by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, News
Pages flagged by the BJP that are on the platform include the official accounts of the Bhim Army, satire site “We Hate BJP”, unofficial Congress-supporting pages, and a page called “The Truth of Gujarat” sharing mostly Alt News fact checks.
NEW DELHI — Social media platform Facebook has been under serious scrutiny after the Wall Street Journal report presented its findings as favouring the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and “disparaging” its biggest rival Indian National Congress (INC).
The alleged role was played on the pretext of maintaining its business terms with the Indian government as suggested by public policy head of Facebook India, Ankhi Das.
Das, who is lenient towards the ruling ideology, has praised the PM as the “strongman” in the messages posted in the internal group between 2012 and 2014 as examined by the international journal. In the same group, she once said, “We lit a fire to his social media campaign and the rest is, of course, history”.
However, Facebook said that the posts were taken “out of context”. “These posts are taken out of context and don’t represent the full scope of Facebook’s efforts to support the use of our platform by parties across the Indian political spectrum”, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told WSJ. The “favour” to the ruling party came along with the “disadvantages” to its rivals, not only politically but also ideologically. According to a report published by The Indian Express, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in January 2019, the BJP flagged to Facebook India a list of 44 pages opposed to the party, claiming they were “in violation of expected standards” and carried posts “not in line with facts”. Out of them, 14 have been taken down.
Pages flagged by the BJP that are on the platform include the official accounts of the Bhim Army, satire site “We Hate BJP”, unofficial Congress-supporting pages, and a page called “The Truth of Gujarat” sharing mostly Alt News fact checks.
Of the pages taken down are sites in support of journalists Ravish Kumar and Vinod Dua.
Reportedly, one of the pages took the name of Postcard News founder Mahesh Hegde. He was arrested in Bangalore in March 2018 on charges of promoting communal enmity and outraging religious sentiments by posting “fake news”, according to the police at the time.
As per the media reports, Facebook India reinstated the 17 deleted pages and “monetised” two right-leaning news–The Chaupal and OpIndia — on the request of the BJP in November last year ahead of the January Lok Sabha polls by allowing them to receive ad revenue for their content. Facebook told the BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya that the pages were taken down “erroneously”.
Not only that, Facebook, on the request of Malviya, “shielded” some of the biggest BJP-supporting pages on the platform. However, A Facebook spokesperson said, “There is no term as shielding. We have a process called Cross-Check which is a system for reducing errors in enforcement by ensuring content from some pages and profiles is given a second layer of review to make sure we’ve applied our policies correctly.”
In its report, The Indian Express said that The Chaupal was a “news and media website” on Facebook, spending Rs 5 lakh in political advertisements since 2018 and followed by 10 million accounts. OpIndia’s official page is followed by 2 lakh accounts and has spent nearly Rs 90,000 on political ads from March to June 2019. “PMO India: Report Card” has spent almost Rs 1 lakh on advertisements and has 2 million followers.
Das, The Wall Street Journal reported, had objected to applying hate speech rules to at least four different pages or groups linked to the BJP. The WSJ has also published findings from internal messages “detailing Das’s support” for the BJP and “disparaging its main rival.”
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Markets, Social Media
In a bid to avoid discrimination in ads related to housing, jobs and credits, Facebook has announced new changes where anyone who wants to run such ads will no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code.
These changes are the result of settlement agreements with leading civil rights organisations and ongoing input from civil rights experts, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said in a blog post late Tuesday.
Last year, the US National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and other private parties, filed litigation against Facebook, saying it needs to build stronger protections against abuse.
“Our policies already prohibit advertisers from using our tools to discriminate. We’ve removed thousands of categories from targeting related to protected classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. But we can do better,” said Sandberg.
Advertisers offering housing, employment and credit opportunities will now have a much smaller set of targeting categories to use in their campaigns overall.
Any detailed targeting option describing or appearing to relate to protected classes will also be unavailable.
“We’re building a tool so you can search for and view all current housing ads in the US targeted to different places across the country, regardless of whether the ads are shown to you,” said the Facebook COO.
–IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Markets, Social Media, Technology
New York : More than 50 engineers at Facebook are reportedly busy giving shape to the social media giant’s own cryptocurrency and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quite bullish on the project.
Not only Facebook, highly-encrypted mobile communications apps Telegram and Signal are also on the job to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
“The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly,” said the report, citing people familiar with the project.
Telegram, with an estimated 300 million users globally, is also working on a digital coin.
“Signal has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line,a the report mentioned.
With Facebook’s plan to merge its three platforms — Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram – the digital currency would reach nearly “2.7 billion people who use one of the three apps each month”.
Last year, David Marcus, a long-time in-charge of Facebook Messenger, said in a blog post that he is setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.
Facebook also promoted one of its senior engineers Evan Cheng as the Director of Engineering at its Blockchain division, signalling the importance of the project.
According to Zuckerberg, the users may soon login to Facebook with Blockchain-based authentication.
In a public interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain late last month, Zuckerberg said he is “potentially interested” in putting the Facebook login on the Blockchain technology.
“I’m thinking about going back to decentralised or Blockchain authentication. Although I haven’t figured out a way to make this work out but this is around authentication and basically granting access to your information and to different services,” Zuckerberg told Zittrain.
According to him, Blockchain could give users more powers when granting data access to third-party apps.
“Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of Blockchain technology,” Facebook said in an earlier statement.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Corporate, Corporate Reports, Markets, Social Media, World
London : As the European Parliament election inch closer, the European Commission has claimed Facebook is withholding key data on its efforts towards how the platform is rooting out the spread of poll-related disinformation.
According to a report in The Guardian on Thursday, the European Commission has complained that Facebook has set up fact checkers only in eight of the European Union’s (EU) 28 member states.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s company has been under fire from the European Commission for failing to provide it with the hard numbers to prove that it was living up to promises made in a voluntary code of conduct,” said the report.
“Facebook has again failed to provide all necessary information, including any data on its actions in January on scrutiny of ad placements or efforts to disrupt advertising and monetisation incentives for those behind disinformation,” the report said, quoting EU’s security commissioner Sir Julian King and digital economy commissioner, Mariya Gabriel.
The commission, however, said Google has fared slightly better on sharing information on election-related misinformation.
The next elections to the European Parliament are expected to be held in May. A total of 751 members of the European Parliament currently represent more than 512 million people from 28 member states.
Facebook in January said it is committed to setting a high standard for transparency when it comes to political advertising on Facebook in EU.
“To run electoral ads or ads about highly debated and important issues related to the European Parliament Elections, advertisers will be required to confirm their identity and include additional information about who is responsible for their ads,” Anika Geisel, Public Policy Elections, Europe said in a blog post.
Facebook said it was planning to set up new operation centres, focused on election integrity, including one in Dublin.
“Working together with our teams in our Menlo Park headquarters and across Europe, the new initiative will serve as an added layer of defence against false news and misinformation, hate speech, voter suppression and election interference,” said Facebook.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : You may soon login to Facebook with Blockchain-based authentication, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has indicated.
In a public interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain late on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said he is “potentially interested” in putting the Facebook login on the Blockchain technology.
“I’m thinking about going back to decentralised or Blockchain authentication. Although I haven’t figured out a way to make this work out but this is around authentication and basically granting access to your information and to different services,” Zuckerberg told Zittrain.
According to him, Blockchain could give users more powers when granting data access to third-party apps.
Facebook last year promoted one of its senior engineers Evan Cheng as the Director of Engineering at its recently launched Blockchain division.
Earlier in May, Facebook set up a group within the company to explore Blockchain technology and its potential use for the platform, headed by Messenger chief David Marcus.
Media reports also said Facebook was exploring to develop its own cryptocurrency.
Facebook has over 2.3 billion users globally and launching cryptocurrency will allow them make payments using a virtual currency like Bitcoin.
In a statement, Facebook said: “Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of Blockchain technology”.
According to The Verge, the risk of further data-sharing scandals is one of the main reasons why Facebook is wary of implementing the change.
“You basically take your information, you store it on some decentralised system and you have the choice of whether to log in different places and you’re not going through an intermediary. There’s a lot of things that I think would be quite attractive about that,” said Zuckerberg.
—IANS