No surprises here. Facebook does not support the co-founder Chris Hughes' proposal to split the world’s largest social media company into three parts. Read the rest

Gosh, it only took 'em 4 whole years

$5 billion is about one month's revenue for Facebook.

Summit Learning is a nonprofit, high-tech "customized learning" group funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's family charity; under the program, students are equipped with high-surveillance Chromebooks and work on their own "at their own pace" and call on teachers to act as "mentors" when they get stuck. Read the rest

Following up on Xeni's post from earlier today: For their 12,000-word, beautifully reported story on how Facebook's top executives coped with 15 months of mounting crises, Wired's Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein spoke with 65 current and former insider sources, producing a gripping account of how the people who built the worst thing to ever happen to the web coped when the world woke up one day and figured this all out. Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data—maybe yours?—to crush rivals and aid allies, leaked documents show.

'Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook.'

Welp. That didn't work.

The May issue cover story of WIRED Magazine is a 12,000-word rip-snorting takedown of Facebook. Read the rest

A consortium of Facebook investors led by Trillium Asset Management and controlling $3B in shares has put a proposal before the shareholders to fire Mark Zuckerberg for his mishandling of a string of ghastly scandals; they will lose, however, because Facebook's share structure gives Zuckerberg's personal shares more votes than other shareholders, ensuring that the company can run as a cult of personality beholden to his whims, rather than one disciplined by shareholder choices (this corporate structure is also in place at News Corp, Google, and other companies whose founders are able to raise funds in the capital markets without having to be beholden to their shareholders). Another shareholder proposal would put Zuckerberg's shares on even footing with other shares -- currently, each of Zuck's shares have ten times more votes than ordinary shares -- and this proposal will also fail. (via /.) Read the rest

In a statement announcing the official ban, Facebook says the ideologies are "inherently hateful."

The Eastern District of New York empaneled a Grand Jury into the dirty data dealings of Facebook.

Facebook executive shakeup comes one week after company announced "privacy-focused" brand makeover.

'Sorry,' and it wasn't a DDOS, says Facebook.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reveals the company may crowdsource fact-checking as a new model for Facebook’s third-party factchecking partnerships, now that they've botched the deal they had with Snopes.

Earlier this month, we wrote that Snopes ended their 'debunking false stuff' partnership with Facebook.

This is the first time we've read that Mark Zuckerberg has come up with a new plan.

It sucks.

From today's new reporting at the Guardian:

In the first of a series of public conversations, Zuckerberg praised the efforts of factcheckers who partnered with Facebook following the 2016 presidential election as a bulwark against the flood of misinformation and fake news that was overtaking the site’s News Feed.

“The issue here is there aren’t enough of them,” he said. “There just aren’t a lot of factcheckers.”

He continued: “I think that the real thing that we want to try to get to over time is more of a crowdsourced model where people, it’s not that people are trusting some sort, some basic set of experts who are accredited but are in some kind of lofty institution somewhere else. It’s like do you trust? Like if you get enough data points from within the community of people reasonably looking at something and assessing it over time, then the question is: can you compound that together into something that is a strong enough signal that we can then use that?”

Here's the bullshit-free response from Snopes' Brooke Binkowski, same Guardian story:

Brooke Binkowski, the former managing editor of Snopes, a factchecking site that previously partnered with Facebook, said Zuckerberg’s comments signaled that he “has learned nothing at all”.

Read the rest

Facebook is expected to be slapped with the largest fine the FCC has ever imposed on a tech company, but the exact dollar amount is yet to be determined.

On the 15th anniversary of Facebook's launch, Mark Zuckerberg says his company will spend more on safety and security in 2019 than the total amount of revenue his company had on hand at the date of its IPO. In a Facebook post today, Zuckerberg takes a swipe at America's technology journalists, and complains about news coverage in 2018 that was critical of Facebook. Read the rest

Most Facebook users have no idea how the company tracks and profiles everything they do to target ads, a new Pew Research study confirms. Read the rest

In a year-in-review post, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday he is “proud of the progress we've made.”

Yes, he really is that deluded. Read the rest