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21 Oct, 2016

Won’t censor Trump despite employee protest

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Zuckerberg decides not to censor Trump’s posts on Facebook, despite employees petitioning for the removal of posts as ‘hate speech’. The decision has prompted employees across the company to complain on Facebook’s internal messaging service and in person to Zuckerberg and other managers that it was bending the site’s rules for Trump. Some employees who review content on Facebook threatened to quit. Facebook:

In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards.

Trump campaign:

Facebook has never contacted us about employee complaints and has never removed a post. We are not concerned about the liberal Clinton elites who are so intolerant of conservative ideas that they would seek to censor the Trump campaign’s enormously successful Facebook engagement.

29 Aug, 2016

Germany: Facebook should take initiative to remove racist, violent content

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(L-R) German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, Eva- Maria Kirschsieper, Facebook head of public policy D-A-CH and Martin Ott, Facebook managing director central Europe, walk during a visted at the Facebook office in Berlin, GermanyGermany’s interior minister visits Facebook’s offices in Berlin and said it should be more proactive in removing forbidden content from its social network platform. The German government has been critical of Facebook in the past. Political leaders and regulators have complained the world’s largest social network, with 1.6 billion monthly users, had been slow to respond to hate speech and anti-immigrant messages. De Maizier:

Facebook should take down racist content or calls for violence from its pages on its own initiative even if it hasn’t yet received a complaint.

30 Oct, 2015

Improves ‘real names’ policy

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In a letter sent to organizations, Facebook says it is testing ways to improve its ‘real names’ policy, with changes coming in December.

Facebook users do not have to use their real names, but must use the name that they use in real-life. Some organizations fear that some users, including domestic abuse victims and those in the LGBT community, may face harassment if forced to use their legal name. Those looking to confirm their identity, without government-issued IDs, for instance, will have space to explain their situation to Facebook and, those looking to report users they think are using an improper identity, are being asked for evidence.

We want to reduce the number of people and to make it easier for people to confirm their name if necessary… It’s a balance to get this right — we want to find a line that minimizes bullying but maximises the potential for people to be their authentic selves on Facebook.

25 Jun, 2015

Only seven black people hired in 2013

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The social network company reveals that more than half of its US staff are white, with the proportion dropping slightly from 57% to 55%. The proportion of Asian employees increased by 2% to 36%, but the shares of hispanic and black people or those of “two or more races” remain flat at 4%, 2% and 3% respectively. Facebook’s senior leadership has 73% filled by white people. Facebook also made little progress increasing the proportion of female employees, 68% of its global employees are male – a decrease of 1%. Among its employees working on its core technology 84% are male, down from 85% last year. Facebook hired an additional seven black people out of an overall headcount increase of 1,231 in 2013. At that time Facebook employed just 45 black staff out of a total US workforce of 4,263. There are no black people in senior management.

11 Apr, 2015

Claims bug made it track nonusers

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Facebook releases a blog post about its investigation into claims that it tracked users without their consent, acknowledging the collection of nonusers’ data.

The report gets it wrong multiple times in asserting how Facebook uses information to provide our service to more than a billion people around the world…We don’t [track non-users], and this is not our practice. However, the researchers did find a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren’t on Facebook. This was not our intention—a fix for this is already under way…Our practice is not to place cookies on the browsers of people who have visited sites with Social Plugins but who have never visited Facebook.com to sign up for an account. The authors identified a few instances when cookies may have been placed, and we began to address those inadvertent cases as soon as they were brought to our attention.

31 Mar, 2015

Tracks non-users

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A report by the Belgian Privacy Commission says that Facebook is tracking non-users by placing cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” people’s browsers, even if they had never visited Facebook.com. The researchers hold that Facebook is collecting data from users who have logged out of their accounts or opted out of tracking altogether, monitoring them through the social buttons (social plug-ins) used to share third-party content, and placing cookies on users and non-users who visit websites that are owned by the facebook.com domain.

It is important to note that tracking of non-users initiates even if one does not visit the Facebook homepage. In principle, any page belonging to the facebook.com domain will result in the placement of a long-term, identifying cookie (e.g., an event page, a shop page, fan page …)

Facebook responds:

Virtually all websites, including Facebook, legally use cookies to offer their services. Cookies have been an industry standard for more than 15 years. If people want to opt out of seeing advertising based on the websites they visit and apps they use, they opt out through the EDAA, whose principles and opt out we and more than 100 other companies comply with. Facebook takes this commitment one step further: when you use the EDAA opt out, we opt you out on all devices you use and you won’t see ads based on the websites and apps you use…We’re disappointed that the authors of this opinion and the Belgian DPA, who we understand commissioned it, have declined to meet with us or clarify the inaccurate information about this and other topics. We remain willing to engage with them and hope they will be prepared to correct their work in due course.

1 Aug, 2014

911 calls during Facebook outage

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Sergeant Burton Brink from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department tweets that people should not call 911 when Facebook is down. He says that multiple people called the emergency line during a one-hour period where Facebook was inaccessible.

29 Jun, 2014

Defends Facebook mood experiment

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In response to the revelation that Facebook attempted to manipulate user moods, Andreessen tweets:

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/483024580554932224

Andreessen says that this type of testing helps improve websites.