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.

Sheryl Sandberg knew more of Facebook’s work with Definers than she let on

Two weeks after The New York Times revealed Facebook’s controversial work with Republican opposition research firm Definers Public Affairs, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has changed her story in significant ways. The latest revelation: Sandberg herself directed Facebook’s communications team to prob…

techcrunch.com

The truth is that Elliot Schrage could NOT have hired or directed Republican dirty tricksters Definers Public Affairs without the direct approval of his Commander in Chief Mark Zuckerberg or even Facebook’s #2 Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer.

Schrage is not innocent by any means. He ran Facebook’s Communication’s department more like a political party.

The new reporting cites an email between Sandberg and a Facebook senior executive that was circulated more broadly to senior comms and policy staff. “Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook’s stock,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Everything that Definers shared with media was approved by a Facebook employee.

“Definers knows where the bodies are buried”, Facebook source

Facebook’s decision to hire Definers, a corporate-facing outgrowth of the Republican America Rising PAC known for its fierce opposition research, proved to be a deeply controversial departure from Silicon Valley ethical norms.

Definers began its work with Facebook through Facebook’s content communications team and Facebook’s Director of Policy Communications, Andrea Saul, who previously worked under Definers founder Matt Rhoades on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Saul served as the national press secretary for the campaign from early 2011 to November 2012 under Rhoades, who managed the campaign. After the Romney campaign ended, Saul went to work doing communications for Sheryl Sandberg’s nonprofit LeanIn.org and found her way to Facebook in 2016.

Some members of Facebook’s communications team are former Republican campaign staffers and strategists with ties to the outside firm that Facebook controversially brought in to support its own internal PR efforts. As TechCrunch previously reported, those ties are largely through Romney’s campaign.

Facebook’s relationship with Definers was mostly overseen by Andrea Saul, Tom Reynolds and Ruchika Budhraja in Menlo Park. In Washington D.C., Definers was handled by Andy Stone under Facebook’s chief lobbyist, Joel Kaplan. Kaplan, who worked in the George W. Bush administration with Definers’ founder and its president, was also in the loop given his high level policy role and position as a strong in-house Republican voice among many at Facebook.

We posed as 100 senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them.

On the eve of the 2018 midterms, Facebook's "Paid for by" disclosure for political ads is easily manipulated.

news.vice.com

But on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, a VICE News investigation found the “Paid for by” feature is easily manipulated and appears to allow anyone to lie about who is paying for a political ad, or to pose as someone paying for the ad.

To test it, VICE News applied to buy fake ads on behalf of all 100 sitting U.S. senators, including ads “Paid for by” by Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Facebook’s approvals were bipartisan: All 100 sailed through the system, indicating that just about anyone can buy an ad identified as “Paid for by” by a major U.S. politician.

But posing as 100 senators didn’t require being smart, creative, or even particularly well-funded. Receiving approval to run an ad “paid for” by a senator typically just took a few minutes. We used 10 fake Facebook pages with no content, and changed the “paid for” disclosure after each senator was approved.

Facebook rolled out the “Paid for by” tool in May “to help prevent abuse, especially during elections.” Rob Leathern underscored its importance. “This will help ensure that you can see who is paying for the ad,” he wrote at the time. “Which is especially important when the Page name doesn’t match the name of the company or person funding the ad.”

His colleague echoed that a few days ago. “When it comes to advertising on Facebook, people should be able to tell who the advertiser is and see the ads they’re running, especially for political ads,” Facebook Vice President of Ads Rob Goldman wrote on Oct. 27.

Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb f*cks.

Why Are We Just Finding Out Now That All Two Billion Facebook Users May Have Been Harvested?

The real story is not Facebook's revelation of two billion harvested profiles - it's why it took until now to confirm, why it was ok before and whether Silicon Valley's mantra of moving fast and breaking things is the wrong mindset in a world in which the things being “broken” are people’s lives.

www.forbes.com|Kalev Leetaru

Basically, the search function of Facebook's apps was so powerful and widely used that if you were a Facebook user and it was turned on — which it was by default — then you should assume someone out there has access to your information, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have had data on 87 million people

Facebook said Wednesday that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, may have had information on about 87 million Facebook users without the users' knowledge.

money.cnn.com|Heather Kelly

“In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the U.S. — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica by apps that they or their friends used,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Android phone users, Facebook was tracking your calls and texts

"Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy."

qz.com|Marc Bain

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum

— Dylan McKay @dylanmckaynz   - Mar 21, 2018

We Allowed This to Happen. We’re Sorry. We Need Your Help.

What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should say next.

shift.newco.co|John Battelle

This is a hurricane largely of the company’s own making. The culture inside Facebook isn’t built to admit this fact, but if one thing is certain from the Cambridge Analytica story, it is this: It’s time for something fundamental to change inside One Hacker Way. Facebook is truly broken. Zuck must now make good on his promise to fix it. Platitudes, protestations and promises won’t do. A plan of action must be delivered. And those actions are being urgently debated inside that war room right now.

• So what might Zuck say to calm the waters? Start with this: Admit fault 
• Step two, apologize. This seems pretty obvious, but again, it goes against the God complex the Valley has created around its most famous and fabulously wealthy founders.
• Third, and again, utterly counter to traditional Valley hero narratives, ask for outside help. Welcome it.

• Pedophiles R Us
• A Safe Place for Sex Offenders
• Free Child Porn
• Facebook doesn’t have a Sex Offender Registry
• Home of Sexual Predators
• Communities for all Sexual Preferences
• We’re the Roy Moore of the Internet

• Mark Zuckerberg 
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Marc Andreessen
• Erskine B. Bowles
• Susan Desmond-Hellmann
• Reed Hastings
• Jan Koum
• Peter A. Thiel (former Trump Advisor)

Facebook appears Russia’s biggest useful idiot in Vladimir Putin’s bold war

Well, Mark, you moved fast and broke things. Now, how are you going to fix it?

www.thedrum.com

To put it simply: Brad Parscale, the digital director for Trump’s presidential campaign, has said Facebook was the social platform that was most responsible for his surprise election victory.

While Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified in November at US Congressional hearings alongside representatives of Google and Twitter on Russian election interference, Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s investors were probably lighting cigars with $100 bills back at their offices. The social network announced a 47% increase in quarterly revenue to $10.1bn at around the same time as the hearings.

Facebook started with Zuckerberg’s famous motto: ‘Move fast and break things.’ But anyone who encourages people to destroy things with such reckless disregard is an immature brat at best or a dangerous psychopath at worst.

Russia pulled down the pants of the social media and tech industries -- to the detriment of the entire western world. I wonder how social media startups and VCs feel today when they get a taste of their own medicine by someone else who moved fast and broke things. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin should co-present at the next TechCrunch Disrupt.

Instead, companies such as Facebook that are dominated by software engineers have always put blind faith in data and algorithms even though data can always be hacked and algorithms can always be manipulated. 

Now, we see where that road lies. As a character in a 2017 episode of the US satirical cartoon South Park stated, Zuckerberg created a platform that provides a monetary incentive for people -- or governments -- to spread misinformation.