Alex Jones and Infowars gets 'disappeared' - are we headed in the right direction?

[Fireball]

Tucker Carlsons White Power Hour is shedding advertisers.

At least 16 advertisers have now dropped “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after the Fox News host said in a show last Thursday that immigrants to the United States made the country “poorer” and “dirtier.”

As of Tuesday morning, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, TD Ameritrade, Just For Men, United Explorer credit card, ScotteVest, Voya Financial, Zenni Optical, Pacific Life, Indeed, Bowflex, SmileDirectClub, NerdWallet, Minted, Ancestry.com, and IHOP Jaguar had all told TheWrap they plan to suspend advertising on the program.

https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-d...rant-flap/

"IHOP Jaguar"? Dafuq?

[Angrboda]

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants
Internal documents show that the social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far greater access to people’s data than it has disclosed.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network 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.

Facebook has been reeling from a series of privacy scandals, set off by revelations in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly used Facebook data to build tools that aided President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Acknowledging that it had breached users’ trust, Facebook insisted that it had instituted stricter privacy protections long ago. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections. They also raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission.

In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations. Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.

With most of the partnerships, Mr. Satterfield said, the F.T.C. agreement did not require the social network to secure users’ consent before sharing data because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself — service providers that allowed users to interact with their Facebook friends. The partners were prohibited from using the personal information for other purposes, he said. “Facebook’s partners don’t get to ignore people’s privacy settings.”

The Times reviewed more than 270 pages of reports generated by the system — records that reflect just a portion of Facebook’s wide-ranging deals. Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.”

The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.

[Angrboda]

Facebook has suspended the account of Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of a top social media research firm, after reports that he and others engaged in an operation to spread disinformation during the special election in Alabama last year.

Morgan confirmed his account’s suspension after Facebook said in a statement that it had taken action against “five accounts run by a multiple individuals for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior,” adding that its “investigation is ongoing.” Facebook did not provide a list of the accounts it had suspended, and Morgan declined further comment.

“We take a strong stand against people or organizations that create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing,” Facebook said. “We’ve removed thousands of Pages, Groups and accounts for this kind of behavior, as well as accounts that were violating our policies on spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior during the Alabama special election last year.”

Earlier this week, Morgan, the head of the firm New Knowledge, told The Washington Post he had experimented with misleading online tactics during the 2017 contest between Republican Roy Moore and since-elected Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Morgan acknowledged creating a misleading Facebook page to appeal to conservatives. He also acknowledged purchasing retweets on Twitter to measure the potential “lift” of political messages.

Morgan said he had been acting in his own capacity as a researcher trying to understand how online disinformation works, not to impact the outcome of the election. But his efforts came amid a broader campaign in Alabama that sought to undermine Moore’s support. The campaign, first reported by the New York Times, supported a write-in Republican candidate in Alabama and created false evidence that automated accounts, called bots, were backing Moore on Twitter.

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“What is obvious now is that we have focused so much on Russia that we haven’t focused on the fact that people in this country could take the same playbook and do the same d--- thing,” Jones said in a statement. “I’d like to see the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department look at this to see if there were any laws being violated and, if there were, prosecute those responsible.”

(Washington Post)

The situation in Alabama is interesting because it could possibly overturn an election and result in Roy Moore having a second bite at the apple, but also because it appears to open a Pandora's box that we and social media may be unable to shut again. But what interests me is this, and I don't know the answer, but even assuming that American actors did engage in a policy of disinformation on Facebook, even if that campaign was paid for out of campaign funds, in this case donated by a wealthy donor, what laws supposedly would they have broken? And second, even if in this case laws were broken, what's to stop future American actors engaging in similar disinformation campaigns, presumably funded by dark money, and still dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's with regard to campaign finance law, or whatever other laws the people in Alabama might be guilty of breaking? (And keep in mind, Russia isn't the only international actor who could realize enormous bang for their buck by meddling in U.S. elections. How are these technology companies going to stem the tide if such disinformation campaigns take off in multiple countries around the world?)

[Angrboda]

Facebook is edging into countries’ politics.

Facebook is growing more assertive about barring groups and people, as well as types of speech, that it believes could lead to violence.

In countries where the line between extremism and mainstream politics is blurry, the social network’s power to ban some groups and not others means that it is, in essence, helping pick political winners and losers.

Sometimes it removes political parties, like Golden Dawn in Greece, as well as mainstream religious movements in Asia and the Middle East. This can be akin to Facebook shutting down one side in national debates, one expert argues.

(NY Times)