Tag: facebook

Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”

The mask is slipping (pun fully intended), all over the place – regarding the Big Tech/Big Government collusion. Now it’s time to pay close attention to the role played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We’ve already been awed – just by the magnitude of the whole thing – if not exactly “shocked” by the Twitter Files.

After all, while it was happening, a whole lot of observers surmised that something of the sort had to be behind the unprecedented and, seemingly inexplicable levels of censorship on the platform.

But – what in the world was happening at Facebook, around the same time? After all, Facebook is an almost orders of magnitude bigger and more influential social network than Twitter.

For the time being, we don’t have the same “direct line” to internal documents as is the case with Twitter, which was made possible by the dedication to transparency by the new owner himself.

However, what could be dubbed as the “Facebook Files” are based on credible sources, too – Reason is coming out with a story based on confidential emails that emerged thanks to a court case – the state of Missouri suing the Biden administration.

The emails show that Facebook (and by extension Instagram) representatives and the CDC not only kept in touch at all times, but that the tech giant also “routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.”

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Facebook, Instagram Just Updated Changed Their Policy To Allow Images Of Bare Breasts On The Platforms — But Only For ‘Trans,’ ‘Non-Binary’

Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram are modifying their regulations to allow transgender and non-binary users to post photos and videos featuring their bare breasts, according to an update published on Meta’s advisory board.

The same rules will not apply to biological females. The tech oligarchs will not permit women who identify as female to flash their bare breasts on the social media platforms.

Meta’s Oversight Board ordered Facebook and Instagram to rescind a ban on images of men with breasts who identify as transgender and anyone who identifies as “non-binary,” those who view themselves as neither male nor female.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg instituted the Meta Oversight Board in 2018 to act as the company’s “Supreme Court,” providing the platform’s governing body the authority to make precedent-setting content moderation decisions and censorship regulations.

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A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet. 

In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence. 

They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups. 

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

The other shots show rooms from homes around the world, some occupied by humans, one by a dog. Furniture, décor, and objects located high on the walls and ceilings are outlined by rectangular boxes and accompanied by labels like “tv,” “plant_or_flower,” and “ceiling light.” 

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UK government asked Twitter and Facebook to “tweak” algorithms during Covid

Former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock, self-styled as an official who was at the forefront of Britain’s battle against Covid, didn’t seem to feel like he had done enough in 2020 and 2021, so he felt compelled to milk the pandemic cow by writing a book about that “battle.”

But he wasn’t laboring alone, since he had a co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, who reports say is actually opposed to Hancock’s policies and is a lockdown skeptic.

And now, Oakeshott, who had access to official records and Hancock’s notes exchanged with “all the key players in Britain’s Covid-19 story” – as the book’s blurb states – has penned her own “story,” an article based on the collaboration published by the Spectator, whose content draws from the material used for the book.

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Meta warns it will remove ALL news content on Facebook if Congress approves Journalism Competition and Preservation Act

Meta is threatening to remove all news content from Facebook in an apparent attempt to pressure Congress over potentially passing the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act that would counter market dominance by social media giants.

The act would ostensibly allow news organizations to negotiate the terms of their content distribution with Big Tech according to the Daily Mail. The move would allegedly impact Meta’s revenue and the company has its fur up over the attempt at leveling the playing field for news.

On Monday, Meta’s Communications Director Andy Stone tweeted that if Congress passes the bill, the company would be “forced” to remove all news content from Facebook and Instagram.

“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” the statement from Meta asserted.

“The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line – not the other way around. No company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue. Put simply: the government creating a cartel-like entity which requires one private company to subsidize other private entities is a terrible precedent for all American businesses,” it concludes.

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New Zealand admits it has direct access to Facebook takedown portal where it can flag content for censorship

New Zealand’s government has officially admitted that it has partner access to Facebook’s controversial content takedown portal.

This portal is designed specifically for government agencies to flag content to Facebook for censorship. According to The Intercept, which reported on the portal in October, government partners can also use the portal to “report disinformation directly” to Facebook.

And in a recent response to a New Zealand Official Information Act (OIA) request, which asked whether the government has partner access to Facebook’s takedown portal, the New Zealand government confirmed that the Department of Internal Affairs has access. While this was the only government department that was confirmed to have access to the portal, the OIA response also said “we cannot advise if any other government agency has access to the takedown portal.”

We obtained a copy of the OIA response for you here.

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Oversight Board tells Meta to stop complying with police requests to censor rap music

Meta’s Oversight Board said that Meta should not have complied with a request from London’s Metropolitan Police to ban a drill music track. Drill music is a rap genre that politicians and law enforcement agencies have associated with gang violence.

In January, rapper Chinx (OS) posted a video of his song “Secrets Not Safe.” Shortly after posting the song on Instagram, Meta received an email from the police requesting the removal of the song. Meta escalated the case to a team for special consideration, and ruled that it violated its policies because it referenced a shooting that took place in 2017 and included what police believed to be a “threatening call to action.”

After the song was removed, Chinx appealed and had it reinstated by a moderator who was not part of the special consideration team. The decision was overruled and the song got banned again after a week, again following a request by the police.

The board questioned whether Meta considered the context, or simply compiled because it was a request from the police.

“Not every piece of content that law enforcement would prefer to have taken down — and not even every piece of content that has the potential to lead to escalating violence — should be taken down,” the board wrote in its decision.

Social media platforms are less transparent about informal requests like the email from the Met.

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FBI Director Cannot ‘Be Sure’ Whether Facebook Is Sending User Information to Agents

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday he cannot “be sure” whether Facebook is sending the agency user information without being compelled to do so, an act that would violate the law.

Wray’s remark in response to a question from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) comes after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a report (pdf) in early November in which a whistleblower suggested that the FBI has a “special relationship” with Facebook “in which it accepts private user information without any consent or legal process.”

The move is part of a program “likely codenamed ‘Operation Bronze Griffin,’” said the report. It alleges that the types of user content that Facebook provides the FBI “have a partisan focus, tending only to concern users from one side of the political spectrum,” and that there is a pro-Democrat bias within the FBI.

On Thursday, Paul asked Wray at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the report’s allegations, “Is Facebook or any other social media company supplying private messages or data on American users that is not compelled by the government or the FBI?”

“Not compelled, in other words, not in response to legal process?” Wray queried.

“No warrant, no subpoena, they’re just supplying you information on their users?” Paul said.

“I don’t believe so,” Wray responded. “But I can’t sit here and be sure about that as I as I sit here.”

Paul told Wray that if Facebook is supplying the FBI with user information, it would be against the law—the Stored Communications Act, part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986—which “prohibits providers from sharing electronic communications with any person or entity, unless it’s compelled.”

“This was done to protect the privacy of people, so we could feel like we can send an email or direct message to people without having that information given over,” Paul said.

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Facebook Censors Posts on Vaccine Harms Because They “Make People Feel Unsafe”

This morning, a friend published a short post on Facebook, drawing attention to how it seemed to him the company was not even bothering any more to refer to the so-called ‘independent fact-checkers’ to justify their censorship. He had re-posted a clip where Fox reporter Tucker Carlson discussed the negative effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, referring to peer-reviewed studies. The clip is available here.

How on earth can peer-reviewed results constitute “misinformation”? The peer review process isn’t perfect, far from it, but after all it is the accepted standard. A first conclusion therefore is that the word ‘misinformation’ does not refer to misinformation any more, it simply refers to any information the censor wants suppressed. The word has become meaningless.

The action, then, is suppression of a certain kind of information, but what about the reason? The reason for suppressing uncomfortable information about COVID-19 vaccines is that seeing this information may “make some people feel unsafe”. What does this mean precisely?

There are at least two possibilities, and here I’m talking only about those who believe in the narrative. The first is that people may feel unsafe seeing evidence that contradicts what they’ve been told by the authorities, the mainstream media and the social media giants; the ‘safe and effective’ mantra. Watching Tucker Carlson’s review of the evidence might make people feel unsafe, uncertain, sceptical towards the propaganda, relentlessly pushed towards them; this is what happens when you discover you’ve been deceived by someone you trusted. You feel unsafe for you don’t know who to trust any more.

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Facebook launches new tools to “combat climate misinformation”

The world’s largest social network, Facebook, has announced plans to increase its elevation of “authoritative climate information” and expand its “fact checking” of content that it deems to be climate misinformation.

Facebook will expand its fact-checking tools by increasing the availability of its “Climate Science Center” (a page that contains “factual resources from the world’s leading climate organizations and actionable steps people can take in their everyday lives to combat climate change”) to 165 countries and expanding its “Climate Inform Labels” (labels that are added to Facebook posts and link to posts from the Climate Science Center).

The tech giant has also launched a “Climate Science Literacy Initiative” that will “pre-bunk climate misinformation” by running ads that “feature five of the most common techniques used to misrepresent climate change.”

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