July 9, 2026

Web and Tech

Auto Draft

Facebook’s Reason for Banning Researchers Doesn’t Hold Up

From www.wired.com
2021-08-04 20:00:28
Gilad Edelman
Excerpt:

 

When Facebook said Tuesday that it was suspending the accounts of a team of NYU researchers, it made it seem like the company’s hands were tied. The team had been crowdsourcing data on political ad targeting via a browser extension, something Facebook had repeatedly warned them was not allowed.

“For months, we’ve attempted to work with New York University to provide three of their researchers the precise access they’ve asked for in a privacy-protected way,” wrote Mike Clark,…

 

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Facebook’s New Vulnerability, “Misinformation”

PGC – Facebook is being accused of letting climate ‘misinformation’ get through its filters by a social media report that is sure to give ammunition to those who would wish to see power more rooted in their particular sphere of power.

Governments around the world can now use its own too-quick willingness to attempt to be responsibile for something like misinformation when it threw in with the coalition of the willing in opposition to the great bad boogeyman Donald J Trump, whose legend was used as a justification for turning the 2020 election into a war to overcome filters or lock down opposition to the shared outcome, a DNC win, by any means necessary.

Now, Facebook’s willingness to dive in to such a sea of responsibility in the name of stopping the literal devil, Donald J Trump, makes them vulnerable to any government ruling wannabes that can now use its accepted ‘responsibility’ of being the filter of true data versus misinformation across the board.

So long as the government officials have the ear and the voice and the power of the state behind them, their definition of misinformation had better be yours, Facebook, else you face fines or other such measures beyond fines, such as Facebook-busting antitrust moves.

When you dance with the devil, don’t be surprised when you find, at the end of the dance, all of your valuables missing.

Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds : worldnews

From www.reddit.com
2021-08-05 02:16:59
/u/Pazluz
Excerpt:

 

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 83%. (I’m a bot)


Facebook failed to enforce its own rules to curb an oil and gas industry misinformation campaign over the climate crisis during last year’s presidential election, according to a new analysis released on Thursday.

Exxon alone spent $5m.”The industry is using a range of messaging tactics that are far more nuanced than outright statements of climate denial. Some of the most significant tactics found included tying the use…

 

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Russia Cancels “Extremists” from World Wide Web

Russia Blocks Exiled Khodorkovsky’s News Sites, Rights Group

From www.themoscowtimes.com
2021-08-05 03:09:39

Excerpt:

 

Russian authorities have blocked access to exiled former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s rights group website and news outlets, which have been critical of the Kremlin ahead of next month’s high-stakes elections.

Open Media and MBKh Media said late Wednesday that they had not…

 

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Google Allows Crypto Ads Again in US, Blacklists ICOs and DeFi

From www.financemagnates.com
2021-08-04 10:37:32
Arnab Shome
Excerpt:

 

Google has updated its advertising policy for financial products and services, allowing marketers to run cryptocurrency advertisements again, effective from Tuesday. But, the search-engine giant is putting heavy restrictions on the advertisements related to cryptocurrencies.

The ads targeted to the United States-based consumers must be of regulated crypto companies, meaning they must be registered with the ‘FinCEN as a Money Services Business and with at least one state as a money…

 

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Why Iran’s new social media bill may threaten livelihoods

From www.csmonitor.com
2021-08-04 12:28:40
Mehdi Fattahi and Isabel Debre
Excerpt:

 

Tehran, Iran

For Ali Hedieloo, who makes wooden furniture in Iran’s capital, Instagram is more than just a surfeit of glossy images. Like an estimated 1 million other Iranians, it’s how he finds customers, as the app has exploded into a massive e-commerce service in the sanctions-hit country.

But now, the social media platform has come under threat. Iran moved last week toward further government restrictions on Instagram and other apps, as hardline…

 

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Facebook Nukes University Political Social Media Project

A group of college researchers engaged in studying political action online found out their accounts had been disabled by Facebook, who alleges the group were violating terms of service  in how they were scraping data.

Facebook Disables Accounts Tied to NYU Research Project – Bloomberg

From www.bloomberg.com
2021-08-03 19:26:22

Excerpt:

Facebook Inc. has disabled the personal accounts of a group of New York University researchers studying political ads on the social network, claiming they are scraping data in violation of the company’s terms of service.

The company also cut off the researchers’ access to Facebook’s APIs, technology that is used to share data from Facebook to other apps or services, and disabled other apps and Pages associated with the research project, according to Mike Clark, a director of product management on Facebook’s privacy team.

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TenCent Gets Broken by Chinese State Media Calling Its Product “Spiritual Opium”

When the Chinese State wants its corporate extensions to modify their market practices in some significant way, it has a number of ways to go about doing this, but, for the sake of the preservation of the image of the benevolent dictator, the state generally chooses to send those message as gently as possible, in a public way.

Turns out, the best way to communicate to your government extension, which is what these corporations within China really are, is to simply create news shows and broadcast them across the lands and monitor anyone who tries to do the same thing but iwithout state approval.

Can’t have anyone expressing unorthodox views to the public, that’s the state’s job, responsibility, nay, right, and its right alone.

When the State saw that one  of its corporate giants was producing a product that was not producing the desred effects of the state, they just create stories that broadcast this new directive in the form of concerns expressed by pretty newscasters in controlled and highly manipulated frames.

The Chinese State Media told Tencent that their games are spiritual opium and electronic drugs and need to be looked into.  The company quickly issued a statement committing to the new direction, both of which caused the shares to stumble abraod.

Investors now realize they hold worthless paper should the centralized personality of Chairman Xi decide to declare whatever must be declared through their state-controlled news outliet whatever narrative gets the message across without making the state look like the heavy-handed thug it really is.

It should be noted the context of the word opium being selected, as there were a series of wars, called the Opium Wars, in the mid 1800s fought against the British by the Chinese, who were fighting the Brits’ efforts to open up China markets to grow and sell opium, to sell domestically as well as imports.  Chairman Xi chose his words very well.

Tencent shares slump after online games branded ‘spiritual opium’ and ‘electronic drugs’ by Chinese state media | Science & Tech News

From news.sky.com
2021-08-03 03:55:00

Excerpt:

 

Shares in China’s biggest online gaming companies slumped after state media branded their products “spiritual opium” and compared them to “electronic drugs”.

The criticism – as reported by Reuters news agency – has stoked concerns that the online gaming sector will be the next to receive unwanted attention from Beijing’s regulators, following a crackdown on tech giants in the country.

Tencent’s stock tumbled by more than 10% in morning…

 

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Non Dispareg

Facebook has relied on its non disparagement clause in employee contracts to protect it from having the messy reality of managing the thoughts, feelings, and desires of hundreds of millions of humans through their digital, server-based  platform.

Now, employees are beginning to challenge the constitutionality of the clause, and legislatures are considering action to make it illegal.

Facebook demands silence from people who know its operations best

From www.washingtonpost.com
2021-08-03 06:00:38

Excerpt:

 

California may be moving to change some of Silicon Valley’s reliance on nondisparagement agreements. In mid-August, the legislature is scheduled to vote on the Silenced No More Act, which includes protection from nondisparagement agreements in the case of workplace discrimination…..

Unfortunately, most of the people who know the most about the company’s inner workings have only been willing to speak to the press anonymously, for fear of retaliation or breach of nondisparagement agreements that are widely used in the tech world.

I worked at Facebook for about six months in 2018, hired as global head of elections integrity ops for political ads as the company attempted to dig out from its last big public relations crisis — the scandal around Cambridge Analytica’s improper use of the site’s data and Russia’s use of the platform to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. But they stripped my title and changed my job description on my second day there. I was later sidelined for questioning why we were not fact-checking political ads and for trying to help ensure that we were not allowing voter suppression to occur through these ads. After I asked to move to a different part of the company where I would be empowered to do the job I was hired to do, I was fired.

 

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The Moral Panic Tactic of Destroying Liberty Exposed

Sometimes moral panics emerge, sometimes they are engineered.  The Nazi boogeyman is the kind of moral panic that is engineered, and seeking to make the world safe by preventing dangerous thoughts and misinformation is far more tyrannical than the alleged boogeyman such moral panics, including this one, actually represent.

Freaking Out About Nazi Content On The Internet Archive Is Totally Missing The Point

From techdirt.com
2021-07-28 12:25:39
Mike Masnick
Excerpt:

 

from the moral-panics dept

The moral panics around anyone finding “bad” content online are getting out of control. The latest is a truly silly article in the San Francisco Chronicle whining about the fact that there is Nazi content available on the Internet Archive, written by the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, Steven Stalinsky, who is quite perturbed that his own personal content moderation desires are not how the Internet Archive moderates.

 

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