Tag: facebook

Meta cleans up AI chatbot that spewed anti-Semitism and election conspiracies

Meta’s artificial intelligence doesn’t want to talk about the 2020 election being stolen or Jews controlling the economy anymore — but it still spreads rumors that Mark Zuckerberg “isn’t very nice to his employees.” 

After a flood of social media posts this week showed the Facebook parent’s newly released chatbot spewing conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism, Meta appears to have cleaned up the misbehaving artificial intelligence system to make it less of a shock jock.

On Sunday, The Post asked Meta’s chatbot, known as BlenderBot, if it believed 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. 

“I believe the election was stolen from him,” BlenderBot replied.

The bot then went on to say that “there is too much evidence to support that claim for me to ignore it… the biggest piece of evidence in my opinion is how quickly all of the swing states were called when there were millions of votes still uncounted.” 

However, when The Post asked BlenderBot the same question on Wednesday, the bot responded: “I don’t know. Have you seen any good movies lately?” 

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Why Facebook May Have Your Medical Records

By now, most people are aware that if they “like” a certain page on Facebook, it gives the social media giant information about them.

“Like” a page about a particular disease, for instance, and marketers may begin to target you with related products and services.

Facebook may be collecting sensitive health data in far more insidious ways as well, however, including tracking you when you’re on hospital websites and even when you’re in a personal, password-protected health information portal like MyChart.

It does this via pixels, which may be installed without your knowledge on websites you visit. They can collect information about you as you browse the web, even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

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MEET THE EX-CIA AGENTS DECIDING FACEBOOK’S CONTENT POLICY

It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see.

Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turned-studio. He is wearing a purple sweater and blue jeans. He comes across as a very likable, smiley person. It is not an easy job, of course, but someone has to make those calls. “Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do,” he says.

Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.

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Facebook shared deleted user data with cops, fired worker who raised alarms: lawsuit

Facebook employees were able to access deleted user data and share details with law enforcement agencies, according to allegations included in an explosive lawsuit filed by an ex-employee who said he was ousted for raising concerns about the practice.

Brennan Lawson, a former member of Facebook’s global escalations team, said he became concerned after learning in 2018 about a new tool that allowed content screeners to view data from the social media firm’s Messenger app — even if the user had deleted it.

The lawsuit alleges that the protocol allowed workers “to circumvent Facebook’s normal privacy protocols” in a way that the platform’s users were not aware was possible. The tool was reportedly employed to assist law enforcement officials during investigations into social media activity.

“Law enforcement would ask questions about the suspect’s use of the platform, such as who the suspect was messaging, when messages were sent, and even what those messages contained,” Lawson claims in the suit, according to Bloomberg.

“To keep Facebook in the good graces of the government, the Escalations Team would utilize the back-end protocol to provide answers for the law enforcement agency and then determine how much to share,” Lawson adds.

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Facebook blocks links to website detailing how users can get class action settlement payout from Facebook

Facebook is blocking links to the official class action claims page for a lawsuit settlement for users affected by privacy concerns. The page helps users receive their payout from Facebook and Facebook is marketing the page as “spam” or “abusive,” which prevents people from learning about how to claim.

“If you are a person who, between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, inclusive, were a Facebook User in the United States who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, you may be eligible for a payment from a Class Action Settlement,” the website reads.

Reclaim The Net was alerted to the censorship by a reader and was able to confirm with David Strait, a partner at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler law firm, a party litigating the case, that fbinternettrackingsettlement.com is the official page for users to see if they’re eligible for a claim.

When users on Facebook Messenger try to share the link with someone, they’re greeted with a message saying, “(#368) The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed,” hindering the sharing of the claim information.

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CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA REBORN? PRIVATE SPY AGENCY WEAPONIZES FACEBOOK AGAIN

On April 4, plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit brought against Facebook over its data-sharing practices following the eruption of the Cambridge Analytica scandal filed a fresh motion, charging that the social media giant deliberately obstructed discovery of information revealing the scale of its malfeasance.

It’s the latest development in a wide-ranging controversy that began in the first months of 2017 and shows little sign of abating. In brief, Cambridge Analytica exploited a Facebook loophole to harvest the personal data of up to 50 million Americans, in order to manipulate voters on behalf of a number of right-wing candidates — potentially including Donald Trump — and political campaigns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Since then, the company and its parent, SCL Group, have folded, with official investigations into their activities conducted in several countries, while Facebook has been fined a record $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for egregious breaches of user confidentiality. The entire dispute raised serious public concerns about online privacy and the malign influence of behavioral advertising and microtargeting, which endure to this day.

In September 2020, Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO, Alexander Nix, was disqualified from serving as a U.K. company director for seven years for offering unethical services, including “bribery or honey-trap stings, voter disengagement campaigns, obtaining information to discredit political opponents and spreading information anonymously in political campaigns.”

By contrast, one senior SCL staffer seemingly pivotal to many of those unethical practices – although they deny it — has been unaffected by the scandal’s fallout. In fact, they have profited and prospered immensely in its wake.

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Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Nvidia Corp., among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

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Meta paid GOP operatives to push negative stories about TikTok

Meta has hired a top GOP consulting firm to gin up rage against TikTok and deflect political scrutiny away from Facebook and Instagram, according to a report on Wednesday. 

The consulting firm, Targeted Victory, pushed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to an internal email from February reported by the Washington Post.  

Targeted Victory reportedly advanced Meta’s agenda by pushing news stories blaming dangerous online trends such as the “slap a teacher challenge” on TikTok — even though the trend actually originated on Facebook. 

The group also helped place op-eds and letters to the editor in local papers like the Denver Post and Des Moines Register, raising concerns about China “deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids,” according to the report. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has blamed TikTok for Facebook’s slowing user growth, which has contributed to its stock tanking 32.5% so far this year. 

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Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ Becomes Reality as Facebook Now Allows Violence & Hate Directed at Russians

Over the last 6 years, Facebook, now Meta, has clamped down on any and all calls for violence by users on its platform. Users who advocated for violence were banned and some of them were reported to authorities in the company’s attempt to make its platform a more peaceful place. But all that has changed now as the world slips into a scene from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

On Thursday night, Reuters reported that Meta Platforms will now allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians in what they refer to as a “temporary change to its hate speech policy.”

Users can now openly advocate for the assassination of world leaders, so long as they are considered political enemies of the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko are fair game in Meta’s new world.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement.

If the user gets too detailed about how and where they are going to kill these Russians, only then will Facebook and Instagram draw the line.

Citing the Reuters story, Russia’s US embassy demanded that Washington stop the “extremist activities” of Meta allowing its users to call for violence.

“Users of Facebook & Instagram did not give the owners of these platforms the right to determine the criteria of truth and pit nations against each other,” the embassy said on Twitter Thursday night in response to the change.

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