Civil-rights probe: Facebook has completely failed to… Zuck: Look over here! We’ve banned four groups! Go me! Facebook on Wednesday published an independent-ish report by civil-rights experts into how it deals with misinformation and hate speech on its platform. The dossier wasn't exactly flattering, and the antisocial network immediately tried to undercut it with an announcement about how it had banned four groups from its site. The …
Not even in the slightest, tiniest bit.
Why??
Because these "vexing" and "heartbreaking" (ha!!) decisions were made... looking at the bottom line. That's ALL American businesses [have been told to] care about. "Shareholder value" is all that matters, and when you directly tie management compensation to the profit reports...that's all management cares about, too.
Just moments before I am writing this I was researching Rana Plaza, to see if any additional information or insight had come up in the past year or so. The perfect irony of this, a disaster caused by the blind ambition to profit and a discussion regarding Facebook's decision making policies. The similarity is all too poignant to bear.
The ONLY reason this is getting *any* lip service from Zuckerburg is due to the advertiser boycott - a hit to his wallet. Otherwise he'd push the issue under the sofa cushions like he, and other "capitalists" like him, always do. He'll bide time until the boycott ends, marching out as many platitudes as he thinks he can get away with and then thank [insert noun here] that's it's all over and he can go back to counting his money bin.
And nothing changes much.
And the public continues to vote, and spend, just as they always have.
"due to the advertiser boycott "
I personally don't use facebook, and I never have. But I've been shown stuff on the site by various people over the years. During all this time, I do not ever, not once, remember seeing advertising anywhere on facebook.
Are all the people I know really that clued in? I mean, even MeDearOldMum (mid-80s and computer incompetent) & GreatAunt (105 years young and computer illiterate) figured out how to install ad blockers and no-script, after becoming annoyed by the ads to the point of distraction ...
One wonders if facebook's advertisers are aware of this. Does anybody care? Does it matter? Maybe ads don't actually need eyeballs to make money these days ... but that hardly makes any sense. Or am I missing something?
I'm not sure how Facebook adverts work as I, also, am not on Faceplant and never will be. But a quick web search does indeed show that Facebook feeds ads to users, based on relevance. It might be reasonable to assume that the pages shown to you had little ad relevance; the ads might be on main landing pages, not inside individual feeds proper.
Ads show as content within your feed. As you scroll down, you will see posts from friends, and occasionally an advert from Facebook.
As they are inline and provided directly through Facebook, adblocking software that attempts to target facebook ads will find it much more difficult - it's not a case of blocking an external server known to supply ads - it has to try and filter part of the content sent by facebook, and in the past facebook has been known to alter the way in which ad content is structured to circumvent adblocking software measures.
Of course, that only helps people using browsers to access facebook - if someone uses the facebook app they'll be stuck with the content facebook provide.
"Maybe ads don't actually need eyeballs to make money these days"
Remember the advertising industry only sells advertising. If the advert gets blocked before reaching eyeballs but still gets charged to the advertiser it still makes money. At least as much as it ever made and quite possibly, by not having a negative effect on the viewer, being slightly better for the advertiser's bottom line that it would had it got through.
So, no, they don't need eyeballs to make money.
I read somewhere that psychopathic people have greater chances to succeed in corporate world (here maybe), because their lack of empathy fits well with the true corporate spirit - You know, the same spirit from companies asking their wage slaves to be 'loyal' before throwing them in a dust can as soon as they are not useful enough anymore.
There are laws in place to allow content providers on the internet to be protected from legal consequences for unmoderated content appearing on their site/service.
If such laws were not in place, then any site/service with a means to accept content submissions (comments, articles, etc.) would have to be thoroughly moderated.
Take El Reg here for example - without those laws, every comment would need to be approved before it could appear on the site. Otherwise, someone could libel themselves in a comment and El Reg would be legally culpable.
Not only would all social media fail, but any sort of community based service would suffer too.
Whereas newspapers and TV stations are responsible for what THEY publish, Facebook doesn't publish content - its members do.
But technically, if Facebook does publish something it is as liable as any newspaper - just as Twitter is accountable for the modifications to Trumps tweets.
As pointed out, CDA Section 230 only covers posts from others and, contrary to popular opinion, provides no cover for illegal posts (kiddie porn etc.). It also provides immunity from prosecution for moderation decisions so Facebook could cull a lot of the BS and worst excesses of the far right and left (before someone shouts 'conservative bias') without legal consequence - they are just choosing not to.
And so it should be. The staffing levels would be horrendous, but if your business can't scale then it shouldn't exist at that scale.
The classic example is YouTube. All content that is uploaded should be validated (preferably by a human) before made public. Is there too much new content? Then there will be either an ever-growing backlog, a throttle, or similar. The inability to be professional at scale is not an excuse to simply be unprofessional at scale.
As someone who (apparently) has an account with Facebook, I can vouch for Facebook being slow to act and consistently failing to apply their own policies.
I am what Facebook call a "power admin" (I am one of the admins in a large group - in this case, over 400k members) and on the occasions that Facebook highlight content as breaking their rules, they make it clear how important it is for admins to effectively police their own groups to Facebook's standards. The terms of service written by Facebook can be interpreted in different ways and while I would prefer to err on the side of caution, I have seen blatantly obvious violations pass through Facebook's watchful eye unscathed, and I have also seen content inexplicably marked as a violation when no interpretation of their rules could justify it.
I have given up trying to alert Facebook to the rampant advertising/sales of adult services where large networks of profiles exist, featuring explicit media content and reporting such profiles results in a far less than 50% success rate of the report being upheld (no way to tag a comment to say "how about checking the 5000 friends also as most of them feature similar violating content")
To further prove that Facebook's system is broken, if you report "too many" profiles, you will actually be blocked from reporting - that's right - if you highlight to facebook that a number of their users are actively violating their rules, they will block YOUR profile for doing so.
My current facebook status? Well, a number of weeks ago (9) someone evidently decided that something I said was too contrary to their opinion and decided to report my profile for not being real... so while Facebook allow explicit content to run rampant on their network; someone reports one of their power admin members and the account gets put into "review" - this entails my account being "suspended", a request for me to provide photo identification (take a picture of your driving license/passport and upload it to us) and then wait for them to review the picture to confirm my identity.
So, 10 seconds required to look at a photo, see the name on that photo matching my name on the account, and click on a button to confirm that my identity matches... however due to covid-19, apparently facebook staff haven't been able to find 10 seconds to confirm my identity for almost 9 weeks now (9 weeks Friday) so my account remains "suspended"
No, Facebook don't have any means to contact them - everything is locked out - the app, the website... all I get is the message saying that reviewing my information may take longer than usual.
My account is over 10 years old, it has never received any warnings or bans for violating the terms of service, I am an officially recognised power admin and belong to the official UK power admin group, I have recently spent money on advertising with facebook for an unrelated page, which I also have no access to currently... (yes even the facebook ads app is locked)
It is my view that Facebook will collapse suddenly when their fragile infrastructure breaks at a critical point. Advertisers boycotting and inconsistent application of their policies aside - they rely too much on automation that isn't up to task.
I have no problem with that - they are a private company after all and can have any political bias they want. The problem comes when they try to hide their bias and, worse, apply inconsistent rules.
If they were open and consistent then people could decide to go elsewhere. Moderation is not censorship after all, you are free to post on another site. It is the lying and weaselling that really annoys me.
Even with all the negative publicity and advertisers "pausing" their ads on FB, Facebook's stocks just broke a new record high of $245.50 per share Tuesday.
https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-stock-hits-record-high-amid-ad-boycott/
This is why Facebook repeatedly violate orders from the FTC to clean up its act because.. money.
Facebook should have been taken down years ago and Zuckerberg brought up on charges for lying to congress about the level of privacy invasions.
Zuck failed to mention to clueless lawmakers that he had allowed certain "partners" (including the Chinese) low-level access to users social media data regardless of what "privacy" settings the user had set.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/technology/facebook-device-partnerships-china.html
Facebook is one of the biggest threats to democracy around the world and it's blackbox algoriths to improve "engagement" at all costs has led to a new surge in hate and racial violence.
I think it is very telling that Trump's political consultant, Roger Stone, was using the neo-fascist hate group "Proud Boys" to push his agenda on Facebook for years:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-proud-boys-became-roger-stones-personal-army-6
And when Zuck and/or Sheryl Sandberg feel that they or Facebook is threatened in any way they hired a PR team to go after George Soros.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/21/facebook-admits-definers-pr-george-soros-critics-sandberg-zuckerberg
Enough already.
Take down Facebook and bring Zuck up the many felonies he committed while lying to congress.
(Posted as Anon because I don't want to be on Facebook's "BOLO" list)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-tracks-posts-location-for-bolo-threat-list.html
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