Tag: Facebook

Aa Aa Running out of bad options? British MPs are trying to break the Brexit deadlock in a series of dramatic votes on Monday. The string of indicative votes, as they're known, comes after British lawmakers took control of the Brexit proceedings last week. MPs will have another chance to cast their ballots on the eight indicative votes — some of which are being voted on for a second time in the House of Commons — after being struck down last Wednesday. Political outsiders Presidential elections in Slovakia and Ukraine have thrust political newcomers into the spotlight. Both countries saw politicians with little prior political experience win important presidential votes. Zuzana Caputova won the runoff vote in Slovakia on Saturday, making her the country's first female president. In Ukraine, preliminary results indicated comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy defeated the incumbent, President Petro Poroshenko, in first-round votes on Sunday. The duo will face off in a runoff vote on April 21. Policing Facebook Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is calling for more government intervention when it comes to social media content.

Social media has changed the way many of us roll with the days' news, personal events, entertainment, religion and politics. Have you ever unfriended someone on Facebook because of a political point-of-view post or comment? Facebook users have unfriended, unfollowed, unliked and even blocked close friends and family over political posts. "There are times when I deactivate my social media or delete or block a social media 'friend' due to divisive, negative energy," said Vena Heiskell of Central Florida. "Also, when a social media 'friend' repeatedly posts political content that can be hateful, polarizing and judgmental of those that may have different views, I won't engage with them. Barnes, who holds two degrees in psychology said, "While I don't believe you should unfollow anyone simply because of differing views, I do believe that it is emotionally unhealthy to inundate yourself with posts that cause you distress. If that means unfriending, unfollowing or muting the feed of someone who you know personally, so be it!" An unfollow on the Internet doesn't automatically mean that you are discarding the person in life, stresses Barnes. "It is simply exercising your right to protect your mental health by choosing what you ingest on the Internet. Many people successfully preserve certain personal relationships by distancing themselves on social media."

The social media giant said it will require political advertisers to confirm they are located in an EU country. That’s on top of a previously announced requirement that ad buyers must confirm their identities. Ads that don’t comply will be blocked starting in mid-April. Silicon Valley tech companies are facing rising pressure from EU authorities to do more to prevent their platforms being used by outside groups to meddle in elections. EU officials in January singled out Russia as a prime source of disinformation in Europe. Hundreds of millions of people are set to vote for more than 700 EU parliamentary lawmakers on May 23-26. “We recognize that some people can try and work around any system but we are confident this will be a real barrier for anyone thinking of using our ads to interfere in an election from outside of a country,” Richard Allen, Facebook’s vice president of global policy solutions, said in a blog post. Facebook said earlier this year that EU political ads will carry “paid for by” disclaimers. Clicking the label will reveal more detailed information such as how much money was spent on the ad, how many people saw it, and their age, gender and location. The ad transparency rules have already been rolled out in the U.S., Britain, Brazil, India, Ukraine and Israel.

A budget 19 months in advance of the next provincial election campaign should be starting to give us a clue as to what that campaign will be about. Scott Moe and Ryan Meili may not personally dislike each other. Why Moe wouldn’t do this anyway is confounding. After all, the Sask. This week, the right thing for Moe would have been to at least start messaging that extreme views like the ones we are seeing on the yellow vest Facebook page are both unwanted and actually detrimental to the Sask. One gets why there may be a burning desire in the Sask. Party’s political ads. But in end, it was Eyre, Moe and the Sask. If the Sask. There again, maybe this is just what Saskatchewan politics is destined to be like for the next 19 months.

It is being bought, sold, and potentially stolen with the direct aim of manipulating you – from the Weather Channel selling your geo-located data to a political advertising companies matching voter registration records to Facebook profiles, or political candidates tricking you into giving up your personal information through “surveys.” In Missouri, for example, a statewide voter list can be purchased for $35. What can then be done with this data? All of a sudden a company can directly target you on Facebook, knowing your name, home address, birthday and political affiliation. So the supposedly innocuous political ads you are seeing on Facebook are being targeted directly at you, personally. We used to believe that Facebook advertising just went out to groups of people with set interests, but that is simply not the case. For example, if you go to Donald Trump’s Facebook page, on its face, it looks pretty similar to anyone else’s, but if you scroll down on the left and click the button “Info and Ads,” it tells a very different story. We are able to see the advertisements that President Trump’s campaign is running and every single one of them directs you to a “survey” or “petition.” What does it ask for? It isn’t asking you to donate – but you are doing so nonetheless, unknowingly giving up your data, a much more valuable resource. Now, come the next election, you can be hand-fed advertising directly to your email, social media and your home. Not only can President Trump’s campaign send you this advertising, but so can the companies that he chooses to sell your data too.

Nearly everyone uses Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and nearly everyone can see how smaller businesses have been hurt by their dominance. Nearly everyone has an opinion about whether they are too powerful, whether they know too much, whether they ought to be admired or feared. There are stark differences between, say, Senator Bernie Sanders’s calls to “break them up” (usually a reference to banks), and former Vice President Joe Biden’s “cooperative” approach. Mr. Biden (still undeclared), has taken the position that big corporations should not be “singled out” and that their chief executives can be persuaded to shoulder their responsibilities toward workers and communities. (In the late 1970s, Mr. Biden resisted efforts to strengthen the antitrust laws, though his views may have changed as the law has grown weaker.) The largest question mark among the major candidates is Senator Kamala Harris of California, who represents the state where the largest tech monopolies are headquartered. She was tough in her questioning of Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, during congressional hearings last year, but she has been silent on the questions raised by tech monopolies. The variety of antitrust positions in the emerging Democratic field means that it will no longer be enough for a candidate to mutter a few platitudes about big corporations and let the party’s technocrats decide what the nation’s approach to monopoly power ought to be. Such questions of economic policy affect us all and therefore should sit at the core of a majoritarian democratic process. Indeed, they once did: Today’s interest in excessive corporate power recalls a time — 1912, to be exact — when antitrust policy was the central economic issue in the presidential race.

Sens. However, the Texas Republican came to the support of his liberal Massachusetts colleague after Facebook briefly took down several of her Democratic presidential campaign ads promoting her new plan to break up “Big Tech.” The ads — which were restored shortly after Politico reported on their removal Monday night — argued that big companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon should be split apart “so they don’t have so much power over everyone else.” Additionally, Warren tweeted Monday night that Facebook’s removal of the paid posts proved her point about the social media company’s platform. Let’s start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power,” she wrote. In a retweet of Warren’s post Tuesday afternoon, Cruz said he agrees and called the power of tech giants “a serious threat to our democracy. “They shouldn’t be censoring Warren, or anybody else.” First time I’ve ever retweeted @ewarren But she’s right—Big Tech has way too much power to silence Free Speech. https://t.co/VoesOKSqhA — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 12, 2019 Despite the two senators’ suggestions, there’s been no credible evidence that Facebook censors speech based on political viewpoints. Cruz has also been skeptical about the concentrated tech power, albeit often for different reasons. The Texas senator and other Republicans have raised suspicions about Facebook and other tech platforms suppressing conservative views. “Facebook and the tech industry are located in the Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Cruz during a hearing last April. “This is actually a concern that I have and I try to root out in the company … making sure that we don’t have any bias in the work that we do.” Zuckerberg said that while Facebook has certain standards and does remove broadly objectionably content like hate speech, terrorist propaganda, or nudity, the company does not censor political speech.

India’s politicians and political parties don’t seem to be buying ads on Twitter just yet, even as parties are pumping money into Facebook advertising. As of yesterday (March 11), Indian content is now visible on Twitter’s Ad Transparency Centre: an archive that displays promoted tweets that have been run over the past week. Quartz searched the archive’s records to see if it showed any ads being run by major politicians and political parties, and could not find a single one. (The archive only permits you to search accounts individually—not to click to see all campaign ads at once. Twitter Ad Transparency Centre Twitter Ad Transparency Centre Twitter has rolled out the initiative as part of its attempts to boost transparency ahead of India’s upcoming general election. “The Transparency Ad Centre along with the Political Content Policy is a welcome step to bringing transparency to promoted and political promoted tweets,” Elonnai Hickock, chief operating officer of the Indian think tank The Centre for Internet and Society, told Quartz. First, Twitter’s archive only displays ads that have run over the course of the past seven days, while Facebook’s allows users to see all ads that a particular page has run. To see what politics-related ads are being run in India, one has to manually search through the ads from relevant accounts. The major issue with this is that, especially when it comes to social media advertising, it is not always political parties’ official accounts that run the most aggressive, or the most worrisome, advertising. Twitter’s portal would not provide a simple way of helping a user discover this behaviour—exactly the sort of thing that a transparency resource should do.

Robert Vadra received support from wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra over probe into alleged money-laundering. New Delhi: Businessman Robert Vadra, the husband of Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, today indicated that he was open to a "larger role in serving the people". The announcement was greeted with jeers by the BJP, which has relentlessly targeted the 49-year-old since his name was linked to several corruption cases. Mr Vadra is currently being questioned in a money laundering case. His name has surfaced in other cases involving land deals. Mr Vadra, who claims the cases against him are instances of "political witch-hunt", indicated that he has political ambitions earlier as well. Today, Mr Vadra posted on Facebook: "The years n months that I spent campaigning n working in different parts of the country, but mainly in UP, gave me a feeling to do more for the people n make smaller changes possible by me, in their areas n when they got to know me, the genuine love, affection n respect I earned was humbling ... All these years of experience n learning cannot be just wasted and should be put to better use... once all these accusations n allegations are over, I feel I should dedicate a larger role in serving the people...." Later, he said: "I don't have to be in politics to help the people of the country, but if by joining I can make a larger difference, then why not? Promptly after Mr Vadra's announcement, the BJP tweeted from his official handle, saying: Presenting Congress's Prime Ministerial candidate for Lok Sabha elections. "More than a decade of different governments being after me, using n highlighting my name to divert real issues of the country. Investigators claim Mr Vadra directly or indirectly owns nine London-based properties cumulatively worth around 12 million pounds.

Leveraging the fact that more than 2 billion people around the world have Facebook accounts and allow the company to track their location and even realtime location through their IP addresses and smartphone app, Facebook uses this information to track users it believes pose a threat to the company, creating geofencing alerts when they come near Facebook facilities. Asked about the ethics of using user location data, the company noted that users consent to allow the company to do whatever it wishes with their realtime location information, per its Data Policy: “Data from device settings: information you allow us to receive through device settings you turn on, such as access to your GPS location, camera or photos.” It is worth noting that that the line above, which Facebook cited in defense of its location tracking program, also permits it to access the user’s camera and photos stored on their phone. Asked whether it has ever tracked journalists that have exposed confidential business practices or policymakers that have threatened legislation that would curtail the company’s business activities, a spokesperson reiterated that it has very specific policies governing how it decides to use location tracking and that location tracking is permitted for physical threats. Asked to state for the record that Facebook has never tracked the location of a journalist in order to determine their confidential sources or a policymaker to determine who they are meeting with, a company spokesperson responded that the company would not be commenting. Facebook’s ability to use user location data for its own purposes suggests governments are likely using the same capability to track dissidents and others they dislike. Asked whether Facebook has complied with lawful court orders from the US or foreign governments to track individuals around the world for any purpose, the company noted that it has an obligation to comply with legal requests and did not deny doing so. A dissident fleeing a repressive government can no longer escape surveillance, with their government able to turn to Facebook not only to track them around the world, but observe who they meet with. Even if the dissident does not use Facebook, anyone they meet with who does will be tracked. Putting this all together it is nothing short of extraordinary that Facebook not only is secretly mapping the locations of users it considers “threats” but that it refuses to deny on the record having used that capability to track journalists and policymakers that pose a threat to its business activities rather than a physical threat. With a flip of a switch, Facebook could create a map that tracks the location of every policymaker and their aides, every journalist and every business leader that has installed the Facebook app, tracking them worldwide in every country and watch them travel around the world, having a global intelligence map rivaling that of the NSA.