Free Republic

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared last week that the social media site was dedicated to removing any content “that promotes or celebrates hate crimes.” Mark Zuckerberg posted to Facebook recently condemning the recent events at Charlottesville which saw three deaths over the course of the weekend as far-left and far-right protesters clashed. The Facebook CEO stated that the company would be watching out for rallies in the future, stating, “With the potential for more rallies, we’re watching the situation closely.” “We won’t always be perfect, but you have my commitment that we’ll keep working to make Facebook a place where...

Facebook Inc. is lucky it owns Instagram. This year, the world’s largest social network will see a decline among teen users in the U.S., according to a forecast by EMarketer. It’s the first time the research company has predicted a fall in Facebook usage for any age group. EMarketer predicts 14.5 million people from the ages of 12 to 17 will use Facebook in 2017, a drop of 3.4 percent from the prior year. Teens are migrating instead to Snap Inc.’s Snapchat and Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook owns, the research company said Monday in a statement. Facebook has...

Antifa is taken very seriously whenever there's any kind of political event and they show up. The quandary comes when we're not seeing them in the field but watch their messaging on social media, especially YouTube and Facebook; platforms that have been targeting what they deem "hate speech". It's easy to see why those platforms haven't removed their content, which is clearly advocating for violence, because those representing Antifa appear to be certifiable morons.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg shut down an anonymous employee group following the election of Donald Trump, after it devolved into a forum for divisive political commentary that alarmed management, according to a report by Business Insider. Named Facebook Anon, the group was formed in March 2015 as a side project by some employees and hosted innocuous discussions about office culture and workplace gripes. But in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the group’s discussions became more political and more hostile. According to the report, employees with conservative political beliefs saw the group as a sanctuary, and...

Updated 2:20 p.m. Aug. 18 with lieutenant governor calling for expulsion — Missouri Lt. Gov. Mike Parson said Friday the state Senate should expel Maria Chappelle-Nadal due to her Facebook comment in which she hoped President Donald Trump would be assassinated. Parson and other top Missouri Republicans and Democrats, from Washington, D.C., to Jefferson City, already have called for Chapelle-Nadal to step down. The University City Democrat has so far resisted numerous bipartisan calls for her resignation after the comment was posted and later deleted Thursday. Parson went a step further Friday, saying that if she doesn't resign by the...

Romney's latest FB post... "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."

It’s time to treat Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter like public utilities.... Yes, they are private companies, just as many utilities are. And yes, these Internet monopolies do not have the same physical-infrastructure advantages that electric-utility monopolies have. But because of their network effects, their dominance and monopoly power are in many ways even starker. If I don’t like my utility I can put solar panels on my roof and an inverter and battery in my garage, and I can still get power. But if I can’t get access to the 2 billion people on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t like...

Many of the "Tech Gods" were dismayed when Donald Trump - who holds a very different worldview - won the American presidency. But did they actually help him to win? A key insider from the Trump campaign's digital operation - Theresa Wong - unravels for the first time the role played by social media and Facebook's vital role in getting Trump into the White House. Jamie Bartlett learns how Facebook's vast power to persuade was first built for advertisers, combining data about our internet use and psychological insights into how we think. Watch Secret's of Silicon Valley on BBC Two,...

Social media giant Facebook said on Wednesday that a second center in Germany committed to deleting hateful or violent content will be set up in Essen by fall. Facebook announced on Wednesday that a center in Essen dedicated to deleting hate speech and similar content punishable by law will hire 500 people and launch in the autumn. The first Facebook center in Germany dedicated to deleting criminal or offensive content on the site was set up in Berlin, and will be increasing their staff to 700. […] The law passed by the Bundestag (German parliament) in June requires sites like...

Two of the most powerful companies in the world are co-sponsoring a protest against a pro-life women’s health care clinic that provides free medical services and counseling to pregnant women — just not abortions.

The owner of a Facebook page praising the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has told their followers that they have been visited by two police officers who provided ‘advice’ that included a warning to stop posting content that is ‘critical of Islam.’ According to an update on the page called The Church Of Mogg, the page itself was frozen by Facebook for two weeks, and the owner was advised that they could face arrest for ‘hate crimes’ if any further content of that nature is posted in the future. Perhaps one of the most worrying parts of the Facebook post is...

Market breadth, a measure of how many stocks are rising versus the number that are dropping, has turned “exceedingly negative,” according to Brad Lamensdorf, a portfolio manager at Ranger Alternative Management. Lamensdorf writes the Lamensdorf Market Timing Report newsletter and runs the AdvisorShares Ranger Equity Bear ETF HDGE, -0.64% an exchange-traded fund that “shorts” stocks, or bets that they will fall. “As the indexes continue to produce a series of higher highs, subsurface conditions are painting an entirely different picture,” Lamensdorf wrote in the latest edition of the newsletter. He noted that the year-to-date advance in equities — the S&P...

Project Description Since 2012, we have been investigating the use of algorithms, automation and computational propaganda in public life. Political bots are manipulating public opinion over major social networking applications. This project enables a new team of social and information scientists to investigate the impact of automated scripts, commonly called bots, on social media. We study both the bot scripts and the people making such bots, and then work with computer scientists to improve the way we catch and stop such bots. Experience suggests that political bots are most likely to appear during an international crisis, and are usually designed...

The movie Zuckerberg is a highly credible character, a computer genius located somewhere on the autistic spectrum with minimal to non-existent social skills. But that’s not what the man is really like. In real life, Zuckerberg was studying for a degree with a double concentration in computer science and – this is the part people tend to forget – psychology. People on the spectrum have a limited sense of how other people’s minds work; autists, it has been said, lack a ‘theory of mind’. Zuckerberg, not so much. He is very well aware of how people’s minds work and in...

Fight to hang onto your seats on the Information Highway, conservative news sites Summer time. And if you are one of the conservative news sites being suppressed by Internet giant Facebook, the living ain’t easy. Facebook’s massive weight is squatting on most conservative news sites, including this one, now down by 50 percent while having broken our own Facebook records a scant two months ago.

A woman’s Facebook post claiming to have used breast milk while baking brownies for a school bake sale has garnered international outrage. Although the claim in the post has not yet been verified, a Facebook page called “Sanctimommy” received thousands of shares for the bizarre rant. According to the post, a woman tried posting three separate times about making brownies using breast milk for a school bake sale. The woman states other mothers found out about the breast milk and are “blowing it way out of proportion”:

Donors have pulled back and incoming students have decided to go elsewhere in response to the firestorm that erupted from a professor’s racially-charged Facebook posts, Trinity College’s president said Monday. Joanne Berger-Sweeney said 16 incoming students have withdrawn and past donors have chosen not to contribute to the school this year, resulting in about a $200,000 loss in donations. Both groups specifically cited the national uproar surrounding Professor Johnny Eric Williams’ posts, she said.

How To Permanently Delete A Facebook Account Here is the direct link to the official Facebook account deletion page. Delete Facebook Share Read the step-by-step guide for a clean, dignified exit. A deceased member's account can be memorialized or deleted. The Facebook Account Deletion Process Your account will be ‘deactivated’ for two weeks. After this period it will be permanently deleted. Do not login to your account during this time. It will cancel the deletion request. Do not be fooled into switching to a deactivation request. Deactivation is NOT deletion. Consider an account deletion epitaph to notify friends of your...

Days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that artificial intelligence (AI) was the biggest risk, Facebook has shut down one of its AI systems after chatbots started speaking in their own language, which used English words but could not be understood by humans.

When Chicago resident Carlo Licata joined Facebook in 2009, he did what the 390 million other users of the world’s largest social network had already done: He posted photos of himself and friends, tagging the images with names. But what Licata, now 34, didn’t know was that every time he was tagged, Facebook stored his digitized face in its growing database. Angered this was done without his knowledge, Licata sued Facebook in 2015 as part of a class action lawsuit filed in Illinois state court accusing the company of violating a one-of-a-kind Illinois law that prohibits collection of biometric data...