Those who signed the letter want the company to cease “providing infrastructure to Palantir (the company that builds preditive policing tools) and any other Amazon partners who enable (Immigration and Customs Enforcement),” according to documents reviewed by Business Insider. They also ask that Amazon “implement strong transparency and accountability measures” that identify which law enforcement agencies are already using the company’s technology.

Facebook calls this group the “Investigative Operations Team” and has directed its members to find the worst possible things that can be done using Facebook, and to help the company prevent them.

The group, whose existence is being revealed for the first time in this story, is testing Facebook’s advertising systems, pages, Instagram, Messenger, and more. Facebook told BuzzFeed News the team is searching for troubling behavior in countries like Myanmar, examining keywords and other signals that could be used to promote violence. And it’s investigating Facebook’s merchant tools, attempting to spot problematic product sales.

Lucas Waldron, a social visuals and graphics producer at ProPublica, noted on Twitter Thursday afternoon that Instagram removed a video uploaded by the publication on October 2017. The video showed footage of violent protests and identified members of white supremacists groups. […]

Late Thursday evening, Waldron said a spokesperson from Instagram contacted him and said the takedown of the video was an accident. “We removed [the videos] by mistake and they have been restored,” the spokesperson said in an email to Waldron. “We have also taken steps to prevent this from happening again.” Instagram didn’t detail how the mistake happened or what guardrails it put in place to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Anaxi, which, according to court filings, was founded in April 2017 to provide “data analytics and communication services to government departments,” never saw much success. It was still in the early stages of marketing its services to potential clients when it was seized in bankruptcy proceedings. Starting such a company requires creating a “pipeline of opportunity,” Wheatland said Thursday, noting that it would have taken about 18 months of relationship-building before it would have started to get contracts.

It wasn’t clear exactly what kind of government work Anaxi was hoping to perform. An attorney representing Wheatland declined BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

The social network now confirms to TechCrunch that 3 percent of apps using Facebook Analytics had their weekly summary reports sent to their app’s testers, instead of only the app’s developers, admins and analysts.

Testers are often people outside of a developer’s company. If the leaked info got to an app’s competitors, it could provide them an advantage. At least they weren’t allowed to click through to view more extensive historical analytics data on Facebook’s site.

To be crystal clear on this point: Facebook does not use users’ phone’s microphone or any other method to extract audio to inform ads or to determine what they see in their News Feed. Facebook only accesses users’ microphone if the user has given our app permission and if they are actively using a specific feature that requires audio (like voice messaging features). We have no plans to change this.

“We know that business leaders have limited time for long reads at work, so we’ve also created a physical version with journeys in mind,” Facebook’s micro-site for Grow said.

The magazine is run by Facebook’s northern Europe marketing team. It has no cover price and does not run advertising.

Leila Woodington, Facebook’s head of business marketing in northern Europe, said in a statement: “Grow by Facebook is a business marketing program that shares thought leadership content directly with our clients through an annual event as well as print and online marketing channels.

“I come across a lot of videos on Facebook. But once you find those videos on Facebook, you can actually search up those types of videos on YouTube, and they provide even more content because Facebook usually is limited to one video in one group or something like that, one genre, and you can connect that to YouTube and find even more videos of that genre and you can enjoy it more.”

 According to reports from those affected, Smyte disabled access to its API with very little warning to clients, and without giving them time to prepare. Customers got a phone call, and then – boom – the service was gone. Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases.

And again, to reiterate, Smyte is a provider of anti-abuse and anti-fraud protections – not something any business would shut off overnight. In npm’s case, it even led to a production outage.

The study also identified the 25 political reporters who male political reporters retweet the most. Of the 25, just three are women.

“We found that male journalists, indeed, were more likely to retweet other male journalists— in fact, when male journalists retweet, they retweet men almost three times more often than they retweet women.” 

Married or single, working or not, and most often grandmothers, they are asserting their presence on Instagram, intent, in the process, on subverting shopworn notions of what “old” looks and feels like. They are, to hear some tell it, “100 percent slaying.”

“These women are ambassadors of age,” said Ari Seth Cohen, the creator of Advanced Style, a popular street style blog, two books and a film documenting, in his words, the “fashion and wisdom of the senior set.” His subjects, he noted, are simultaneously reflecting and contributing to a gradual shift in the common perception of aging.