Posts

Facebook Yanks Page of 12-Year-Old Conservative Who Said Obama Doesn’t Love America

/6 Comments/in , /by

On Friday, C.J. Pearson, a 12-year-old conservative from Georgia who posted a viral video supporting Rudy Giuliani, discovered that his personal Facebook page was locked. In an exclusive interview with Examiner.com on Saturday, Pearson said he received a message from someone about 6 a.m. Friday. That’s when he learned his account and page had been locked for “suspicious activity.”

He jumped through all of Facebook’s hoops, but wasn’t able to recover his account. So he created a new profile to take its place. His public page was not affected, he said, however, he can no longer administer the page. Fortunately, he said, a friend is helping post links to that page.

As is so often the case in these situations, Facebook did not respond to his requests for help. Nor would they tell him what the alleged suspicious activity was. We reached out to Facebook, but the social media giant has so far refused to respond to our request for comments.

Pearson said he is working on legislation to lower the age of those serving in the state House and Senate. The legislation, which is set to be the subject of a hearing on Monday, would lower the age of House members from 21 to 18, and lower the age of state Senators from 25 to 21. Pearson said he was using Facebook to line up witnesses for the hearing, but Facebook’s actions have made that more difficult. He can’t read any messages sent to his old profile and the old page doesn’t show up. (Read more about the page of the 12-year-old Conservative being yanked HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Edward Snowden’s Privacy Tips: “Get Rid Of Dropbox,” Avoid Facebook And Google

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: TechCrunchAccording to Edward Snowden, people who care about their privacy should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google.

Snowden conducted a remote interview today as part of the New Yorker Festival, where he was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy.

His first answer called for a reform of government policies. Some people take the position that they “don’t have anything to hide,” but he argued that when you say that, “You’re inverting the model of responsibility for how rights work”:

When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.

He added that on an individual level, people should seek out encrypted tools and stop using services that are “hostile to privacy.” For one thing, he said you should “get rid of Dropbox,” because it doesn’t support encryption, and you should consider alternatives like SpiderOak. (Snowden made similar comments over the summer, with Dropbox responding that protecting users’ information is “a top priority.”)

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Apologizes to Drag Queens for Name Policy

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP / Eric RisbergFacebook is apologizing to drag queens and the transgender community for deleting accounts that used drag names like Lil Miss Hot Mess rather than legal names such as Bob Smith.

The world’s biggest online social network caught heat recently when it deleted several hundred accounts belonging to self-described drag queens, other performers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Facebook has long required its users to go by their “real names” on the site for security purposes, to stand out from other social networks and so it can better target advertising to people. Now, the company says the spirit of its policy doesn’t mean a person’s legal name but “the authentic name they use in real life.”

“For Sister Roma, that’s Sister Roma. For Lil Miss Hot Mess, that’s Lil Miss Hot Mess,” Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president of product wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Though the real names policy isn’t changing, the way Facebook enforces it might.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Deletes Profiles of Drag Queens; LGBT Community Outraged

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APSan Francisco drag queens are sparring with Facebook over its policy requiring people to use their real names, rather than drag names such as Pollo Del Mar and Heklina. But the world’s biggest social network is not budging from its rules.

In recent weeks, Facebook has been deleting the profiles of self-described drag queens and other performers who use stage names because they did not comply with the social networking site’s requirement that users go by their “real names” on the site.

On Wednesday, Facebook declined to change its policy after meeting with drag queens and a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors. The company said is usually deletes accounts with fake names after investigating user complaints.

“This policy is wrong and misguided,” said Supervisor David Campos, who was flanked by seven drag queens during a press conference at San Francisco City Hall.

The drag queens and others in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community say many Facebook account holders fear using their real names for a variety of reasons, including threats to their safety and employment.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook's Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense Research on Civil Unrest

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: SCG News There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.

Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.

In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you’ll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you’ll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”. If you go to the project site for that study you’ll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

Read more from this story HERE.

Apple, Facebook, Others Defy Authorities, Notify Users of Secret Data Demands

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.

“It serves to chill the unbridled, cost-free collection of data,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents several technology companies. “And I think that’s a good thing.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Getting Facebook Slapped: Understanding Facebook’s Big Lie

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: commdiginews

Photo Credit: commdiginews

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg lied. It may not have been intentional, but at the end of the day, he lied.

Zuckerberg was the next big thing. The wunderkid. At age 29, he is worth some $25 billion. And he is selling out the very “next big thing” that made him who he is. Facebook has over a billion users, who have created over 54 million pages including more than 25 million small business pages.

facebook-stats-1-1-14Facebook Statistics from StatisticBrain.com – visit https://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/ for complete chart.

Facebook began just over ten years ago in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. It was built as a social network whose declared purpose was to let users grow “their voice” and expand their reach by collecting new friends. In a May 28, 2010 article entitled “Epicenter: Mark Zuckerberg: I Donated to Open Source, Facebook Competitor,” Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth. He explained:

I guess we could. … If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads…. That’s the simplest thing we could do. But we aren’t like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to. (Wikipedia)

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Drones to Offer Low-Cost Net Access

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: BBC

Photo Credit: BBC

Facebook has ambitious plans to connect the two-thirds of the world that has no net access, using drones, satellites and lasers.

The move was announced on the social media platform by founder Mark Zuckerberg.

It will put it in direct competition with Google, which is planning to deliver net access via balloons.

Both of the net giants want to extend their audiences, especially in the developing world.

Details about Facebook’s plan were scant but it will include a fleet of solar-powered drones as well as low-earth orbit and geosynchronous satellites. Invisible, infrared laser beams could also be used to boost the speed of the net connections.

Read more from this story HERE.

German Cartoon of Facebook’s Zuckerberg Compared to Nazi Imagery

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: TwitterA caricature of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg published on Friday by a German newspaper was sharply criticized by Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) as reminiscent of Nazi imagery.

SWC Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper on Monday called the cartoon “an outrage” and said that the artist was guilty of anti-Semitism.

The cartoon, published by Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and entitled “Krake Facebook,” German for “Facebook Octopus,” shows Zuckerberg as a half-human sea giant grasping with tentacles at computers around him. Depicted with a hooked nose, the 29-year-old entrepreneur is shown smiling while his curly hair creeps out from under an oversized hat that has the Facebook logo on its brim.

One of the creature’s tentacles holds the logo of WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service, recently acquired by Facebook.

Cooper told The Algemeiner, “The nefarious Jew/octopus was a caricature deployed by Nazis. That was used pretty much as a staple by the Nazis in terms of their hateful campaign against the Jews in the 1930s. [An] exaggerated Jewish nose removes any question if this was unconscious anti-Semitism.”

Read more this story HERE.

Miller and Begich in Dead Heat According Facebook Modeling Used to Predict Election Outcomes

/8 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: InTheCapital

Photo Credit: InTheCapital

Thanks to Facebook’s prominence (there are over 128 million active monthly users in the U.S.) it has become the perfect sample pool for researchers conducting large scale studies. Particularly the social media platform has given political strategists a fascinating glimpse on how political campaigns are being perceived in real time, as well as the ability to predict election outcomes with startling accuracy. Campaigns themselves are also starting to better understand this correlation, with 12 percent of campaign communication budgets going to social media in 2012. So what is Facebook so far telling us about the critical 2014 elections?

In a piece published by POLITICO Magazine, Ph.D. candidates Matthew MacWilliams and Edward Erickson, along with research assistant Nicole Berns, took a look at what Facebook reveals about the political changes to come in 2014. These scholars studied three major variables to make their predictions. First, the growth of a candidate’s fan base, measured by the number of “likes” over time on their page. Next they look at the growth of engagement, measured by the shares and comments on the candidates content that users share with their friends. Lastly, they divide these two factors to discover the candidate’s effectiveness in mobilizing voters, by seeing how many of those that “like” the candidate actually engage with others about it.

Based on this formula, the researchers predicted the outcome of four Senate races in 2014, taking place in North Carolina, Alaska, Kentucky and Michigan, and conclude that the Republicans will likely pick up a seat this year…

The big upset could happen in Alaska, where this Facebook model has incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich dead even with both of his Republican challengers, Joe Miller and Mead Treadwell.

Read more from this story HERE.