DragonI

Facebook removed 3 billion fake accounts over a six-month period

Facebook said it had removed more than 3 billion fake accounts over the past two quarters, a spike in inauthentic activity that the tech giant attributed to “unsophisticated” bad actors that are caught in the act of creating scores of fake profiles in batches.

www.washingtonpost.com

Between October and March, Facebook reported it removed or labeled 

• 11.1 million pieces of terrorist content
• 52.3 million instances of violent or graphic content
• 7.3 million posts, photos or other uploads containing hate speech
• 1.4 million pieces of content that violated its rules against selling guns, gun parts or ammunition
• 1.5 million items about drugs, including marijuana.

Europe Could Fine Tech Companies That Don't Remove Terrorist Content in One Hour

The European Union has made a litany of warnings to online platforms, urging them to better moderate their hellish platforms or else. But these have all been voluntary guidelines with the looming threat of enforcing “necessary legislation” if tech companies don’t shape up. This week, the EU’s executive body got a step closer to making good on that promise.

gizmodo.com|Melanie Ehrenkranz

The proposal focuses specifically on hampering the spread of terrorist content, again giving platforms one hour to take the illegal content down. At the moment it’s simply a proposal, requiring support from member states and the EU parliament to become legislation, according to TechCrunch.

Earlier guidelines seemingly and explicitly targeted giants in the tech space, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft, which makes sense, given the dominance of their platforms. But the Commission’s latest proposal extends beyond just the big ones, stating that all hosting service providers that operate in the Union would be held accountable by this legislation, “regardless of their place of establishment or their size.”

The proposal states that while terrorist content should be quickly removed from platforms, companies should still maintain the data for six months in the event that it was mistakenly or wrongfully scrubbed so that they can reinstate it.

Websites that fail to promptly take down terrorist content would face fines — with the level of penalties being determined by EU Member States (Germany has already legislated to enforce social media hate speech takedowns within 24 hours, setting the maximum fine at €50M).

Although, in a section on penalties, the Commission suggests systematic failure to comply should be subject to financial penalties of up to 4% of the hosting service provider’s global turnover for their last business year.

Twitter is Suspending More Than One Million Accounts Per Day in Latest Purge

Apparently sick of being criticized by everyone from US Congress to Seth Rogan for not doing enough to purge its platform of bots, trolls, and malicious foreign actors, Twitter has started liberally dropping the ban hammer on suspicious accounts, suspending more than 70 million users over the course of May and June.

gizmodo.com|AJ Dellinger

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence estimates bots make up between nine and 15 percent of Twitter’s userbase. David Caplan, the co-founder of TwitterAudit, told Gizmodo earlier this year that just 40 to 60 percent of Twitter accounts are real people.

Twitter’s crackdown comes in the wake of criticisms leveled against the company—and other social media platforms like Facebook—for allowing propaganda and bots to flood the feed, particularly during the 2016 US presidential election. The companies have been trying to make amends for their shortcomings ever since, initiating new rules for political advertisers and trying to boot as many bots and abusers from the platforms as possible.

The targets of the latest mass suspensions appear to be primarily bots and spam accounts. 

• A Twitter spokesperson told Gizmodo that as of May of this year, the company’s automated systems were identifying and challenging about 10 million accounts per month that were believed to be spammers or automated posters.
• The company also said it is blocking more than 50,000 potential spam accounts per day from even being created. 

According to a survey in 2017 by the Royal Society for Public Health, Britons aged 14-24 believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have detrimental effects on their wellbeing. On average, they reported that these social networks gave them extra scope for self-expression and community-building.

But they also said that the platforms exacerbated anxiety and depression, deprived them of sleep, exposed them to bullying and created worries about their body image and “FOMO” (“fear of missing out”). Academic studies have found that these problems tend to be particularly severe among frequent users.

Far more than 87m Facebook users had data compromised, MPs told

Former Cambridge Analytica employee gives evidence before parliamentary committee

www.theguardian.com|Alex Hern

Far more than 87 million people may have had their Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, according to evidence from former employee Brittany Kaiser.

“The Kogan/GSR datasets and questionnaires were not the only Facebook-connected questionnaires and datasets which Cambridge Analytica used. I am aware in a general sense of a wide range of surveys which were done by CA or its partners, usually with a Facebook login – for example, the ‘sex compass’ quiz.“

“When I first joined the company, our creative and psychology teams, and data science teams, would work together to design some of these questionnaires.”

“Secondly, I have evidence from my own eyes of possible breaches of the Data Protection Act concerning the usage of personal and commercial data of individuals in the Eldon Insurance database and possibly the Ukip database, being used for the benefit of the Leave.EU campaign,”

Who trusts Facebook?

When it comes to protecting their information, more people trust Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo! than those who trust social media giant Facebook.

fingfx.thomsonreuters.com

• 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information
• 66 percent trust Amazon
• 62 percent trust Google
• 60 percent trust Microsoft
• 47 percent trust Yahoo

‘A grand illusion’: seven days that shattered Facebook’s facade

Revelations about the depths of Facebook’s failure to protect our data have finally pulled back the curtain, observers say

www.theguardian.com|Olivia Solon

“Dumb fucks.” That’s how Mark Zuckerberg described users of Facebook for trusting him with their personal data back in 2004. If the last week is anything to go by, he was right.

Since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested from Facebook and improperly shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, it has become increasingly apparent that the social network has been far more lax with its data sharing practices than many users realised.

As the scandal unfurled over the last seven days, Facebook’s lackluster response has highlighted a fundamental challenge for the company: how can it condemn the practice on which its business model depends?

“This is the story we have been waiting for so people will pay attention not just to Facebook but the entire surveillance economy,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built

A group of Silicon Valley technologists plans to call attention to the dangers of tech, including working on an ad campaign aimed at 55,000 public schools.

www.nytimes.com|Nellie Bowles

A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build.

The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States.

The campaign, titled The Truth About Tech, will be funded with $7 million from Common Sense and capital raised by the Center for Humane Technology. Common Sense also has $50 million in donated media and airtime from partners including Comcast and DirecTV. It will be aimed at educating students, parents and teachers about the dangers of technology, including the depression that can come from heavy use of social media.

The effect of technology, especially on younger minds, has become hotly debated in recent months. 

• In January, two big Wall Street investors asked Apple to study the health effects of its products and to make it easier to limit children’s use of iPhones and iPads.
• Pediatric and mental health experts called on Facebook last week to abandon a messaging service the company had introduced for children as young as 6.
• Parenting groups have also sounded the alarm about YouTube Kids, a product aimed at children that sometimes features disturbing content. 

The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes 

• Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager
• Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive
• Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive
• Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana
• Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook
• Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots

The group expects its numbers to grow. Its first project to reform the industry will be to introduce a Ledger of Harms 

• A website aimed at guiding rank-and-file engineers who are concerned about what they are being asked to build.
• The site will include data on the health effects of different technologies and ways to make products that are healthier. 

New Facebook tool tells users if they've liked or followed Russia's 'troll army'

Tool allows users to see if they have engaged with Russian propaganda entity the Internet Research Agency, but won’t reach millions already exposed to fake news

www.theguardian.com|Sam Levin

Facebook has launched a new tool to allow users to see if they’ve liked or followed Russian propaganda accounts, though the feature likely won’t reach many of the millions of people exposed to fake news during US and UK elections.

Facebook on Friday quietly rolled out a new page that says, “How can I see if I’ve liked or followed a Facebook Page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency?”, referencing the infamous Russian entity and “troll army” accused of trying to influence American elections and British politics on social media.

Facebook’s war on free will

The long read: How technology is making our minds redundant

www.theguardian.com|Franklin Foer

In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.

Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behaviour can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That’s always been a danger of the engineering mindset, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and begins to design a more perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in the grand design.

Revealed: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

Leaked policies guiding moderators on what content to allow are likely to fuel debate about social media giant’s ethics

www.theguardian.com|Nick Hopkins

• Facebook will let users livestream self-harm, leaked documents show
• Videos of abortions are allowed, as long as there is no nudity.
• Photos of animal abuse can be shared, with only extremely upsetting imagery to be marked as “disturbing”.
• Videos of violent deaths, while marked as disturbing, do not always have to be deleted because they can help create awareness of issues such as mental illness.

While I am not a programmer, I gravitate to Hacker News the community seems to value smart, clear, concise, rational arguments, and sees through the BS. Because the community is intellectually curious, it is happy to discuss any interesting article that contains a smart new idea or perspective, which extends far beyond programming.

LINK QUALITY: Articles that are low quality and don't provide any new or noteworthy information are not upvoted by HN and as a result I don't need to take time and energy to sift through them. Almost every mainstream news site on the internet is half full of fluff, and the FB newsfeed is even worse. HN avoids this be having a community of smart people who care enough to vote, and also by not being captive to advertisers

COMMENTS QUALITY: Concise, rational, well backed up comments get upvoted. If I don't have a pre-formed opinion of a particular article I can turn to the comments to find the smart people who know what they're talking about, and then the best rebuttals right below. If I stay on WSJ I don't see that.

DIVERSITY Not only does HN cover an incredibly diverse range of topics, but also a diversity of opinion in the comments. Most news sites are siloed by topic, and my FB feed is an echo chamber.

PROCRASTINATION VALUE Something about HN makes it the ultimate place to go when you don't want to do something else. Your brain gets a jolt from hunting through the list and finding something new and interesting to read. And it updates constantly at a similar pace to meet my procrastination needs. Plus the articles are good so I feel like I actually learned something compared with the Buzzfeed articles I might have clicked if I went to FB.

I'm a board-certified anesthesiologist/research scientist, author and blogger (www.bookofjoe.com). I don't know how I happened on Hacker News sometime last year, though it may have been after seeing Y Combinator or one of its principals mentioned somewhere. Sources — and the past — are more often than not misremembered, so I'm hesitant to go beyond that.

What keeps me coming back daily are the links to stories I would never see anywhere else. I'm a TechnoDolt®© (I coined the word) and haven't a clue about coding and software et al, but headlines like "Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages Bite (bloomberg.com)," "What makes the perfect office? (timharford.com)," "Your personal Facebook Live videos can legally end up on TV (thememo.com)," "The Beauty of Nature Seen Through Creepy Webcams (wired.com)," "German parents told to destroy Cayla dolls over hacking fears (bbc.com)," and "Map showing the homeland of every character in Homer’s Iliad (kottke.org)" — 6 of the 30 links currently on the front page! — get me right where I live intellectually.

Non-coding marketing guy here. When I jumped into the "startup" world I did all the cliche things, joining HN being one of them. I also found myself surrounded by tech nerds and I needed to start understanding this foreign language they spoke. I skip over the technical articles on here, which actually makes the reading experience quite fulfilling. There's plenty here for non-techs, including relatively healthy conversations and debates. Also, I like to pick up tech jargon and randomly blurt words out during all-team meetings to give everyone a reason to laugh. "JSON" is my favorite term to use. Every now and then the devs will look over and ask me how I'd approach some problem and I'll string together something to the tune of: "Well, I'd first query the database to ensure we're stringing together the AngularJS properly, then I'd hardcode the server side to strengthen our architecture. Also, JSON."