Tag: facebook

Facebook says it will begin removing coronavirus vaccine misinformation

Facebook announced Thursday that it will begin removing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines as the immunizations are poised to be rolled out globally.

Posts containing false claims about “safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects” about the vaccines can be taken down, the social media giant said in a blog post.

“For example, we will remove false claims that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips, or anything else that isn’t on the official vaccine ingredient list,” it said.

The policy change comes as vaccines from three companies – Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna – near approval by health authorities.

Keep reading

Facebook Censorship Algos Go Haywire, Blocking Ads From Struggling Legitimate Businesses As “Hate Speech”

In what is definitely some type of Karmic payback for social media companies now appending some type of label to what seems like every other post nowadays, Facebook just found out that its super-duper censoring algorithm also banned advertisements from some struggling businesses, mistaking them as hate speech.

We love it when a plan comes together.

One woman, Ruth Harrigan, who advertises on Facebook to sell her honey and beeswax-based products, told Bloomberg she thought she missed out on an estimated $5,000 in revenue after Facebook mistakenly banned her ads right before black Friday.

She said: “I was getting a little anxious thinking, ‘Oh my God, Black Friday is around the corner, most of my sales for the year happen in November and December and that’s it,’. I said, ‘If I’m shut down any longer than this, it’ll cripple me.’”

The company’s “misfiring content-moderation software” was to blame – and it happened in the middle of a pandemic when sellers are more reliant on Facebook and social media advertising to drive business. In fact, Facebook has been censoring so much content this year, it has relied heavily on software to do the job, since they don’t have enough human moderators. 

Keep reading

FBI launches open attack on ‘foreign’ alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy

The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Silicon Valley social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI.

In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram and Google to remove or restrict ads on the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online journal that published critical opinion articles on US policy toward Iran and the Middle East. The bureau has never offered a clear rationale, however, despite its private discussions with Facebook on the ban.

Keep reading

Report: Half of Trump’s Twitter and Facebook Posts Since Election Day Flagged as Misinformation

A recent report states that half of President Donald Trump’s posts since election day have been flagged as misinformation by Facebook and Twitter and censored on each platform.

Forbes reports that half of President Trump’s social media posts on Facebook and Twitter since election day have been labeled as false or questionable by the social media giants.

Of President Trump’s 22 posts on Facebook and Twitter, 11 have been labeled by the Silicon Valley tech firms. The posts include the President’s claims to victory and assertions of election fraud taking place. Twitter hid some posts on the President’s timeline and warned users that “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” and restricted users’ ability to like or retweet the tweets.

Underneath some of President Trump’s Facebook posts, the social media company warned users that “final votes may different from the initial vote counts” or “elections officials follow strict rules when it comes to ballot counting, handling and reporting,” but users were still able to reply to and share the posts.

Keep reading

From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent

Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.

Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.

Keep reading

Obama-Era Officials Call for More Government Control of Your Facebook Feed

Writing in the Washington Post, senior Obama-era official Samantha Power has called on social media giant Facebook to do more to crush what she calls conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating on its platform.

Describing it as being “overrun with foreign disinformation,” Power demanded Mark Zuckerberg “take far more drastic steps” to “detox” the company’s algorithm. The former United States ambassador to the United Nations compared the viral vitriol circulating on Zuckerberg’s platform to the weaponized disinformation campaigns in the former Yugoslavia, implying that it could help spark a conflict in the United States.

52 percent of Americans get news on Facebook, making it an enormously powerful and influential news service, not just a social media or messaging app. For years, it has at least partially outsourced its news feed algorithm cultivation to the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization funded by the U.S. government and headed and controlled by former CIA chiefs. Thus, the government already has significant control over the content on America’s most important media platform.

Keep reading