Tag: facebook

Most online recruitment in sex trafficking cases occurs on Facebook: analysis

The majority of online recruitment in sex trafficking cases last year took place on Facebook, according to a new report.

The Human Trafficking Institute on Tuesday said in its annual report that 59 percent of online recruitment of victims occurred on Facebook, along with 65 percent of child victims.

“The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites,” Victor Boutros, CEO of the Human Trafficking Institute, told CBS News on Wednesday.

“Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases,” he added.

In a statement to CBS News, Facebook said: “Sex trafficking and child exploitation are abhorrent and we don’t allow them on Facebook. We have policies and technology to prevent these types of abuses and take down any content that violates our rules.”

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Facebook “fact checkers” used a letter organized by Wuhan lab backer to “debunk” leak theory and censor allegations, report says

It has emerged that Facebook’s “independent” fact-checkers used a letter organized by a major Wuhan Institute of Virology backer to “debunk” articles suggesting that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.

Facebook recently announced it would no longer flag posts linking the origins of the pandemic to China and the Wuhan Lab.

Since the start of the pandemic over a year ago, Facebook, and other social media platforms, have been flagging posts suggesting the virus leaked from a lab. The social media giant relies on independent fact-checkers to “debunk” conspiracy theories.

In the case of the lab leak theory, it relied on an article by Science Feedback, which “debunked” an opinion piece by Steven Mosher, published in the New York Post on February 23 2020, titled, “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.”

The Science Feedback article cited a letter published in leading medical journal The Lancet, signed by “27 eminent public health experts.”

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During Sex Assault Investigation, Police Chief Caught Running Child Porn Ring on Facebook

The city of East Helena is currently looking to fill the position of police chief within their department as their current chief is no longer employed. He quit in March amid a sex assault scandal and has just been arrested for distributing child sexual exploitation material on social media.

On March 2, Police Chief William Harrington submitted his resignation letter to the city of East Helena after he was accused of sexual assault. According to public records, on February 1st, someone filed a complaint with the Lewis & Clark County Sheriff’s Office, claiming that Harrington had sexually assaulted them. A criminal investigation by the Montana Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation was launched in March and is currently still underway.

Fast forward to this month and the chief’s case is looking grim as he now faces new charges of receiving and distributing child pornography on Facebook.

According to the criminal complaint, Harrington was under investigation for child porn before the sex assault investigation. The complaint states that in September 2020, a law enforcement officer began investigating a Cybertip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, a national centralized reporting system for the online exploitation of children.

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Facebook to “fact-check” and suppress individual users

Personal Facebook accounts that are flagged by Facebook’s fact-checkers for repeatedly sharing “misinformation” will now have all their posts suppressed in the news feed as part of the tech giant’s latest crackdown on content that challenges the narratives of its fact-checking partners.

Facebook also announced that it will start dissuading its users from liking pages that are flagged by its fact-checkers via a pop-up that forces users to complete an additional step before they can like the page. When users attempt to like flagged pages, this pop up appears, tells users that the page has “repeatedly shared false information,” and asks them to choose whether to “Go Back” or “Follow Page Anyway.”

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Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea

Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

A narrative in flux: Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.

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CENSORED: National Vaccine Information Center

A highly-rated nonprofit vaccine safety charity has been censored by Facebook on behalf of pharmaceutical industry interests in a purge of vaccine safety information.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) had maintained a Facebook page since 2008.

The organization was started 39-years ago. Co-founder and president is Barbara Loe Fisher. Fisher became a vaccine safety advocate after her two-and-a-half-year-old son suffered a severe neurological reaction to DPT vaccine in 1980. He was left with multiple learning disabilities that required him to remain in a special education classroom throughout his public school education.

Far from a fringe group, as propagandists try to convince the public, Fisher has provided consumers with crucial vaccine safety information for decades and served as an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee as part of the Vaccine Safety Writing Group, on the agency’s Vaccine Policy Analysis Collaborative, on the Blue Ribbon Panel on Vaccine Safety, and Chair of the Subcommittee on Vaccine Adverse Events.

Additionally, Fisher has served as a member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. And she has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum.

We are not surprised that Mark Zuckerberg views the truthful information that NVIC publishes about vaccine science, policy and law as a threat to perpetuating false narratives about vaccine safety created by the pharmaceutical industry and its business partners. The U.S Congress has encouraged the creation of public-private business partnerships between vaccine manufacturers and federal agencies for the past three decades. In order to be part of those lucrative partnerships, Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are clearly happy to engage in censorship. If NVIC had not done such a good job educating the public about vaccination and health for four decades, our Facebook page would still be up.

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Facebook Whistleblowers Reveal Campaign To Censor Vaccine Hesitancy

Whistleblower organization Project Veritas has obtained internal documents from Facebook insiders detailing the company’s efforts to censor concerns over the COVID-19 vaccine.

Leaked company documents provided by two whistleblowers detail Facebook’s plan to combat “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) worldwide via “comment demotion”.

“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” one insider told Project Veritas. “If I lose my job, it’s like, what do I do? But that’s less of a concern to me.”

The social media giant’s goal is to “reduce user exposure” to those with VH, while also reducing the ability to engage with said posts.

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Doctor’s message about low pediatric deaths from COVID blocked by Facebook

Facebook removed a comment by a doctor on the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths. Facebook claimed the comment violated it “Community Standards on Spam.”

A Facebook user asked about the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths in the month of April. Dr. Tracy Høeg, a sports, spine, and regenerative medicine doctor, responded with factual information from the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and even included a graph.

“Part of the reason I have (for the most part) left Facebook is they delete my post/responses that are factual, which I triple check,” Dr. Tracy Høeg wrote in a May 20 Facebook post. “I was responding to a question about what the number of pediatric deaths were due to COVID in April. I don’t feel like directly citing numbers from CDC and AAP should be deleted as spam, but maybe that is just me. I have moved to Twitter FYI.”

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Facebook Still ‘Secretly’ Tracks Your iPhone—This Is How To Stop It

So, this isn’t good. Your iPhone settings enable you to tell Facebook you don’t want your location tracked. It’s clear and non-ambiguous. Why then, if you tell Facebook “never” to access your location, is the data harvesting giant doing exactly that?

Apple’s iOS 14.5 is just a few weeks old, and the data already suggests it has delivered the expected strike against Facebook . Unsurprisingly, more than 80% of users do not opt in to being tracked. Millions of you have seen through the brazen warnings that Facebook’s free apps won’t remain free unless we surrender our right to privacy.

Facebook generates almost all its revenue from digital advertising—targeting ads by harvesting as much data from you and about you as it can. “Facebook marketing is generally dominated by iOS,” one ad industry article laments, “it’s pretty safe to assume Facebook has lost at least half their data, arguably the most valuable half.”

All of which means that Facebook will be doing ever more with the data that remains. And there’s a hidden danger in all the iOS 14.5 publicity—a false sense of security for iPhone users, thinking that the Facebook data issue is suddenly over, that everything has now changed. That would be very wrong—it really hasn’t.

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How Facebook uses ‘fact-checking’ to suppress scientific truth

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

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