Tag Archives | Facebook

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

The recent reporting on the Uber Files—a series of 124,000 communications, dated from 2013 until 2017, that Mark McGann, one of Uber’s top lobbyists, leaked to The Guardian—has shed light on the company’s strategies to gain global prominence during its nascent years.

From the persecution and torture of journalist Julian Assange to mass censorship of independent media outlets by U.S. government contractors in Silicon Valley, Washington’s attacks on freedom of the press hurt every country and person on Earth.

Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Platforms such as Facebook on alleged state-backed online influence campaigns–has itself received $1.2 million from U.S. intelligence front USAID, for “counter disinformation and communications support.”

It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.”

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.