Elon Musk deletes Facebook

Eighteen enforcement officers have entered Cambridge Analytica’s London office after the High Court granted a search warrant.

The Information Commissioner’s Office applied for the warrant to access the company’s records and data amid allegations it illegally harvested information from millions of Facebook users.

The interactive graphic, which looked like a piece of journalism and purported to list “10 inconvenient truths about the Clinton Foundation”, appeared for several weeks to people from a list of key swing states when they visited the site. It was produced by the in-house Politico team that creates sponsored content.

The Cambridge Analytica presentation dedicates an entire slide to the ad, which is described as having achieved “an average engagement time of four minutes”. Kaiser described the ad as “the most successful thing we pushed out”.

The FTC’s McSweeny said her agency should have “some kind of civil penalty authority” so that it can punish the worst abusers.

Newly, though, McSweeny said she supported a “substantial policy conversation around the kind of data practices” used by firms like Cambridge Analytica. That includes psychographics, and “really powerful analytics and automated technology,” and “AI-driven systems that can be used for misinformation on a massive scale.”

“I think we should take these warnings for what they are,” she said.

Facebook had a collaboration with Kogan that was not disclosed in a company blog post describing the abuse of the company’s systems, or in a timeline that Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook wall on Wednesday.

Kogan co-authored a paper with 10 others that was funded by Cambridge University and the University of St. Petersburg in Russia in addition to Facebook. Titled “On wealth and the diversity of friendships: High social class people around the world have fewer international friends,” it studied the social ties between wealthy people around the world and was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2015.

“No, these changes are salutary, helpful and long overdue, but I don’t think that they will deter the FTC from imposing a very substantial civil penalty on Facebook should the Commission find, as I expect it will, that Facebook violated the consent decree with the FTC,” said David Vladeck, who led the Bureau when Facebook signed the agreement. 

“Like any security precaution, it’s not that this is a bulletproof solve,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “It’s not that any process by itself is ever going to find every single thing,” but it will be a strong deterrent to stop developers who are “doing bad things” and help Facebook track down what users’ data was mishandled, he added.

“The real point of what we’re trying to do is to make it a lot harder for anybody to misuse the data,” he said. 

But Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a privacy expert and co-founder of PersonalData.IO, said he suspects the data has already proliferated far beyond Cambridge’s reach. “It is the whole nature of this ecosystem,” Dehaye said. “This data travels. And once it has spread, there is no way to get it back.” 

Overall, there’s nearly no evidence that political campaigns have any power to persuade voters. Recently, political scientists Josh Kalla and David Broockman conducted a meta-analysis of 49 experiments that were designed to test whether voters are persuadable. The result: “These experiments’ average effect is also zero.”

Their study did find an important nuance, though. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained here, they turned up evidence that voters are persuadable when it comes to primary campaigns and ballot measures. But by the time a general election comes along, people are pretty much set in their preferences.

The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which it hired specifically to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents.

Mr. Bolton’s political committee, known as The John Bolton Super PAC, first hired Cambridge in August 2014, months after the political data firm was founded and while it was still harvesting the Facebook data.

Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday.

The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches, according to Chris Wylie, who left the company at the end of that year.

I was browsing through my news feed, and I was given a short survey to answer. Most of the questions seem routine enough, but I was made to reply if other companies are more trustworthy or not. This question includes companies that are not part of Facebook’s own, i.e., these companies are not the main platform or Instagram or WhatsApp which the company has acquired.

As you will notice the companies that are mentioned here are Amazon, Microsoft, Snapchat and Google. Which is highly odd, considering the platform should be more worried about saving the interest of it’s own users rather than asking if people feel safe in the usage of other companies platforms.

First, we’ll be emailing anyone who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed an IRA-linked account with the list of usernames they engaged with.

Second, we’re going to start keeping a public record of usernames we’ve linked to the IRA or other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. We’re committed to transparency and want you to know everything that we know.

We’ve decided to leave up any reblog chains that might be on your Tumblrs—you can choose to leave them or delete them. We’re letting you decide because the reblog chains contain posts created by real Tumblr users, often challenging or debunking the false and incideniary claims in the IRA-linked original post. Removing those authentic posts without your consent would encroach on your free speech—and there have been enough disruptions to our conversations as it is.

“Facebook used to be my favorite place to find out how my friends are doing and what everyone is up to. Now I use Instagram for those updates,” Delatorre says. “That is my time and I adore it.”

“Big digital platforms offer us incredible opportunities to personalize and contextualize the advertising we deliver to you. But with the power of those capabilities comes a great responsibility that can’t be neglected.”

Facebook is hustling to quell anxiety among its advertising partners—and prevent damage to its core business—as a handful of marketers have suspended advertising on the platform in the wake of revelations that an outside company improperly handled user data.

In recent days, Facebook executives have been reaching out to advertising trade bodies, marketers and major ad agencies like WPP, Dentsu Inc. and Omnicom Group Inc.  to tell them it is working to audit all apps on its platform and reassure its users that their personal data is being protected, according to people in the ad industry and at Facebook.

He’s right that relying on the internet makes it easier for companies to manipulate us — and yes, Facebook already has. This is a genuine problem, but it’s also one we’re trying to solve now, not a scary future apocalypse we’re all blind to. For Chollet’s argument to be truly frightening, Facebook needs to be the sole source of news. That’s unlikely, and Pew numbers show that people still get their news from a variety of sources.

More than a decade ago, ISPs like Comcast began hoovering up your clickstream data (data on every website you visit) and selling it with little accountability and absolutely no transparency. When press outlets back then asked ISPs about what data they were collecting, most would simply refuse to respond. And regulators (and most press outlets) saw no real problem with that.

AT&T and Verizon’s roles as extensions of the nation’s intelligence apparatus have since been well documented, and when AT&T was caught (with the help of former employee-turned whistleblower Mark Klein) helping the government spy on Americans without warrants, they simply lobbied to have the laws changed to dodge any accountability whatsoever.

Craigslist abruptly shut its personals section just days after Congress approved a bill expanding the criminal and civil liability of website operators over user-generated content. President Trump is expected to soon sign the measure into law.

In an attempt to curb sex trafficking, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) amends a bedrock law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — that helped the internet flourish by shielding websites from liability for outside content.

Reddit also shuttered sections of its website as part of a policy update that prohibited “paid services involving physical sexual contact,” but the company did not specifically call out FOSTA. Reddit’s policy change appears to have affected the sections Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy.

High viewer counts are a common feature of this more distressing content, too. The parasites-and-eye-gouging video, titled ᴴᴰ Mickey Mouse Babies Crying because of Grub in Belly! Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes racked up 20,218,533 views in two days before we reported it.

Cartoons Sun & Moon Babies Love Story! Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse Sexy Girls Pole Dancing – which isn’t as bad as it sounds – has been seen over 12m times. Paw Patrol Cartoons Skye Scorpion Bites in Halloween Holiday! Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes – which includes a brawl and a depiction of one of the cartoon characters mourning over his friend’s grave 11m.

In April, Outside Magazine will launch a Facebook group it created with an advertiser as part of a multimedia buy, a first for the publisher; Outside declined to share the advertiser’s name ahead of the campaign launch. The group will include a pinned post directing readers to a piece of branded content explaining the brand’s involvement, and the brand will share moderating duties with Outside editorial staffers. The brand also will help draft the group’s welcome messaging, and where appropriate, be allowed to run giveaways in the group.

Facebook’s problem is simple: It is a staggeringly powerful civic and commercial institution that has lost the public’s trust. Talking to the press is one way to regain that trust. But as chief executive—and as the face of the company since its inception—Zuckerberg must show that he understands that he even lost that trust in the first place, let alone why. Then he has to ask users for their trust back and take responsibility for fixing it.

And if he wants the public to think fondly of Facebook again, he has to recruit us to it, has to remind us of the beauty of a connected world, has to act like the vessel of a tremendous societal responsibility.

Instead, he shrugs and implies that it would be impossible for anyone in his position to do any better.

That doesn’t go nearly far enough. Facebook needs a full, independent examination of its approach to content, privacy and data, including its role in the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum. This should be made public. Each year Facebook should publish a report on its conduct that sets out everything from the prevalence of fake news to privacy breaches.

Next, Facebook and other tech firms need to open up to outsiders, safely and methodically. They should create an industry ombudsman—call it the Data Rights Board. Part of its job would be to set and enforce the rules by which accredited independent researchers look inside platforms without threatening users’ privacy. Software is being developed with this in mind (see article). The likes of Facebook raise big questions. How does micro-targeting skew political campaigns? What biases infect facial-recognition algorithms? Better they be answered with evidence instead of outrage.

So why is one of the world’s biggest communications companies so bad at communicating? The glaring answer is that, up until recently, the press have entirely failed to hold Facebook to account, allowing it to build a user base bigger than the population of any country, while receiving almost no scrutiny from a media more interested in holding up Silicon Valley as a community of geniuses changing the world.

Users of the internet have been forced into a bargain they had no hand in negotiating: You get the services you want, and platforms get the data they need. We need the right to opt out of this bargain, paying for services like Facebook or YouTube in exchange for verifiable assurances that our usage isn’t being tracked and that our behavioral data is not being sold. We need an ecosystem that encourages competitors to existing social-media platforms, which means ensuring a right to export data from existing social networks and new software that lets us experiment with new services while maintaining contacts on existing ones. We need to treat personally identifiable information less like a resource to be exploited and more like toxic waste, which must be carefully managed, as Maciej Ceglowski has proposed. This may require a digital EPA, as Franklin Foer, Paul Ford, and others have argued—a prospect that would be more appealing if the actual EPA wasn’t currently being gutted.

Facebook, after all, is based in the United States, which makes it subject to American political and social pressures. It has offices in Britain as well. It has to listen to Americans and Brits in a way that it doesn’t have to listen to Sri Lankans.

Tellingly, the very same week that Facebook failed to shut down extremist Sri Lankan pages that had provoked this month’s violence there, Facebook banned a far-right British group called Britain First. Its British user base had compelled it to get serious about hate speech regulation in a way that Sri Lankans could not compel on their own.

If British and American users withdraw from the site in large numbers, yes, Facebook will lose market share in those countries. But this would also drastically alleviate the pressure on Facebook to instigate reform.

There are better solutions: give people more access to their own data. That means, as Cory Doctorow suggested, the better way out is for Facebook to open itself up in a different way: to open itself up to third party app developers not to suck up data for marketing databases, but to give end users more control over their own data and how it is used.

People are so focused on Facebook sucking up their data, that they’re responding by demanding Facebook be a better steward of their data… rather than demanding that they get to manage their own data.