Facebook And The Unravelling Of Truth

At a time when access to accurate, well-informed and well-researched information is crucial, it is probably not surprising that there are bad actors who promote disinformation. After all, chaos, their preferred state, constantly needs stoking, and oh, what a friend they have in Facebook.

Earlier this month, the BBC exposed the internet giant for the amoral, greedy and even nefarious entity it is, one quite content to promote the ranting of the far-right fringe as it exploits the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is a sample of the posts regarding the virus gleaned from Mark Zuckerberg's baby:

"What if [they] are trying to kill off as many people as possible" reads one Facebook post.

"Eventually, these scum will release something truly nasty to wipe us all out, but first they have to train us to be obedient slaves" reads another.

A third: "Coronavirus is the newest Islamist weapon."

That Facebook willingly makes itself a vehicle (a very profitable one, of course) for hatred, prejudice and conspiracy theories comes as no surprise to me. A post I wrote almost five years ago shows why. Yet in our current situation, it can be argued that the stakes are even higher today.

Writing in The Markup, Aaron Sankind explains Facebook's tactics of open solicitation, i.e. prostitution, which openly contradict its promise to combat misinformation about Covid-19.

Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to

Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.

This week, The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience, and the ad was approved by Facebook.

Interestingly, after posting it, Sankin writes that

an ad for a hat that would supposedly protect my head from cellphone radiation appeared on my Facebook feed on Thursday, April 16.

Concerns about electromagnetic radiation coming from 5G cellular infrastructure have become a major part of the conspiracy theories swirling around the origin of the coronavirus.

The social media giant's synergistic (some would say parasitic) money-making techniques are obvious here.

Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington studying how conspiracy theories spread online, said one hallmark of the ecosystem is that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to be convinced of other conspiracy theories.

By offering advertisers the ability to target people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories, she said, Facebook is taking “advantage of this sort of vulnerability that a person has once they’re going down these rabbit holes, both to pull them further down and to monetize that.”

Actions speak louder than words, as they say, and it appears that Facebook may talk the talk, but refuses to walk the walk:

Facebook has also said that it is cracking down on ads on products related to the pandemic. “We recently implemented a policy to prohibit ads that refer to the coronavirus and create a sense of urgency, like implying a limited supply, or guaranteeing a cure or prevention. We also have policies for surfaces like Marketplace that prohibit similar behavior”...

However, earlier this month, Consumer Reports was able to schedule seven paid ads that contained fake claims, such as stating that social distancing doesn’t work or that people could stay healthy by drinking small doses of bleach. Facebook approved all of the ads.

Business is business would seem to be the only ethos Facebook lives by. And the consequences for a credulous public couldn't be more lethal.

Facebook Is Not Our Friend

I wrote a blog entry over four years ago about Facebook tolerating hate groups. I won't repeat the post here, other than to say it became apparent after I lodged a complaint with them and got a wholly unsatisfactory reply that the company must have a very strange set of community standards, given that I was told the anti-Muslim group in question did not violate them.

It now appears that the situation at Facebook is even worse, thanks to its promotion of private and 'secret' groups, some of which have very frightening agendas. The following Global News reports explains all:



Facebook is a corporate digital giant that needs far greater government intervention and regulation than has thus far been meted out. Despite its public persona, it is clearly not our friend.

You Can Close The Open Book That Is Your Data

Now that it has been demonstrated Facebook is not the benign social media giant it has always claimed to be, people are becoming more conscious of how vulnerable and how valuable their data is to unscrupulous entities. Among those who are concerned, there will be a corp looking for ways to keep more of their information private. Fortunately, you don't have to be a technical wizard to take prophylactic measures.

Exactly what does Facebook have on you? It is easy to find out, and easy to change your privacy settings to frustrate those who 'want to get to know you better'.

In the Facebook settings for your account — right below the link to deactivate it — there’s an option to download a copy of all your Facebook data. The file can be a creepy wake-up call: All those years of browsing the News Feed, and sharing selfies, engagements and birthday wishes on Facebook have taught the company quite a lot about you. You, the user, are part of the reason that Facebook has become so good at targeting ads. You’re giving them everything they need to do it.

Here’s a link that will take you right to the settings page, if you’re logged in to your account. One there, click on the link to download your archive, and follow the prompts.

The following video offers further explanation:



Yesterday I downloaded my data and, after nine years on Facebook I was amazed at what is stored there: all manner of messages, posts, photos and likes. While most of what I put on the social media is not personal, as I prefer to use it to post links to articles and interesting blog posts, in the past I have included vacation photos and other such memorabilia, but for the most part have always kept this information either private (available only to me, or limited to my FB friends). Nonetheless, I am not at all confident that the data could not be taken and sold by FB anyway.

However, it is easy to change your settings, and something privacy experts agree is a good start.

On a related note, I have stopped using Google for my searches, because all of them are tracked and sold; instead, I am using another engine called DuckDuckGo, which does no such tracking. You can click on this link to find out more about it.

Finally, those who are cavalier about their data may want to think twice after reading this article about the "extreme vetting" the U.S. is subjecting visa applicants to, expected to affect 14.71 million applicants, including those who apply as students, for business trips, or on vacation.

Whose Democracy Is It, Anyway?

While the Mound has been giving comprehensive coverage of the Cambridge Analytica assault on democracy, I am taking this opportunity to supplement his work with the following. I hope it sheds further light on the ongoing subversion of politics and citizens' rights, all for the sake of facilitating victory for those who have no goal other than to attain power for its own sake.



Fittingly, for Facebook's pivotal role in this monstrous scheme, its shares lost 7% of their value for a whopping market value loss of $40 billion.

Facebook's Community Standards

Some time ago, I wrote about my disappointing experience with Facebook after I complained about what was essentially hate speech by a FB group. The response I got was that the racist anti-Muslim group did not violate their community standards.

Since then, it would appear that little has changed.

Yesterday I happened upon a video by a FB group entitled Refugee Resettlement, below which was an invitation to learn more at Act For America, which describes itself as "the NRA of national security." Take a look if you want to get a flavour of their 'concerns.' I watched the group's video which, in my view, is an exercise in fear-mongering and anti-Muslim sentiment, and it does violate my standards, but apparently not those of Facebook. Here is the reply I got about my complaint:

Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards. Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the video you reported for displaying hate speech and found it doesn't violate our Community Standards.

Please let us know if you see anything else that concerns you. We want to keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone.

Well, perhaps not everyone, as the video below makes clear:

UPDATED: Fearless Journalism, Or Presidential Appeasement?

Happy New Year, everyone.

And now, a return to regular programming.

As 2017 dawns and the Trump presidency draws near, I have been wondering if the MSM will show any real backbone and fulfill the role traditionally ascribed to them as bulwarks of democracy. Or will they simply continue to be the abject failures that journalist and social prophet Chris Hedges calls them, sell-outs as part of the liberal class he takes to task in his book Death of the Liberal Class?

One of the prizes that journalists, on behalf of their corporate employers, hold most sacred is access. Given the unbridled contempt Trump has shown toward criticism, will there now be an effort at appeasement of the temperamental one? Indeed, Will both external and internal factors influence the media's approach to political coverage?

Early signs offer cause for concern. Take, for example, this report from The Guardian:

A journalist was temporarily banned from Facebook after a post in which he called Trump supporters “a nasty fascistic lot”, in the latest example of the social media platform’s censorship of journalists.

The social media giant later reversed its decision and apologized, but the trouble began when writer Kevin Sessums shared a post by

ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd that read: “In the last few hours I have been called by lovely ‘christian’ Trump fans: a jew, faggot, retard. To set record straight: divorced Catholic.”

Sessums added his own commentary, writing:

But as those who do hold Trump to the standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is lucky he didn’t get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent trolls, you’re not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous. We’re past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you off the hook. You’re Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists.

Seesums was initially informed that his post violated FB's community standards, a curious justification given much of what it deems to be consistent with those standards.

The writer's reaction was swift and excoriating:

It’s chilling. It’s arbitrary censorship ... Do I have to be careful about what I say about Trump now?

That does become the central question, doesn't it? And that leads to this concern: will mainstream journalists now practice a kind of prophylactic self-censorship? They might be wise to heed the advice of Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who said on Saturday that

journalists needed to “grow a backbone” to deal with President-elect Donald Trump.

With a Republican-controlled House and Senate, expect the usual checks and balances of the American political system to completely fail. Let us all hope that mainstream journalism doesn't have to be consigned to the same category as well.

UPDATE: This Washington Post piece, replete with links, gets to the journalistic heart of the matter.

More Weapons In The War Against Fake News

If you get the bulk of your news from television and print journalism, you may be unaware of the extent to which fake news has taken hold in the virtual world. If you are in that category, here is a link to the stories I have posted revolving around the issue. Or just do a quick Google search. The fact that such fiction has deep traction should worry us all.

Given the suspicion that fake news may very well have been a contributing factor in the recent U.S. election results, especially the prominent role that Facebook seems to have played, the world is now beginning to take this threat seriously and devising ways to ferret out the mendacious from the true. And Facebook will play a leading role:

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users.

If those articles don’t pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will pass on that evaluation with a little label whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

While it will not end the scourge of fake news, once the domain of tabloids like The National Enquirer, it will undoubtedly put a dent in it:

The new system will work like this: if there’s a story out there that is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they aren’t, for example — then users will see a notice saying that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try and share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will also appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

Users will also be able to report potentially false stories to Facebook, or send messages to the person posting a questionable article directly.

And if that isn't enough, there are other means at our personal disposal through browser plug-ins and extensions, one of which, the B.S. Detector, I previously wrote about. There are others as well:

Slate unfurled This Is Fake, which combines crowdsourcing and editorial curation to identify articles in Facebook feeds that spread misinformation and flag them as false.

An open source project, the FiB Chrome Extension, combs through a user’s Facebook news feed to verify status updates, images and links through image recognition, keyword extraction, source verification and a Twitter search. An artificial intelligence assessment of facts results in a verdict tagged as “Verified” or “Not Verified.” If the story is deemed false, the AI will search for a verified source on the same topic.

Another one is Media Bias/Fact Check. The Daily Dot offers this description:

While Media Bias/Fact Check doesn’t scan your Facebook, it will help you when you end up on a site with questionable news. Or any other type of news. The app works by scraping data from Media Bias Fact Check, a wonderful site that checks for bias across all ideological spectrums.

When you land on a news page and press the MB/FC icon in Chrome, the extension will tell you exactly what kind of bias you can expect from your source. Left, right, center, or somewhere in space, MB/FC will tell you who is lying and when.

As I have said before, ultimately nothing serves to replace skilled critical thinking in assessing what we read and hear. But given the scope of fake news today and its increasingly harmful impact, every development that helps to hem in such deceit is indeed welcome.

Exactly How Does Facebook Define Community Standards?

Living in a democratic society, of course, entails the promotion, encouragement and defense of a diversity of views. With that I obviously have no quarrel. But, as the saying goes, with that freedom comes responsibility. it is the second part of this equation that some people refuse to accept.

When, for example, does freedom of expression cross the line into the promotion of hatred? I have a specific reason for asking that question, which I shall get to in a moment.

I have had a Facebook account for about seven years now; the reason that I joined goes back to our first visit to Costa Rica in 2009, where we met a group of hospitality students staying at the resort and joined them for a day's excursion. All of us were taking a lot of pictures, and when I inquired how I could see theirs online when they got home, they told me to join FB, where they would be posting them. Thus my social media experience began.

Nowadays I use it primarily to share political stories, people's blog posts, etc., as well as to receive various feeds from newspapers and political groups that interest me.

Because the following subject is one I find profoundly distasteful, I thought long and hard before writing this post, as I have no desire to give any kind of publicity or wider exposure to a group of xenophobes and racists, yet I am interested in getting feedback from readers. Yesterday the following appeared in my timeline:



Accompanying this were a variety of comments, a few of which I am reproducing here. Some of it is pretty vile.

... you crack me up. Sure there are Muslims who work. There are exceptions to every race. Believe it or not I've met a chinaman who doesn't like rice and black man who prefers heavy metal to rap music and doesn't play basketball. But the stereotypes exist for a reason. The fact of the matter is these Muslim refugees ARE costing us money for them to be here. We don't want them here, as a tax payer I have the right to not want to waste it on them. I'd rather use it to build a new park or maybe feed our homeless and let them have housing instead of these pieces of shit taking it all while our people starve on the streets.

... We as in WE THE PEOPLE. And of course they are refugees? But the wars and problems the middle East have is all a product of their own choice to follow such an evil ideology. Christian founded countries are the ones that have a greater quality of life and now they wanna come and take what we have after they ruined their own country. And yeah I would rather have a park over a Muslim parasite mooching 1 cent off our tax dollars. I'm happy that little boy drowned. Maybe the money Canada saves from not having to pay for them will be used to re-pave a street instead? And in case you didn't noticed WCAI is worldwide as in Worldwide Coalition Against Islam. We are just one person.


Well fortunately for me I live in a free Democratic country that isn't run by evil Islamic ideologies. It reminds me of 2 brothers that inherited a million dollars each. One brother invested his money right and is reaping the benefits while the other brother blew his money by making poor choices and is now trying to mooch off the other brother. This is no different. You reap what you sew.

...But all people of the islamic ideology are behind an evil ideology that promotes anti-semitism, rape, child molestation, beastiality, persecution, ridiculous law suits and wearing bed sheets and curtains for clothing. And if you think about it the similarities of the Islamic and Nazism ideologies are uncanny. The only difference is Hitler never bothered disguising the holocaust as a "peaceful religion"

In my mind, this is racism thinly disguised by 'economic concerns'. Interested in making a complaint about the group, I checked Facebook's reporting criteria. Under Encouraging Respectful Behaviour, this is what I found:

Hate Speech

Facebook removes hate speech, which includes content that directly attacks people based on their:

Race,
Ethnicity,
National origin,
Religious affiliation,
Sexual orientation,
Sex, gender, or gender identity, or
Serious disabilities or diseases.

Organizations and people dedicated to promoting hatred against these protected groups are not allowed a presence on Facebook. As with all of our standards, we rely on our community to report this content to us.

Feeling I was on pretty solid ground, I lodged a complaint. About two hours later I received this reply:

Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards. Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the photo you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn't violate our Community Standards.

I am disappointed in Facebook's response, and it appears there was no effort made to read the comments accompanying the illustration.

So I am left with the question which is my post's title: Exactly how does Facebook define community standards?

I welcome, as always, your comments.

And Just When You thought It Was Safe To Go Back To Facebook

Pastor Pat has a warning for those given to 'abhorrent' practices.

This Is Great!

It is a strange online world we have created for ourselves, as this video amply demonstrates. Enjoy!

A New Facebook Page to Encourage Greater Voter Participation

I have established a Facebook page entitled Getting Out the Vote - Election 2011. My hope is to establish a forum for political discussion, the end goal being to increase the voter turnout for the upcoming federal election.

During the 2008 election, slightly over 58% of eligible voters cast ballots, the lowest in the history of Confederation. Given the distribution of those votes, we as Canadians are allowing the fate of our country to be determined by a minority of people.

Does this seem fair? Does this seem reasonable?

Although my Facebook effort may ultimately accomplish little, I hope as many of you as possible will participate in the page with your ideas, observations, suggestions and links to politically useful sites, including your own blogs.

I look forward to hearing for as many of you as possible. Click here to get things started.