Facebook has deleted a large group dedicated to sharing and discussing QAnon conspiracy theories.
QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that a “deep state” network of powerful government, business and media figures are waging a secret war against Donald Trump.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the group was removed for “repeatedly posting content that violated our policies”.
Last month both Twitter and TikTok also cracked down on QAnon content. Continue reading.
Fact-checkers were unanimous in their assessments when President Trump began claiming in June that Democrat Joe Biden wanted to “defund” police forces. PolitiFactcalled the allegations “false,” as did CheckYourFact. The Associated Press detailed “distortions” in Trump’s claims. FactCheck.org called an ad airing them “deceptive.”Another site, the Dispatch, said there is “nothing currently to support” Trump’s claims.
But these judgments, made by five fact-checking organizations that are part of Facebook’s independent network for policing falsehoods on the platform, were not shared with Facebook’s users. That is because the company specifically exempts politicians from its rules against deception. Ads containing the falsehoods continue to run freely on the platform, without any kind of warning or label.
Enabled by Facebook’s rules, Trump’s reelection campaign has shown versions of the false claim on Facebook at least 22.5 million times, in more than 1,400 ads costing between $350,000 and $553,000, a Washington Post analysis found based on data from Facebook’s Ad Library. The ads, bought by the campaign directly or in a partnership with the Republican National Committee, were targeted at Facebook users mainly in swing states such as Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania. Continue reading.
The long anticipated confrontation between the chief executives of America’s largest tech firms and Congress produced several memorable moments Wednesday and gave important insight into the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust’s investigation into competition in digital marketplaces.
The hearing — featuring Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai teleconferencing in — went more than five hours, with each lawmaker on the panel getting three rounds of questioning.
Here are the five biggest takeaways from Wednesday’s hearing. Continue reading.
But civil rights activist and other critics say Facebook and other tech companies are still too timidThe nation’s technology industry has begun taking a harder line against hate speech, misinformation and posts that potentially incite violence when made by President Trump and some of his most extreme supporters after years of treating such issues gingerly for fear of triggering the wrath of the nation’s most powerful politician.
The moves, such as labeling false posts by Trump and banishing forums devoted to supporting him after years of policy violations, have taken place across the industry in recent weeks, with actions by Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, YouTube and Twitch.
Even Facebook, which long has given wide latitude in allowing problematic posts by Trump and his followers, on Wednesday closed down a network of more than 100 accounts and pages affiliated with Trump confidante and felon Roger Stone. The action came years after his use of social media first came under the scrutiny of federal investigators and involved issues dating back to 2015 that the company said it had unearthed only recently. Continue reading.
An independent audit faulted the social network for allowing hate speech and disinformation to thrive — potentially posing a threat to the November elections.SAN FRANCISCO — Auditors handpicked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”
The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: That it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.
Now Facebook has to decide whether its approach to hateful speech and noxious content — which was to leave it alone in the name of free expression — remains tenable. And that decision puts pressure on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who has repeatedly said that his company was not an arbiter of truth and that it would not police politicians’ posts. Continue reading.
The longtime Trump friend and former campaign adviser used fake accounts and other deceptive tactics to manipulate public debate, the company saidFacebook took down a network of more than 100 pages and accounts on Wednesday it said was affiliated with felon and former Republican operative Roger Stone for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” taking the company’s campaign against disinformation closer to the heart of the nation’s political establishment.
The offending activity on Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram dated as far back as 2015 but was particularly active during the 2016 presidential election season, when Stone was advising Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and in 2017, as federal investigators were scrutinizing his activities.
Facebook officials said Stone, a longtime friend of Trump’s, used fake accounts and other deceptive measures to manipulate public debate. In at least a small number of occasions, Stone also drew attention to posts made by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which at the time was publishing damaging Democratic Party emails originally stolen by Russian hackers, the company said. Continue reading.
Starting as early as 2015, Facebook executives started crafting exceptions for the then-candidate that transformed the world’s information battlefield for years to come.Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.
To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said. Continue reading.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the platform will label but leave up posts deemed “newsworthy” that violate company policies, a major reversal that comes after weeks of criticism.
“We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “We’ll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what’s acceptable in our society — but we’ll add a prompt to tell people that the content they’re sharing may violate our policies.”
He pointed specifically to posts from politicians, writing that “we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm.” Continue reading.
Facebook is coming under mounting pressure from major companies to rein in hateful content on the platform or risk further loss of ad revenue.
In the past week, companies like Patagonia, The North Face, Ben & Jerry’s and REI have joined the Stop Hate for Profit campaign organized by civil rights groups in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
Organizers of the Facebook boycott acknowledge that while previous efforts to change Facebook’s platform have fallen short, the national focus on racial injustice has put a spotlight on all aspects of life, including social media. Continue reading.
Mark Zuckerberg has forged an uneasy alliance with the Trump administration. He may have gotten too close.Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.
That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power.
But I was able to pry some of those details loose last week from White House officials along with current and former senior Facebook employees and people they speak to. Most said they would only talk on the condition their names not be used, since the company is not eager to call attention to Mr. Zuckerberg’s relationship with the president. Continue reading.
