“A total of 113 white supremacist organizations and groups had a presence on Facebook, sometimes more than one. One user-generated page that has been active for over a decade had 42,000 likes. Ten other pages and one group had more than 1,000 likes each.Much of Facebook’s moderation system relies on artificial intelligence to flag potential violations for human moderators, a system that appears to be easily thwarted. Simple misspellings of words—whether by adding vowels or using $ in place of S, for example—have been enough to foil algorithmic moderation.”
“Let’s start with fake accounts. We take a hard line against this activity and block millions of fake accounts each day, most of them at the time of creation. Between October and December of 2020, we disabled more than 1.3 billion of them. We also investigate and take down covert foreign and domestic influence operations that rely on fake accounts. Over the past three years, we’ve removed over 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) from our platform and keep the public informed about our efforts through our monthly CIB reports. ”
“The company won’t stop Facebook from tracking you, but it will have to ask you for permission first. Why, then, is Facebook so worried? Because it knows what everyone else already knows–that when given a choice, most people will choose to not allow Facebook to track them. If that happens to be bad for Facebook’s business, that isn’t Apple’s fault. It just means that Facebook’s business model is based on something most people would prefer it didn’t do.Except, small businesses can still advertise to their customers. They can still use all of the information Facebook knows about its users–like their gender, age, location, and interests, to show ads. If you’re a small business, none of that changes. The only person that really stands to lose seems to be Facebook. ”
“Facebook was embroiled in controversy over its data-collection practices. Mr. Cook piled on in a national television interview, saying his own company would never have found itself in such a jam. Mr. Zuckerberg shot back that Mr. Cook’s comments were “extremely glib” and “not at all aligned with the truth.”In private, Mr. Zuckerberg was even harsher. “We need to inflict pain,” he told his team, for treating the company so poorly, according to people familiar with the exchange.It wasn’t the first time—or the last—that Mr. Cook’s comments and actions would leave Mr. Zuckerberg seething and, at times, plotting to get back at Apple. The escalation of grievances erupted late last month in a rare public tit-for-tat between the two tech giants that laid bare the simmering animosity between their leaders, who exchanged jabs about privacy, app-tracking tools and, ultimately, their dueling visions about the future of the internet.”
“The most revealing insight comes from the summer of 2011, when the company was gearing up to fend off the threat of Google’s rival platform, Google+. The complaint quotes an email in which Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “For the first time, we have real competition and consumers have real choice … we will have to be better to win.” At the time, Facebook had been planning to remove users’ ability to untag themselves in photos. One unnamed executive suggested pumping the brakes. “If ever there was a time to AVOID controversy, it would be when the world is comparing our offerings to G+,” they wrote. Better, they suggested, to save such changes “until the direct competitive comparisons begin to die down.” This is close to a smoking gun: evidence that, as Srinivasan hypothesized, Facebook preserves user privacy when it fears competition and degrades privacy when it doesn’t.”
“The harsh truth is that Facebook doesn’t need to perform technical miracles to target you via weak signals. It’s got much better ways to do so already. Not every spookily accurate ad you see is a pure figment of your cognitive biases. Remember, Facebook can find you on whatever device you’ve ever checked Facebook on. It can exploit everything that retailers know about you, and even sometimes track your in-store, cash-only purchases; that loyalty discount card is tied to a phone number or email for a reason. Before you stoke your Facebook rage too much, know that Twitter and LinkedIn do this as well, and that Facebook copied the concept of ‘data onboarding’ from the greater ad tech world, which in turn drafted off of decades of direct-mail consumer marketing. It’s hard to escape the modern Advertising Industrial Complex.”
“Le fil conducteur du DSA est simple : ce qui est autorisé off line doit l’être on line, ce qui est interdit off line doit l’être on line. Que l’on parle de contrefaçon, d’antisémitisme, de pédopornographie, de menaces de mort, ou de vente de drogues, tous les contenus illégaux doivent être retirés. Les contenus haineux, l’amplification de la violence verbale et physique, la désinformation doivent être identifiés comme tels et traités en conséquence.
Il n’est pas question de la remettre en cause, ni de la réduire. Que ce soit pour les simples internautes ou pour les influenceurs, même s’il faut en permanence rappeler qu’ils doivent respecter les règles de droit afférentes à leurs propos, sous peine de sanctions.
Certains ont désormais des audiences nettement plus importantes que des médias traditionnels, ce qui leur confère des responsabilités assimilables à celles d’un directeur de rédaction ou d’un éditeur de contenus. Pour autant, la publication sous couvert d’anonymat ou de pseudonyme restera possible, mais, dans ce cas, la plate-forme se doit de connaître l’identité de l’auteur dès lors qu’un certain seuil d’audience (qui reste à déterminer) est franchi. Elle doit aussi pouvoir le situer, si nécessaire.”
“Le ministère l’accuse ainsi de forcer les consommateurs et les annonceurs à utiliser ses services sur les appareils sous Android via des applis qu’il est impossible d’effacer (comme Google Maps), ce qui restreint considérablement la concurrence. Pour rappel, Google avait écopé d’une amende de 4,3 milliards d’euros en 2018 de la part des autorités européennes de la concurrence pour pratiques déloyales dans l’écosystème Android, afin de renforcer sa position dominante, notamment dans le domaine de la recherche sur internet.”
“For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” said Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. “Today, we are taking action to stand up for the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been harmed by Facebook’s illegal behavior.”
“Les relations se sont détériorées en janvier 2019, raconte The Telegraph, lorsque les 35000 employés de Facebook se sont réveillés un matin pour découvrir que toutes les applications développées pour le fonctionnement interne de l’entreprise ne marchaient plus: Leurs agendas, messageries, l’horaire des navettes et même les menus de la cantine étaient devenus inaccessibles. Et le développement de nouveaux produits a dû stopper net, les versions de test ne pouvant plus être mises à l’épreuve.
Apple, révolté par la révélation que Facebook avait payé des mineurs pour installer un VPN permettant d’aspirer leurs données, avait révoqué la veille au soir, les autorisations qui permettaient aux applications IOS du réseau social de fonctionner.
Puis, avec une nouvelle riposte en début d’année, Apple annonça l’introduction de la fonctionnalité «App Tracking Transparency (ATT)», qui obligera les applications mobiles à demander aux usagers leur permission avant de les suivre à la trace, gênant ainsi la récolte des données et le placement d’annonces personnalisées. Une démarche qui ferait baisser les revenus de Facebook de 50%.”
