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

Mark Zuckerberg has told the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Argentina, Australia and Ireland that he is "not available" for a planned hearing on political disinformation and Facebook. Read the rest

We are watching Facebook unravel in real time. I hope. Read the rest

MEPs in European Parliament want Facebook to submit to a full audit by European Union bodies to determine whether the U.S. based social media company adequately protects users’ personal data. The demand made in the form of an EU resolution adopted Thursday, October 25, 2018, follows the company's recent breach scandal, in which data belonging to 87 million Facebook users around the world were improperly obtained and misused. Read the rest

Facebook is working very hard right now to prove it can be trusted to protect users from malicious fake news, political disinformation, and cyberattacks intended to throw the 2018 midterms. What Facebook is not doing: providing details. Read the rest

The good news: Facebook downgrades the number of accounts hit in the breach they disclosed two weeks ago to 29 million, down from 50 million. The bad news: Uh, that's still a LOT. And if you were one of those 29 million Facebook users, A LOT of your intimate personal data was stolen. Read the rest

Facebook says an attack on its network left the personal information of some 50 million users—perhaps you?—exposed to hackers. Who were the hackers, and what did they want? Facebook doesn't know, or won't say. But the company has confirmed that execs Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanders were among the users affected.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said about Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year.

Well. You heard the man. Read the rest

Facebook's longtime Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos is quitting, as announced earlier this year. The company seems to think it doesn't need a new CSO, despite having just acknowledged Tuesday it is the subject of ongoing, sustained, coordinated information warfare attacks just ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Read the rest

Despite Mark Zuckerberg's internal war on transparency, the Facebook data abuse reveals just keep on coming. Read the rest

It makes me very happy that the "Bad Lip Reading" folks took Zuck's recent testimony footage and made this gem of a video. Read the rest