Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media

book review of Elizabeth Williamson's new book An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Charles Kaiser
The Guardian, March 13, 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/13/sandy-hook-review-an-american-tragedy-elizabeth-williamson-facebook-youtube-alex-jones

Elizabeth Williamson’s book on the 2012 elementary school shooting is a near-unbearable, necessary indictment of Facebook, YouTube and the conspiracy theories they spread .

Lenny Pozner regularly saw his dead son described as an “alleged victim”, but it took years before Facebook and YouTube and Twitter took substantial action to quiet the insane conspiracies their own algorithms had done so much to reinforce.

Facebook allowed a Sandy Hook Hoax group and dozens of others to operate virtually uninterrupted for two years. Hundreds of videos on YouTube, owned by Google, wallowed in the hoax, drawing thousands who made threats against the families.

Image taken from npr book review of the book on March 9, 2022. Link: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/09/1084912392/sandy-hook-hoax-elizabeth-williamson

Facebook has sold ads promoting anti-vaccine messages

https://twitter.com/donie/status/1466578222846459907

Tweet Dec 2, 2021

NEW: Facebook has sold ads promoting anti-vaccine messages, comparing the US government's response to Covid-19 to Nazi Germany, casting doubt on the result of the 2020 election, and even pushing political violence.

https://cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocaust-misinformation/index.html… @AC360

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.

Karen Hao
November 20, 2021

excerpt from MIT Technology Review

"In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn’t done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”
Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook’s algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world.
But there’s a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn’t just amplifying misinformation.
The company is also funding it.
An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world."

MIT Technology Review

see full story

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/

Internal Alarm, Public Shrugs: Facebook’s Employees Dissect Its Election Role

Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote.

By Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel

Oct. 22, 2021

Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.

On Nov. 5, two days after the election, another Facebook employee posted a message alerting colleagues that comments with “combustible election misinformation” were visible below many posts.

Four days after that, a company data scientist wrote in a note to his co-workers that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political material — a startlingly high figure — were of posts that alleged the vote was fraudulent.

see full report

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/technology/facebook-election-misinformation.html

Facebook Live Updates: Whistle-Blower Tells Senate Hearing That Facebook Needs to ‘Declare Moral Bankruptcy’

New York Times Oct 5, 2021 Live report

Frances Haugen, a whistle-blower, has focused her testimony on how the social network harms young people, and Facebook replied on Twitter that she ‘has no direct knowledge of the topic.’ Senator Marsha Blackburn invited the company to testify about its research on teens.

Teenage girls say Instagram’s mental health impacts are no surprise.

By Erin Woo

[Name ] got an Instagram account during her freshman year of high school. At first, she curated her profile carefully, showing off different outfits and looks. She followed body positivity and body neutrality accounts. But she still sometimes compared herself with others, and “it can make me feel bad,” she said.

So when she recently listened to a podcast revealing how Facebook’s research concluded that Instagram, which it owns, was toxic for teenage girls, she said, the findings “didn’t surprise me at all.”

New York Times Oct 5 2021

Read full story

Facebook’s Apps Went Down. The World Saw How Much It Runs on Them.

By Raymond Zhong Oct. 5, 2021

Excerpt...

"Facebook has been under fire for weeks after a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, shared internal documents indicating, among other things, that the company knew Instagram was worsening teenagers’ body-image issues and that it had a two-tier justice system. The revelations have spurred criticism from regulators and the public. On Tuesday, Congress was hearing testimony from Ms. Haugen about Facebook’s impact on young users. ..."

Read article here:

http link

Facebook’s Outage Shows We Need Antitrust Action Now

Facebook is already the internet gateway for millions of people across the world. Transparency and accountability can't fix that. Breaking it up can.

By Edward Ongweso Jr

October 4, 2021, 2:10pm

"The outage, which affects billions of people, occurred just as Facebook filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's amended antitrust complaint against the company accusing it of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate anti-competitive market power. ...

"...for the past decade, Facebook has not simply had a deleterious effect on the general public, but established itself as the major if not sole conduit for internet activity across the world with a series of ruthless acquisitions that are now under scrutiny for breaking antitrust law ...

...Haugen has said that Facebook “chose profits over safety” but it feels as if we are supposed to believe it was a real choice, instead of the logical consequence of the laws we have, the amount of power Facebook has, and a host of other factors that should be tackled with antitrust legal action to cut the company down to size, spin off various businesses, and prevent that sort of consolidation of economic and political power from ever happening again. ...

Read article here:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj87wm/facebooks-outage-shows-we-need-antitrust-action-now?utm_source=motherboard_twitter

Facebook’s Role in the Genocide in Myanmar: New Reporting Complicates the Narrative

By Evelyn Douek Monday, October 22, 2018, 9:01 AM

"Members of the Myanmar military have systematically used Facebook as a tool in the government’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, according to an incredible piece of reporting by the New York Times on Oct. 15. The Times writes that the military harnessed Facebook over a period of years to disseminate hate propaganda, false news and inflammatory posts. ..."

Read article here:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebooks-role-genocide-myanmar-new-reporting-complicates-narrative

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