If you’re not familiar with the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma, they’ve been called the most persecuted people in the world. The government of Myanmar has been accused of what essentially amounts to ethnic cleansing of trying to remove the minority Muslim Rohingya in the largely Buddhist country. Myanmar even refuses to recognize them as citizens while placing discriminatory restrictions against them.
So how does Facebook fit into all of this? According to reports by both The Atlantic and The Daily Beast, Facebook is considered the de facto internet in Myanmar. And much like it has in America, Facebook has been used to spread false information about the Rohingya people. To compound matters, Facebook is being accused of deleting the posts of pro-Rohingya activists under the vague terms of their ‘community guidelines’. Not just in Myanamar either as a Canadian activist has said that some of his posts criticizing the Myanmar government have been deleted. In many other cases, entire Facebook accounts have been deactivated. Meanwhile, Facebook’s response to the criticism can be summarized as a dismissive ‘we’re looking into it.’
This is yet another example of how Facebook’s power and reach has gotten out of their control and probably the most devastating example. Even if it’s not intentional, Facebook gives the impression that they’re largely unsympathetic to the plight of the Rohingya which allows this campaign of hate to continue against them unabated in a country that the Rohingya have lived in for centuries.
It appears that Facebook is once again in hot water for the way it serves its ads. If you’ve been following the Facebook ad saga, first there was the fact that the social media giant accepted foreign currency for ads allegedly trying to influence the 2016 US Presidential election. Then there were allegations that Facebook was serving housing ads that discriminated by race. Now, through a joint investigation by the New York Times and Pro Publica, Facebook is allegedly serving employment ads that are discriminating by age.
Communications giant Verizon is the one being singled out the most by supposedly targeting their employment ads to people in the 25 to 36 age range. However, reports say that companies such as Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself have used such tactics when it comes to hiring ages. There may be legal investigations forthcoming as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 prohibits discriminating against people who are over 40 when it comes to employment.
Facebook says that it’s not their fault. They say this practice is protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1997. This is the same act that Backpage hides behind to continue making money off of obvious ads for prostitution and human trafficking. Facebook’s problem with this argument is that they’re the ones who are offering this specific age targeting options for ads. The sad truth is that Facebook will continue to flaunt their unchecked power until a rival platform comes along that users would be willing to jump to and that probably won’t happen any time soon.
Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya recently addressed a Stanford Graduate School of Business last month that social media is destroying how society works. This got reported by many media outlets as Mr. Palihapitiya said ‘Facebook is ripping society apart’ due to his former connection with Facebook. However, his point was more nuanced than that.
But that’s not the story here. The story is that Facebook actually took time to descend from their ivory tower to address the masses about this latest round of negative press.
Chamath has not been at Facebook for over [six] years. When Chamath was at Facebook we were focused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebook around the world. Facebook was a very different company back then, and as we have grown, we have realized how our responsibilities have grown too. We take our role very seriously and we are working hard to improve. We’ve done a lot of work and research with outside experts and academics to understand the effects of our service on well-being, and we’re using it to inform our product development. We are also making significant investments more in people, technology and processes, and — as Mark Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call — we are willing to reduce our profitability to make sure the right investments are made. (Source)
Facebook has definitely grown exponentially since Mr. Palihapitiya was at Facebook, but it’s highly debatable that they’ve realized their responsibilities have grown too. If anything, Facebook has grown out of its own control. From the dissemination of flagrant falsehoods to accusations that their ads can be tailored to focus on or void certain ethnic groups, Facebook appears to have become the faceless corporation of dystopian fiction that only cares about the bottom line. Instead of growing uncontrollably like an amorphous blob that increases in size as it consumes, maybe they should dial things back until the company is in control again instead of being at the whim of bad actors.
Did you know that you used to be able to buy guns on Facebook? Not from licensed gun dealers but from individual gun owners who could sell their guns to other users without conducting a background check. That was until early 2016 when under pressure from parents groups when Facebook placed an outright ban on their platform of any kind of gun sale.
However, if you fast forward to today, the trading and selling of guns is still taking place on Facebook. According to the Columbia Missourian, the trading of firearms continues mostly unabated on the social network. Now this isn’t an argument about the 2nd Amendment. This is an argument about Facebook not being able to enforce its own policies.
Facebook is a private entity and can ban whatever it wants on its network. However, to say your banning something and actually being able to enforce it are two different matters. This is yet another example of how Facebook’s reach has grown beyond their ability to control it. Even the gun traders admit that sometimes a gun will fall into the wrong hands. Without any kind of real enforcement on Facebook’s part, any kind of ban they declare is one in name only.
In the wake of the Russian ad scandal, and its fake news problem, many in the US have been calling for federal regulation of companies like Facebook. Now another major world government is set to investigate Facebook for anti-competitive practices. The Australian government has announced their intentions to investigate companies including Facebook and Google believing those companies are harming Australian news media.
It’s widely believed that between Facebook and Google, the two companies control close to 40% of all media advertising in Australia. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will be investigating the two tech giants along with any other digital platforms that affect the quality of news media in the country.
Thanks to Facebook’s pervasive influence on our lives, many media outlets have sacrificed quality in order to get clicks and pageviews. They are forced to fight against less than reputable news sources and false memes that are viewed as gospel by some, making true journalism in this and other countries a rare occurrence.
In the wake of governmental calls for potential regulation against Facebook, one former Facebook employee has come out to say that Facebook must be regulated since they won’t regulate themselves. Former operations manager Sandy Parakilas wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times where he calls for the government to regulate Facebook since Facebook cares more about putting a stop to bad PR than they do about privacy.
In his piece, Parakilas relates a story from before Facebook’s IPO where a game developer was using Facebook’s user information to automatically generate profiles of children without their consent. When the developer was confronted they claimed that no violation of Facebook policy took place and that there was no way to verify if this was true or not.
Mr. Parakilas also calls out the fact that Facebook discovered Russian tampering on their platform after payments for ads were received in foreign currency. He says that much like his own investigation into the game developer, this should have been an easy thing to stop and he calls on the government to regulate Facebook as democracy itself is at stake with the amount of power Facebook yields.
Facebook has almost become a world power in itself with the amount of information it possess and its infiltration into our lives. Without regulation it will just become a political tool for hire, being used by any entity who has the money to buy whatever influence they want.
According to recent reports, there may have been Russian involvement in another historical election besides the 2016 US Presidential election. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre is said to be getting ready to announce that there was severe Russian interference when it came to the 2016 Brexit referendum. As with the US election, Russian groups were said to have allegedly placed Facebook ads in the UK stirring the flames of nationalism and anti-immigration movements.
Buzzfeed has reported that Facebook has admitted there may have been Russian bought ads in the UK about the Brexit vote. Interfering in the Brexit vote doesn’t just affect England but affects the whole of the European Union if not all of Europe. When the UK leaves the EU this will have a negative economic impact on the rest of Europe which Russia may be trying to exploit, all through a social network used mainly for cat pictures.
Facebook has more users than most countries have citizens. It wields massive influential power but that power has grown wildly out of their control and Facebook doesn’t seem to be doing much to rein that power in. Instead, they’re letting burn out of control while trying to tell everyone that everything is fine. Even while they’re allegedly being manipulated by world superpower with a history of meddling in the political affairs of other nations.
Not pictured: Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Page
This week, Congress continued its probe into alleged Russian influencers purchasing ads on the internet’s three top platforms, Facebook, Google and Twitter. Rather than appearing themselves, the CEOs of each company sent their legal counsel in their stead. Yes, that’s not unheard of for businesses to send their legal representatives to Congress, but we’re talking about these companies taking money from foreign entities that might have influenced the outcome of the 2016 election.
While Congress by and large can be tech-illiterate, at least one Senator seemed to hammer the point home that these companies probably knew who they were taking money from. Minnesota Senator Al Franken showed everyone just how unwilling these companies are to divulge the truth.
“People are buying ads on your platform with roubles. They’re political ads. You put billions of data points together all the time. That’s what I hear that these platforms do: they’re the most sophisticated things invented by man, ever. Google has all knowledge that man has ever developed. You can’t put together roubles with a political ad and go hmm, those two data points spell out something bad?”
Stretch replied: “Senator, it’s a signal we should have been alert to and in hindsight–”
But Franken cut him off, asking whether Facebook would pledge not to publish a political ad paid for in North Korean won. As Stretch demurred, Franken interjected fiercely: “Please answer yes or no, sir. You’re sophisticated. You’re the chief legal counsel for Facebook. Please answer yes or no.”
Of course, Senator Franken did not get a straight answer out of Stretch. Instead the counselor hemmed and hawed his way through a non-committal answer.
However, the question remains, why weren’t the CEOs there to answer questions directly? What exactly are they afraid of? Perjury perhaps? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t comment on the hearings until the day after Stretch’s testimony on an earnings call.
“I’m dead serious,” Zuckerberg said. “I’ve directed our team to invest so much in security on top of the other investments we’re making it will significantly impact our profitability going forward.” That investment will include hiring at least 10,000 new employees to focus on security and enforcement. CFO David Wehner later clarified that many of those new jobs won’t be full time but rather contract positions at partner companies.
“Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” Zuckerberg said.
Which doesn’t address the problem at hand at all. Zuckerberg was then said to have handed off the remainder of the call to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook was the biggest offender in this story having served up alleged Russian ads to at least 125 million American users. Considering the entire population of the US is 323 million, that’s not a small percentage of potential voters who saw these misleading ads. That’s more than enough people to sway an election one way or the other. If protecting the community is more important than profits, why take the foreign money at all for American political ads? Facebook can claim hindsight is 20/20 all they want, but there were accusations of Russian political meddling even before these ads appeared on Facebook. So how could accepting Russian currency for American political ads not throw up a red flag?
If you don’t think the CEOs of this company aren’t cowards, please think of this for a moment. Even Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer eventually appeared before Congress. So when the CEO of a company that reportedly makes money from the sexual slave trade in this country appears before Congress and these other CEOs don’t, it goes a long way in showing just how scared of Congress they probably are.
Facebook has come under fire recently for allegedly accepting money for ads from a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency. For two years these ads ran which intended to fuel the fires of rampant political discord already troubling our country. Some of the ads could have even been viewed as racist or anti-Semitic. After turning over records of these ads to Congress, Facebook announced they would be hiring 1000 people to manually review certain ads targeted toward religious, ethnic, and social groups.
However, this blog post ultimately is not about Facebook, but another website that touts itself as being socially responsible. We’re of course referring to craigslist. From its iconic purple peace sign logo to the numerous charitable foundations craigslist founder Craig Newmark has donated to, craigslist appears on the surface to be this socially conscious entity, yet they still do nothing to try to protect their own users.
Craigslist ads remain largely unmoderated which has led to a vast number of scams and violent crimes. Their rants & raves section is filled all sorts of vitriol and hate from blatant racism to calls for violence. Their casual encounters section is often the playground of child predators looking for their next victim. Yet craigslist does not hire any moderators, refusing to expand from their alleged two dozen employees.
While craigslist may not be as lucrative as Facebook, I think they could probably scrounge enough to money to hire a team of moderators. They just choose not to.
Noted news and opinion website Slate recently published an article entitled “What Facebook Can Learn From Craigslist”. One could assume by the headline that Slate must mean craigslist can teach Facebook something about Facebook Marketplace, but that’s not the point Slate is trying to make. Instead, Slate makes the questionable claim craigslist has ‘conquered’ its own content moderation, which leads to the question, what moderation?
Granted, Facebook has had its own controversies lately with Facebook Live being used to broadcast a number of crimes and suicides, and the ever-growing problem of hate speech, however craigslist should not be held up as a shining example of how content should be moderated. In researching this post, it took me literally under a minute to see something racist posted in craigslist’s forum section. That’s not even taking into account the number of news stories that go out almost daily that contain the words ‘beware’ and ‘craigslist’.
If anything, craigslist could learn from Facebook. While craigslist only has 40 employees, Facebook has hired contracted content moderators to at least try to curb some of the material that goes against Facebook’s terms of service. Craigslist wouldn’t even remove their adult ads section until well after CNN’s Amber Lyon famously approached craigslist founder Craig Newmark, as pictured above, about the human trafficking that took place on craigslist.
The only thing that craigslist can teach is how not to do things.
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