yet another layer of censorship for Faceboo!
15 Oct: New Yorker: The Ad-Hoc Group of Activists and Academics Convening a “Real Facebook Oversight Board”
by Sue Halpern
Two hours before Donald Trump boosted the standing of white supremacists at the last Presidential debate, Facebook told Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights organization Color of Change, that it would not remove a potentially incendiary and racially tinged Trump-campaign post. The message in question showed the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., calling upon “an army” of Trump supporters to show up at polls across the country, to “protect” the election...
Robinson recounted the experience at the launch, over Zoom, of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an international, ad-hoc cadre of activists and academics convened by the British investigative journalist ***Carole Cadwalladr. Cadwalladr was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, for exposing the malpractices of Facebook and ***Cambridge Analytica, both in the U.S. and abroad. That reporting led her to the realization that “journalism alone is not enough.” Earlier this year, she started a nonprofit called All the Citizens, which is organizing the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “This is an emergency intervention, focussed on the American election,” she told me, a few hours before the launch. Other members include Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist and leading critic of Facebook’s role in supporting President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous regime; Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P.; Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women; and Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor.
“Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emerita and the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” said on the Zoom call. “We demand comprehensive action to insure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been tracking hate groups for decades, observed that Facebook “actively and knowingly has facilitated the flow of poison into the population, and enabled waves of anti-Semitism and racism, Holocaust denialism and Islamophobic conspiracies, disinformation and extremism.” The Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe called his participation in the Real Facebook Oversight Board “probably the most important effort in my fifty-year career in the law.”
The Real Facebook Oversight Board is a self-appointed proxy for the official Facebook Oversight Board, which was designed to function as a kind of independent appeals court, adjudicating various challenges to the company’s decisions on whether to remove content...
Facebook Oversight Board’s first twenty members, who were named in May, include Cadwalladr’s former boss at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The body has yet to convene a meeting.
Cadwalladr’s board has embraced a broader definition of oversight than the one championed by Zuckerberg. From now until the election, its members will use their various platforms to expose the many ways in which Facebook’s algorithms promote divisive, inflammatory, and extreme content; amplify disinformation and misinformation; and promote deceitful political advertising. These methods were crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016, and have not abated in the years since.
They’ve contributed to a proliferation of QAnon, white-supremacist militias, anti-vaccine propaganda, and coronavirus falsehoods...
Now, as Trump continues to question, without evidence, the legitimacy of the upcoming election, there is a real danger that his campaign and its followers will use Facebook to sow chaos after the polls close, by challenging the results, posting false information, or inciting Trump’s base to violence. “The most valuable thing this board can do is to inoculate voters, by giving them the facts,” McNamee told me...
The Real Facebook Oversight Board’s inaugural demands are fairly modest: first, Facebook must remove posts that incite violence, even those from public figures, including the President; second, Facebook must ban all advertising that mentions Presidential-election results until one person is definitively declared the winner, and his opponent concedes; and, third, Facebook must label as untrue any post that declares a winner, until the victory is certified and the losing candidate has conceded. A few hours after the group enumerated these demands, it scored its first win: Facebook announced that it would not allow any ads that delegitimized the election’s outcome...
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-ad-hoc-group-of-activists-and-academics-convening-a-real-facebook-oversight-board
Wikipedia: ***Carole Cadwalladr, features writer for The Observer (sister of The Guardian) and formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph; was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, ***alongside The New York Times reporters, for her coverage of the ***Cambridge Analytica scandal...
Before Cambridge Analytica closed operations in 2018, the company took legal action against The Observer for the claims made in Cadwalladr’s articles.
In April 2019 Cadwalladr gave a fifteen-minute long TED talk about the links between Facebook and Brexit, titled “Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy”. According to Cadwalladr she delivered the talk directly to the people she described as “’the Gods of Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey’, the founders of Facebook and Google – who were sponsoring the conference – and the co-founder of Twitter – who was speaking at it.”...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Cadwalladr
thousands of hours/words from FakeNewsMSM over Cambridge Analytica/Trump ended up with -
18 Oct: IT Wire: Cambridge Analytica yarn turns out to be as much a hoax as Russiagate
By Sam Varghese
Much in the same way that the myth that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential election was shown to be just that after a probe by former FBI chief Robert Mueller, the great Cambridge Analytica scandal appears to have also lost all its air like a deflated balloon.
A report by Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s Information Commissioner found that the company had used “in the main, well-recognised processes using commonly available technology” to create what it sold to the Trump campaign...
***Denham’s report, which took three years to complete, did not gain half as much publicity as the sensational reporting of journalist Carole Cadawalladr who wrote about it in an article in 2017 titled The great British Brexit robbery.
Cadawalladr, who along with Britain’s ***Channel 4 was behind the story, described it as follows in a report that drips with hype...
Cadawalladr’s reporter colleagues at the Guardian, who worked on the story, were sceptical about it as well and privately said it was being pushed on them by senior editorial staff.
On Brexit, Denham said there was “no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA (Cambridge Analytica) were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK”...
As to the old bogey of Russian involvement, she said the only things found were some Russian IP addresses in data from Kogan’s server. There was no “additional evidence of Russian involvement”...
Cadawalladr has made no statement about the ICO report which came out in the first week of October. She won a number of awards for her so-called exclusives. Whether she will return them now and acknowledge that her reporting was mostly hype remains to be seen.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that score.
https://www.itwire.com/open-sauce/cambridge-analytica-yarn-turns-out-to-be-as-much-a-hoax-as-russiagate.html