Plus, also, this website? It's like my home, on the internet. I have this online, virtual space that I can decorate any which way I want. I can add all sorts of things for people to read, talk all day about the things that interest me, make it any color, any pattern, any font, any layout. I keep it simple, yes, but it's my space. And there's Park City, the "netgroup" I admin as well, which is like a communal webspace for me and my friends. It's just, I feel such a sense of ownership over my homepage, such a sense of freedom, and I love it. If there's anything this pandemic has taught me, it's that I need this space to express myself. For the vast majority of the pandemic I essentialy did not have a life outside the digital world, besides the bare minimum like eating and sleeping and such. Most places outdoors right now are too dangerous, and I do not feel any sense of ownership at all in my current living space. The computer is all I have. It's all a lot of people right now have.

why a company like Facebook invests so much research and engineering into the network performance of things as seemingly trivial as notifications.

Greene went on to say, "If it weren't for the Facebook post and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn't be standing here today and you couldn't point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong."

The parallels between walled gardens and the Berlin Wall don't stop there: the East German government maintained that the Wall wasn't there to keep people from escaping; rather, they said it was there to stop westerners who longed for the East German lifestyle from pouring across the border. Today, Facebook insists that it blocks interoperability to keep privacy-plunderers out of its service -- not to trap its users inside.

These noncommercial alternatives would not have to be funded by the government (which is fortunate, given that government funding for public media such as PBS is in doubt these days). Ralph Engelman, a media historian at Long Island University who wrote Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History, points out that the creation of public broadcasting was led by—and partially funded by—prominent nonprofit groups such as the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. In the past few years, several nonprofit journalism outlets such as ProPublica have sprung up; perhaps now their backers and other foundations could do more to ensure the existence of more avenues for such work to be read and shared.

Facebook is fundamentally not a network of ideas. It’s a network of people. And though it has two billion active users every month, you can’t just start trading insights with all of them. As Facebook advises, your Facebook friends are generally people you already know in real life. That makes it more likely, not less, to stimulate homogeneity of thought. You can encounter strangers if you join groups that interest you, but those people’s posts are not necessarily going to get much airtime in your News Feed. The News Feed is engineered to show you things you probably will want to click on. It exists to keep you happy to be on Facebook and coming back many times a day, which by its nature means it is going to favor emotional and sensational stories.

Facebook further its core mission: the optimization and auctioning of human behavior (colloquially known as “targeted advertising”).

Documents examined by the Wall Street Journal last May show Facebook’s internal research found 64 percent of new members in extremist groups joined because of the social network’s “Groups you should join” and “Discover” algorithms.

The few people who are willing to defend these sites unconditionally do so from a position of free-speech absolutism. That argument is worthy of consideration. But there’s something architectural about the site that merits attention, too: There are no algorithms on 8kun, only a community of users who post what they want. People use 8kun to publish abhorrent ideas, but at least the community isn’t pretending to be something it’s not. The biggest social platforms claim to be similarly neutral and pro–free speech when in fact no two people see the same feed. Algorithmically tweaked environments feed on user data and manipulate user experience, and not ultimately for the purpose of serving the user. Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—

Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

On August 10, 2009, FriendFeed accepted Facebook’s offer. As Facebook employees internally discussed via email on the day of the acquisition, “I remember you said to me a long time (6 months ago): ‘we can just buy them’ when I said to you that Friendfeed is the company I fear most. That was prescient! :).”

Facebook Inc. FB 0.73% is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad-targeting practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the platform without the company’s permission. The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university’s engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them.

No, I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, as you probably know. I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem. I think ——

Maar denk eens verder. Gaan we de wereld beter maken door verder te groeien? Dat willen ondernemers. En daar zijn neveneffecten aan verbonden. Uber is zogenaamd idealistisch. Ze willen de klant een betere en goedkopere taxirit bieden, maar hun chauffeurs worden uitgebuit. Met Airbnb kun je een leuk zakcentje verdienen, maar woonwijken worden hotels zonder sociale patronen. Facebook is één grote fake-news-show. Amazon is zo goedkoop dat ze alle kleine ondernemers van de weg drukken. Musk wil ons naar Mars brengen. Dat gaat zeker gebeuren, maar wat gaan we daar doen? Maakt het ons gelukkig? Waarom kiezen we er niet voor om elkaar en onze natuur op deze planeet vooruit te helpen?

But as long as the most important measure of success is short-term profit, doing things that help strengthen communities will fall by the wayside. Surveillance, which allows individually targeted advertising, will be prioritized over user privacy. Outrage, which drives engagement, will be prioritized over feelings of belonging. And corporate secrecy, which allows Facebook to evade both regulators and its users, will be prioritized over societal oversight.

Increased pressure on Facebook to manage propaganda and hate speech could easily lead to more surveillance. But there is pressure in the other direction as well, as users equate privacy with increased control over how they present themselves on the platform.

Facebook makes choices about what content is acceptable on its site. Those choices are controversial, implemented by thousands of low-paid workers quickly implementing unclear rules. These are tremendously hard problems without clear solutions. Even obvious rules like banning hateful words run into challenges when people try to legitimately discuss certain important topics.

At the same time, working through these principles is only the first step in building out a privacy-focused social platform. Beyond that, significant thought needs to go into all of the services we build on top of that foundation -- from how people do payments and financial transactions, to the role of businesses and advertising, to how we can offer a platform for other private services.

People want to be able to choose which service they use to communicate with people. However, today if you want to message people on Facebook you have to use Messenger, on Instagram you have to use Direct, and on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. We want to give people a choice so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer.We plan to start by making it possible for you to send messages to your contacts using any of our services, and then to extend that interoperability to SMS too. Of course, this would be opt-in and you will be able to keep your accounts separate if you'd like.

An important part of the solution is to collect less personal data in the first place, which is the way WhatsApp was built from the outset.

As we build up large collections of messages and photos over time, they can become a liability as well as an asset. For example, many people who have been on Facebook for a long time have photos from when they were younger that could be embarrassing. But people also really love keeping a record of their lives.

We increasingly believe it's important to keep information around for shorter periods of time. People want to know that what they share won't come back to hurt them later, and reducing the length of time their information is stored and accessible will help.

I understand that many people don't think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform -- because frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing.

Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication.

As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.

Facebook AI is introducing M2M-100, the first multilingual machine translation (MMT) model that can translate between any pair of 100 languages without relying on English data. It’s open sourced here. When translating, say, Chinese to French, most English-centric multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available. Our model directly trains on Chinese to French data to better preserve meaning. It outperforms English-centric systems by 10 points on the widely used BLEU metric for evaluating machine translations. M2M-100 is trained on a total of 2,200 language directions — or 10x more than previous best, English-centric multilingual models. Deploying M2M-100 will improve the quality of translations for billions of people, especially those that speak low-resource languages. This milestone is a culmination of years of Facebook AI’s foundational work in machine translation. Today, we’re sharing details on how we built a more diverse MMT training data set and model for 100 languages. We’re also releasing the model, training, and evaluation setup to help other researchers reproduce and further advance multilingual models. 

you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).

When Wojcicki took over, in 2014, YouTube was a third of the way to the goal, she recalled in investor John Doerr’s 2018 book Measure What Matters.“They thought it would break the internet! But it seemed to me that such a clear and measurable objective would energize people, and I cheered them on,” Wojcicki told Doerr. “The billion hours of daily watch time gave our tech people a North Star.” By October, 2016, YouTube hit its goal.

Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that “Going forward, our intent is not to profit from Meta’s data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the benefit of the world.”

A spokeswoman for Summit said in an e-mail, “We only use information for educational purposes. There are no exceptions to this.” She added, “Facebook plays no role in the Summit Learning Program and has no access to any student data.”

M.B can’t be reduced to stereotypes, of course. But there’s also a bar to entry into this social-media network, and it’s a distinctly technophilic, first-world, Western bar.

Schemas aren't neutral

In fact, these platforms have become inseparable from their data: we use “Facebook” to refer to both the application and the data that drives that application. The result is that nearly every Web app today tries to ask you for more and more data again and again, leading to dangling data on duplicate and inconsistent profiles we can no longer manage. And of course, this comes with significant privacy concerns.

hanks to a Facebook page, perhaps for the first time in history, an in-ternet user could click yes on an electronic invitation to a revolution

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.

Even publishers with the most social media-savvy newsrooms can feel at a disadvantage when Facebook rolls out a new product.

People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.

We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.

Facebook’s use of “ethnic affinity” as a proxy for race is a prime example. The platform’s interface does not offer users a way to self-identify according to race, but advertisers can nonetheless target people based on Facebook’s ascription of an “affinity” along racial lines. In other words. race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both.

Facebook’s use of “ethnic affinity” as a proxy for race is a prime example. The platform’s interface does not offer users a way to self-identify according to race, but advertisers can nonetheless target people based on Facebook’s ascription of an “affinity” along racial lines. In other words, race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both.

You could throw the pack away and deactivate your Facebook account altogether. It will get harder the longer you wait — the more photos you post there, or apps you connect to it.

My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here.

What were the “right things” to serve the community, as Zuckerberg put it, when the community had grown to more than 3 billion people?

“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” she wrote. “A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator – he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”

“There was so much violating behavior worldwide that it was left to my personal assessment of which cases to further investigate, to file tasks, and escalate for prioritization afterwards,” she wrote.

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

“In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,” Zhang said.

On and on it goes, until the perceived cost of not being on Facebook is higher than the perceived downsides of joining the platform.

il est fondamental de comprendre que, sur Facebook, je suis comme devant une fenêtre

The mass surveillance and factory farming of human beings on a global scale is the business model of people farmers like Facebook and Google. It is the primary driver of the socioeconomic system we call surveillance capitalism.

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

Facebook is warning developers that privacy changes in an upcoming iOS update will severely curtail its ability to track users' activity across the entire Internet and app ecosystem and prevent the social media platform from serving targeted ads to users inside other, non-Facebook apps on iPhones.

But the business model that we now call surveillance capitalism put paid to that, which is why you should never post anything on Facebook without being prepared to face the algorithmic consequences.

Nefarious corporations

One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees. The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”

Alarmingly, Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of websites across the web to monitor your behavior and Facebook has hidden trackers on about 25% of websites, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. It is likely that Google and/or Facebook are watching you on most sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products.

And while all major tech platforms deploying end-to-end encryption argue against weakening their security, Facebook has become the champion-in-chief fighting against government moves, supported by Apple and others.

WhatsApp has become the dominant messaging platform, dwarfing all other contenders with the exception of its Facebook stablemate Messenger. In doing so, this hyper-scale “over-the-top” platform has also pushed legacy SMS messaging into the background

The breach was caused by Facebook’s “View As” feature, which allows users to view their own account as if they were a stranger visiting it.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data,” said Zuckerburg, in March. “And if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

Facebook already harvests some data from WhatsApp. Without Koum at the helm, it’s possible that could increase—a move that wouldn’t be out of character for the social network, considering that the company’s entire business model hinges on targeted advertising around personal data.

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

For instance, Google’s reCaptcha cookie follows the same logic of the Facebook “like” button when it’s embedded in other websites—it gives that site some social media functionality, but it also lets Facebook know that you’re there.