against Rohingya Muslims in the troubled nation. It also bans 20 organizations and individuals guilty of some of the worst offenses in question. It was a U.N. call for Myanmar military leaders to be charged with genocide and other crimes against humanity that finally spurred Facebook into action. The takeaway: Don’t worry, if the use of its platform puts an entire race of people in danger, Facebook will totally hire a few extra content moderators in your country.
September 28, 2018
Hackers “View As” Much User Data as They Can
Another day, another data breach – as Facebook admits to a cyberattack that exposed the information of nearly 50 million of its users. It’s all good, though – the company would later downgrade this number to a mere 30 million people whose accounts might have been taken over by hackers via the platform’s “View As” feature – a tool that allows users to see their own page as someone else would. “We need to do more to prevent this from happening in the first place,” says Mark Zuckerberg in a follow-up call with reporters, to which everyone responded by writing “no s**t” in their little notepads.
November 14, 2018
Profits Over People: The Story of Facebook
Yet another riveting New York Times expose unveils Facebook’s sustained efforts to “delay, deny, and deflect” warning signs of hate speech, bullying, and other toxic content on its platform. Focused on how “bent on growth” Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg really were, the story details some astonishingly cynical measures the pair took to keep Facebook’s problems under wraps, and to warp public sentiment regarding its business practices. These included minimizing the company’s role in Russia’s election meddling even after their own internal investigations showed clear signs of it, and working with a conservative PR firm to attack critics of Facebook – including billionaire George Soros – in far-right media outlets.
December 14, 2018
Millions of Private Photos Exposed
First, it was 87 million Facebook users whose privacy was compromised. Then, another 50 million. So, it almost seems anticlimactic when it is discovered that 6.8 million more Facebook users had their personal information violated by the social network. But even though exposing the private photos of millions of people to third-party apps is still a travesty, the biggest deal about today’s revelation is that, in the wake of the previous two privacy disasters, this one hardly registers at all.
January 29, 2019
Today, Facebook causes another problem with Apple via their Research app, which paid teenagers to let the social media giant surveil all of their phone and web activity – 1984 style. Hey, remember how on August 22 Facebook tried something like this once before, with their Onavo Protect app, and then Apple banned it? Well, this time around, Facebook just sidestepped all those pesky App Store restrictions regarding privacy and other annoying things, “purposefully avoiding TestFlight, Apple’s official beta testing system,” writes TechCrunch. That’s a big no-no at Apple, not to mention a sign of Facebook’s increasingly desperate measures to cater to the youth demographic that is leaving Facebook in droves.
March 4, 2019
User Contact Info Stolen, Shared
We wouldn’t blame you if you forgot about this one, but it’s worth remembering. Today, Facebook is accused of failing to let its users opt out of a feature that lets other people look them up using their phone number and email address. This includes users who would never in a million years add their number to a social media platform, but did so anyway because they were led to believe it was necessary to set up the site’s much-touted two-factor authentication security option. Even while pretending to protect your security, Facebook finds a way to blow it up again.
March 13, 2019
Dirty Data Deals Deemed Criminal
Those darn dirty data deals from December 18 just keep coming back to haunt Facebook. (So it goes when you play fast and loose with the personal information of a 2-billion-person user base who thought they could trust you.) Besides being on the hook for what could be a multi-billion-dollar fine from the FTC, today the Times reports that Facebook is now under criminal investigation by a New York grand jury for business practices that, to put it lightly, “deceived consumers.” So, what do you do when your favorite social media platform is considered a literal criminal in the eyes of the law? Well, if you’re the average Facebook user, turns out you… don’t do squat? Sigh. What is wrong with us??
March 14, 2019
Mere weeks after laying out plans to become a more “privacy-focused” social network (says the social network that has privacy violations in its DNA), Facebook loses two more top executives. One of them, Chris Daniels, was in charge of the company’s 1.5 billion-user chat colossus, WhatsApp. No biggie. But the other guy, Chris Cox, was instrumental in the creation of News Feed, Facebook’s signature personalized update engine/fomenter of fake news. Reportedly, both men were unhappy with their employer’s revamped approach to personal data and encryption – a rumor Cox substantiates with an internal goodbye memo containing what could go down as one of history’s most passive-aggressive jabs: “This will be a big project and [Facebook] will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.” Question: if the guy described as Zuckerberg’s “right hand man” isn’t excited about where things are going at this point… who will be?
March 15, 2019
Mass Shooter Films Himself, Goes Viral
Facebook’s bottomless cesspool of harmful content reaches staggering new depths when a New Zealand shooter films himself massacring dozens of mosque worshipers – and his horrific livestream goes viral. This tragedy comes after months of reassurances from Zuckerberg that his company is 1) “doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening,” and 2) “building A.I. tools … to identify and root out most of this harmful content.” Following today’s debacle, allow us to respond to such claims with a highly nuanced, point-by-point breakdown: 1) Clearly, you’re not, and 2) We’ll believe it when we see it.
March 21, 2019
Instagram Passwords Exposed on Company Server
In a blog post, Facebook fesses up that the supposedly encrypted passwords of “tens of thousands” of its Instagram users were stored on its servers in a “readable format.” But, fear not! The passwords were “never visible to anyone outside of Facebook.” Well, good then – we guess?
April 3, 2019
User Records Exposed… Sigh… Again
Some enterprising cybersecurity researchers discover that hundreds of millions of Facebook user records had been exposed to the public. Comments, likes, reactions, account names – you name it, it was available for download to literally anyone with a little technological know-how. Once again, this egregious data breach was caused by Facebook’s eagerness to let third-party app developers integrate seamlessly with its platform. Once again, it’s clear that Facebook has “no way of guaranteeing the safe storage of the data of their end users if they are going to allow app developers to harvest it in mass,” said one of the researchers.
April 16, 2019
Dirty Data Deals Even Dirtier than First Thought
Leaked company documents show that, in between heartfelt pledges to protect user data at all costs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was aggressively handing over that very same data to other companies in private. Drawing from more than 4,000 pages of emails, webchats, spreadsheets, and other internal communications, a damning NBC News report shows that Facebook enjoyed rewarding favored partners with data access while denying it to other companies it viewed as competitors.
They also discussed selling access to the data for years, despite Zuckerberg’s adamant and repeated claims to the contrary in front of Congress. “One of the most striking threads to emerge from the documents is the way that Facebook user data was horse-traded to squeeze money… from app developers,” writes NBC News. It all prompted one Facebook employee to gift the world with the understatement of the year: “It’s sort of unethical.”
April 17, 2019
Email Contact Lists Stolen En Masse
Facebook admits to having collected, without permission and apparently without even realizing it, the email contact lists of 1.5 million users over the last two years. But even if the company doing the collecting claims it didn’t realize it was happening, maybe we should have gotten suspicious when Facebook started forcing certain new users to enter their email passwords to verify their identities? (Note to self: Don’t share your email password with anyone – not your mom, not your friends, and definitely not a social media behemoth with a history of flagrant privacy violations!)
April 18, 2019
Instagram Password Leak Statistic Gets a Shameful Revision
Hey, remember all those Instagram passwords that were made visible back on March 21? Well today, Facebook makes a slight tweak to its original post about that little dilemma. Turns out its initial figure of “tens of thousands” of users affected by the leak actually should have read… “millions.” You know, just a statistical difference of… oh, a few extra zeroes!! And no, we’re not suspicious at all that it took their allegedly top-notch security team weeks to notice the discrepancy (sarcasm alert). And yes, sneaking a line about the snafu into a month-old blog post seems like a super-efficient way to inform the public about it (double-sarcasm alert). After years of frantically covering their own ass, today’s fresh scandal might be most notable for Facebook’s shady PR response. It appears they’ve given up on even trying to be straightforward about how awful they are.
April 25, 2019
New York Attorney General Investigates Facebook
Today, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James wrote each of Facebook’s dozens of data breaches onto its own piece of scrap paper, put all the scraps in a hat, and pulled the company’s April 17 scraping of 1.5 million user email contacts out at random. The point is, it’s unclear why this particular snafu is what finally compelled her to open an investigation into the company’s repeated “lack of respect for consumers’ information,” but we’ll take it. “It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers’ personal information,” James said in a statement. We’ll take that, too – even though we could have told you the same thing years ago.
May 9, 2019
Facebook Co-Founder Calls for Facebook Break-Up
Another day, another former high-level Facebook executive calling for breaking the company up (now if only someone from within the company would make the call). It doesn’t get much higher than this one, though: Mark Zuckerberg’s former partner in moving fast and breaking things, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. “Mark is a good, kind person,” Hughes writes in a blistering New York Times op-ed. “But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks.” Sounds like he’s really taking this personally – but hey, imagine if your best friend betrayed the thing you made together, and it affected the lives of 1.5 billion people. You’d be pretty angry, too.
June 25, 2019
Facebook Embraces Criminality on its Platform
Illegal drug sales. Prostitution. Sex trafficking. Endangered animal trafficking. The trading of… human remains ranging from “Tibetan skull caps to babies in jars”!? Wow. The Dark Web is truly a twisted and distur… —wait, that’s Facebook that Morning Consult is talking about in today’s op-ed? And what’s that? It contains 1.5 million listings for illegal drug sales alone, which is six times more than the vile Dark Web platform, Silk Road? Well, we wish we could say we’re surprised, but by now we’re just, sadly, not. One detail, however, does scare us anew in this scathing piece: “[Zuckerberg’s] announcement at F8 that he plans to shift the platform design to focus on groups, and Facebook’s plan to launch a cryptocurrency, are downright alarming… the changes will make it harder for authorities and civil society groups to track and counter illegal activity on the platform.” Just what we need – more obstacles to holding Facebook accountable.
July 12, 2019
Let it be known that on this, the twelfth day of July in the year 2019, the social media giant known as Facebook became the proud owner of the largest fine ever dished out by the Federal Trade Commission. Is $5 billion a large enough punishment for a platform that, somehow, despite egregious abuses of customer data and the perpetual fomentation of division and hatred, is still worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Not nearly – but it signals, as The New York Times today reports, “a newly aggressive stance by regulators toward the country’s most powerful technology companies.” We’ll take what we can get, and keep our fingers crossed that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
September 5, 2019
(Bad) Luck of the Irish – Facebook Leaks 400 Million Records in Ireland
Today, we learn about Facebook’s 400 millionth data breach… er, that is, we learn about 400 million Facebook user records leaked in one data breach. Really, the statistic could go either way at this point, as yet anotheregregious abuse of personal information gets added to Facebook’s miles-long tally. Sadly, the sheer number of these things is starting to work in the company’s favor, as you had probably already forgotten about this one, if you ever knew about it at all. But, hundreds of millions of users is a lot of people. Fun twist: under its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Europe now shells out big fines for stuff like this, so this one could come back to haunt Facebook in a major way.
October 1, 2019
Leaked Zuckerberg Comments Point to Inner Turmoil
To be on Facebook is to risk having your personal information leaked. This is a fact that the company has proven too many times to count. But today, the tables turn, as The Verge publishes a leaked, unfiltered transcript from supreme ruler Mark Zuckerberg, speaking with his employees at two town hall meetings in July. We’re struck not so much by the content of these private admissions (though Zuck’s huffy comments about presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s plans to break up big tech certainly betray an alarming level of insecurity and hostility) as by what they reveal about Facebook’s soul: they tell us that “the people inside Facebook feel under siege and uncomfortable about the world around them,” one Harvard professor told CNET. Or, in other words – this rotten company is rotting from the inside.
October 8, 2019
40 States Join Facebook Antitrust Probe Party
Not to be outdone by Google, Facebook has been the target of a states-sponsored antitrust investigation for some time now. But what started as a little soiree with just eight states in attendance, today swells to a full-on rave as a total of 40 states announce plans to take part in the New York-led probe. Even so, Facebook has a little more catching up to do – Google’s probe party has 50 state attorneys general on board. Pretty pathetic there, Facebook! But don’t worry – you’ll still get the brunt of the antitrust crackdown in the end.
October 12, 2019
Fake Ad Flogs Facebook’s Fiasco of a Factchecking Policy
“Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election.” Don’t believe it? Well, you shouldn’t – it’s not true. But, this fake headline sure makes it seem like it is, and that’s the whole point. Dropped onto the platform today by presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, the sponsored post attacks Facebook’s lax policy around political ads with known lies in them – by targeting Facebook themselves with a lying ad. It’s hard to think of a cleverer way to expose the company’s transformation into, as Warren herself put it, a “disinformation-for-profit machine.”
October 23, 2019
Zuck-Bucks Out of Luck on Capitol Hill
“Zuck-bucks” is our nickname for Facebook’s beleaguered cryptocurrency project, Libra. This terrible plan from a company that has lost America’s trust got hammered today on Capitol Hill, as enraged lawmakers lined up to give none other than Zuckerberg himself the what-for at a hearing assessing the project. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) put it best when she told the CEO, “Libra is Facebook, and Facebook is you… You’ve proven we cannot trust you with our emails, with our phone numbers, so why should we trust you with our hard-earned money?” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!
October 31, 2019
Facebook Finally All Things to All People, Including Slave Traders
You know you’re having a bad year when the world discovers that your photo app with more than a billion monthly active users enables a thriving slave market. Today, a hard-hitting BBC News Arabic report finds that “domestic workers are being illegally bought and sold online in a booming black market” on Facebook’s Instagram app. (And it turns out that listings for slaves have also been promoted in apps “approved and provided by Google Play”.) We knew Quality Control was not these tech companies’ strong suit, but COME ON! At this point, it’s just getting surreal.
November 6, 2019
Facebook Sued by Their Own State
Okay, here’s how you really know you’re having a bad year: You’re one of the most successful companies in an area of the country – Silicon Valley – that generates massive revenues for the state where it resides. For years, you helped make this state a shining beacon of progress and innovation and wealth, admired around the world. And today, none of it matters. Because now things have gotten so bad that Facebook’s home state of California has sued the company for “failing to comply with lawful subpoenas requesting information about its privacy practices.”
November 25, 2019
Facebook Hit with Data Scandal No. Eleventy-Billion
We had no choice but to invent an entirely new number to account for Facebook’s unfathomably huge pile of data scandals. And it keeps growing. Today’s news involves a “software development kit” from Facebook called One Audience that gave third-party developers improper access to users’ personal data such as email addresses and usernames. Privacy? At this point, who cares?
December 9, 2019
Facebook’s Fact-Checking Failures Are Bad for Your Health
Let’s add a new Facebook harm to the list: they may be making us physically sicker. It turns out the company’s abject failure to keep misinformation off their platform is actively “harming public health,” reports The Washington Post. Turns out that misleading ads on Facebook about medication meant to prevent the transmission of HIV are scaring patients away from taking the preventative drugs they need. The tech giant’s refusal to remove the content, say lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocates, has created nothing less than a “public-health crisis.”
December 19, 2019
267 Million Phone Numbers Exposed
Remember when an event where Facebook exposed millions of people’s records seemed inconceivable? Did you ever think it would become routine? Well, shockingly, it has. Facebook exposed 267 million phone numbers? Meh… that’s just today’s scandal. We’re very tired.
January 9, 2020
Facebook Can’t Stop Won’t Stop… Letting Politicians Lie in Ads
Pop quiz: You’re a global internet giant who has lost the trust of pretty much everyone because you can’t (won’t?) curb misinformation on your platform. But now you have the opportunity to earn back some of that trust by reducing the spread of misinformation on your platform by politicians. So, what do you do? Why, just the opposite, of course! Today, Facebook announces that they will do nothing to limit the targeting of voters by politicians spreading misinformation. Paired with the previous announcement that they also will be exempting political ads from third-party fact-checking, and Facebook has now notched two BIG strikes against the pillars of democracy.
January 11, 2020
Skilled Workers Embarrassed to Apply at Facebook
All this scandal and strife, as horrible and embarrassing as it is, doesn’t seem to have slowed Facebook’s growth. But here’s something that might: The New York Times reports that tech companies have lost their status as “every student’s dream workplace”. These bad reputations are finally starting to catch up with them.
January 28, 2020
DOJ Pulls Facebook’s Enemies into Antitrust Probe
It’s been relatively quiet on the antitrust front in recent weeks, but now comes news that one of the probe’s major players, the U.S. Department of Justice, has been setting up interviews with Facebook rivals – looking for insight into “the competitive landscape of the industry, along with their perspectives on and relationship to Facebook.” Just guessing, but we think the feds will hear something like this: “They’re ruthless and rotten to the core – break ‘em up!”
January 31, 2020
At Last, Facebook Embraces True Purpose – ‘To Piss Off a Lot of People’
Today, from the CEO who recently said “my goal… isn’t to be liked, but to be understood,” comes a brand-new statement of total indifference to the human race. “This is the new approach, and I think it’s going to piss off a lot of people,” Mark Zuckerberg told a crowd at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Utah. He was referring to Facebook’s claim that it will stand up for “free expression” and for encryption, damn the consequences for civilization.But not to worry, Mark – you’ve been pissing people off for years, starting with us.
March 9, 2020
Australia Sues Facebook Over Cambridge Analytica
It has been almost two years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Facebook is still feeling the fallout. Today, Fortune reports that the privacy regulator for Australia is suing Facebook for exposing the personal data of more than 300,000 users “to the risk of being used for political profiling” by the consulting firm. “We consider the design of the Facebook platform meant that users were unable to exercise reasonable choice and control about how their personal information was disclosed,” said Australian Information Commissioner Angelene Falk, in a statement.
March 21, 2020
Facebook Was Inflating Its Ad Metrics and Its Employees Knew It
Two years ago, a class-action lawsuit accused Facebook of inflating its “potential reach” metrics in order to woo more advertisers. Today, the complaint is amended to show that Facebook’s own employees were aware of the overestimation of reach and had expressed serious concerns. “This is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” wrote one Facebook product manager to their colleagues as far back as October 2018. Yup, they called it.
March 28, 2020
Facebook’s Policies Don’t Apply to Posts Proposing COVID-19 Infection Parties
Earlier this week, an article in The Federalist by an unlicensed dermatologist argued that Americans should throw coronavirus infection “parties” as a way to establish “herd immunity” and save the economy. Today, a Facebook spokesperson tells HuffPost that a post sharing that article does not violate its explicit prohibition of coronavirus-related misinformation “that could contribute to imminent physical harm.” The spokesperson declined to explain, HuffPost reports, “how a post proposing readers deliberately contract a virus that has rapidly killed tens of thousands of people does not meet that standard.” Anyone want to try to defend Facebook’s position? We didn’t think so.
April 7, 2020
Facebook’s Ad Review System Fails to Spot Virus Harms
In the midst of a global pandemic, misinformation on Facebook is a matter of life or death – and the company is failing miserably at stopping it. Today, Consumer Reports chronicles a test in which they put forth a series of seven paid ads that made claims such as “Coronavirus is a HOAX” and claiming that people can “stay healthy with SMALL daily doses” of bleach. Guess what? Facebook approved every one of them… and took the money. “Had I published my test ads, Facebook probably would have found and removed them eventually,” writes the study’s dumbfounded author. “But it’s impossible to know how far the ads would have spread first—or how much damage they would have done.”
April 16, 2020
Study Finds Debunked COVID-19 Facebook Claims Linger for Up To 22 Days
At the start of pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that “fake news spreads faster and more easily than the virus, and it is just as dangerous.” Here’s proof. Today, a study from Avaaz reveals it can take up to 22 days for Facebook to downgrade content labeled as harmful misinformation, “giving ample time for it to go viral.” In just the small sampling analyzed by Avaaz, the group found pieces of misleading and false content that were shared “over 1.7 million times on Facebook, and viewed an estimated 117 million times.”
April 22, 2020
Facebook No.1 in Big Tech Lobbying
From fighting antitrust investigations to beating back encryption legislation that would help rein in child exploitation, Facebook has its hands full on the policy front – and is spending accordingly. Today, CNBC reports that Facebook led all Big Tech lobbying in the first quarter of 2020, spending $5.3 million to manipulate minds in the halls of government. Now if only they’d spent some of that money on solving the problems they’ve created rather than defending them.
May 13, 2020
Facebook Shells Out $52 Million to Workers With PTSD
Today, NPR reports that Facebook agreed, in a legal settlement, to provide $1,000-dollar cash payments to its more than 10,000 content moderators “who viewed and removed graphic and disturbing posts on the social media platform for a living, and consequently suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.” And those diagnosed with psychological conditions related to their work sifting through “child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide,” and other horrors, will be eligible for additional payments up to $50,000. “Facebook admitted no wrongdoing as a part of the settlement,” NPR continued.
May 22, 2020
White Supremacist Groups Are Thriving on Facebook
Today, a report released by Campaign for Accountability’s Tech Transparency Project found that “dozens of white supremacist groups are operating freely on Facebook, allowing them to spread their message and recruit new members.” Searching Facebook for 221 white supremacist organizations that have been designated as hate groups, Campaign for Accountability found that 113 of them – more than half – had a presence on the platform. The findings run directly counter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 claim that, “We do not allow hate groups on Facebook, overall”. Well, Mark, “overall” there’s still a lot of hate being allowed on your platform.
June 1, 2020
New Content Oversight Board In Need of Oversight
A much-touted Oversight Board tasked with making some of Facebook’s toughest content decisions gets off to a rough start today – with Axios reporting on one of its white members’ use of the N-word in front of his students. Board Co-chair Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor, uttered the slur while reading aloud a quote attributed to Patrick Henry during a discussion of how racism and slavery impacted the writing of the Constitution.
June 2, 2020
Facebook Refuses to Act on Presidential Post Inciting Violence
Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doubles down on his company’s decision to let stand a post from President Trump that reads, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” in reference to the ongoing protests in the US against racism and police brutality. The company’s handling of the post, reports Vox, “has divided employees at Facebook and prompted them to openly criticize Zuckerberg in a way they never have before.”
June 9, 2020
Advertisers Drop Facebook in Wake of Protests, Trump Posts
By refusing to take action on controversial posts, including those from President Trump, Facebook has lost credibility, staff members, and now, as The New York Times today reports, it is losing advertisers as well. “The current developments have now rendered it morally impossible for us to continue feeding the same hand that complacently offers its services as the major platform for hate-mongering, promotion of violence, and disinformation,” said one advertiser. Facebook receives 98% of its revenue from ads – will advertiser disgust at the platform ever generate enough economic pain for Facebook to change its ways?
June 9, 2020
Facebook Makes 300,000 Content Moderation Mistakes Every Day
A study from NYU Stern shows that Facebook makes 300,000 content moderation mistakes every day. So just as Facebook is allowing way too many harmful posts to slip through, it’s flagging or deleting as many, if not more, legitimate posts. Consider Facebook’s content moderation math: it has 15,000 poorly paid (and often traumatized – see May 13, 2020 above) moderators trying to review three million posts – which works out to about 200 posts per person, per day, or about 25 per hour across a standard, eight-hour shift. “That’s under 150 seconds to decide if a post meets or violates community standards,” writes Forbes, whether the post is a simple image file or a 10-minute video.
June 24, 2020
Facebook Loses Antitrust Decision in Germany Over Data Collection
Today was a big day if you see the need for real regulation of the world’s biggest technology companies (if you’re not, where have you been the last few years?). “Germany’s top court,” The New York Times reports, ruled that Facebook “abused its dominance in social media to illegally harvest data about its users.” The decision is important because 1) it could embolden other European countries to go after the social media giant, and 2) it is a direct attack on the heart of Facebook’s business model – which is all about collecting reams of data about its users to offer them more targeted advertising. “In Germany, Facebook now must alter how it processes data about its users,” the Times continues. Hopefully, Germany is only the beginning.
July 2, 2020
Big-Name Advertisers Drop Facebook Like it’s Hot (Trash)
Fed up with Facebook’s total failure to curb the spread of hate, droves of big-name brands have announced they will pull their advertising from the platform. Today, CNN releases a list of who has joined the boycott to date, and so far it includes huge names such as Adidas, Levi Strauss, Target, and many more. The list will ultimately grow to more than 1,000 brands – unfortunately, their collective action will barely put a dent in Facebook’s bottom line.
July 8, 2020
Facebook Flunks Civil Rights Audit
It turns out that even handpicking your own civil rights auditors doesn’t help you pass the audit if your platform is a toxic cesspool of racism, white supremacy, and hate. Facebook learns this the hard way today, as a two-year, independent audit that the company itself commissioned culminates in the release of a damning 89-page report. “Facebook was repeatedly faulted for prioritizing free expression on its platform over nondiscrimination, and for not having a robust infrastructure to handle civil rights,” writes The New York Times. “We have a long way to go,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in response to the audit. Her company has had a long way to go for years now. When will it ever get shorter?
July 23, 2020
Facebook to Pay Illinois Users $650 Million
One of the toughest defenders of privacy in the face of Facebook’s relentless data collection machine is… the state of Illinois? Today, Recode reports that the social network has agreed to pay a $650 million settlement to Illinois residents over its facial recognition feature, which is in violation of a state law that prohibits businesses from collecting biometric data without consent. It is a drop in the bucket of the company’s $70 billion+ annual revenues, but doesn’t it seem like these things are starting to add up?
July 29, 2020
Antitrust Hearing Makes It Official: Facebook Uses Acquisitions to Crush Competition
A blockbuster Big Tech antitrust hearing concludes today that will have ramifications for months and maybe years to come. One key takeaway: past emails from CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself make it abundantly clear that the social network was gutting competition by buying out its potential rivals. “Buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2012. “Those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.” Someone must have read the email and freaked out, because 45 minutes later, The Verge reports, he sent an email correcting himself: “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way.” Uh-huh, sure…
July 31, 2020
Australia to Facebook: Pay Up for News
If only more countries treated Facebook like Australia, which seems intent on seriously addressing the company’s dirty business practices and unfair competitive advantage. Another round of this fight presents itself today, as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission releases its plan for making Facebook (and Google) pay for the news content created by real news organizations. The two companies have massively profited from selling billions in ads around this content on their own platforms, despite having nothing to do with its creation. “News businesses have no option but to deal with the platforms,” said the chair of the Commission, “and have had little ability to negotiate over payment for their content or other issues.” The creative industries, who see their works pirated on these two platforms every day, feel the same way.
August 10, 2020
Not Content with Human Trafficking, Facebook Enables Animal Trafficking, Too
Today, BGR reports on a World Wildlife Fund survey that “found over 2,000 posts of wild animals for sale across nearly 100 species” on Facebook… in Myanmar alone. This violates Facebook’s terms of service and the company says it attempts to crack down on it, but like every other harm its platform enables, it is just not up to the job. The illegal animal trade endangers, among other things, ecosystems, biosecurity, national stability, and of course, the animal species themselves.
August 19, 2020
Health Misinformation on Facebook is Worse than You Ever Imagined
Today, Avaaz releases a study about health misinformation on Facebook that raises the concern level from “disturbing” to “what the… ?” Avaaz found that “global health misinformation… generated an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook in the last year” and that it peaked at an estimated 460 million views in April – just as the pandemic was escalating around the world. And, perhaps scariest of all, “content from the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation had almost four times as many estimated views on Facebook as equivalent content from the websites of 10 leading health institutions, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
September 8, 2020
Another Facebook Worker Quits in Disgust
Facebook’s once-enviable status as a preferred destination for talented workers takes another hit today, as software engineer Ashok Chandwaney announces to the company’s internal employee network that he is quitting because he can “no longer stomach contributing to an organization that is profiting off hate in the US and globally.” In a long letter, Chandwaney offers an outline, replete with resource links, of Facebook’s failures in the face of threats such as white nationalism and illegal discrimination. The “company’s approach to hate,” he writes, “has eroded my faith in this company’s will to remove it from the platform.” You and us both, Ashok.
September 9, 2020
Germany Moves to Crack Down on Big Tech with Antitrust Bill
Europe continues its leadership in platform accountability as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet approves a draft of digital antitrust legislation to give authorities more power to combat market abuse by Big Tech companies. “The proposed rules,” Bloomberg reports, “would allow the German antitrust regulator to step in if marketplace platforms use the data they collect from smaller businesses through their site to undercut competitors.” The new law would, most of all, benefit consumers, said the German Economy Minister, “by helping them gauge digital offers better and take decisions without being influenced.”
September 14, 2020
Facebook Supercharges Genocide in Ethiopia
Today, VICE News reports on brewing genocide in Ethiopia, “supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook” following the politically motivated assassination of famed singer, Hachalu Hundessa. “When the violence erupts offline, online content that calls for ethnic attacks, discrimination, and destruction of property goes viral,” an African activist told VICE News. “Facebook’s inaction helps propagate hate and polarization in a country and has a devastating impact on the narrative and extent of the violence.”
September 18, 2020
‘Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World’
By now, The New York Times has run many, many headlines that are critical of Facebook, but this one really sums everything up: “Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World”. If your eyes have started to glaze over from the endless onslaught of bad Facebook news, this utterly damning opening to an op-ed today by Jamelle Bouie will jolt you back to reality. The meat of the article hits all the familiar touchpoints we have come to expect from the world’s biggest social media platform: genocidal violence, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and so on. It’s a strong piece, but what will linger is that headline – a blunt-force instrument hurled full strength by the world’s most-read newspaper. This sounds like more than a headline – it’s a mission statement. The Times is mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. We’re right there with them.
September 23, 2020
Facebook’s Biggest Market is in India, So Of Course it Has a Hate Speech Crisis There
If it feels like every day on Facebook is a hellscape of disinformation, hate speech, and political strife here in America – well, it is. But also, hey, at least we’re not alone. In India, Facebook’s biggest market, the company is dealing with what CNN Business today calls a “hate speech crisis.” The report comes after Facebook appealed to India’s Supreme Court to exempt it from being investigated for its role in religious riots in New Delhi earlier this year, and also after Facebook allowed a prominent Indian politician to remain on the platform “even though his anti-Muslim posts flouted its rules against hate speech”. And India is only the beginning: “A former Facebook data scientist outlined several instances when the company was slow to clamp down on abuse of its platform by politicians in countries such as Honduras, Azerbaijan and several others.” Facebook’s abuses are happening everywhere, and often in areas with even less regulation than we have in America.
October 4, 2020
Online Violence Against Women ‘Flourishes’ Online, and Especially on Facebook
You already knew that the internet is a cesspool of escalating online violence against girls and women – but did you know those attacks are most common on Facebook? Today, The Guardian reports on a study from Plan International that surveyed more than 14,000 teenagers and young women across 22 countries. The poll found that 58% of total respondents had been exposed to “a spectrum of online violence”, and 39% of total respondents have been directly harassed on Facebook. As Plan International’s chief executive put it, online platforms like Facebook are “where the worst of humanity has manifested.”
October 6, 2020
Antitrust Committee to Facebook: You Are a Monopoly
Today, a report from the House Antitrust Subcommittee confirms the obvious – as CNBC’s coverage puts it, Facebook “is a social network monopoly that buys, copies or kills competitors”. The report’s juiciest piece of evidence for this claim? An exchange in which Mark Zuckerberg suggested to Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom that “refusing to enter into a partnership with Facebook, including an acquisition, would have consequences for Instagram.” Dictators take many forms…
October 12, 2020
Facebook Bans Holocaust Denial but Denial of Other Genocides is Still Just Fine
Hate-mongers and conspiracy theorists (who are often one and the same) love to claim that the state-sponsored mass murder of some 6 million European Jews – and millions of other people – never happened. Bloomberg today reports that, after many years of unrelenting criticism of Facebook’s decision to not remove such content from its platform, the company will ban posts that deny the Holocaust. But the arc of justice at Facebook is pretty short – the company also told Bloomberg that the new policy “doesn’t apply to the denial of other genocides, such as the Armenian or Rwandan genocides.” So, hate-mongers espousing those despicable beliefs still have a home on Facebook.
October 18, 2020
Ireland Investigates Facebook for Instagram Breach of Children’s Data
Big Tech’s war on children has no borders. Today, U.S. News & World Report reports on Ireland’s launch of two inquiries into Facebook “after concerns were raised about the social network giant’s handling of children’s personal data on Instagram.” According to The Telegraph, Instagram exposed the email addresses and phone numbers of millions of users under 18 – which is bad for its users of any age, let alone its youngest and most vulnerable users. As one source told the publication, “Instagram had enormous resources at their disposal, but this incident shows they had woefully low levels of empathy, safety awareness and care for their users”. At this point, that statement might as well be Facebook’s company motto.
October 22, 2020
Facebook Free Speech Hypocrisy on Full Display in Vietnam
Facebook loves nothing more than to tout its love of free speech – and to use that professed love as a reason for letting stand everything from misinformation to piracy. But the company’s ardent commitment for free expression is very much a marriage of convenience, one that Facebook is happy to annul whenever it’s convenient – and by “convenient” we mean, “a threat to earnings”. For powerful evidence, look no further than Vietnam, where Facebook “routinely restricts posts that governments deem sensitive or off-limits,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “trying to placate a repressive government that has threatened to shut Facebook down if it does not comply.” The company has shown a similar bent toward censorship in “countries including Cuba, India, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey”.
October 27, 2020
Facebook on List of Tech Platforms Accepting Payments to Hate Groups
Facebook has explicit policies preventing its users from using the platform to facilitate hate or violence – but it’s happy to accept payments to hate groups through its donation tools. “Among the 19 hate groups with access to Facebook’s donation tools,” reports NBC News, “is VDARE, an anti-immigration group that promotes white nationalist views, even though Facebook removed pages associated with the group in May.” Italics added by us – because sometimes, somehow, Facebook’s staggering hypocrisy still manages to shock us.
October 29, 2020
Facebook Charges Biden More than Trump for Campaign Ads
Federal laws require television stations to charge political candidates the same price for ads. In many states, newspapers cannot charge one candidate a higher price than another. But on Facebook? Political ad pricing is a Wild West where, according to The Markup, the Biden presidential campaign paid more than $8 million more for ads than it would have if it “had been paying Trump’s average price.” Political preferences aside, fair is fair – and what’s more, this wildly inconsistent model adds further strain to an election process whose integrity is already stretched way too thin. Candidates who can figure out how to game the platform’s ad system, or have friends on the inside, “get an advantage that other candidates wouldn’t get,” writes The Markup, “because it’s opaque”.
November 5, 2020
Facebook Groups Become ‘Vectors of Disinformation’ Around Election Results
As of this day, the presidential election is over, but the results remain unclear – which means the misinformation machine on Facebook is firing on all cylinders, spreading doubt and chaos around ballot counting. “Private groups in particular,” reports Axios, “can easily escape notice because only certain content review teams at Facebook can see inside them, as compared to the wide-open visibility of public groups.” Facebook has tried to crack down, shutting down public groups like Stop the Steal for unfounded claims of voter fraud, vote tampering, and other dangerous falsehoods. But their effort is akin to “playing whack-a-mole with disinformation,” says one source from the German Marshall Fund. “They’re extinguishing the fire after the fact.”
November 10, 2020
Biden Campaign Staffer Accuses Facebook of “Shredding the Fabric of Our Democracy”
Among the societal impacts Facebook hoped to have ascribed to it by the incoming Biden presidential administration, “shredding the fabric of our democracy” likely ranks very low. So said Biden campaign staffer Bill Russo today, in a tweet lamenting the post-election disinformation assault that Facebook has entirely failed to rein in. “The criticism could be an early indication of President-elect Joe Biden’s approach to the social media platform and even the tech industry at large,” reports CNBC. We can only hope.
November 24, 2020
Facebook Employee Morale Hits New Low
Awash in election-related battles and criticism, beleaguered Facebook workers feel “less pride in the company compared to previous years,” The New York Times today reports. In an internal employee survey, about half also “felt that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down from roughly three-quarters earlier this year.” Their “intent to stay” dropped as well, “as did confidence in leadership.”
It seems that Facebook’s “break the glass” efforts to help curb election-related misinformation were not enough to lift employee morale – and claims by executive Guy Rosen that there was “never a plan” to make those changes permanent haven’t helped much either. It seems that Facebook is committed to its democracy-harming business model – high-paid workers and the greater health of individuals and society be damned.
November 26, 2020
Britain Plans a Big Tech Watchdog to Police the Likes of Facebook
The U.K. government will establish a “Digital Markets Unit,” FOX Business today reports, “to enforce a new code of conduct governing the behavior of tech giants that dominate the online advertising market.” Under the new code, tech companies like Facebook would have to be more transparent about how they use consumers’ data and would no longer be allowed “to make it harder for customers to use rival platforms.” The department might even have the power to “suspend, block or reverse decisions” made by Zuckerberg and Co. The decision feels like yet another wall closing in on the Facebook social media monopoly.
The Great Unfriending
As we head into 2021, it is imperative that scrutiny of Facebook should not only continue but must be heightened – and, as of now, it appears that it will be. Soon, it is reported, Facebook will join its Big Tech sibling Google in dealing with antitrust charges. Facebook’s users do not benefit by having four of the world’s biggest social media platforms (WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook itself) under one umbrella. If anything, Facebook’s monopoly harms its users – by preventing the success of competitors who might offer better, safer social media alternatives.
Which is all to say that, with the election behind us, we have a chance to break the vice-like grip Facebook has on our lives and our politics, and the increasingly toxic ways that we interact with each other. Let’s all work harder to unfriend Facebook in 2020 and beyond, to reach out to our leaders in Congress and let them know that reining in Facebook and holding it accountable must be a priority going forward.
Facebook cannot – or will not – put out the fires it has started on its own. It was always, and it remains, up to us.
#StandCreative
