Facebook says, oops, it's 'likely' a bug.

And you thought Facebook was in the bag for Trump! Mark Zuckerberg and his wife have privately made hiring recommendations for Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign, and the recommendations were hired by it.

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg sent multiple emails to Mike Schmuhl, Buttigieg’s campaign manager, with names of individuals that he might consider hiring, campaign spokesman Chris Meagher confirmed. Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife, also sent multiple emails to Schmuhl with staff recommendations. Ultimately, two of the people recommended were hired.

Buttigieg's centrist presidential campaign floundered until recently, but has enjoyed a surprise surge as Joe Biden's risen star sputtered. Buttigieg recently became conspiciously defensive of billionaires and big corporations, and maybe now you know why. Read the rest

Mike Winkelmann (homepage, behance) animated a few illustrative seconds of the immediate future: "ZUCKERBORG'S NIPPLE FREE TECHNO-UTOPIA"

ZUCKERBORG'S NIPPLE FREE TECHNO-UTOPIA #everydays pic.twitter.com/nPGlLkemie

— beeple (@beeple) October 9, 2019

Here's another, starring that darn mouse.

DISNEY PLUS #everydays pic.twitter.com/IhUV9dAama

— beeple (@beeple) October 8, 2019

Embedded below is a short movie he made in 2015, "Zero-Day" Read the rest

The $5 billion FTC fine isn't the only fine Facebook must pay.

Settlement between FTC and Facebook ends 16-month probe that began Cambridge Analytica, Russia, and Trump.

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