Tag: Facebook

Democrats increase pressure on Facebook over content policies and Trump posts

Democrats also question the company’s paid advertising policies and its ‘micro-targeting’ practices, which allow advertisers to aim divisive messages at specific users

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, Facebook is emerging as a key target of Democrats who say the social media giant’s passive approach to President Donald Trump’s provocative online statements is endangering American lives and the state of American democracy.

In the two weeks since Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to take action on a post by Trump that appeared to endorse the shooting of protesters against police brutality who engaged in looting, Democrats in Congress and former Vice President Joe Biden, the party’s presumptive nominee to run against Trump, have turned on Facebook’s content policies.

In a letter to Zuckerberg last week, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, D-Mo., and other House Democrats wrote that the company’s response to violent content and the spread of disinformation on its platform, such as Trump’s recent false statements about mail-in voting, “are extremely troubling.” Continue reading.

Facebook employees said they were ‘caught in an abusive relationship’ with Trump as internal debates raged

Washington Post logoA week of internal debates shows widespread anxiety about how the company will handle abuse going into 2020, according to a trove of internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.

SAN FRANCISCO — At an emergency town hall meeting Facebook held this week, days after President Trump posted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” on his account, 5,500 Facebook employees had a demand for Mark Zuckerberg.

Before the meeting, the employees voted in a poll on which questions to ask the chief executive at the meeting, according to internal documents viewed by The Washington Post. The question that got the most votes: “Can we please change our policies around political free speech? Fact checking and removal of hate speech shouldn’t be exempt for politicians.”

Zuckerberg also met privately with black executives to discuss their pain and objections to Trump’s post, which referred to responding to protesters over George Floyd’s death while in Minneapolis police custody. And employees questioned whether Facebook was in an “abusive relationship” with the president, according to a trove of documents that included more than 200 posts from an internal message board that showed unrest among employees. Continue reading.

Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests

Washington Post logoA trio of far-right, pro-gun provocateurs is behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country, offering the latest illustration that some seemingly organic demonstrations are being engineered by a network of conservative activists.

The Facebook groups target Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and they appear to be the work of Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called “Minnesota Gun Rights,” and his siblings, Christopher and Aaron. By Sunday, the groups had roughly 200,000 members combined, and they continued to expand quickly, days after President Trump endorsed such protests by suggesting citizens should “liberate” their states.

The Dorr brothers manage a slew of pro-gun groups across a wide range of states, from Iowa to Minnesota to New York, and seek primarily to discredit organizations like the National Rifle Association as being too compromising on gun safety. Minnesota Gun Rights, for instance, describes itself as the state’s “no-compromise gun rights organization.” Continue reading.

Stealth political ads flourish on Facebook

More than half of Facebook pages that featured U.S. political ads failed to disclose who was behind them, NYU researchers found.

More than half of Facebook pages that displayed U.S. political ads during a recent 13-month period concealed the identities of their backers, according to research reviewed by POLITICO — a tide of deceptive messaging that raises new questions about the social network’s promises of transparency.

The stealth political ads were estimated to cost at least $37 million, equivalent to 6 percent of all the money spent on Facebook messages in the U.S. during the research period, from May 2018 until June 2019, according to estimates from New York University researchers.

The academics also found evidence that partisan groups across the political spectrum had created 16 clusters of inauthentic communities on the world’s largest social network that bought ads aimed at swaying potential voters, borrowing from tactics Russian operatives had employed during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Continue reading.

Facebook takes down deceptive Trump campaign ads — after first allowing them

Washington Post logoThe ads were misleading about the U.S. census, the social media platform said.

Facebook removed Trump campaign ads on Thursday for violating its policy against misleading references to the U.S. census amid criticism that it has given politicians too much leeway to misinform users on its platform.

The Trump ads urged Facebook users to “take the official 2020 Congressional District Census today,” but despite the look and language of the ad, they were not related to the once-a-decade national count of U.S. citizens happening this year. Instead, the ads linked to a survey on the “Certified Website of President Donald J. Trump,” which collected information and requested a donation.

Facebook initially said it would permit the ads, ruling that they were clearly not a part of the U.S. census, according to Popular Information, a politically themed online newsletter that first reported on the ads and the company’s refusal to remove them. Facebook announced its policy against misleading references to the census in December

How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

Washington Post logoFacebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.

In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships. Continue reading.

Facebook won’t limit political ad targeting or stop false claims under new ad rules

Washington Post logoBut changes announced Thursday will allow users to exercise control over more of the ads they see.

Facebook on Thursday defied public calls to adopt significant limits on political advertising ahead of the 2020 presidential election, opting instead to introduce changes that allow users to control more of the ads they see.

The company’s new rules will continue to allow politicians to make false claims in their paid political posts and preserve the powerful yet controversial targeting tools that long have helped Democrats and Republicans deliver messaging to narrowly segmented audiences on the social networking site.

Pressure to rethink its approach to political ads came from a wide array of federal regulators, digital experts and privacy advocates, as well as some of Facebook’s own employees. They argued that the company’s policies coarsened the American electorate and exposed users to serious risks, including viral disinformation, which malicious actors could pay to promote on the site. Continue reading.

Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump had a secret dinner last month

In October, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made national headlines when he visited Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, Libra. Having faced scandal after scandal during the past few years, this visit to Capitol Hill was contentious, with progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Katie Porter (Calif.) in particular grilling the Facebook boss about his website’s practices. But it turns out that Zuckerberg’s appearance before the House wasn’t the only stop he made while in the nation’s capital: NBC News reported late Wednesday that Zuckerberg had a private dinner with President Trump during his October visit.

Also at the dinner was Peter Thiel, a multi-billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Republican donor — and, oh yeah, Facebook board member. Thiel, like Facebook, has a fraught relationship with the media; Zuckerberg spent part of his October testimony explaining his resistance to fact-checking political advertisements on his platform, even as the spread of false information on Facebook faces increased scrutiny.

While the White House did not comment on the dinner, Facebook did. “As is normal for a CEO of a major U.S. company, Mark accepted an invitation to have dinner with the president and first lady at the White House,” a company spokesman wrote in an email to NBC News.

View the complete November 21 article by Seamus Kirst on the Mic.com website here.

Phillips Questions Zuckerberg As House Considers Election Security Package

WASHNGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03) questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about online foreign interference in U.S. Elections during a hearing in the House Financial Services Committee. The hearing comes as the House passed the SHIELD Act (Stopping Harmful Interference in Elections for A Lasting Democracy Act), a comprehensive election security package. The SHIELD Act includes Rep. Dean Phillips’s (MN-03) Firewall Act, aimed at preventing foreign interference in U.S. elections by prohibiting foreign nationals from paying for online advertisements created to attack or support federal candidates.

During his questioning, Phillips raised concerns about the ability of foreign entities to purchase political ads on the social media platform. Phillips told Zuckerberg to expect Congressional scrutiny should Facebook allow entities to purchase ads with Facebook’s proposed anonymous crypto-currency, Libra.

Facebook takedowns show new Russian activity targeted Biden, praised Trump

Washington Post logoThe company disabled a network of accounts that posed at times as locals in swing states to post on divisive political issues and the upcoming presidential election

Facebook on Monday said it removed a network of Russian-backed accounts that posed as locals weighing in on political issues in swing states, praising President Trump and attacking former vice president Joe Biden — illustrating that the familiar threat of Russian interference looms over the next U.S. presidential race.

Facebook said the network bears the hallmark of the same Kremlin-backed group that interfered in the 2016 election by sowing social discord, seeking to boost Trump and attacking Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The new disinformation campaign appears to follow the same playbook.

This time, a coordinated group of Russian accounts that appears to show some links to the Internet Research Agency largely took to Facebook’s photo-sharing app, Instagram, to post content this year about U.S. politics and memes targeting Democratic presidential contenders.

View the complete October 21 article by Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker on The Washington Post website here.