Tag Archives | Facebook

For all the public outcry, official probes and hearings, financial penalties, apologies and proposed regulations, Facebook remains the world’s foremost surveillance tool–weaponized in all manner of malevolent ways by any number of hostile elements.

The Washington Post–owned by billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos, who has CIA and Pentagon contracts–has called for censoring Chinese news outlets on social media, while praising Silicon Valley for purging Russian publications.

The Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin, and Russians in general emerge as the latest contenders, the comic strip villains who those in the broadly designated “West” can now take issue with.

A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.

Recently, U.S. media have been aghast at legislation affecting China’s tech sector.

Social media companies including Facebook have admitted to MintPress that pro-Palestinian posts were removed, blaming “technical bugs” and “spam filters.”

Reed has been held in federal pretrial detention without bail for ten months after a prior high school acquaintance reported him to the police for a different satirical social media post about planning a protest or ‘riot’ at the courthouse that never actually happened.

This is most clearly shown in what is allowed by the powers that run the financial system.

Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of the 2020 U.S. elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.

And the Digital Censorship to Come.

The company behind In The Now, Soapbox and Waste-Ed is taking on media giant Facebook, who it claims is falsely labeling it as Russian state-controlled propaganda.

An aggressive push to consolidate companies in the tech sector, coupled with the world’s ever-increasing dependence on digital platforms and tools, is quickly leading to a crisis of sovereignty.

The censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread. The latest victim to fall to Facebook and YouTube’s overzealous banhammer is well-known conflict watchdog website, SouthFront.

Facebook is under fire for (among other things) its involvement with Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm funded by hedge fund billionaire and major Republican party donor Robert Mercer and formerly led by President Trump’s ex–campaign manager and strategist Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica harvested data from over 87 million Facebook profiles (up from Facebook’s original count of 50 million) without the users’ consent, according to a report by the London Observer (3/17/18) sourced to a whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica until 2014.

The images below are from a lecture I gave to at SOAS, London University, on 18 October. This was part of a series organised by the SOAS Economics Department, and my lecture covered the forms taken by corporate power today, focusing on Apple, Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba.

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in—and, even more, concerned about—Facebook. Many of them are raised in the recent review of Facebook-related books by John Lanchester [ht: db]: the fragmentation of the polity (via the targeting of posts), the dissemination of “fake news” (which played an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election), the undermining of other livelihoods (such as journalism and music), the level of surveillance of users (much more than any national government), the violation of anti-monopoly rules (via individualized pricing), and so on.