Tag: Social Media

If I was a Hedge Fund losing billions to Reddit shitposters, I would get a second job driving for Uber, cut out the Starbuck’s, and skip the avocado toast.

— Jean-Paul Blarte: Mall Cop (@OldPappyThomas) January 27, 2021

This is Beautiful

The Hedge Funds are Pissants

MaY NeEd tO gEt BaiLeD oUt pic.twitter.com/JrGW4hsxyI

— Aimee into the Sun🌹 (@AimeeDemaio) January 27, 2021

Too True

The inevitable sea shanty

to be clear. This has nothing to do with gamestop as a business. They are just a piece of rope being used in a tug of war between internet nerds and wall st suits.

the rally cry on r/wallstreet bets:

“we can remain retarded for longer than they can stay solvent!”

— Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) January 26, 2021

The real bottom line

It appears that a bunch of Redditors have taken down at least 2 hedge funds, and on one side are the titans of Wall Street saying something must be done to stop this, and on the other side is literally everyone else in the world, who are pointing and laughing:

GameStop’s stock price continued to soar in after-hours trading last night to over $300. While many are waiting for it to come crashing back down, it might be too late for some major hedge funds. With the stock still sitting at well over $250 a share (unthinkable just last year when it was trading at under $5) after the market reopened, Melvin Capital, one of the largest hedge funds betting against the company, is reportedly getting out of the game after suffering major losses, seemingly driven out by amateurs trading on their phones and joking on Reddit in what continues to be one of the most bizarre stories of 2021 so far.

“Melvin Capital closed out its short position in GameStop on Tuesday afternoon after taking a huge loss,” the fund’s manager told CNBC this morning.

The firm, which was worth about $12.5 billion before the battle between short sellers and Redditors began, bet big against GameStop and a number of other companies, only to see 30% of the fund disappear over the last few days. That prompted other billionaires to swoop in and lend Melvin $2.75 billion to help cover the losses. Andrew Left, a notorious short-seller activist, also announced in a new YouTube video today that his investment firm moved away from most of its bets against GameStop’s stock at “a loss of 100%.”

………

Meanwhile, the ensuing chaos caused GameStop stock trading to be temporarily halted yet again this morning and caused outages on the trading app Robinhood. Other companies like Blackberry and AMC are also seeing smaller, though still dramatic stock climbs, as Reddit traders attempt to go boost other companies massively shorted by big hedge funds.

All of this is the culmination of a long game that’s been brewing on the WallStreetBets subreddit for a while now as amateur day traders decided to turn the misfortunes of a floundering brick-and-mortar game seller into their cause celebre for dunking on professional investment firms. In some ways it’s a very complicated story driven by the weird mechanics of Wall Street, but in other ways it’s a familiar tale of extremely online people trying to stick it to someone, in part to make a buck, but also for the “lulz.” Here’s a quick rundown of how things got here.

Short version: A bunch or Redditors, seeing that the moribund console game store GameStop was the most shorted stock in America, decided to take down said short sellers by bidding up the price and creating a “Short Squeeze”.

The mechanism is such that the hedge funds are incredibly exposed to this, and at least one had to be bailed out by other Wall Street Parasites because it was essentially insolvent.

What’s more, it appears that the same thing is happening with AMC Theaters, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Blackberry as I am typing this. (Scroll down)

One thing that is not clear at this point is whether some other hedge fund type entity might be involved in this on the other side, though even if they did, they have done nothing illegal, since the information, “Let’s do it for the lulz,” is both accurate and publicly available.

One thing that is clear at this point is that this entire affair is showing most of the short selling activity out there serves no useful purpose, and that the arguments in favor of it, basically that shorting stocks create a financial incentive aggressive due diligence of companies, are 6 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.

It is one step removed from the infamous Bucket Shops of the early 1900s.

23 January 2021, 8:29 PM

Yeah, Me Too

1 Comment

A throw away tweet

My throw away response

I agree with Mike Caulfield statement on Twitter’s take-down and appeals process, that it is arbitrary, opaque, and the subject has no inkling as to the process.

I would not be writing about this, except that this happened to me.

About a week ago, I got locked out of Twitter for a post I made in June.

Someone posted a sign a McDonald’s which appears to state that they are out of happy meals, though they use the term “Boy Toys.”

The poster suggested that he was sad, because he wanted his “twinks”, a slang term for young, and young appearing, gay men.

My response was that he was being “Homonormative, (a play on the term “Heteronormative”) and that “Wymyn” (An 80s radical feminist spelling for “Woman”) might want their “Boy Toys” as well.

It was pretty anodyne, though every 2 weeks of so, it showed up in someone’s feed, and they would ask, “What the heck is Wymyn?”

When I got the ban, I appealed the decision, which was likely automated, and was probably driven by someone flagging it. (No accounting for humor, I guess)

That I got a Twitter Timeout™ was actually kind of a thrill, I have been in a bit of a competition with my son Charlie after Twitter flagged him for suggesting that Meghan McCain do something anatomically dubious with a cactus.

I submitted an appeal, and then nothing happened.

After 4 days of not being able to access twitter, I deleted the tweet.

But just before I deleted the tweet, I came across Mr. Caulfield’s essay, and I agree with his assessment of the appeals process:

So that would be my recommendation to Twitter. Either cancel the appeals process, apply it narrowly to suspensions, or speed it up. At the very least, inform people engaging in it what the average time for resolution is. And while my suspension probably won’t derail national or international efforts against COVID-19, I can’t help but think of all the medical researchers and public policy people out there using Twitter to communicate and collaborate. So as much as Twitter seems to think any deference to academic culture is a thumb on the scale, I really hope they can have someone write up a list of experts more important than me and take a bit more care before they ban them. I assume what I was hit with was based on a programmatic scan, not trolls gaming reporting. But the anti-vaccine trolls are out there and I know they are reporting the heck out of anyone that gets in their way. If Twitter doesn’t make a nominal effort to protect those researchers, there will be much more high-profile (and damaging) bannings to come.

(Incidentally the fact that the report does not actually tell me if I have been banned by a programmatic scan –having 5g and vaccines in the same tweet — or via a report is very bad in terms of both transparency and utility. I actually need to know whether it is a troll report or algorithm. If it’s an algorithm, it’s a lightning strike, and I go on the way I have. If the trolls have found me, that’s a different problem, and one I need to be alerted to.)

When we talk about the size of the online giants, what is frequently ignored is the generally poor quality of user^* services.

Terms and services are poorly written, arbitrarily enforced, and completely lacking in any measurable human involvement.

It would not be at all unreasonable to require that the large online service sites to provide clearer processes, along with the ability to contact an actual human being.

The quality of the services would improve, at least from the end user perspective, and it would make the enormous scale that entities like Facebook, Twitter, and Google have achieved more expensive, which might aid smaller challengers and mitigate against further growth.

^*They not customers, the advertisers are the customers, the users are the product.

15 January 2021, 7:24 PM

Because ……… Of Course They Are

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Have you heard the one about Facebook showing ads for military gear next to posts calling for an insurrection?

Nope, this is not a joke.

Zuckerberg’s Horror is actually doing this.

The employees have flagged this since the lynch mob stormed the Capitol, and Facebook has done ……… Nothing:

Facebook has been running ads for body armor, gun holsters, and other military equipment next to content promoting election misinformation and news about the attempted coup at the US Capitol, despite internal warnings from concerned employees.

In the aftermath of an attempted insurrection by President Donald Trump’s supporters last week at the US Capitol building, Facebook has served up ads for defense products to accounts that follow extremist content, according to the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. Those ads — which include New Year’s specials for specialized body armor plates, rifle enhancements, and shooting targets — were all delivered to a TTP Facebook account used to monitor right-wing content that could incite violence.

Beginning last summer, the Mark Zuckerberg–led company banned pages, groups, and accounts belonging to US-based militant groups, “boogaloo” extremists, and those associated with the QAnon mass delusion. But members of those movements quickly found ways around the company’s policies by renaming their pages or using code names. They continue to proliferate, organize, and advertise on the social network.

These ads for tactical gear, which were flagged internally by employees as potentially problematic, show Facebook has been profiting from content that amplifies political and cultural discord in the US.

In related news, water is wet.

I don’t know how you regulate this sort of crap, but if there is a potential to profit from extremism, Facebook will be there.

13 January 2021, 11:39 PM

It Really Sucks to be You

1 Comment

It appears that in addition to being contemptible people, the purveyors of Parler, the now-shuttered right-wing Twitter, were technically incompetent.

Their tech was incompetently managed, and a security researcher managed to download almost every post in Parler, including deleted posts and extensive metadata.

I’m sure that the FBI will be most interested in this information:

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.

………

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.

………

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.

………

Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced it was pulling Parler’s plug.

………

The privacy implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.

My suggestion to @donk_enby is that if someone comes sniffing around for the archive that she made, don’t without a subpoena. Providing the information under compulsion indemnifies you, so if someone wants to sue you for someting like “Invasion of Privacy”, you are covered. (NOte that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit.^*

My second piece of advice is that turning your personal information over to an online site is a stupid thing, and doing so to a business that caters to reactionaries is even dumber.

Businesses that cater to conservatives on the basis of politics tend to be scams. All you have to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, and see how many of the ads are transparent bullshit like fat burning plant extracts, overpriced gold, phony ED cures, Corona Virus Cures, etc.

For them, it’s all about the Benjamins.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

6 January 2021, 9:29 PM

12 Hours: What You Get for Suggesting that Megan McCain Have Carnal Knowledge of a Cactus, or for Calling On Your Supporters to Storm the Capitol

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As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy. https://t.co/k6OkjNG3bM

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

We’ll continue to evaluate the situation in real time, including examining activity on the ground and statements made off Twitter. We will keep the public informed, including if further escalation in our enforcement approach is necessary.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Following a particularly moronic statement in which Meghan McCain insisted that mockery of her by a Jewish cartoonist was antisemitic, my son replied to her on Twitter that she should, “Go F%$# yourself with a cactus.”

Twitter gave him a 12 hour time out.

It now appears that for calling for a violent insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States, Twitter will also give you a 12 hour time out.

Needless to say, Charlie is considering how best to use that rather perverse juxtaposition of Twitter’s enforcement of its, “Civil Integrity Policy,” as a bit for his standup.

On the bright side, with the pandemic, he’ll have plenty of time to polish the bit.

On the dark side, Covid-19 is why he’ll have plenty of time to polish the bit.

I’m actually a bit jealous about his getting the suspension, it’s been a goal of mine.

I have not managed to do this yet, I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t post something just to get banned. I must post something that I would normally posts.

I even changed my Twitter handle to, “Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff),” in an attempt to get the elusive ban.

Much to my surprise, and to the surprise of those who know and love me, it appears that my normal behavior is not sufficient to get me banned from Twitter.

(Update)

Facebook gave the Trumpster Fire a time out as well.

25 December 2020, 7:03 PM

Remember When I Said that Facebook Engaged in Systematic Fraud?*

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In advertising, there are two philosophies behind advertising, contextual advertising, where you base you ads on what the user is doing, or looking at, or looking for, when you serve the ad, and behavioral advertising, where the advertiser tracks the user across the internet by creating a dossier of everything that they do.

They are called tracking-based and contextual advertising respectively.

The claim of the trackers has always been that they create more effective ads as versus contextual advertising, though the best evidence seems to show the exact opposite.

To me, the “advantage” of tracking based advertising is that it creates tremendously high barriers for new market entrants, because they have to replicate the massive databases of user information of the incumbents.

It appears that Facebook’s managers on their advertising side are similarly dubious of the claims of tracking-based ads, alleging that Facebook’s claims are fraudulent.

Get the cuffs, Ponch:

Facebook is currently waging a PR campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy features. But at the same time, according to allegations in recently unsealed court documents, Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent.

The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time and that data behind a targeting criterion was “all crap.” Facebook says the material is presented out of context.

………

The documents emerged from a suit currently seeking class-action certification in federal court. The suit was filed by the owner of Investor Village, a small business that operates a message board on financial topics. Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach “highly compensated and educated investors” but “had limited resources to spend on advertising.” But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village’s ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says.

………

The lawsuit goes on to quote unnamed “employees on Facebook’s ad team” discussing their targeting capabilities circa June 2016:

One engineer celebrated that detailed targeting accounted for “18% of total ads revenue,” and $14.8 million on June 17th alone. Using a smiley emoticon, an engineering manager responded, “Love this chart! Although if the most popular option is to combine interest and behavior, and we know for a fact our behavior is almost all crap, does this mean we are misleading advertiser [sic] a bit? :)” That manager proceeded to suggest further examination of top targeting criteria to “see if we are giving advertiser [sic] false hope.”

………

The complaint also cites unspecified internal communications in which “[p]rivately, Facebook managers described important targeting data as ‘crap’ and admitted accuracy was ‘abysmal.’”

I would argue that Facebook’s whole advertising model is fraudulent.

^*See here for earlier posts.

10 December 2020, 7:52 PM

Finally,

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The Federal Trade Commission and 47 states have filed a lawsuit to break up Facebook.

This is long overdue.

As an aside, at the top of the list should be the replacement of all the class B shares of Facebook, the ones with special voting rights that allow Zuckerberg to maintain complete control of the company, with class A shares, at least on a temporary basis.

Mark Zuckerberg’s 58% of the vote would become 5.8% of the vote, and the slightly less psychopathic “adults in the room” could deal with take charge.

A breakup will take years and millions of dollars. Changing the class of shares could be done almost instantly, and the the cost of this would be minimal.

The lawsuit is calling for Instagram and WhatsApp to be spun out from Facebook:

The Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 47 states attorneys general today filed a pair of long-awaited antitrust suits against Facebook, alleging that the company abused its power in the marketplace to neutralize competitors through acquisitions and prevent anyone else from presenting a more privacy-friendly alternative to consumers.

“By using its vast troves of data and money, Facebook has quashed or hindered what the company perceived as potential threats,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the states’ effort, said. “In an effort to maintain its market dominance, Facebook has employed a strategy to impede competing services.”

The lawsuit brought by the states (PDF) asks the court to prohibit Facebook from engaging in “any anticompetitive conduct” or practice going forward. That includes a request for Facebook to be blocked from any acquisitions valued at greater than $10 million without first getting permission from the states.

The states also explicitly ask that Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp be found in violation of the Clayton Act and that Facebook be required to divest those businesses if necessary “to restore competitive conditions” in the marketplace.

The suit filed by the FTC (PDF) also calls for Facebook to face more scrutiny when it acquires other firms and to be broken up if necessary to restore competition in the marketplace.

………

As we’ve explained before, antitrust law isn’t just about being a literal monopoly or even about being the biggest player in a sector. Instead, it’s about power—how much you have, and what you do with it. Antitrust investigators basically want to answer the question: did you become the biggest naturally, or did you cheat along the way?

In that framing, then, Facebook stands accused of cheating to beat out any potential competition—a lot.

………

Emails obtained by Congress earlier this year as part of its investigation into Big Tech’s outsized power revealed that Zuckerberg explicitly thought of Instagram as a threat before acquiring it.

If apps such as Instagram were allowed to grow, Zuckerberg wrote in a 2012 email, it “could be very disruptive” to Facebook, and he added that an acquisition “will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get to their scale again.”

………

The FTC and the states both launched their antitrust investigations back in the long-long ago of 2019, as did Congress, European Union competition regulators, and regulators from several other nations. The Congressional report, published in October, now seems like a harbinger of today’s suit: the House committee found that Facebook (as well as Apple, Google, and Amazon) exerts monopoly power in the marketplace and should be forced to split up.

It’s incredibly rare in the modern era for the courts actually to force a company to break up for antitrust reasons. The last major breakup came more than 35 years ago, when AT&T finally split up in to the seven regional “Baby Bells” after a decade-long legal fight with the Justice Department. The court initially ordered a breakup in the Microsoft antitrust case that began in the late 1990s, but Microsoft appealed the ruling and, in 2001, reached a settlement with the DOJ that left its business intact.

Some of Facebook’s app updates from earlier this year seem to have been designed with a potential antitrust suit in mind: the company in late 2019 began a plan to integrate WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Direct messaging into a single service. The integration between Instagram’s and Facebook’s messaging services began in August; when all three platforms are combined, Facebook will reach an estimated 3.3 billion users on a single messaging service.

Which is, in and of itself, evidence of bad faith and monopolistic behavior.

………

“The claims being reported—serial predatory acquisition and withholding interoperability—set up a strong case,” said Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at Public Knowledge. “This action reflects a lot of work from advocates, experts, and enforcement officials to build the case, first that Facebook was deserving of scrutiny, and then that the company really has run afoul of our antitrust laws. To fix the harms to competition, we need to see changes to Facebook’s business and the company should be required to open up its network to competitors so that users are not locked in.”

Whatever the plaintiffs are trying to achieve, they have to be as disruptive as possible to Facebook, because otherwise, they are going to pull crap that makes IBM’s shenanigans in its antitrust defense look like tiddly winks.

^*At one point, IBM literally submitted trailer loads of documents as evidence as a delaying tactic. The lawsuit spanned 3 decades.

3 December 2020, 7:25 PM

For Facebook, Fraud is a Feature, Not a Bug

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For a number of years, I have noted that Facebook has knowingly been defrauding advertisers.

So, when Mark Zuckerberg’s monster is forced to admit that its advertising models and tools had been cheating them, I am disinclined to believe that this was an accident.

Whenever we hear about these “mishaps”, they ALWAYS seem to accrue to the benefit of of Zuckerberg’s wallet.

They are only making an apology because they got caught:

Facebook Inc. is offering millions of dollars in credits to some advertisers after discovering a glitch in a tool that tells advertisers how effective their ads may be in driving results, such as getting consumers to download an app or purchase a product.

Facebook’s “conversion lift” tool overestimated some campaign results for 12 months, the company quietly told its advertisers this month. The glitch skewed data that advertisers use to decide how much money to spend with the company.

It isn’t the first problem Facebook has discovered in its systems to measure advertisers’ campaigns, and it is not likely to dent Facebook’s ad revenue. But some ad buyers said the latest gaffe has hurt confidence in the company’s metrics at a time when many businesses are navigating the pandemic by trying to cut costs and make sure their ad spending performs.

………

The issue is particularly acute for certain categories such as retail, where marketers are spending as much as 5% to 10% more on Facebook and other performance-centric advertising channels to recover business lost during the early stages of the pandemic, said the chief executive of one digital agency that spends hundred of millions of dollars advertising on Facebook every year.

………

Facebook’s offer of credits extends to some advertisers that used the tool when the error went undetected, from August 2019 through August 2020.

………

“More so than past measurement problems with Facebook’s ad platform, this error has the potential to be extremely serious,” the agency wrote in the note to clients. “The fact that it led to a systematic overstatement of ad performance, combined with the yearlong duration of the error, likely misinformed media budget allocations. These misallocations came at the expense of both advertiser media efficiency and Facebook’s competitors.”

So it harmed Facebook’s competitors? Imagine that.

Facebook, which said it fixed the error in September, told advertisers about it this month, according to a memo that Facebook sent clients. The company is basing the amount of credits it is issuing to advertisers on an analysis that shows how much the error may have affected their actual investments during the period following the lift study.

Some ad buyers are also questioning the analysis Facebook is using to determine advertisers’ compensation—criticizing the tech giant for not being transparent enough in how it determined who receives ad credits and how, exactly, compensation was calculated, as well as details on steps Facebook is taking to ensure such errors don’t occur again.

“This can’t just be covered with a one-time compensation in credits,” said OMD’s Mr. Adamski. “It needs that reconciliation for every single client on how did it influence the investment decisions we made.”

Marketers aren’t likely to turn away from Facebook despite the incident, said Kevin Simonson, vice president of social for digital marketing agency Wpromote LLC, which spends more than $100 million a year on Facebook ads on behalf of clients.

“This particular error would impact strategy regarding what creative to use and what audiences to spend against, which could be significant to some extent, but it’s not going to be significant to a degree that’s going to cause any brand (in this day and age) to not do Facebook,” Mr. Simonson said in an email. “It’s more like to what degree.”

News of the glitch was reported last week by industry publication AdExchanger.

For Facebook, the only crime is to get caught.

27 October 2020, 6:02 PM

Chutzpah Redefined

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Facebook is threatening academics doing a study on political advertisements breaking its rules, claiming ……… wait for it ……… that allowing users to voluntarily report what ads that they see is a violation of user privacy.

This is truly beyond satire:

Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform.

The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering’s Online Transparency Project’s Ad Observatory violates Facebook’s terms of service on bulk data collection and demanded it end the program immediately.

………

“We launched the Online Transparency Project two years ago to make it easier to see who was purchasing political ads on Facebook,” said co-founder Laura Edelson, of the project.

………

Facebook didn’t like this one bit, and responded with a warning letter on October 16, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The Silicon Valley titan wants the academic project shut down and all data deleted by November 30.

………

“We understand the intent behind your tool. However, the browser plugin scrapes information in violation of our terms, which are designed to protect people’s privacy.”

It seems the researchers aren’t backing down. On October 22, they published the latest research showing 12 political ads that had slipped under the radar as non-political on Facebook, some of which are still running.

………

Rather than rely on Facebook’s carefully controlled library, the NYU researchers built their own external approach and quickly discovered widespread disclosure violations which it says have helped facilitate the spread of election disinformation.

This is not a surprise. After all, Facebook has been aggressively engaging in ad fraud, click thru fraud, and user fraud for years.

This is not about protecting user privacy, since, after all the users in this case know what they are doing, this is about their concerns that their fraudulent behavior will be identified and traced.

12 October 2020, 6:11 PM

Facebook is Ineluctably Evil

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On a company discussion board, a Facebook employee noted that senior management had repeatedly reversed decisions to flag conservative groups and media for posting false and deceptive information, and was promptly fired.

So much for social media having a liberal bias.

Also, this should be a lesson for the Dems: Oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg care about nothing but themselves. They are not to be trusted.

Seeing as how the US has not done what Yeltsin did when he selected his oligarchs, he overwhelmingly selected them from a despised minority, Jews, so that he would have public support if he needed to take them down. (He didn’t, but Putin did.)

Break up Facebook:

After months of debate and disagreement over the handling of inflammatory or misleading posts from Donald Trump, Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election.

“I do think we’re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history,” one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the company’s internal communication platform, earlier this week.

For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it “an unprecedented position.”

………

While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.

………

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg danced around the question but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company’s news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)

………

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

………

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication’s behalf.

“A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote.

The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

………

Past Facebook employees, including Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global election ads integrity lead, have expressed concerns with Kaplan’s influence over content enforcement decisions. She previously told BuzzFeed News a member of Kaplan’s Washington policy team attempted to influence ad enforcement decisions for an ad placed by a conservative organization.

Facebook did not respond to questions about why Kaplan would personally intervene in matters like this.

………

“It appears that policy people have been intervening in fact-checks on behalf of *exclusively* right-wing publishers, to avoid them getting repeat-offender status,” wrote another employee in the company’s internal “misinformation policy” discussion group.

Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company’s “respectful communication policy.”

Bullsh%$.

Zuckerberg has absolute authority over Facebook, and Joel Kaplan is his guy, and has no authority beyond what Zuckerberg gives him.

Psychopaths like Mark Zuckerberg is why anti-trust law was created.

15 September 2020, 7:06 PM

F%$# Zuck

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We have yet another Facebook whistle-blower, this time they are claiming Facebook ignored fake accounts used from despots and foreign governments to harass opponents online and manufacture consent.

This is not a surprise. Facebook has been ignoring fake accounts so that they can sell non-existent eyeballs to advertisers for years.

The former Facebook data scientist Sophie Yang thinks that Facebook is not taking the issue seriously.

I think that Facebook DOES take this seriously. They simply CHOOSE to profit from it:

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

………

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It’s also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

………

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:

It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.

In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets… to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.

Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”

In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that “he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch.” Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.

In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.

Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.

After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.

In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence” the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

………

In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook’s efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.

………

Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. Doing so allowed her to speak out internally, and she used that freedom to reckon with the power that she had to police political speech.

………

A former Facebook engineer who knew her told BuzzFeed News that Zhang was skilled at discovering fake account networks on the platform.

“She’s the only person in this entire field at Facebook that I ever trusted to be earnest about this work,” said the engineer, who had seen a copy of Zhang’s post and asked not to be named because they no longer work at the company.

“A lot of what I learned from that post was shocking even to me as someone who’s often been disappointed at how the company treats its best people,” they said.

………

Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook’s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company’s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm.

No, it’s malice, and it comes from the top.

Expect an insincere apology from Mark Zuckerberg in 3………2………

………

Katy Pearce, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies social media and communication technology in Azerbaijan, told BuzzFeed News that fake Facebook accounts have been used to undermine the opposition and independent media in the country for years.

“One of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they’re not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative,” she told BuzzFeed News. “There’s a chilling effect. Why would I post something if I know that I’m going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I’m going to be targeted?”

Pearce said Zhang’s comment in the memo that Facebook “didn’t care enough to stop” the fake accounts and trolling aligns with her experience. “They have bigger fish to fry,” she said.

………

They said Facebook has at times made things worse by removing the accounts or pages of human rights activists and other people after trolls report them. “We tried to tell Facebook that this is a real person who does important work,” but it took weeks for the page to be restored.

Facebook is notorious for this, and they honestly don’t care. If they did, they would change it.

………

Zhang outlined the political processes within Facebook itself. She said the best way for her to gain attention for her work was not to go through the proper reporting channels, but to post about the issues on Facebook’s internal employee message board to build pressure.

“In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,” Zhang said.

Surprising, a toxic founder created a toxic workplace.

Even by the psychopathic standards of Silicon Valley, Facebook is remarkably evil.

30 August 2020, 11:27 PM

Don’t Throw Me in That Briar Patch

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Facebook is completely losing its sh%$ because the next version of the iPhone operating system will require that users explicitly opt in to being spied on by advertisers.
They have actually issued an apology of sorts, which is just about as sincere as their apologies for spying on their users:

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.

“This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” the behemoth bemoans before thinking the unthinkable: that it may have to end its most intrusive analytics engine for iPhone and iPad users.
“We know this may severely impact publishers’ ability to monetize through Audience Network on iOS 14, and, despite our best efforts, may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14 in the future.”

Amazingly, despite Facebook pointing out to Apple that it is tearing away people’s right to have their privacy invaded in order to receive ads for products they might want, Cupertino continues to push ahead anyway.

………

Facebook wants advertisers to know however that it has their back. It will continue to suck as much information as possible off every other device and through every other operating system.

………

Facebook closes out by promising that it will do all it can to prevent user privacy from being respected in future. “We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem,” it said. “We’re encouraged by conversations and efforts already taking place in the industry – including within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the recently announced Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM). We look forward to continuing to engage with these industry groups to get this right for people and small businesses.”

What can I say but, “F%$# Zuck.”

29 August 2020, 7:07 PM

I’m Surprised That It Took So Long

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@whatchugotforme How to tiktok
♬ original sound – whatchugotforme

The reason Trump wants to shut down TikTok

The video sharing site TikTok has filed a lawsuit against Trump’s executive order shutting it down.

Trump claims that it’s a security risk, because its parent company is Chinese owned, but the reality is that he’s chuffed about how Sarah Cooper has gone viral doing satirical lip syncing of him.

In any case, this court case will almost certainly result in an injunction that will last well beyond election day:

Made-in-China social network TikTok has decided to challenge the Trump administration’s looming ban on its service by taking the matter to the USA’s courts.

On its qq account and in a statement, TikTok owner Byte Dance offered a two-pronged rationale for its actions.

The first disagrees with the Trump administration’s suggestion that TikTok shares data with China’s government and is therefore a threat to national security. ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, said it has tried to explain itself to the administration and find a solution that would satisfy US authorities its service is safe.

The second strand is an alleged “lack of due process” during those talks. TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner said the Trump administration “paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses”.

………

The ban on TikTok was enacted with an Executive Order that relies on powers designed to let a US president act during a national emergency. The power has not previously been applied to an entity like TikTok so the case may well rest on some gnarly legal issues rather than the nature of TikTok’s activities.

TikTok allows people to share short videos.

The idea that it could be a threat to anything than it’s users’ or Donald Trump’s dignity is simply ludicrous.

28 August 2020, 6:09 PM

Facebook Supporting Right Wing Terrorists Again

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It turns out that the Kenosha white supremacist militia had been repeatedly reported for threats of violence, and moderators refused to take any action:

In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night.

The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it “non-violating.” The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting.

“To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day,” one Facebook worker wrote in the internal “Violence and Incitement Working Group” to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event.

………

The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News reveals the extent to which concerned Facebook users went to warn the company of a group calling for public violence, and how the company failed to act. “The event is highly unusual in retrospect,” reads the report, which notes that the next highest event for the day had been flagged 18 times by users compared to the 455 times of the Kenosha Guard event.

………

During Facebook’s Thursday all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg said that the images from Wisconsin were “painful and really discouraging,” before acknowledging that the company had made a mistake in not taking the Kenosha Guard page and event down sooner. The page had violated Facebook’s new rules introduced last week that labeled militia and QAnon groups as “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” for their celebrations of violence.

The company did not catch the page despite user reports, Zuckerberg said, because the complaints had been sent to content moderation contractors who were not versed in “how certain militias” operate. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that was responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

During the talk, Facebook employees hammered Zuckerberg for continuing to allow the spread of hatred on the platform.

“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?” wrote one employee. “[A]nti-semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”

All the complaints in the world from Facebook employees who matter, the algorithm folks and the ad folks, not the moderators, start leaving over this, or perhaps when they start demanding concrete actions, like the removal Facebook’s vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan, who is the most aggressive support of violent white supremacists in the organization.

Kaplan is arguably the most powerful supporter of those who promulgate right-wing violent stochastic terrorism of anyone in the USA.

He is a clear and present danger to public safety and to the Republic.^*

He is also a Shanda fur die Goyim.^†

^*Please not that I am not calling him a רוֹדֵף (rodef), literally a pursuer who is required under Halacha to be stoped by any means necessary, including lethal force. It would be irresponsible for me to call him a He is a רוֹדֵף (rodef). It would be irresponsible for anyone to call another person a רוֹדֵף (rodef). It is an explicit call for the murder of another individual.
^† Yiddish for a, “Shame before the nations,” meaning that this person is an embarrassment to the whole Jewish people.

16 August 2020, 7:23 PM

Hate for Profit, Facebook Edition

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People studying Facebook’s algorithms have determined that the method used to increase user engagement with the social media site actively promotes Holocaust denial.

This is no surprise.

Facebook is in the business of eyeballs, and action is taken only when content is so contemptible that it impacts the bottom line:

Facebook’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content according to an analysis that will increase pressure on the social media giant to remove antisemitic content relating to the Nazi genocide.

An investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, found that typing “holocaust” in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving.

The findings coincide with mounting international demands from Holocaust survivors to Facebook’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to remove such material from the site.

………

The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.

Jacob Davey, ISD’s senior research manager, said: “Facebook’s decision to allow Holocaust denial content to remain on its platform is framed under the guise of protecting legitimate historical debate, but this misses the reason why people engage in Holocaust denial in the first place.

“Denial of the Holocaust is a deliberate tool used to delegitimise the suffering of the Jewish people and perpetuate long-standing antisemitic tropes, and when people explicitly do this it should be seen as an act of hatred,” he added.

Facebook’s basic algorithm is, “If it increases clicks, it makes us money,” which is why we see it supporting genocide against the Rohinga in Myanmar, Muslims in India, etc.

Zuck don’t care, he never has.

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