Free Republic

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is questioning the CEOs of Google and Facebook about vaccine misinformation being spread on their respective platforms.The congressman expressed concern that YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram “are surfacing and recommending messages that discourage parents from vaccinating their children, in a direct threat to public health, and reversing progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases.”Social media platforms have served as a ground zero for vaccine skepticism in recent years. Increased access to unverified information and the ability to connect with like-minded individuals appears to have fueled skepticism of vaccines that have long been credited with the near eradication of...

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”. The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s...

CHICAGO, February 18, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – As more and more observers arrive at the conclusion that Empire actor Jussie Smollett likely staged an assault against himself to blame on bigoted Trump supporters, Facebook temporarily blocked a post by The Benedict Option author Rod Dreher labeling the incident a “hate hoax.” The 36-year-old, openly-homosexual actor says he was assaulted in Chicago on January 29, with two masked men allegedly shouting racial and homophobic epithets, beating him to the point of fracturing a rib, putting a rope around his neck, and pouring bleach on him. “This is MAGA country,” they allegedly...

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps...

Facebook in a blog post on Monday affirmed its "commitment" to the workers who moderate the platform's content after a report found many of them suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), drug abuse and anxiety. The post began by acknowledging "questions, misunderstandings and accusations around Facebook's content review processes," a likely reference to an investigation by The Verge published earlier Monday. "We want to continue to hear from our content reviewers, our partners and even the media — who hold us accountable and give us the opportunity to improve," the company wrote. The Verge interviewed a dozen current and former...

That's a problem as more and more Americans look to take control of their privacy online. In the past six months, many have been rudely awakened by the lack of privacy within the behemoth data platforms of Facebook and Google. A recent report by Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans are significantly changing their relationship with Facebook, with about half taking breaks from the platform in one way or another.But as Facebook usage wanes, messaging apps like WhatsApp are growing in popularity as a "more private (and less confrontational) space to communicate." That shift didn't make much...

Insider, Formerly Responsible for Content Review in Facebook’s Intellectual Property Dept Speaks Out, Loses Job Facebook Engineers Plan to “demote bad content” Conservative Facebook Page Livestreams Secretly “deboosted,” No Notice to Page Owners Facebook Can Classify Users as Trolls Based on Their Vocabulary, Then Punish By Limiting Bandwidth, Blocking Comments… Facebook Engineer: “‘hateful’ content is coming from right-leaning sites.” “Special features” Triggered “leading up to important elections” Bizarre View of “hate speech” Includes Content from Conservative Commentator (Update: In the video, we said Steven Crowder’s “livestream was dethrottled,” when in fact his entire page was “dethrottled.”) (UPDATE 2: FACEBOOK RESPONDS...

Facebook employees have been caught leaving glowing reviews on Amazon for Facebook's new video-chat device. Facebook released the Portal, a video-chat and smart-speaker device, in October. It's the first hardware product built and sold under the Facebook brand. The new gadget has already faced some hardship, as Facebook acknowledged that it could collect data about its owners to help the company target ads at people.

Advocacy groups on Thursday urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to order a breakup of Facebook after the agency concludes its investigation into the company’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in a letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons that modest enforcement actions would not be adequate to curb Facebook’s privacy practices. “Given that Facebook’s violations are so numerous in scale, severe in nature, impactful for such a large portion of the American public and central to the company’s business model, and given the company’s massive size and influence over...

BILLIONAIRE Mark Zuckerberg has halted the sale of his Facebook stock after the company's value collapsed last year. The controversial 34-year-old has seen his company fall from grace, and failed to sell a single share in the last three months of 2018. Back in September 2017, Zuck promised to flog between 35million and 75million of his Facebook shares over 18 months. It was part of a promise to give away most of his fortune, which requires converting stocks to hard cash. Since then, he's sold about 30.4million shares worth roughly $5.6billion (£4.4billion). But Bloomberg says that the Facebook CEO has...

The Swedish media thought they had successfully covered up the gang rape of a young Swedish girl inside a flat in Malmberget, situated in the municipality of Gällivare, according to news outlet Fjällsjö news. "Facebook promptly censored the posts of the family friend, in an attempt to further silence the story" Politicians in Sweden blame Swedes for not helping migrants successfully integrate in their community when the public learn of a Muslim gang-rape of a young Swedish girl. However, an friend of the young girl’s mother learned of the rape and in her anger and shock, posted about it on...

Yes, you read that correctly Democrats? Yes, Democrats.The social media giant said Tuesday that it uncovered a whole web of fake accounts spreading disinformation in what they believe could be an attempt to influence the upcoming midterm elections.The campaigns exposed were similar to Russian campaigns that ran before and after the 2016 elections. NBC News reported: The company removed 32 pages and accounts from its platform and from Instagram “because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company said in a statement. The pages and accounts were connected to protests planned in Washington next week, Facebook said.Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s...

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates. Facebook confirmed it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign believed to be working ahead of November's midterm elections. In a series of briefings in Washington D.C. this week, the social media company told lawmakers that it detected dozens of fake accounts and pages, people briefed on the matter told the New York Times. --CNBC's Julia Boorstin contributed to this report. This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 opened lower on Thursday after a sharp decline in Facebook sent tech shares lower. Facebook shares dropped more than 20 percent in the premarket, a day after its quarterly revenue missed expectations. Global daily active users, a key metric for the social media giant, also disappointed investors. Additionally, Facebook said it expects its revenue growth rates to slow down from last year. Facebook's earnings per share, however, topped Wall Street estimates. "It's all about tech and Facebook," said Tom Essaye, founder of The Sevens Report. "Facebook earnings and guidance were a disaster and...

Here’s a list of all the pages I know of which have been deleted or unpublished indefinitely: Collectively Conscious (915K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Natural Cures Not Medicine (2.3M followers) – Deleted on June 11th, 2018. I Want to Be 100% Organic (700K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Viral Alternative News (500K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Organic Health (230K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Natural Cures From Food (120K followers) – Deleted on June 13th, 2018. Heart Centered Rebalancing (3.9M followers) – Deleted a few years ago. Awareness Act (1.1M...

Apple has announced a new “midterms election” feature for its official News app, which will feed users election content from a cherry-picked group of left-leaning and establishment news outlets that the tech giants considers “trusted sources.” Instead of letting users decide what news they want to see on their phones, Apple confirmed that it intends to deliver exclusive news and opinion to their users that have been “curated by Apple News editors from trusted publishers.” “Today more than ever people want information from reliable sources, especially when it comes to making voting decisions,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News....

Dear Generation Z, Lazy. Entitled. Technology obsessed. Do those descriptions sound familiar? Like millennials, you have been called a variety of not so flattering labels. And now, the media has added one more: murderer. All right, maybe you weren’t called murderers, but you have been accused of killing. And no, not the horror movie kind, but rest assured you’ve managed to kill pastimes and have placed entire industries on life support. As someone who either falls into the young millennial or old Gen Z category depending on your definition, I can only share in the excitement (read: eye rolls) as...

Political consulting group Cambridge Analytica used Russian researchers and shared data with companies linked to Russian intelligence, a whistleblower told a congressional hearing on interference in the 2016 US election Wednesday. Christopher Wylie, who leaked information on the British-based firm's hijacking of data on millions of Facebook users, told a Senate panel he believes Russian intelligence services had access to data harvested by the consultancy. Wylie told the panel that Russian-American researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who created an application to harvest Facebook user profile data, was working at the same time on Russian-funded projects, including "behavioral research." "This means that in...

This thread is a friendly collaborative place for FReepers to analyze information and share opinons. FReepers have a wide variety of reasons for investigating Q Anon content; this is not the appropriate place to criticize or badger those who choose to use some of their time in this manner. I plan to post one thread at a time and ping new drops posted to it. When I post each (new) thread, the prior thread is retired and all new posts occur on the newest thread. If you are new to Q Anon, the three links below provide overviews to...

FULL TITLE: Senator Tim Scott Unloads on Facebook: “What Is Unsafe About Two Black Women Supporting the President?” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) is a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. On Tuesday the committee met as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was meeting with senators on Capitol Hill. Tim Scott took time out of his committee to address Facebook and why the company believes two black women supporting Trump are “unsafe for the community?” In a bit of irony, I’m posting video from our HELP Committee hearing today. As I’m sure many of you know, Mark...