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The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has filed a lawsuit in Hamburg against three AdTech industry trade bodies including the Interactive Avertising Bureau (IAB). Members of the IAB include big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...), data brokers (Equifax, Experian, Acxiom...) and advertising agencies (Groupm, Publicis, IPG...).
The lawsuit follows the filing in 2018 of complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and UK Information Commissioner (ICO), which…
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Facebook's scientists are analysing location data about compliance with social distancing recommendations in various countries using information from a private vault of location information its apps have collected. The analysis shows that only "very modest" changes in habits in the US, France, and the UK, and much more substantial change in Spain and Italy between mid-February and mid-March. Other companies such as Google and Apple, may also be able to contribute insights into public behaviour…
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WhatsApp is being flooded with fake cures, false information about how the illness is transmitted, and coronavirus conspiracy theories, and has become a vector for spreading panic and misinformation around the world, particularly in countries such as Nigeria, Singapore, Brazil, Pakistan, and Ireland. In Botswana, the government has begged the population to be wary of what they're reading on the app. The fact that WhatsApp messages are encrypted, readable only by sender and recipients makes…
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A task force at the Italian Ministry of Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Pavia to leverage big data technologies to deal with COVID-19, after the WHO advised governments that lockdowns alone are not enough, and that testing, isolation, and contact tracing are crucial. The effort is beginning with anonymised data provided by Facebook; Italian telcos including Tim, Vodafone, Wind Tre, and FastWeb, via their Asstel trade association, have also offered anonymous datasets…
Content Type: Examples
A task force at the Italian Ministry of Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Pavia to leverage big data technologies to deal with COVID-19, after the WHO advised governments that lockdowns alone are not enough, and that testing, isolation, and contact tracing are crucial. The effort is beginning with anonymised data provided by Facebook; Italian telcos including Tim, Vodafone, Wind Tre, and FastWeb, via their Asstel trade association, have also offered anonymous datasets…
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In a rare departure from personalisation, Facebook announced that it had begun inserting a box into its news feed directing users to the Centers for Disease Control’s page about COVID-19, potentially driving many millions of users to reliable information from an authoritative source. Facebook also granted unlimited free ad credits to the World Health Organization to promote accurate information about the crisis. The company also promised to remove “false claims and conspiracy theories that have…
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Facebook announced on its blog that it was providing researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan with aggregated and anonymised mobility data and high resolution population density maps to help inform their forecasting models for the spread of the virus as part of the company's broader "Data for Good program". Facebook said it might expand these efforts to a broader set of partners in the coming weeks. They are also helping partners…
Content Type: Examples
Facebook is providing researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan "aggregated and anonymized" mobility data and high resolution population density maps to help inform their forecasting models for the spread of the virus as part of our broader Data for Good program. Facebook may expand these efforts to a broader set of partners in the coming weeks. They are also helping partners understand how people are talking about the issue online…
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In 2018, to prove how easily soldiers' real-world actions can be manipulated via social media, researchers at NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (StratCom) conducted a red-team exercise in which they "catfished" members of the armed forces. Using information collected from Facebook profiles and people search websites, the researchers created targeted advertising to draw soldiers to phony Facebook pages mimicking those service members use to connect with each other. In the…
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In December 2018, Facebook provided an update on the civil rights audit it asked civil rights leader Laura Murphy to undertake in May. Based on advice Murphy culled from 90 civil society organisations, Facebook said it had expanded its policy prohibiting voter suppression, updated its policy to ban misrepresentation about how to vote, begun sending information about voting to third-party fact checkers for review, and was ramping up efforts to encourage voter registration and engagement.
https…
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Le Monde exposed anti-IVG (anti-abortion) advertising on Facebook as part of a borader campaign led by anti-abortion website IVG.net. The advertisement relied on stock photos and fake testimonies posted in public Facebook groups and promoted to young women. Most of the posts attempt to promote the idea that abortion leads to mental health issues, a fact that has been proved to be falacious.
https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2018/07/11/les-anti-ivg-ciblent-les-jeunes-femmes-grace-aux…
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As a part of Facebook’s efforts to curb disinformation and misinformation on its platform, the company introduced new rules over how political content is marked. This has resulted in content that is educational, news articles, and otherwise seemingly non-political being marked incorrectly and taken down. In Hungary (and Ukraine) this has caused frustration from newspapers, especially due to difference between how Western European papers are treated differently from others. The Guardian reports…
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Political ads on Facebook are meant to be marked with a disclaimer that says who paid for the ad, as well as be archived into the platform’s ad library, where users are able to see more information about how an ad was targeted. It’s important to note that the ‘who paid for the ad’ requirement is loose, meaning that a generic organisation name could be used, instead of a name that ties the ad to an interest group, for example. These modest requirements of ads transparency came in the wake of…
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Volunteers for Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy were tasked with pouring over social media sites to search for disinformation and combat bot armies that spread negative comments about the candidate. Facebook has been slow to take down 'fake news' and so the volunteers search social media sites for such content, and then report it as violating Facebook's terms of service. While Facebook is Ukraine's most popular social media site, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that there…
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Facebook's efforts to remove disinformation in the wake of the 2019 Ukrainian Presidential election have so far failed. Politico reports that "Among the Facebook pages that spread spurious claims during the election was one with more than 100,000 followers that ran a video claiming (the Presidential candidate) Zelenskiy will allow Russia to take over the country with a violent military operation. Others portrayed him as a drug addict, or Poroshenko (the other Presidential candidate) as an…
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In August 2018, Apple forced Facebook to remove its Onava VPN from the App Store because the Facebook had been using it to harvest data across multiple apps and track user activity. In January 2019, a TechCrunch investigation revealed that in a separate part of the same programme Facebook had been paying users aged 13 to 35 to download a "Facebook Research" VPN and give it root access to their devices to enable it to collect data on their usage habits. The programmed, known as "Project Atlas",…
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In a December 2018 update, Facebook so effectively disguised sponsored posts that it took AdBlocker Plus a month, instead of the more usual few days, to find a way to counter it. Facebook has responded to the threat posed to its business model by adblockers by both providing users with advertising settings and tweaking its code to keep adblockers from working on the site. Federal Trade Commission rules require Facebook ads to be clearly labelled as such, but the adblocking arms race has…
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In November 2018 the campaign group Freedom from Facebook used the social network's own advertising tools to promote a "safe space" website where they can submit whistleblower tips anonymously. Facebook declined to comment but did not appear to be blocking the ads nor keeping a log of who viewed them. One leak suggested that recent scandals, including the Cambridge Analytica affair, had led to a rise in the percentage of staff who said they were optimistic about the company's future. The PR…
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Days after the 2018 shooting that killed 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue, The Intercept found that Facebook still allowed advertisers to choose "white genocide conspiracy theory" as a targeting criterion, capturing 168,000 members of the social network. The technique used was the same as the one Pro Publica had discovered a year earlier that showed that "Jew hater", "How to burn Jews", and "History of 'why jews run the world'" were acceptable to Facebook as selection criteria…
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In December 2018 Facebook revealed that over a 12-day period in September a software bug may have wrongly allowed about 1,500 third-party apps to access 6.8 million users' photos, including some that people began uploading to the social network but didn't go on to finish posting. EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg said the incident offered more evidence that Facebook has violated the terms of its 2011 agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission. In May, Facebook suspended some 200 games…
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Facebook has taken down 65 accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts, which were ran by Archimedes Group, an Israeli political consulting and lobbying firm that aimed at disrupting elections in various countries.
Archimedes was mostly active in Sub-Saharan Africa but also some part of Southeast Asia and Latin America. According to Facebook, the accounts taken down were attempting to influence people in Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia. But the most…
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The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. Back in 2009, the case of Nathalie Blanchard a woman in Quebec who had lost her disability insurance benefits for depression because she looked “too happy” on her Facebook pictures had made the news.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/woman-loses-insurance-benefits-facebook-pics/story?id=9154741
Author: Ki Mae Heussner
Publication: ABC News
Content Type: Examples
Before and after the Italian election on 4 March 2018, concerns were raised about the spread of misinformation, disinformation and inflammatory content through a network of news sites and Facebook pages.
In November 2017, in the run up to the election, Buzzfeed reported on links between a large network of Italian news websites (175 domain names) and Facebook pages owned by a media network company Web365 – that represents one of the most popular alternative media operations in Italy including…
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In an experiment conducted by Fabio Chiusi and Claudio Agosti during the 2018 election season and set out in detail in their report for Tactical Tech, the duo sought to investigate the Facebook algorithm that powers users’ news feed and the algorithm’s treatment of political content. One of the experiment’s goals was to observe how perception of reality is algorithmically shaped in the context of an electoral campaign. In order to do this, Chiusi and Agosti created six bot accounts on Facebook…
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In February 2019, an examination of Facebook's searchable database of Indian political ads showed that in India political ads on Facebook were viewed nine times more often by men than by women. Facebook's Indian user base was reported as 24% female in 2016. The reason for the disparity in ad viewing is unclear: deliberate gender-based targeting of Facebook users, the demographics of the population attracted by the pages on which the ads appear, or the levels of Facebook penetration in the…
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In January 2019, Facebook announced that as of February 28 the site would add more information to that displayed when users click on the "Why am I seeing this?" button that appears next to ads on the service. Along with the brand that paid for the ad, some of the biographical details they'd targeted, and whether they'd uploaded the user's contact information, Facebook would also show when the contact information was uploaded, whether it was by the brand or one of their partners, and when access…
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In January 2019, the British transparency NGO WhoTargetsMe, Mozilla, and the US investigative journalism site Pro Publica reported that recent changes in the social network's code were restricting their ability to monitor political ads on Facebook. The company said the changes were part of a crackdown on third-party plug-ins such as ad blockers and ad scrapers accessing data on the site without authorisation; however, the 20,000 users of WhoTargetsMe's plug-in had specifically chosen to share…
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In January 2019, Facebook announced it would extend some of the rules and transparency tools it developed for political advertising for upcoming spring elections in Nigeria, Ukraine, India, and the EU. In Nigeria, the site will bar electoral ads from advertisers outside the country where the election is being held, build a searchable library of electoral ads and retaining them for seven years, check the identity of individuals buying political ads against government-issued documents, and…
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In January 2019, Facebook' announced it had removed multiple pages, groups, and accounts coordinating inauthentic behaviour on Facebook and Instagram that were set up by two unrelated operations originating in Russia. One of these operated 364 pages and accounts was active in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern European countries; the other ran 107 Facebook pages, groups, and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts, and was specific to Ukraine. The company…
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In a November 2017 report, Facebook's security group outlined the steps it would take to combat new forms of misuse of the platform, including attempts to deceive people and manipulate civic discourse at low cost or risk to the organisers. Among the drivers, the group cited the global reach Facebook affords and the fact that everyone on social media can act as an amplifier. The group said it intended to collaborate with others to find industry solutions to fake news; disrupt economic incentives…