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

Mark Zuckerberg explains, in a defensive Facebook blog post, that he thinks that fake news and state-level election manipulation are "ideas and content" and that Facebook is his vision of a neutral place for their propagation. As quoted by Alexis Madrigal,

“Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like. That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”

Trump wants Facebook to be seen as having a traditional anti-Trump bias. Mark Zuckerberg wants the service to be seen as neutral. And they’re both wrong.

Zuckerberg’s statement begins with a play right out of the D.C. congressional playbook: The tough-minded, get-things-done pragmatist knows in his heart that if everyone is mad, he must have done something right.

But the sophisticated critiques of Facebook are not about ideas and content that people don’t like, but rather the new structural forces that Facebook has created.

Zuckerberg got played by people smarter than he is. All we see of him now is the bottomless narcissistic injury inflicted by the fact one of them was Donald Trump. Read the rest

The Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond reports that a controversial street artist's Facebook page was taken down as "Hate Speech" after posting rude pictures mocking Mark Zuckerberg's apparent presidential ambitions.

The work of a conservative street artist known for skewering the liberal politics of celebrities and corporations has been deemed "hate speech" by Facebook, which shut his page down on Sunday.

The notice comes just days after the artist known as Sabo attacked Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with posters disparaging his alleged presidential aspirations. "F*ck Zuck 2020" read the posters, the symbol after the "F" being a middle finger. They were hung in the dead of night last week in various California cities.

However, there were also 'faux ads, made to look like a genuine movie poster for War for the Planet of the Apes, feature the image of a well-armed ape on horseback with the text: "BLM: Kill Whitey."'

Sabo's page is full of garbage, from amusing photoshops of politicans to edgy N-word race war chum and inexplicable Ted Cruz fan posters. Facebook's refusal to explain its actions allows him to highlight the most broadly popular (no-one other than Mark Zuckerberg wants Mark Zuckerberg to be president) as the only hate it actually cares about. And you know what? Sabo's probably right, which is a great reminder of why you don't want Mark Zuckerberg to be president. Read the rest

In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg (who insists that privacy is dead) bought 100 acres of land around his vacation home in Hawaii to ensure that no one could get close enough to spy on him. Read the rest