Glenn Greenwald: Facebook has been aggressively deleting the pages of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices for at least 18 months, obeying the demands of the Israeli govt. Congrats to those who thought it was a good idea for Silicon Valley to act as paternal censor & guardian of the internet:
In Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Sheryl Sandberg, and Eric Schmidt we trust to censor and regulate the internet with the most benevolent of motives, devoted as they've been their entire lives to safeguarding the voiceless and protecting the marginalized," Greenwald added, about Facebook's CEO, Google's CEO, Facebook's COO, and the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
"Facebook, to address hate and misinformation epidemics of its own creation, is intervening into political and social matters the world over. Like an unseen branch of government, it is governing without our consent." -Max Fisher, New York Times
Max Fisher's report for the Times offers a glimpse into its secretive but widely criticized censorship practices. A review of 1,400 pages provided to the newspaper by a concerned employee and verified as authentic by Facebook, which supposedly has made some updates-"revealed numerous gaps, biases, and outright errors. The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself."
Facebook claims the rule book is for training, moderators told Fisher they reference it regularly. And though Facebook staff reportedly craft moderation rules in meetings every other week, "the company outsources much of the actual post-by-post moderation to companies that enlist largely unskilled workers, many hired out of call centers."
Fisher explained:
"Moderators were once told, for example, to remove fundraising appeals for volcano victims in Indonesia because a co-sponsor of the drive was on Facebook's internal list of banned groups. In Myanmar, a paperwork error allowed a prominent extremist group, accused of fomenting genocide, to stay on the platform for months. In India, moderators were mistakenly told to take down comments critical of religion."
There are two things I want you to take away from this story:(1) Facebook, to address hate and misinformation epidemics of its own creation, is intervening into political and social matters the world over. Like an unseen branch of government, it is governing without our consent
(2) Facebook is doing this all on the cheap, shipping disorganized PowerPoint slides to outsourcing companies it can barely control. And it is making many, many mistakes along the way.
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Facebook's Secret Censorship Manual Exposed as Platform Takes Down Video About Israel Terrorizing Palestinians
"An incredibly damning indictment of Facebook, every single paragraph," Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote of the Times report, which is the latest in a long line of recent revelations about Facebook's intrusive-and possibly illegal-data practices.Citing hundreds of pages of internal company records and interviews with dozens of former employees, the Times reported that "Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent" and "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages."
Facebook "permitted Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends' posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier." In addition to being invasive, former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials said to the Times that Facebook's data-sharing "partnerships" with other corporate giants may also violate federal law.
This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it," said David Vladeck, former head of the FTC's consumer protection bureau. "I don't understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree."
Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, wholeheartedly agreed, declaring:
"I don't believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user. No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model," McNamee concluded.
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