Now that the cat is out of the bag about how Facebook has been allowing the exploitation of user data for years, it is important to recognize that this evil corporation’s misdeeds have been hiding in plain sight for quite some time.
It took the story that third-party Cambridge Analytica had used commonly accepted data-mining practices on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media surveillance platform and that that information may (or may not) have helped President Trump to target voters based on their individual preferences but this has been standard practice for Facebook.
I would like to point out a hair-raising story that I just read in Rolling Stone – the rabidly leftist publication – that illustrates how powerful that FB has become. The story is by virulently anti-Trump writer Matt Taibbi who has in the past put out some good work and even dared to go against the grain by writing some pieces that were critical of Obama and Hillary but has lately gone to seed until he wrote this.
Can we be saved from Facebook? https://t.co/M0YtVq38WH pic.twitter.com/sbwZyEfqbZ
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) April 4, 2018
Via RS “Can We Be Saved From Facebook?”:
The social media giant has swallowed up the free press, become an unstoppable private spying operation and undermined democracy. Is it too late to stop it?
And it was. Long before 2016 had a chance to happen, the news media in the United States was effectively destroyed. For those of us in the business, the manner of conquest has been the most galling part. The CliffsNotes version? Facebook ate us.
Internet platforms like Zuck’s broke the back of the working press first by gutting our distribution networks, and then by using advanced data-mining techniques to create hypertargeted advertising with which no honest media outlet could compete. This wipeout of the press left Facebook in possession of power it neither wanted nor understood.
It was all an insane accident. Facebook never wanted to be editor-in-chief of the universe, and the relatively vibrant free press that toppled the likes of McCarthy and Nixon never imagined it could be swallowed by a pet-meme distributor.
But it happened. As a result, we’re now facing a problem potentially worse than either a Trump election or a Russian cyber-incursion: a world in which the informational landscape for billions of people is controlled more or less entirely by a pair of advanced private spying operations, Google and Facebook – and Facebook especially.
The Facebook mess is really the final chapter in a decades-long collision of the news media with the Internet. Many smart people expected this tale to end well. It hasn’t. The creators of the Internet sold their invention as inherently democratizing. Instead, information is now so concentrated that a 1984 scenario is just a few clicks away.
The entire thing can be read HERE.
It’s long and the rest of the magazine is total garbage – including another article that claims that the NRA has been infiltrated by Russia – but it is an eye-opener as to just how quickly that FB has become so powerful.
With this in mind, wasn’t it just last year that Zuck’s little cyber-Nazis were soliciting nude pictures from users ostensibly to combat revenge porn?
Via The Guardian “Facebook asks users for nude photos in project to combat ‘revenge porn'”:
Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in an attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse.
Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner (or ex-partner) might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be “hashed”. This means that the company converts the image into a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to identify and block any attempts to re-upload that same image.
Facebook is piloting the technology in Australia in partnership with a government agency headed up by the e-safety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, who told ABC it would allow victims of “image-based abuse” to take action before pictures were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” she told the Australian broadcaster.
Carrie Goldberg, a New York-based lawyer who specializes in sexual privacy, said: “We are delighted that Facebook is helping solve this problem – one faced not only by victims of actual revenge porn but also individuals with worries of imminently becoming victims.
I wonder how the suckers who sent their intimate pictures to Facebook are feeling today and god only knows where their nudies ended up.
