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, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?) On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine on the company for transferring[Read More…]
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 of trade and profit; its political conditions manipulated to favour predatory companies. A similar pattern is detectable in the digital world. The slavers have replaced their human product with data[Read More…]
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 her premature death. In the second, she is dead, beheaded, and roasted. Can you guess which post was approved? It turns out that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is[Read More…]
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 was condemned for doing before: encourage discussions on hating a group and certain figures, while spreading the bad word to everyone else to do so. The Russian Federation, President Vladimir[Read More…]
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 Google and Facebook to cough up some €210 million ($237 million) between them, fining the firms for their questionable use of data-tracking ‘cookies’ on their sites. A report by The[Read More…]
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 vision. On October 28, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a new company brand, Meta, at the annual Facebook Connect event. According to Facebook, “Meta… brings together our apps and technologies under one[Read More…]
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 of Israel’s crimes. But Facebook and Instagram users soon noticed their posts being taken down, their accounts suspended and their content receiving reduced visibility. A new report by Human Rights Watch confirms that the[Read More…]
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 news item with less long-term significance but more sensational media appeal is that what was supposed to be a small configuration change took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down for a few hours[Read More…]
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 that Facebook could produce a person willing enough to show us the laundry, with the dirt still caking the content. And the laundry in question proved to be bountiful, with[Read More…]
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 shortly after the 2020 election, said that Facebook has been a major contributor to divisions in society. “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people[Read More…]
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 about what Zionism means to Palestinians… We are not allowed to question the concept of Jewish self-determination in historic Palestine,” as Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal expresses[Read More…]
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 block Australians from sharing and posting news items on hosted pages. The company’s target of opprobrium: the News Media Bargaining Code. The Code’s ostensible purpose is to address the inequalities[Read More…]
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. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content. As the company notice to those trying[Read More…]
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. And when the blood does flow, it will not only be the hands of Indian corporates that will be drenched in red but also those of global investors backing them.[Read More…]
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 important calls for a more just and green world! In fact, all of Greenpeace USA’s online staff could not access their Facebook accounts, along with frontline Wet’suwet’en Indigenous leaders, grassroots[Read More…]
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 to date is $111 billion USD. It makes him the fifth richest man on the planet. In 2017, while Zuck was nabbing an honorary degree from Harvard College, Harvard’s 28th[Read More…]
“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 so much about giving people a voice” -Mark Zuckerberg Dear Mark, Very few have the privilege, convenience and power to give the masses a voice, like you do. Facebook has[Read More…]
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 the claim that the internet would challenge dictatorships even at an inconvenient time to do so. While thousands were out on streets during the Arab Spring, he delivered a Ted[Read More…]
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 for hate speech or content that promotes violence.” Can we trust him? How serious is he to ensuring his claims? Is he ready to walk the talk? After all, accusations[Read More…]
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’ morale, cause a lot of headaches, bring lawsuits, and affect the organization’s ability to function cohesively. He or she can waste the CEO’s time and the precious resources defending and[Read More…]
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 truly psychopathic individuals. The mass of others were ragged and illiterate peasants easily roused to hatred of the Tutsi. Perhaps the most sinister people I met were the educated political[Read More…]
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 are praised as “virtuosos of ingenuity,” to use Steve Forbes’ words, “creating and supplying products and services that were once unimaginable and that have been enabling us to survive the[Read More…]
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, and while Mark Zuckerberg cannot launch missiles, as yet, he can certainly launch platforms and what can be coarsely termed “deliverables”. Having become the object of derision and resentment from[Read More…]
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 false assumption that suppressing expressions of racism, bigotry, supremacism and intolerance or psychological warfare campaigns by the likes of Russia will ensure that they do not reach the public. Perhaps,[Read More…]
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 information, poster child, in fact, of surveillance capitalism, is losing users. At the very least, it is falling to that mild phenomenon in business speak called “flat-lining”, a deceptively benign[Read More…]
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 Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). In a previous FAIR article (8/22/18), I noted that the “fake[Read More…]
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 no legal oversight or recourse. Its “community guidelines” are so sweeping and broad that effectively any statement expressing any critical political view can be constrained as violent, defamatory, “extremist,” “bullying”[Read More…]
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 appearances of late, often looks like a deer in the headlights), is not about what his company did or didn’t do regarding the safeguarding of privacy of hundreds of millions[Read More…]
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 the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state. It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue[Read More…]
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., blocked from posting for 30 days). The post says, “#Hillel, a racist organization, has as much place on university campuses as does the #KKK.” And Facebook removed it, saying: “We[Read More…]
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 efforts in the US–is going through a phase that maybe described as mid-life crisis. That’s the time when people—especially men, we’re told, but lots of women too though theirs are[Read More…]
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 needed, the company said, to support “richer content” such as live-streaming and virtual reality. The Facebook executive who made the public announcement (live-streamed, of course), noted that the new facility[Read More…]
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 part of a broader corporate media campaign to clamp down on independent and alternative news organizations. Facebook’s announcement is in response to criticism it received from major corporate news outlets[Read More…]
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 ones the group decides are fake. WaPo leaves out of its report that the ‘independent fact checker’, the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, receives funding from a US government-funded group, the[Read More…]
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 the media invent and promote precisely this kind of “news” to bounce Hillary over the last hurdle? It’s convenient for media whores to blame everybody except themselves and Hillary’s corrupt[Read More…]
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 Facebook Townhall Modi pointed out the importance of women and the role of social media in a democracy. In IIT Delhi Facebook Townhall on Oct 28th Zuckerberg marketed his net[Read More…]
Release activists incarcerated in Bhima Koregaon Case 
The writing is on the wall: Farmers warn Parliamentarians 
The End Stage of American Empire 
End the culture of impunity and arrest accused Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh now 
Brasilia summit: Lula and Maduro reboot regional integration 
Steaming Ahead: Sikkim’s First Rail Project to Boost Connectivity by 2024 
Five years behind bars for five activists 
Five Years Since The First Arrests In Bhima-Koregaon Case 
Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example 
Conflict, Migration, and Demography in Russia and Its Border Regions 
Railway Safety Has Been Short of Funds, Needs Early Increase 
Notes on two recent sensations 
A shocking picture of health apathy….. 
Railway accident in Odisha- Are the Railways ready for high-speed trains? Who is to be blamed? 
Teaser of Film on Savarkar: Lies Galore 
Preserving India’s Heritage: The Power of International Collaboration for Natural and Cultural Conservation 
Looking for Home in an Overheating World – If Emissions Continue, Will We All Be Migrants Someday? 
From Ploughshares to Swords—Sudden Militarism of Those Who Once Stood for Peace 
Transreality 
Australia stands to benefit from India only if Indian democracy survives, not from rallies 
Whether Rhetoric or Serious, Arab Diplomacy Can’t Be Ignored! 
Unleashing the Power of Sports: How Sporting Events Drive Tourism Growth 
Black Panther and the need to dream for a better world 
Mexico’s Zapatistas Warn Chiapas Is on “the Verge of Civil War” 
Why distress from railway accidents may be much higher than is commonly believed 
Stop Plastic Pollution as We Commemorate 50th World Environment Day 2023 
Modi Regime should be Called to Account for the Deadliest Triple Train Collision at Balasore 
Thoughts on World Environment Day 
Nuclear Fusion: Eternal Energy = Eternal Damnation 
Why There Should Be A Treaty Against the Use of Weaponized Drones 
Protests in Germany after Anti-fascists sent to five years in prison 
Women Wrestler’s Protests: Exposing Beti Bachao Slogan 
Inauguration of Parliament Building: Coronation Ceremony? 
FBI appears to be continuing investigation of Julian Assange 
And We Are Much More Than Our Uterus. (In Solidarity With the protesting wrestlers) 
Strike ends in Belsonika with reinstatement of 10 suspended workers 
A Man Without a Strategy: How Netanyahu Is Provoking Armed Intifada in the West Bank 
The Ancient Patterns of Migration 
Seven Reasons Why the Present Phase of Imperialism is the Most Dangerous Ever 
Unmasking Tourism’s Roadblocks 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
