Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. SUBSCRIBE Dec. 22, 2018 / 8:28 PM GMT By Kalhan Rosenblatt Facebook says it has suspended five accounts that were being run by multiple people for "for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior" on the platform during the Alabama special election last year. In a statement to NBC News, a Facebook spokesperson declined to name the account holders, but said an investigation into the improper behavior is ongoing. "We take a strong stand against people or organizations that create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing. We've removed thousands of Pages, Groups, and accounts for this kind of behavior, as well as accounts that were violating our policies on spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior during the Alabama special election last year," the platform said. One of the accounts that Facebook suspended … [Read more...] about Facebook suspends 5 accounts for ‘inauthentic behavior’ during Alabama special election
Facebook Suspends Democrat Strategists Behind Election Disinformation Campaign
Facebook has suspended five accounts belong to Democrat strategists who were involved in a 2017 Alabama Senate election disinformation campaign against Republican candidate Roy Moore. The social media giant called the effort “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” According to the Washington Post, Facebook “suspended the account of Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of a top social media research firm, after reports that he and others engaged in an operation to spread disinformation during the special election in Alabama last year.”In a statement, Facebook confirmed its suspension of “five accounts run by multiple individuals for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior,” one of which was reportedly Morgan, and claimed to have an “ongoing” investigation. “We take a strong stand against people or organizations that create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing,” proclaimed … [Read more...] about Facebook Suspends Democrat Strategists Behind Election Disinformation Campaign
Facebook’s Top Five Fails of 2018
2018 was not an easy year for Facebook due to a number of data hacks and company scandals. As the year draws to an end, Breitbart News would like to highlight some of the company’s biggest mistakes. Breitbart News has chosen to outline just a few of Facebook’s biggest mistakes and scandals over the course of 2018. Due to the company’s practices in recent months, there has been many stories to choose from but here are five of the biggest situations that Facebook faced this year:1: The Cambridge Analytica User Data Breach Perhaps the most widely reported and most well known of the company’s data breaches this year has been the one involving the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm gained access to the personal details of 87 million Facebook users via a quiz app which required certain permissions from users, providing the firm with access to users personal data. Even more worrying is that the political consulting firm could still have … [Read more...] about Facebook’s Top Five Fails of 2018
Analysis: The Facebook scandal isn’t really about social media. It’s about capitalism.
As wizened consumers we've learned to be cynical about the commodification of our privacy at the hands of tech corporations. Still, it's one thing to know in principle that industry giants like Facebook are spying on practically everything we do and say; it's quite another to see it in action. But that's just what we have thanks to recent reporting by The New York Times, which revealed how Mark Zuckerberg, who's expected to act as the trusted custodian of the personal information of more than 2 billion people, has allowed his company's partners -- Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify, among many others -- access to users' most intimate communications. Some arrangements enabled Facebook's partners to read and delete users' private messages; others had access to users' friends and their data. In some cases, the deals appeared to be so broad that Facebook's partners claimed that they weren't even aware that they had access to certain data streams. The Times' reporting offers a necessary … [Read more...] about Analysis: The Facebook scandal isn’t really about social media. It’s about capitalism.
Instagram was a bigger Russian election tool than Facebook, Senate report says
Facebook Inc.'s Instagram played a much bigger role in Russia's manipulation of U.S. voters than the company has previously discussed, and will be a key Russian tool in the 2020 elections, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Russian Internet Research Agency, the troll farm that has sought to divide Americans with misinformation and meme content around the 2016 election, received more engagement on Instagram than it did on any other social media platform, including Facebook, according to a joint report by three groups of researchers. "Instagram was a significant front in the IRA's influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony," the report says. IRA activity shifted there after the media began to write about Russian activity on Twitter and Facebook. "Our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis."There were 187 million interactions … [Read more...] about Instagram was a bigger Russian election tool than Facebook, Senate report says