The Super-Aggregators and the Russians

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis (Published 2018)

Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech — the social network faced one scandal after another. This is how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg responded.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter remove disinformation targeting Ukraine

Facebook parent company Meta says it has uncovered Russian efforts to undermine trust in the Ukrainian government and to hack Ukrainian military officials and journalists using social media.

Facebook's War on Bullshit Is Not Going Well—We Talked to the Fact Checkers on the Front Lines

The harassment of Julia and her team started in May. That’s when Facebook expanded its fact-checking effort to Brazil. Fact-checkers at one of the

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing

Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes m…

Facebook Shouldn't Give Politicians More Power Than Ordinary Users

Amidst escalating rhetoric about alleged "anti-conservative bias" on social media, Facebook has doubled down on its policies exempting (some) politicians from its ordinary fact-checking and from its

On Digital Disinformation and Democratic Myths – MediaWell

For two years, from 2015 to 2017, the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) operated a “Blacktivist” Facebook page. The Blacktivist account posed as an organic, grassroots online activism site, amplifying and contributing to the Black Lives Matter movement. It shared news, memes, and perspectives about racial injustice in America. Blacktivist was the most prominent of the IRA-generated Facebook pages, with over 6.18 million “interactions” recorded across its top 500 posts. The page had 360,000 likes, more than the verified Black Lives Matter account on Facebook (O’Sullivan and Byers 2017). In congressional hearings about Russian online disinformation and propaganda campaigns, poster-sized versions of Blacktivist posts and memes were on prominent display. Blacktivist stands as a warning sign of the sheer volume of online disinformation activities by foreign actors in US politics.

New study shows just how Facebook's algorithm shapes conservative and liberal bubbles

Research conducted at the height of the 2020 election reveals new details about how Facebook's algorithms handle political content. But it suggests there are no easy fixes to political polarization.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica: A timeline of the data hijacking scandal

Facebook is desperately trying to mend its damaged reputation following the continued fallout of a massive data scandal.

Publishers fearing Facebook dependency: fight for your future, reinvent RSS.

Right now Facebook accounts for over 40% of all traffic for U.S. news organizations, making many dependent on the social network for…

Facebook faces a reputational meltdown

This is how it, and the wider industry, should respond

Facebook’s Attack on Research is Everyone's Problem

Facebook recently banned the accounts of several New York University (NYU) researchers who run Ad Observer, an accountability project that tracks paid disinformation, from its platform. This has

One Response to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal: Block Facebook's

With Facebook in a dominant position in hosting a huge portion of the world’s social conversation, we’ve been worried about the incredible power the company has accumulated and the risks that poses

How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth (Published 2024)

The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.

Facebook Data Privacy Scandal: A Cheat Sheet - TechRepublic

Read about the saga of Facebook's failures in ensuring privacy for user data, including how it relates to Cambridge Analytica, the GDPR, the Brexit campaign, and the 2016 US presidential election.