Matters of Revenue: Meta Abandons Australia’s Media Stable
It was praised to the heavens as a work of negotiated and practical genius when it was struck. The then Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had finally gotten those titans of…
The slow transformation of Facebook in India
As the general election approaches, there are few spaces where the opposition can be safe online India has been tightening its platform laws for years, but with next year’s general…
‘Breaking the Mold’: How Facebook Became the NYT of the Digital Age
"If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long," famed linguist and cultural critic Noam Chomsky wrote in an essay published in Z Magazine in October…
Meta and Privacy: The Economy of Data Transgressions
Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types,…
Suing Meta in Kenya
Africa has been a continent exploited since the European scramble carved it out in lines of a draughtsman’s crude design. Its resources have been pilfered; its peoples enslaved for reasons…
Dinner Versus the Truth: The Problem With Facebook’s Content Warnings
Facebook’s algorithm is considering two sponsored posts that feature the same chicken. In the first post, she is alive and struggling, confined in a tiny cage, on her way to…
Business as Usual: Facebook, Russia and Hate Speech
Seedy, compromised and creepy, the surveillance machine of Facebook, now operating under the broader fold of its parent company Meta Platforms, is currently giving out the very signals that it…
Spying On Users: Google, Facebook Hit With More Than $200M In Fines By French Regulators
A French privacy watchdog accused the tech giants Google and Facebook of making it difficult for users to opt out of tracking their activity. France’s online privacy regulator has ordered…
Meta Isn’t Just About Rebranding Facebook—Could It Bring a Dystopian Future?
Facebook’s announcement has implications about digital life and work—provided it can attract younger users and gamer skeptics and overcome the hate speech and disinformation problems that could still plague Zuckerberg’s…
How Facebook helps Israel hide its crimes
As Israel intensified its killing campaign in the Gaza Strip in May, people across the globe took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians. Others used social media to document, condemn and raise awareness…
How Facebook’s Algorithms Promote Hate and Drive Toxic Content
Facebook has been in the limelight for two issues of late—both damaging from the company’s perspective, but in terms of public interest, each has its own level of usefulness. The…
Blowing the Whistle at Facebook
The only surprise was that it did not come sooner. Big Tech whistleblowers are not exactly running out of the offices of Silicon Valley, so it was with some excitement…
Company Puts Profits Before Public Safety Over and Over Again, Claims Facebook Whistleblower
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen claimed that the social media giant for prioritizing profits over public safety. Haugen, who worked on the company’s Civic Integrity team until it was dissolved…
Facebook Evaluates Boosts Of Posts That Include Anti-Zionist Speech As Having A “low Quality Attribute”
Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal (still from “Weaponizing anti-Semitism: IHRA and Ending the Palestine Exception.” For Palestinians, it takes a lot of courage to say, “Let’s talk…
Refriended in Defeat: Australia Strikes a Deal with Facebook
The Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was unconvincing in his efforts to summon up courage. The Australian government had been left reeling in the wake of Facebook’s decision to scrap and…
Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos
Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement.…
It’s Facebook versus India’s Farmers
The tug-of-war between Indian farmers and government over new laws facilitating corporate takeover of the country’s agriculture is getting uglier by the hour and likely to get quite bloody too.…
Facebook blocked Greenpeace USA
Earlier in the month, I woke up to my Facebook account blocked. I could not access anything and, as a result, I could not do my job to amplify your…
Zuckerberg wants to “Change” the World with his Philanthropy
Since 2014, we all have seen how Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg constantly talks about changing the world. Will his billionaire philanthropy actually save the world? His estimated wealth…
Open Letter Mark Zuckerberg-CEO Of Facebook
“I think there’s a comfort in knowing and having confidence that there are things bigger than you...it’s why I have so much faith in democracy overall, it’s why I care…
Has Indian Democracy Been Facebooked?
Belarus-born American writer Evgeny Morozov, a scholar of the political and social implications of technology, is among the early technology sceptics whose words have now proved prescient. Morozov had questioned…
Does Facebook’s Zuckerberg have a ‘Muslim’ problem?
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, claims to be against the use of his popular social media portal for spreading hatred. He said that there “is no place…
Sound Advice to Facebook Cheif Zuckerberg on hiring practices
Religious discrimination is on the rise across the world and must be contained before it harms businesses and our social progress. A religiously or politically prejudiced employee can affect others’…
Corporate Social Media in India: Sell Hate, Enjoy Profit
The bias that social media platforms such as Facebook display reflect their own world-view as much as it does the regimes they support. A few gave the appearance of being…
Big Tech Antics: The Data Robber Barons Appear Before Congress
Silicon Valley continues to sprawl in influence, and its modern robber barons bestride the globe with a confidence verging on contempt. The technology giants that mark that region of California…
Facebook, Funny Money and Libra
In this squalid era of compromised data and hollowed privacy, it would be fitting that the company largely responsible for such mishaps would steer another technological innovation. Distractions are needed,…
Tackling hate speech: Tech companies and world leaders opt for band-aid solutions
There’s a ‘blame the messenger’ quality to global efforts to counter misinformation, extremism and hate speech by world leaders and technology companies. The efforts are informed by a historically proven…
Losing Users: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Problems
His detractors and enemies have been waiting some time for this, but it must have given them moments of mild cheer. Facebook, the all-gazing, accumulating system of personal profiles and…
Facebook’s New Propaganda Partners
Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International…
Facebook Codifies Its Censorship Regime
Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, spelled out for the first time the criteria it uses to censor speech on its platform, purely at its own discretion, and with…
Presstitutes push social media to stamp out free speech and all political dissent
The latest scandal swamping Facebook’s top corporate echelons, and capitalist wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg himself (who is clearly out of his depth and, stuck in the mobs that usually surround his…
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica And Surveillance Capitalism
Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade. The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated…
Hillel And Facebook Censorship: Conflating Zionism With Judaism
In applying its community standards, Facebook frequently conflates anti-Zionist attacks with anti-Semitism. A case in point is a post for which I have just been put in Facebook jail (i.e.,…
Bangladesh, Social Media And Longings In A Bizarro World
It definitely looks like law enforcement in Bangladesh--as also apparently in many other countries, e.g. reference: the British Home Minister's recent opinions regarding social media, not forgetting similar persistent…
Facebook Server Farm Powered by “Clean Energy” Will Increase Denmark’s Greenhouse Emissions
Co-Written by Stan Cox and Paul Cox Last month, the social-media giant Facebook announced plans to build a new data center near Odense, Denmark. The expansion of server capacity was…
Facebook’s “Fake News” Measures: A Move Toward Censorship
On Thursday, the global social media giant Facebook announced new measures it said were designed to limit the spread of “fake news” from hoax web sites. The measures, however, are…
US Gov’t, Oligarchs Behind Planned Fake News Flagging on Facebook
Facebook is adding a new feature wherein a group that the Washington Post calls an ‘independent third party fact checker’ will decide whether stories are real or fake, and flag…
Mark Zuckerberg, Don’t Get Hoodwinked By Media And Politicians
Shortly after Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat, the media came up with another spin: Zuckerberg and Facebook were held responsible for her debacle! What crap! Facebook apparently carried "fake news". Didn't…
What Indian Women Want: A Better Facebook or A Better Internet?
We have been hearing a lot of discussions around Indian women and social media after the Narendra Modi-Mark Zuckerberg interface in the Facebook Townhall at Menlo Park last month. In…
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