The Truth About Disinformation
“It’s always fascinating to see government agents (senators and congressmen) pretending to be outraged that the Data of Americans has been stolen as THEY THEMSELVES work night and day to steal our freedoms. As long as people keep buying tickets to the three-ring circus, these clowns will keep performing for the masses who love their authoritarian, psychopathic masters.” – HighImpactFlix
A couple of years ago I had a pair of sunglasses stolen from my car when I forgot to take them with me when the car was being serviced. I complained to the garage and indignantly reported this important event to my wife. Spookily, the following day I started receiving ads in my Facebook feed for where I could buy exactly the same pair of sunglasses. I thought my natural gift of cynicism had turned into paranoia. As Joseph Heller said in Catch 22 – “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” In Facebook’s case – it turns out they are!
From Canada’s National Post, (Screenshot below) comes the report that one of their own citizens is testifying that exactly my sunglasses experience was indeed not paranoia but a matter of fact – Facebook did indeed have the capacity to listen in to my private conversations.
The report starts off with “Facebook could be listening to its user’s conversations through smartphone microphones, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says. He appeared in front of a committee of British parliamentarians on Tuesday, and in his nearly four hours of testimony, he used words like “fraud” and “cheat” to describe the use of Facebook data to affect the outcomes of Brexit. He also addressed the longstanding internet theory that Facebook spies on its users to shape their advertising.”
The report goes on to say that last year, a YouTube video of a man claiming Facebook gave him cat food ads because of a conversation with his girlfriend went viral. And the eavesdropping claims are regularly discussed on social media. To be fair, the video is actually both quite funny and just a bit scary.
Conservative MP Damian Collins, who chaired the committee, asked Wylie if the rumours were true.
“There’s been various speculation about the fact that Facebook can, through the Facebook app on your smartphone, listen in to what people are talking about and discussing and using that to prioritize the advertising as well,” Collins said. “Other people would say, no, they don’t think it’s possible. It’s just that the Facebook system is just so good at predicting what you’re interested in that it can guess.”
Whilst Wylie said that he was only speculating (presumably to protect his legal position), he went on to say that Facebook and other apps can listen in and figure out the context of where you are based on the sounds in your environment. It picks up whether your TV is on, or if you’re at work or at home based on “environmental context,” he said.
“There’s audio that could be useful just in terms of, are you in an office environment, are you outside, are you watching TV, what are you doing right now?” Wylie said.
The social media giant has repeatedly denied using people’s microphones to target ads or tailor users’ news feeds. But Facebook also said that its app only accesses the microphone on a smartphone if the user gave it permission to do so, and only if the user is using a feature that requires audio, for example, if they are recording a video.
Last October, Facebook’s vice president of ads addressed the rumour again. “I run ads product at Facebook. We don’t — and have never — used your microphone for ads. Just not true,” Rob Goldman tweeted.
But as privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye, who was at the hearing, points out, Facebook’s “opaque” practices means there’s no telling how much data users hand over.
Dylan Curran at The Guardian downloaded his Facebook data – his was roughly 600MB, which is roughly 400,000 Word documents. This includes every message you’ve ever sent or been sent, every file you’ve ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you’ve ever sent or been sent. It stores everything you liked and what you and your friends talk about. They store all the apps you’ve downloaded, what type of phone you have and when you bought it.
Curran confirms the data they collect which includes tracking where you are, what applications you have installed, when you use them, what you use them for, access to your webcam and microphone at any time, your contacts, your emails, your calendar, your call history, the messages you send and receive, the files you download, the games you play, your photos and videos, your music, your search history, your browsing history, even what radio stations you listen to.
And there’s a sinister side to all of this. Facebook is willing to sell all this data to anyone with enough money to buy it. It knows what your political tendencies are, your sexual preferences and even designed tools to understand what you are thinking by your device keystrokes and are quite prepared to sell these most private of thoughts.
In fact, according to the BBC, Facebook will sell 5,000 pieces of information about you. Did you know you even had 5,000 pieces of interesting information to know? I didn’t. But if they can listen in, record and store everything as you step through daily life, then I guess they would. It’s not just about selling advertising though is it. It’s about who they sell it to and what they want with it.
What happens if the government fancied the idea of clamping down on dissenting voices for instance. Nah – they wouldn’t do that, would they? After Thersa May’s recent announcement you might want to think again.
Facebook has shown no professional ethics whatsoever – this much is revealed with the scandal engulfing them with their association with Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections. There’s more to come on this story, of course.
Source: Global Research
Following a lengthy silence in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was revealed that a data firm was able to obtain personal information from over 50 million Facebook accounts, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally spoke out on Wednesday.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Facebook’s top dog then embarked on a small media tour, addressing several of the major concerns highlighted by the unsavory affair. While speaking with the Wall Street Journal, for instance, Zuckerberg said his company has launched an investigation into third-party developers who are “doing bad things” with users’ personal data on the Facebook platform.
But he also admitted that “like any security precaution, it’s not that this is a bulletproof solve” and that no mechanism “by itself is ever going to find every single thing.”
While it’s great that the company is taking a proactive step, the effort is not likely to comfort those users who feel their privacy has already been violated. What’s more, Zuckerberg conceded in the interview that the investigation may take months or more to complete.
In the meantime, options are available to those who refuse to simply wait around while Facebook gets its collective act together.
For starters, stop using the “log in with Facebook” option after downloading an app. It may take a bit longer to create a new account, but the app won’t get instant access to private information from your Facebook profile, which the company itself admits is what happens.
For the apps you’re already using, there’s a fairly simple process for managing the types of data they can access. Or, if you prefer, the same process always you to delete the app entirely.
Source: theantimedia.com
ANTI MEDIA| Facebook’s user data gathering prowess has been common knowledge for some time now, but one journalist’s impromptu experiment suggests it is even more ubiquitous and pervasive than previously believed.
Nick Whigham, a reporter for the New Zealand Herald, decided to test out a feature on Facebook that allows users to download a ‘secret’ file showing how much personal history the company has gathered about them. What he discovered is that Facebook not only has disturbingly vast consumer profiles on all 1.4 billion daily users but also tracks the internet movement and personalities of people who don’t even log into the website.
A large part of Facebook’s business model is selling the information it collects about users to advertisers. It’s free to us because we’re the product. Its algorithms track your posts, likes, shares, and preferences, of course, but they also track your overall Internet activity — the websites you go to, your operating system, your IP address, and comments you happen to leave on random forums — via social media plugins and cookies on third-party websites.
Even if you’re not logged into Facebook, your browsing behavior is tracked by secret trackers called Pixels, which are embedded on over 10,000 websites.
Sorry, social media Luddites — even if you’ve never used Facebook, your online activity is tracked everytime you merely visit a website that contains Facebook ads and trackers.
Whigham downloaded his Facebook files and was stunned by the specificity of the information. The 500MB zip files contained 105 biometric facial recognition files, photo metadata that includes where and when the photo was taken, his entire iPhone contact list with names and numbers, old tenancy agreements, photo scans of broadband bills, bank transfer screenshots, and, naturally, the entire archive of his Messenger chat logs.
Whigham urges people to download their file so they can see the extent to which their privacy is being violated by what he calls “surveillance capitalism.”
How do its algorithms aggregate so much personal information? There are 98 data points Facebook uses to size you up, and some of them may stun you. They range from the square footage of your home to whether or not you’re an early adopter of technology. They also look for “users who are interested in the Olympics, fall football, cricket, or Ramadan.”
While much of the public seems to have become somewhat anesthetized to predatory data mining and privacy violations, legitimate legal challenges have finally begun to surface, and Facebook is finally facing some heat.
Last month, a Belgian court ruled that the firm could not collect data on Internet users who do not have a Facebook account. Elsewhere, a federal judge recently dismissed Facebook’s motion to dismiss an Illinois class action lawsuit charging the company with violating constitutional privacy rights.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman Rodd Sims, whose organization is running a separate investigation into the privacy violations of multiple tech giants, including Facebook and Google, thinks it’s time for people to really consider the full ramifications of opting into services that harvest their personal information.
“Some people have asserted that consumers know what’s going on and don’t care,” Mr. Sims stated.
“I think it’s absolutely crucial we find out what consumers do know and then let’s see whether they care. My suspicion is Facebook and Google have much more personal information about people than people realise.”
To download your ‘secret’ Facebook file, click at the top right of Facebook’s navigation bar and select Settings. Then click “Download a copy of your Facebook data” beneath General Account Settings and click the green button. Then wait ten minutes and you should receive an email letting you know that “surveillance capitalism” is alive and well.
Happy hunting!
“Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another. We are continuing to develop, test, and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution,” Monika Bickert, head of Facebook’s global policy management, said in a statement on Friday evening.
President Barack Obama and state attorneys general, as well as gun control activist groups Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Mayors Against Illegal Guns – backed by billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg – had been urging the world’s top social media website to crack down on private gun sales, USA Today reported.V
‘Hood rats’ and Tasers: NYPD cop outed for incendiary social media posts https://t.co/uWgrYt8Twk pic.twitter.com/PuGNqjPIGm
— RT America (@RT_America) January 15, 2016
The last time Facebook took gun-related action was in March of 2014, when it blocked posts involving gun transactions to minors and required user-controlled pages to adopt wording telling others to obey local and federal laws and regulations. The site already bans arranging sales of marijuana, pharmaceuticals, and illicit drugs.
The one exception to the rule is licensed dealers, who can keep their businesses advertised, though online sales will still be prohibited.
With 1.6 billion visitors each month, Facebook is expanding its marketplace capabilities, providing digital payment services and instant transfers via personal messaging. The users that make up that emerging marketplace will also serve as lookouts for banned gun sale posts, according to the New York Times.
Some users, however, are not so likely to help enforce the new rule, which they see as a violation of their rights, or an example of the website’s political bias or hypocrisy.
Facebook will first remove posts violating the new rule and then possibly take action against the user, depending on the situation, the Times reported.
Facebook joins other services like Craigslist, which don’t also allow gun sales either. Many ad services such as Google AdWords prohibit the promotion of weapons as well, The Verge reported.
Snopes lead writer Kim LaCapria admitted in her personal blog that she smokes pot while fact checking political articles.
The Daily Mail report that LaCapria, who boasts of being a dominatrix called Vice Vixen, also keeps a personal sex blog. In her personal blog she described what she did on a day off, writing that she “played scrabble, smoked pot, and posted to Snopes.” She then added, “That’s what I did on my day ‘on,’ too.”
The revelation raises further alarm bells for those uncomfortable with Facebook’s inclusion of Snopes in their fact checking team. Should a team of unqualified, avowedly liberal bloggers in California, who operate in a company with no checks and measures or standardized quality control, be given the power to decide what constitutes “real news” that will be allowed on Facebook timelines?
Snopes became the voice of reason by debunking Bigfoot stories and accounts of UFOs in Haiti, then in an ill-advised case of mission creep moved into political fact checking. Snopes have been added to the Red Flagged Spam Sites list – curated and shared by young progressive Democrats – as a “hit and miss” source. Snopes are no more trusted than most of the sites they disagree with politically and loftily claim to debunk.
When it comes to politics, Snopes’ modus operandi involves framing questions artfully so they can answer with the FALSE or UNPROVEN verdict that suits their partisan agenda. For more information see here and here. Being debunked by Snopes these days feels like being savaged by a dead sheep.
READ MORE: Snopes Got Snoped
In a world where news that doesn’t confirm one’s bias gets flagged as fake, and the snowflake generation seek the solace of a partisan liberal fact checking site to tell them the world is exactly like they think it is, Snopes are thriving. The Daily Mail exposé revealed David Mikkelson, the founder, takes $50K holidays and divorced his wife for a porn star/prostitute.
But the most troubling part of the exposé of the Snopes HQ den of depravity is the fact that lead fact checker Kim LaCapria admits she smokes weed while fact checking. It’s California, it’s legal. That’s not the problem. The problem is that fact checking political news is a serious business, and it should be taken seriously by Snopes – especially now that Facebook have anointed them watchdogs of all of our news feeds.
Facebook should draw the line at using the services of a fact checking company whose senior staff admit they work while stoned. There is too much at stake.
by Julie Telgenhoff, Creator of A Sheep No More
Censorship via social media is increasing and with that, I’ve been personally attempting to help out any other alternative media outlets that are being affected and to make others aware if they have had their work shut down.
With Facebook, we know that they can censor us by not showing our content in the newsfeed. The only Solution as of now is to click on the page’s ‘following button’ then click on ‘see first’ ….
For those being shut down on YouTube, I feel it is important that the entire alternative media networks make others aware of the fascist event and then ask their own subscribers to view the content of that channel and subscribe to the new YouTube channel that was created to override the censorship.
Just recently, A Call For An Uprising on YouTube had their channel taken down.
If you want to support his work, he has a new channel available and he will not be silenced!!!
BackUp Channel: The Fire Rises
I may not agree with everything that is published on these social media outlets that are being censored and/or shut down, but I do support their work because I do not believe it is fair that their work should be censored by any fascist corporation.
Please watch this video via A Call For An Uprising 2:
I need your help in order to keep this small, independent media site going and sharing information with you 365 days/year because of the increasing censorship and ‘on purpose’ demonization. If you see any value in my work and feel you can trust me to give you the truth as I see it, please consider supporting me. My Patreon account allows for a small monthly pledge (here) or you can support this work with a small donation via Paypal (here). THANK YOU for your concern and support. – A Sheep No More
This article was originally published by 21st Century Wire.
Ever since the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, Silicon Valley firms like Google and Facebook – all of who backed Hillary Clinton and ploughed huge sums of money into her losing campaign – have been on a mission to try and marginalise and disappear alternative news content which runs counter to the mainstream party line.
Now Facebook wants to charge publishers and businesses who want their content to be visible in the site’s News Feed section.
This latest move by Facebook is a continuation of a pattern of corporate-fascist behaviour designed to kill-off dissent and alternative sources of information. This also raises a few important questions:
Q: Doesn’t this amount to censorship?
A: Yes. This is a clear case of corporate censorship by stealth. If Facebook is allowed to pull this off, then only large corporations, start-up and foundation-funded media outlets will be able to afford to pay to be seen.
Q: Has Facebook done this before?
A: Yes. When FB introduced its ‘Boost’ feature on fan pages in 2015, organisations like 21WIRE were then forced to pay Facebook money per post in order for that post to be seen by people who ‘liked’ our 21WIRE Facebook page. Even though we have over 30,000 organic likes, we must pay Facebook a minimum of $10 per post for our content to be seen by roughly 1,500 to 2,000 fans of our page. So essentially, it’s been quietly running a pay-to-play swindle for years now.
In this way, Facebook is able to pull increased revenue from corporations and foundations, while simultaneously burying independent media and bloggers in the process – a double win for the obsessive controllers of the Silicon Valley.
RT International reports…
Facebook is testing out a change to their network in six markets. As a result, posts from some publishers and businesses will be removed from the site’s News Feed section. The change has caused a dramatic drop in referral traffic to news outlets.
The posts will now only be shown in a separate tab called ‘Explore Feed,’ which was officially unveiled last week. The test is only active for people in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. Facebook confirmed the test on Monday, which was first spotted by Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik.
Some of the top Facebook pages in Slovakia lost as much as two-thirds to three-fourths of their reach due to the change, according to Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle.
Biggest drop in organic reach we’ve ever seen. Pages have 4 times less interactions, reach fell by two-thirds https://t.co/KhAtCR0yvu
— Filip Struhárik (@filip_struharik) October 21, 2017
Slovak media have 4x less interactions since #Facebook is testing #explorefeed (data by @crowdtangle, 60 biggest FB media pages in Slovakia) pic.twitter.com/UMfEBFz98P
— Filip Struhárik (@filip_struharik) October 20, 2017
Stories from publishers and businesses are being transferred from the main feed to the Explore Feed, while the main feed is reserved for posts from friends and family.
It may end up with publishers having to pay Facebook to promote their stories so that people can see them.
Facebook’s News Feed VP Adam Mosseri wrote about the test, saying: “We currently have no plans to roll this test out further.”
Mosseri also tweeted about the length of time the test will take.
According to Mosseri,
“The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further… As with all tests we run, we may learn new things that lead to additional tests in the coming months so we can better understand what works best for people and publishers.”
We look at what people say and what people do – do they comment, like and share more? are they happier when asked? do they spend more time?
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) October 23, 2017
Facebook has been known to make dramatic changes in their algorithms that affect referral traffic and reach for publishers. Just last year, it changed how the News Feed works, prioritizing posts shared by family and friends over content shared by publishers.
I need your help in order to keep this small, independent media site going and sharing information with you 365 days/year because of the increasing censorship and ‘on purpose’ demonization. If you see any value in my work and feel you can trust me to give you the truth as I see it, please consider supporting me. My Patreon account allows for a small monthly pledge (here) or you can support this work with a small donation via Paypal (here). THANK YOU for your concern and support. – A Sheep No More
Social media and our mobile devices have redefined the way we connect and communicate with each other. And though we have more “friends” than ever, we’re actually becoming lonelier.
At 0:40 I was shocked but my mind was blown at 3:40.
Via Omeleto :
A secretive division at Facebook’s California headquarters has been experimenting with mind-reading technology for several months, the company revealed.
Former Pentagon DARPA Director, Regina Dugan, is a head of the company’s experimental technologies division Building 8. She says that allowing people to rapidly transcribe thoughts would allow them to privately send texts and emails in an instant, but said the project was only the beginning of Facebook’s mind-reading efforts. Ms Dugan suggested that in the future, people may be able to share thoughts directly, removing the barriers of different languages. “You may be able to share your thoughts independent of language: English Spanish or Mandarin, they become the same,” she said. (source)
Connecting the mind to the computer (hmmm …). Nothing to see here, folks …carry on ….
Watch this video via A Call For An Uprising: