Facebook (FB)

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Facebook (FB -0.8%) will hire 1,000 more people to review ad buying in the wake of growing public scrutiny over whether Russia used the network to interfere in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere. The hires will come over the next year, along with more investment in software that can flag and disable ads automatically. “Reviewing ads means assessing not just the content of an ad, but the context in which it was bought and the intended audience -- so we’re changing our ads review system to pay more attention to these signals,” it says. The company faces an enforcement challenge, with more than 5M paying advertisers on its roster.

Facebook to add 1,000 hires to ad review process - Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) | Seeking Alpha

Britain is considering classifying and regulating Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) as news publishers, rather than platforms. “We are looking at the role Google and Facebook play in the news environment,” says a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May. “As part of that work we will look carefully at the roles, responsibility and legal status of the major internet platforms.”  Consultancy group Enders Analysis says 6.5M British internet users get most of their news from Facebook.  Facebook shares are down 0.72%.     Previously: Washington Post: Russian-bought ads spread on Google platforms (Oct. 9)

Britain considers regulating Facebook and Google as news publishers - Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) | Seeking Alpha

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election, raising new questions about when the company became aware of the situation, WSJ reports. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion, according to WSJ; ultimately the report did not mention Russia at all, referring only to "malicious actors." Facebook's problems could get worse, as the full scope of how Russia used the social networking site are not yet fully known, tech investor Roger McNamee tells CNBC. It is not good enough for Facebook to say it will hire more people and punish those who misuse the social media site after the fact, McNamee says; the company instead needs to prevent the situations from happening in the first place.

WSJ: Facebook cut Russia out of April report on election influence - Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) | Seeking Alpha

In prepared testimony that it will present to Congress, Facebook (FB +1.1%) says that posts from accounts backed by a pro-Kremlin group reached 126M people at some point over a two year period -- a number equivalent to about 40% of the U.S. population. Some 29M people directly got served contact from the pro-Russian group the Internet Research Agency. Those posts traveled to the news feeds of 126M total through likes, shares and comments. The prepared testimony portrays a shocked company looking to implement solutions to prevent such an occurrence in the future. “The foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and outrageous and opened a new battleground for our company, our industry and our society,” testimony from General Counsel Colin Stretch reads.

Facebook: Russian-related posts reached 126M people - Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) | Seeking Alpha

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About 67 percent of American adults somewhat rely on social media platforms such as Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and Snapchat for news, the survey showed, compared with 62 percent in 2016. For the first time in the Center’s surveys, the research also found that 55 percent of Americans adults over 50 were consuming news on social media sites, up from 45 percent in 2016. “While a small increase overall, this growth is driven by more substantial increases among Americans who are older, less educated, and non-white,” the research said.

Two-thirds of American adults get news from social media: survey

We could go on for hours about all of the rules that TV networks and local stations have to follow that social media sites don't. But let's just focus on the key rules surrounding the broadcasting of political ads that even the smallest local station has to follow and the multi-billion dollar cash cow Facebook does not. Any request from any source to purchase ad time dealing with a federal candidate has to be put in the station's political file, which is open to public inspection. And here's the information about the ad request that needs to be in that file: (These are all according to the FCC guidebook): The name of the group sponsoring the ad The group's principal officers or directors Whether the request to buy time was accepted or rejected The class of time purchased The rate charged The name of the candidates the ad refers to The exact time the spots ran

Russian election meddling gives Facebook good reason to be afraid—Commentary

Executives for the social media company said Friday they will verify political ad buyers in federal elections, requiring them to provide correct names and locations, and to create new graphics where users can click on the ads and find out more about who's behind them. More broadly, Rob Goldman, Facebook's vice president in charge of ad products, said the company was building new transparency tools in which all advertisers — including those that aren't political — are associated with a page, and users can click on a link to see all the ads any advertiser is running.

Facebook announces new ad transparency before Russia hearing - LA Times

[MartiniStocks9756]

Facebook has been a great investment!!!!

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It certainly has, Martini and if I'm not mistaken, they're out with figures later today.

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I did try to get something of an understanding of the regulatory threat they face (that's what the quotes are about), culminating in an article:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4118846...t-solution

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We thought Twitter had sent out a good signal, but perhaps we were a tad too optimistic..

And when pressed about what happened last year, the companies' lawyers offered a slew of excuses. Overall, they conveyed the sense that Big Tech feels it's largely blameless for what happened. And they gave little reason to hope that their companies would make many real changes to how they do business.  After two days of hearings, it was hard to feel optimistic. Here are the most important takeaways from the hearings

Perhaps the most frustrating moment during the hearings was when Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota asked Facebook's Stretch if the company would stop allowing people to pay for political ads shown in the US with Russian rubles, North Korean won, or other foreign currencies.  Stretch danced around the issue quite a bit, but his answer was essentially that Facebook wouldn't commit to that. The bigger message from that exchange? Facebook values making money over making sure political ads are legitimate.

Ah, the tiresome media company debate again. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana asked the Big Tech companies if they were in the media business or were simply agnostic technology platforms. Surprise! Each company's lawyer declared his company an agnostic tech platform. This despite the fact that all three companies distribute news and other media to billions of people each day, act as a primary news source for millions here in the US, and make money by selling advertising that they runs next to or place within news articles and videos.

Last month, senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the Honest Ads Act, which would require online political ads to contain similar disclosures about who paid for them as are found in print, broadcast, and radio ads. If the bill were enacted, you would be able to see if the election ad in your Facebook News Feed were funded by a political candidate's campaign, a political action committee — or a Russia-linked group looking to stir up trouble. Before the hearings, Facebook and Twitter committed to putting in place new transparency rules for political advertising. But they declined to voice support for the Honest Ads Act, despite its similar goal. Google, which has yet to announce any transparency rules of its own, likewise declined to explicitly endorse the bill.

What you missed from the tech hearings on Russia - Business Insider

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"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" said Parker, who joined Facebook in 2004, when it was less than a year old. "And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever," he told Axios. "And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments." Parker added: "It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." "The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously," he said. "And we did it anyway."

Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker says social network exploits human 'vulnerability' - Business Insider

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Governments in Southeast Asia use Facebook as public evidence of wrongdoing, imprisoning activists and journalists for expressing dissent. Facebook does not have an office in Cambodia or Myanmar, and only a small office in Thailand despite its popularity in the countries. Facebook is affecting Southeast Asia politically just as much as the rest of the world, but the tech giant does not seem to act.

Facebook can't cope with the world it's created - Business Insider

But too often web companies just plow ahead without understanding the consequences. He criticized the likes of Google, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. for creating advertising systems that, for example, incentivized fake-news purveyors in Veles, Macedonia, “who learned that if you tweet something which is wrong, and put an article with a fake headline on your site, you will get more clicks and more ad revenue. “They didn’t do that out of malice,” Berners-Lee said. “They did it completely commercially, not even caring about who won the election. … But Google gave them money [to do it], and that trained them to think of headlines like, ‘Hillary really wants Trump to win.’”

Toward the end of the chat, Berners-Lee said it was important for people to be able to own and control their own data and that companies should think twice before assuming it’s a business asset.  “It used to be said that data is the new oil,” he said. “Personally, I think it’s like nuclear fuel. It’s becoming toxic. Two years ago, the question from the board was, ‘How are we monetizing the data?’ Now the question is, “How are we protecting ourselves from the damage of this getting out?’”

I asked Berners-Lee if he owned a connected assistant like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. The answer, he said, is no; he believes that when conversations and queries are recorded in our home and transferred to the cloud, they inevitably become vulnerable to intruders and accessible to prying governments. Sounding very unlike the web pioneer who created the web nearly three decades ago, he vowed, “We must resist these technologies.”

Father of the Web Confronts His Creation in the Era of Fake News - Bloomberg

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Facebook FB, -0.18%   made agreements with at least 60 makers of phones and other devices that gave them access to the personal information of users’ friends without their consent, The New York Times reported Monday, citing company officials. Facebook said in a blog post that device makers it partnered with “signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.” Facebook also said partners like Apple AAPL, +0.02%   and Amazon AMZN, +1.87%  couldn’t “integrate the user’s Facebook features with their devices without the user’s permission.”

The sad truth about how much your Facebook data is worth on the dark web - MarketWatch

Facebook logins can be sold for $5.20 each because they allow criminals to have access to personal data that could potentially let them hack into more of an individual’s accounts. The credentials to a PayPal PYPL, +0.57%   account with a relatively high balance can be sold on the dark web for $247 on average, the report found. One’s entire online identity, including personal identification numbers and hacked financial accounts, can be sold for only about $1,200 on the dark web, Fractl found.

The sad truth about how much your Facebook data is worth on the dark web - MarketWatch

Facebook integration has been a thing for quite some time, with the social media firm giving companies access to its users’ data via built-in address books, like systems and log-in features. While this sounds relatively harmless, Facebook has now been caught giving Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Blackberry and at least 56 other manufacturers “deep access” to each user and their friends without consent. The New York Times reports that this has been a long-term partnership with the companies over the last decade, in the social media platform’s bid to gain dominance. This deal supposedly continued even after Facebook made it known it would comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s consent decree, which was meant to put a stop to the gathering of data without a direct agreement between the party and the firm. This is but another skeleton out of Facebook’s closet, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw founder Mark Zuckerberg in front of the US Congress. During investigations, the platform emphasised that it had previously put measures in place back in 2014, that hoped to limit the amount of data third-party firms could gather.

Facebook caught giving at least 60 big-name companies "deep access" to user data | KitGuru

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This week, we got a glimpse of why tech giants like Facebook and Twitter appear so reticent to clean up their platforms. As they face increasing scrutiny from the media, users, and regulators in Europe and the United States over privacy, how they police their sites, and fake news, expecting them to self-regulate is a demanding ask: even minimal efforts to address issues with their platforms, or just the threat of them, garnered an enormous backlash from Wall Street. Facebook’s stock saw the biggest one-day drop in history on Thursday, with $119 billion wiped off of its value after the company reported slower-than-expected revenue growth for the second quarter of 2018 and said it expects declines to continue in the second half of the year. The Menlo Park, California-based company also showed signs of sluggish user growth. Then on Friday, Twitter saw its own market meltdown: Its stock plunged by 20 percent after its earnings report said the number of monthly active users on the platform fell..

Facebook stock drop: The $120-billion reason tech can’t police itself - Vox