#facebook
accessnow:
“Your passport, Facebook, and Twitter please.”
We already told you about the U.S. government’s proposal to add an “optional” field asking you to list your social media accounts every time you cross the border. And thousands of you have already told the U.S. government you think that’s a bad idea. Unfortunately, their proposal just got even worse.
We’ve seen the revised form (PDF download) Customs and Border Protection is proposing, and the “Social Media Identifier” field isn’t even marked as optional — making it mandatory for travelers entering the United States to divulge their social media accounts.
This kind of broad-strokes data collection violates fundamental privacy rights and hinders freedom of expression — and there’s no proof it would do anything to improve security. Instead, it sets a terrible example for countries around the world to start monitoring everyone’s social media at the border.
Take action now to stop the U.S. government’s expansion of social media surveillance.
Not as much as journalism needs Facebook
Today, just 6 percent of people in the United States say they have a lot of confidence in media, according to a survey by the Media Insight Project, a significantly lower score than Congress’s 17 percent approval rating, according to Gallup.
The disillusion in media, it seems, is eroding people’s loyalty to individual news brands—or, at least, distrust and decreasing loyalty are happening simultaneously in an age when news consumers have more options than ever for finding news.
Read more from the Atlantic.
Not as much as journalism needs Facebook
It’s clear from any number of measures that people don’t trust or even particularly like the media. (Anyone who works in media might remind you that “the media” is not actually the monolithic or coordinated entity it is often accused of being—which is, of course, precisely the kind of reaction that makes the media unlikeable.)
Today, just 6 percent of people in the United States say they have a lot of confidence in media, according to a survey by the Media Insight Project, a significantly lower score than Congress’s 17 percent approval rating, according to Gallup.
Read more from the Atlantic
opinion piece by
Zeynep Tufekci
FACEBOOK is biased. That’s true. But not in the way conservative criticssay it is.
The social network’s powerful newsfeed is programmed to be viral, clicky, upbeat or quarrelsome. That’s how its algorithm works, and how it determines what more than a billion people see every day.
The root of this bias is in algorithms, a much misunderstood but increasingly powerful method of decision making that is spreading to fields from news to health care to hiring and even to war.
Algorithms in human affairs are generally complex computer programs that crunch data and perform computations to optimize outcomes chosen by programmers. Such an algorithm isn’t some pure sifting mechanism, spitting out objective answers in response to scientific calculations. Nor is it a mere reflection of the desires of their programmers.
We use these algorithms to explore questions that have no right answer to begin with, so we don’t even have a straightforward way to calibrate or correct them.
Read more.
Regulators blocked access to Twitter and Facebook, and to the messaging service WhatsApp today, according to press reports.
Godfrey Mutabazi, executive director of the Uganda Communications Commission,told Reuters that security agencies had requested the move as “a measure to limit the possibility of terrorists’ taking advantage” of the presence of foreign leaders in the country for President Yoweri Museveni’s inauguration for a fifth term as president today.
Read more
via Gizmodo
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Read more.
Committee to Protect Journalists, immortalized on the @facebook NY headquarters wall.
According to press reports, the Uganda Communications Commission cited an unspecified threat to national security to justify blocking access to Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp at around 8 a.m. local time, an hour after voting began. Access to the services remained blocked on mobile phones at 9:15 p.m. local time.
Read more.
Search engine giant reveals plans for pilot scheme to home affairs committee hearing, with Facebook and Twitter also probed over extremism policies
Users of Google who put extremist-related entries into the search engine are to be shown anti-radicalisation links under a pilot programme, MPs have been told by an executive for the company. The initiative, aimed at countering the online influence of groups such as Islamic State, is running alongside another pilot scheme designed to make counter-radicalisation videos easier to find
Read more from the Guardian.
Image:
Chris Ison/PA
