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A national group called Republicans for the Rule of Law is running ads aimed at moving Sen. Lisa Murkowski off the sidelines. They want her to criticize President Trump for asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. But both of Alaska’s senators have said they see shades of grey in the Ukraine picture. This ad is showing up in Alaskans’ Facebook feeds. It’s focused, of course, on that call this summer, when Trump leaned on the Ukrainian president for an investigation of the Bidens. “We think she will be receptive to the message,” said Chris Truax, a San Diego attorney who...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton moderated a post-screening discussion of the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, which covers the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal and the larger implications data mining has on democracy, at New York's Crosby Street Hotel on Friday night. “I’m thrilled to be part of this conversation, but I think the three people sitting here are the ones you need to hear from because they’ve been in the middle of this incredibly complicated and serious threat to individual freedom, to the rule of law, to democracy,” she said at the top of the conversation. But filmmakers...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will huddle with Rev. Al Sharpton and other top civil rights leaders next week in California to discuss concerns about Facebook's policy allowing politicians to make false statements in political ads, Sharpton confirmed Thursday. The meeting between Zuckerberg and top officials with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and others will come about a month into a controversy over whether Facebook is enabling the spread of misinformation with its political ads policy. "Last week, I sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO...

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On October 29, 1969, the internet era began as UCLA Computer Science Professor Len Kleinrock sent the first message on ARPANET, a network of computers that would evolve to become the internet. Five decades later, and 30 years since the World Wide Web brought the internet into the mainstream, global digital connectivity has fundamentally changed our world. Marking the anniversary, our founder and inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, said: “It’s astonishing to think the internet is already half a century old. But its birthday is not altogether a happy one. The internet — and the World Wide Web...

In the not too distant past, most adults realized that not everything one saw on the internet or on social media was to be taken as true. Today, however, what used to be a sarcastic phrase – “I saw it on the internet so it must be true” – is taken quite literally, regardless of the online source for such information; especially if it confirms our existing opinions and beliefs. This reflects a deep-seated cultural problem far beyond the ken of the Congress to solve; yet, of course, they try. And, as is par for the congressional course, they are...

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the “Youth Climate Strike” founder who has been thrust into stardom by globalist oligarchs, is now demanding that her opponents be thrown off Facebook in order to stop supposed “hate and conspiracy theories.” “I am, like many others, questioning whether I should keep using Facebook or not,” Thunberg wrote in a Facebook post last week. “Allowing hate speech, the lack of fact-checking and, of course, the issues of interfering with democracy… are among many, many other things that are very upsetting.” “The constant lies and conspiracy theories about me and countless others, of course, result...

Facebook Inc said on Saturday that it had removed an ad which falsely claimed that U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham supported the Green New Deal, demonstrating that it will fact-check ads from political groups but not politicians. The ad, which ran on Friday, was put up as a stunt by a left-leaning Political Action Committee, or PAC, called The Really Online Lefty League, to test Facebook’s political ad policies. Facebook has been criticized in recent weeks over its decision to not fact-check ads run by politicians, drawing ire from Democratic candidates running in the 2020 presidential election such as former...

Mark Z and Facebook has announced that there will be a new feed featured on FB pages..FACEBOOK NEWS. He said that it will be true journalism from many different sources such as: NYT, WAPO, WSJ et alia. Thank you, Mark. You have just assured that CNN, MSNBC and other money losers will now be saved from the ash heap of failure. Will OAN be allowed on this site? He said the new feed will not be algorithmic which means there will be real people choosing the stories, honestly and objectively.

ICE agents have used fake Facebook accounts to monitor suspected undocumented immigrants and lure them into raids in 2019, according to multiple reports. Most recently, a New York Times report detailed how ICE agents used Facebook and other social media to carry out a series of arrests in Oregon this summer. In one instance, according to the report, an undocumented woman named Gladys Díaz Tadeo made a Facebook post in a private buy/sell/trade group advertising a piñata that she had made with her three daughters. The next day, a Facebook account with a "Hispanic name" and a profile picture of...

It's no secret that technology plays an important role in our lives. Almost every single aspect of our life is ruled by technology, from smart phones to computers and the internet. That's why it's not surprising to know that Google and Facebook are keeping tabs on gun owners' firearms. According to The Firearms Blog (TFB), the two tech giants are scanning users' pictures to look for serial numbers. They're then creating an index of every person's firearms based on the image scans. If you've posted a picture of your firearm on a social networking site and didn't smear out the...

Facebook is the latest tech company to try to fix California's housing woes. On Tuesday, the social media giant announced that it would invest $1 billion to spur the construction of 20,000 new housing units in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. "In San Francisco, a family of four making over $100,000 per year is considered low-income," wrote Facebook CFO David Wehner in a blog post, saying that developing new affordable housing required a partnership of "companies, communities, non-profit organizations, and policymakers statewide." The announcement received a glowing endorsement from California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who said in...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his company's new political ad policy during a House Financial Services Committee hearing Wednesday. The freshman New York lawmaker asked Zuckerberg a series of hypotheticals about what types of political ads candidates could run without Facebook taking them down. "Could I pay to target predominantly black zip codes and advertise them the incorrect election date?" Ocasio-Cortez asked. "No, you couldn't," Zuckerberg responded, emphasizing the platform's policy of intervening in political ads when they incite violence or could lead to voter suppression. "Could I run ads targeting Republicans in primaries saying...

After a month of blistering criticism over Facebook’s decision to help more politicians lie in online advertisements, the company has conveniently announced an update on its efforts to shield American voters from the misinformation chronically afflicting its platform. “We have a responsibility to stop abuse and election interference on our platform. That’s why we’ve made significant investments since 2016 to better identify new threats, close vulnerabilities and reduce the spread of viral misinformation and fake accounts,” four senior Facebook officials blogged on Monday, while announcing several changes intended to “help protect the democratic process.” For weeks, Facebook, which makes the...

Facebook on Monday announced it had taken down networks belonging to Russian and Iranian actors on both Facebook and Instagram, part of a new effort to secure the platforms from foreign interference ahead of the 2020 election. The networks comprised pages and groups on Facebook and Instagram that were “engaging in inauthentic behavior” regarding elections. They were targeting the U.S., North Africa and Latin America. Three of the networks were Iranian, while one was Russian. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the Russian network had the “hallmarks of a well-resourced operation” with potential links to the...

Facebook blocked the account of ResistanceFeed.com from posting links on October 15 and said that the ban would last until October 22. The link that Resistance Feed had posted on on its page was about the footage that ABC had posted claiming that it was video from the Middle East from an attack on the Kurds. ABC retracted the story, admitting that the video footage was not from the Middle East and not of the Kurds and/or Turks but rather a video of an explosion in the United States in Kentucky from 2017. So Resistance Feed wasn't posting an unsupported...

I've managed to live without Facebook and Twitter. However, we're in a rural area and apparently Facebook Marketplace is the place to go for local classifieds for buying/selling and for offering/finding services. I need someone to haul some scrap metal off our property and have hit a brick wall trying to find someone through my small network of contacts (I'm at a new job at month 4). So I'm reluctantly considering opening a Facebook account, if only because the site's popups make it virtually unusable without one. I've also noticed a lot of local businesses don't have web sites in...

SNIP Zuckerberg in recent weeks has made a flurry of public and private appearances to make the case for his company and stave off anger from policymakers on both sides of the aisle. From livestreaming a Q&A with Facebook staff to meeting with GOP lawmakers and conservative pundits, Zuckerberg has been making the rounds, a sharp break from his company's normal strategy of deploying other high-level executives in moments of crisis. BIG SNIP But the meetings with conservatives have drawn criticism from some quarters. “They’ve obviously proven very sensitive to conservative criticism and so I think it’s a part of...

Whether you like them or not, a lot of big businesses are sucking up to government in ways couched as being principled, but are really just attempts to make sure they maintain their dominance. Preemptively addressing an issue is one way, an effective way, to keep the government from crushing your business, but it’s also a way some companies are hoping to fend off further scrutiny from legislators. This week we saw two examples: one from Facebook and the other from Juul.In one case, Facebook is pretending to be pro-free speech, and in the other, Juul is pretending to care...

The mother of an 8-year-old boy who was found hanging in a Pennsylvania basement last month alongside his 4-year-old sister told a 911 dispatcher he had been bullied and "had made threats of doing this but didn't want to go alone." The dispatcher further quoted the mother as saying that sadly the boy, Connor Snyder, “may be the aggressor,” Fox 10 Philadelphia reported Thursday. Lisa Snyder, 36, called 911 after reporting finding Connor and her daughter Brinley hanging from the basement rafters of their home in Albany Township with a dog leash on Sept. 23. Connor and his sister died...