Category: Social Media

Twitter, Facebook suspend accounts allegedly tied to Chinese government effort to undercut Hong Kong protests

Big Data, General, Social Media

Twitter has gone on another account suspension spree, this time targeting nearly 1,000 accounts it claims are agents of a Beijing-devised conspiracy to influence the world’s perception of political events in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Facebook has banned seven pages, three groups and five accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong.”

“Inauthentic behavior” is Facebook’s latest catch-all term for content that runs counter to its own Western-oriented ideology. (Facebook has partnered with organizations with ties to Western governments in its efforts to root out “fake news” and “disinformation.” One such organization is the Atlantic Council, funded in part by the US State Department and NATO.)

A total of 936 accounts have been unplugged by Twitter, all allegedly based in China, all allegedly in violation of Twitter’s “platform manipulation policies.” The South China Morning Post reports:

“The social media activity of the suspended accounts, which posted in both English and Chinese, were part of efforts to undermine the ‘legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground,’ the company said.”

Of the accounts suspended, 326 had over 10,000 followers, some with close to 300,000. But Twitter assures us that “intensive investigations [found] reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation.”

Speaking of coordination, Facebook confirmed that its own China-backed users were shut down thanks to a “tip” from Twitter. Partners in censorship?

Of course, it’s safe to assume that China is doing what it can to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong protests, but it’s equally safe to assume that the US government is doing what it can in the opposite direction. At the time of writing, neither Twitter nor Facebook has suspended any accounts for being part of a US-led campaign to drum up support for political unrest in Hong Kong.

Facebook admits it collects users’ audio data and has it reviewed

Data Management & Networks, General, Mobile Security, Networking, Social Media

Facebook pays hundreds of contractors to transcribe bits of audio taken from its users, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Disturbing enough, but get this: the people contracted by Facebook to do this … shady work have no idea what the purpose of such work is. These contractors, who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity lest they face some kind of disciplinary action, have no information about where the recordings come from, how they were collected, nor why Facebook wants them transcribed. They are simply given audio of Facebook users’ conversations and told to write it down.

After hearing of the practice, the Irish Data Protection Commission announced that it would be performing an investigation to see whether Facebook is in violation of the European Union’s privacy laws.

Caught red-handed (like Apple was in recent weeks), Facebook said it has already stopped the activity. Surprise, surprise. “Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago,” the tech giant said, the operative word being “human.” In another surprise (not), Facebook claims its users consented to having their audio recorded and transcribed. I’m sure they did so freely, voluntarily and knowingly, and not because they didn’t understand the implications of such a policy.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg was grilled about this, and many other things, during his testimony to the US Congress in 2018. He didn’t have answers of the lawmakers then, but his company submitted a few after the fact. With regard to the audio collection, Facebook said it “only accesses users’ microphone if the user have given our app permission and if they are actively using a specific feature that requires audio.”

Here’s a question for Facebook: if this is such an innocuous thing, to which users are voluntarily submitting, why discontinue it? Maybe because, as Bloomberg reports, “Facebook hasn’t disclosed to users that third parties may review their audio.”

It’s high time people initiated a mass boycott of Facebook. The company needs us far more than we need it.

Facebook finally puts its name on Instagram and WhatsApp

Big Data, Social Media

Tech monopoly Facebook has decided to make its ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp a little more apparent. “We want to be clearer about the products and services that are part of Facebook,” spokesperson Bertie Thomson explained. No doubt this will come as a small shock to a good chunk of those Instagram and WhatsApp users, many of whom are still under the impression that the two apps are separate, independent entities. (Instagram ceased to be so in 2012; WhatsApp in 2014.)

The confusion is understandable. As Wired points out, “The companies had their own CEOs, their own apps and websites, their own office buildings and email addresses. Facebook even allowed WhatsApp employees to have nicer desks and fancier bathrooms.”

No doubt this arrangement was calculated in part to sow confusion among users, given how much (well-earned) flak Facebook has taken over the past few years, mostly over privacy and security concerns, but now also about censorship and political partisanship concerns. All of which are valid. Facebook is a titanic trust and deserves every bit of scrutiny it receives.

Recently, former NSA analyst-cum-whistleblower Edward Snowden accused Facebook and its subsidiaries of spying on its users, and pledged to demonstrate it for laypeople.

“In the weeks ahead, I aim to explain how each of these sites spies on you, and methods to limit how much they know about you. If you use them, keep an eye out,” he wrote on Twitter. If you don’t already follow him, I would suggest you do so now.

Returning to the original point of this blog, Wired reports that Instagram now says “Instagram from Facebook” at the bottom of the screen.

The tech website goes on to ascribe a less-than-noble motive to Facebook’s decision:

“What makes the move seem ill-considered is that just last week Facebook confirmed that both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are investigating the company for possible antitrust violations. Among the items the agencies are considering: Whether Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram were anti-competitive, because they snuffed out potential rivals. It’s hard to avoid wondering if Facebook’s rebranding exercise isn’t some ham-handed effort at convincing government lawyers that three apps are already fused.”

As to whether or not the acquisitions were “anti-competitive,” of course they were. It’s high time we bust this trust.