Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook was slammed for not doing enough to prevent the spread of misinformation on its platform. As a result, the social media giant has stepped up its efforts this time around to ensure foreign bad actors aren’t abusing the site to influence the outcome. And this week, Facebook announced…
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Facebook is no stranger to controversy surrounding its advertising practices. The company has repeatedly been accused of allowing marketers to use its targeted ad tools to discriminate on the basis of age, gender, religion and more. Of course, there are legitimate reasons why a company would want to tailor its advertising to reach a specific…
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Facebook is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons again this week following an apparent double murder in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The violence stemmed from a clash between activists protesting a recent police shooting and armed militia groups who also showed up. And according to a report in The Verge this week, Facebook was warned…
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Last week, Facebook announced that it would begin cracking down on thousands of Facebook and Instagram accounts affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, militia and anarchist groups, and other politically-charged accounts promoting violence. In addition, while the social media giant said it will allow users to continue posting content that supports these groups, the company…
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Facebook has long struggled with its content moderation policies, and unfortunately, that includes the things people sell on its platform. For instance, the company bans the private sale of firearms and ammunition on Marketplace — but that doesn’t mean shady gun sellers aren’t finding creative ways to skirt the rules. According to a report in…
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Facebook’s business model depends upon knowing as much about us as possible. The social media giant is constantly searching for an edge in gathering our data — both online and in real life. That’s why some eyebrows were raised this week when the company announced new research that could give Facebook a front-row seat into…
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On July 1, the state of California began enforcing a landmark law aimed at holding tech companies like Facebook accountable for how they monetize user data. And according to experts, this new policy could prove to be a “nightmare” for the social media giant. The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) is a first-of-its-kind data privacy…
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Facebook has struggled to contain the spread of misinformation on its platform, and misleading content about the coronavirus is certainly no exception. According to a report released this week by nonprofit advocacy group Avaaz, health misinformation has been viewed 3.8 billion times in the past year, while only 16 percent of this content received a…
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When Facebook introduced its “Off-Facebook Activity” tool, it promised more transparency for users who didn’t know what the company was doing with their personal data. However, it may have shown some users more than it bargained for. Digital Trends reporter Shubham Agarwal was so disturbed by what he saw in his Off-Facebook Activity report that…
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Facebook is under increasing pressure around the world to take a stronger stand against hate speech. However, the company has thus far refused to label Holocaust denialism as a form of it. That’s why the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an anti-extremism advocacy group, conducted an investigation to discover just how prevalent these anti-Semitic conspiracy…
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