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Facebook prompts outcry after including ‘alt-right’ website Breitbart in ‘high quality’ news section

Inclusion comes amid criticism of tech company's relationship with right-wing groups

www.independent.co.uk

Earlier this month, Mr Zuckerberg was criticised by liberal commentators for hosting informal talks and off-the-record dinners with conservative journalists, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson. ... and Lindsey Graham

• “Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos had worked directly with a white nationalist and a neo-Nazi to write and edit an article defining the “alt-right” movement and advancing its ideas.”, The Guardian
• Breitbart writer Jack Hadfield caught running a secret White Supremacist Facebook Group, Think Progress

Breitbart, a publication that has been criticised for repeatedly inaccurate and incendiary reporting, has raised concerns about Facebook’s editorial judgement.

• In 2018, Wikipedia editors voted to ban the publication as a source of fact in its articles “due to its unreliability”.
• During the 2016 presidential election, Breitbart promoted a widely-debunked conspiracy theory about senior Democratic Party figures being involved in a child sex ring and spread baseless claims that Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton aide, was involved with terrorism.
• It has also repeatedly published anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views, as well as publishing journalists who deny climate change.
• However, it has also faced criticism for its reluctance to crack down on white nationalism and far-right hate on its platform.

Facebook has also been criticised in recent weeks for its policy decision to not fact check political adverts.

• “Facebook is paying some publishers $1 million to $3 million a year”, Bloomberg
• “Watch Mark Zuckerberg duck a question about including Breitbart in Facebook's News tab ”, Mashable

Facebook leak contained phone numbers for 419 million users

Another month, another Facebook data breach. As reported by TechCrunch, security researcher Sanyam Jain was able to locate an online database containing phone numbers linked to user IDs for over 419 million Facebook users. While linking phone numbers to user IDs is bad enough, in some cases the data included the user’s real name, gender, …

thenextweb.com|Napier Lopez

Facebook told TechCrunch “the data set is old and appears to have been obtained before [the company] made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers.” The company says that data set has since been taken down and that it has no evidence Facebook accounts were actually compromised. 

it’s another worrisome incident in a series of major data breaches at Facebook – in May, data for 49 million Instagram users was leaked as well.

The exposed server contained more than 419 million records over several databases on users across geographies, including 133 million records on U.S.-based Facebook users, 18 million records of users in the U.K., and another with more than 50 million records on users in Vietnam.

This is the latest security lapse involving Facebook data after a string of incidents since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw more than 80 million profiles scraped to help identify swing voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.