“Facebook will continue to offer a platform to Holocaust deniers, Infowars, and other publishers of hoaxes on the assumption that they are sincere in their beliefs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.”
Read: Mark Zuckerberg says Holocaust deniers are making an honest mistake
“Facebook and Google, two of world’s biggest and most influential companies, pride themselves on their ad businesses. These operations generate tens of billions of dollars per year, thanks in part to letting advertisers target even the most obscure microcommunities using unprecedented sets of data.”
Read: Facebook’s racist ad problems were baked in from the start
“Data mining is such a prosaic part of our online lives that it’s hard to sustain consumer interest in it, much less outrage. The modern condition means constantly clicking against our better judgement.”
Read: Get Ready for the Next Big Privacy Backlash Against Facebook
“A huge percentage of election-related talk on Twitter isn’t coming from humans. It’s coming from bots. And the majority of those bots are gunning for Trump to win the race, according to a paper released yesterday from Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda.”
Read: On Twitter, Trump bots are out-tweeting Clinton bots 7 to 1
“A huge percentage of election-related talk on Twitter isn’t coming from humans. It’s coming from bots. And the majority of those bots are gunning for Trump to win the race, according to a paper released yesterday from Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda.”
Read: On Twitter, Trump bots are out-tweeting Clinton bots 7 to 1
“For years, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have provided data to a company marketing social media surveillance tools to police, according to a newly published investigation by the ACLU of Northern California.”
Read: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram surveillance tool was used to arrest Baltimore protestors
“For DeRay Mckesson and his fellow Black Lives Matter activists, Twitter is a double-edged sword. The social media platform has made it easy for Mckesson to post messages, amass a dedicated digital following (half a million strong, and growing), and influence real-world events.”
“There’s a scene in the dystopian scifi novel “Ready Player One” in which the protagonist glimpses the dossier of personal information a major tech company has gathered on him. It includes his height and weight, his browser history, his address — even several years of his school transcripts.”
“Computers are people, too. It’s something we’ve been thinking about over at Technical.ly Brooklyn HQ for a bit and it’s come up in the news recently a few times, most notably last month with the Facebook Trending Topic Imbroglio of 2016.”
Read: ‘Mathwashing,’ Facebook and the zeitgeist of data worship
“The controversy about the human curators behind Facebook Trends has grown, since the allegations made last week by Gizmodo.”
Read: Algorithms, clickworkers, and the befuddled fury around Facebook Trends