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

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

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

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

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

We are watching Facebook unravel in real time. I hope. 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

Mark Zuckerberg snuck an amazing Easter Egg into his Congressional testimony, feigning ignorance of the most basic questions about his own company a whopping 42 times, in tribute to Douglas Adams and his classic work of comedic science fiction, "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy." Read the rest

Shadow Profiles is the industry term for the dossiers that Facebook compiles on billions of people, including people who don't have Facebook accounts, merging data from Facebook Like buttons and tracking pixels, outside data brokers, and data entered by Facebook users about their friends, including harvested address-books, tagged photos, and other personal information that can pertain to Facebook users and non-users alike. Read the rest

The audio work makes it funny; the original, narrated by Morgan Freeman, is just uncomfortable, even as it smooths over the fact you're watching Zuckerberg eat plain toast right out of the toaster while nodding mechanically. Read the rest

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He admitted the social media company made mistakes, and pledged “to protect your data.” Read the rest

Seemingly in hiding these last few days, Mark Zuckerberg's plans are anyone's guess. But a committee chairman in the UK's House of Commons would like a word. He doesn't have to go, obviously, but just for reference, Rupert Murdoch did. [via]

British MPs have issued a formal request to Mark Zuckerberg to appear in front of a parliamentary committee and explain Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data use scandal. The Conservative MP said the committee had “repeatedly asked Facebook about how companies acquire and hold on to user data from their site”, with a particular emphasis on whether data had ever been taken without users’ consent. “Your officials’ answers have consistently understated this risk and have been misleading to the Committee”, he added.

To Zuckerberg, you were and are and always will be dumb fucks. Read the rest

Facebook is about to undergo a dramatic overhaul, company-wide, to prioritize "“meaningful interactions” between friends and family, starting with the news feed. The change also implies they'll be killing publishers' reach. What does this mean? If you get your daily dose of our Boing Boing goodness on Facebook, in other words, you may be seeing less of us there because Facebook turned some dials. Never trust Facebook, my independent publisher friends. Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg takes a break from his XY-chromosome hominid meatform for a relaxing trip to to his natural environment, today configured for recreation: a virtual reality depiction of the natural disaster that lately befell Puerto Rico.

This is the actual footage I saw when I watched Zuckerberg's virtual tour of Puerto Rico. (Background is survivors on the island.) pic.twitter.com/X9Zhyrn7G9

— Spooky Tech CEO 🎃 (@anildash) October 10, 2017

Cartoon avatars make plenty of sense for the typical use of Facebook Spaces, which is mostly just meant as a digital hangout spot for early adopters of the Oculus Rift. But it clearly isn’t an ideal way to discuss hurricane relief efforts, particularly for a Silicon Valley billionaire doing his best to stay in touch Americans outside of the tech world. It made lines like, “It feels like we’re really here in Puerto Rico,” stand out for clearly being so far off from the actual experience, even though NPR’s reporting may well start to convey an idea of what it’s like.

After discussing Facebook’s contributions to Puerto Rico relief efforts, Zuckerberg and Franklin then transported themselves to the Moon

Those Facebook Spaces avatars creep me out. They're children, but they ain't cute.

Today is the day Mark Zuckerberg killed the concept of virtual reality dead. This was a public execution. https://t.co/MOUJzwJhF4

— The Ghost of McCrea (@christianmccrea) October 10, 2017

Read the rest