Facebook megathread

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-blocked-internal-ios-apps

Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.

The shutdown comes in response to news that Facebook has been using Apple’s program for internal app distribution to track teenage customers with a “research” app.

That app, revealed yesterday by TechCrunch, was distributed outside of the App Store using Apple’s enterprise program, which allows developers to use special certificates to install more powerful apps onto iPhones. Those apps are only supposed to be used by a company’s employees, however, and Facebook had been distributing its tracking app to customers. Facebook later said it would shut down the app.

This poses a huge issue for Facebook. While Apple provides other tools a company can use to install apps internally, Apple’s enterprise program is the main solution for widely distributing internal apps and services. In an email, a Facebook spokesperson said “I can confirm that this affects our internal apps.”

In a statement given to Recode, Apple said that Facebook was in “clear breach of their agreement with Apple.” Any developer that breaches that agreement, Apple said, has their distribution certificates revoked, “which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.” Apple declined to comment on shutting down all of Facebook’s internal apps in an email to The Verge.

Revoking a certificate not only stops apps from being distributed on iOS, but it also stops apps from working. And because internal apps by the same organization or developer may be connected to a single certificate, it can lead to immense headaches like the one Facebook now finds itself in where a multitude of internal apps have been shut down.

Apple and Facebook have already been bickering over privacy, but this is the first instance of Apple taking an action that directly shuts down some of Facebook’s activities. Last March, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation” if he were running the company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said the comments were “extremely glib” and spoke of Apple as a company that “work hard to charge you more.”

 

[RP 520]

Yeah seeing this as coming from Project Veritas has me.... well lets call it dubious. I'd love for this to be real, but... they do have a bad habit of weirdly editing stuff...

The whole editing video thing has been proven false though.

 

[frozenrunner]

Yeah seeing this as coming from Project Veritas has me.... well lets call it dubious. I'd love for this to be real, but... they do have a bad habit of weirdly editing stuff...

They also have habit of releasing raw footage alongside the edited videos.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

They also have habit of releasing raw footage alongside the edited videos.

Eh fair enough. I've made my feelings about watching videos known, so it's fair to say I'm relying on secondhand information. Besides which, when they first came onto the scene, I wasn't so... vigilant about believing shit I heard in the mainstream. So maybe I'm being unfair to them.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Veritas is much more trustworthy than Fox or CNN or other MSM figures.

 

[Tomboy Respecter]

Veritas is much more trustworthy than Fox or CNN or other MSM figures.

Because they do actual investigation, not do a human centipede when it comes to headlines.

 

[RG 448]

Wait i’m confused, which laws is facebook allegedly breaking?

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Wait i’m confused, which laws is facebook allegedly breaking?

I don't believe any accusations of lawbreaking have been made, just the company saying one thing and doing another.

 

[RG 448]

I don't believe any accusations of lawbreaking have been made, just the company saying one thing and doing another.

In other words, a corporation acting like every corporation.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

In other words, a corporation acting like every corporation.

Yeah, but it's still good to call them out when exposed in their lies. They claim to not be biased, but apparently are consciously purposely biased. This means they are actually liars, not just unaware of unconscious bias.

This sort of thing could be used down the line in an antitrust lawsuit if enough companies are doing it, although that's wildly .

 

[MightyBiteySnake]

inb4 "well Facebook is a corporation so this is fine"

 

[Ineedahero]

Tation uliamcorper

 

[moocow]

Well, we all knew they were doing it, but at least it's nice to have it in handy written form to show people who claim it's not happening.

 

[Wake me up]

Here's the "troll video" found on one of the slides and commented about in the article. It's actually a pretty decent attempt to define and critique the elusive "Social Justice" term - I mean, it's not anything new but it's as good an attempt as it gets.

 

[idosometimes]

This has to be fake. The examples sound like any CNN story covering anything on the internet. I am sure a bunch of kids are just 'avin' a loff.

 

[Unog]

This has to be fake. The examples sound like any CNN story covering anything on the internet. I am sure a bunch of kids are just 'avin' a loff.

Reminder that FBI agents have been known to text each other in a way not that dissimilar to 14-16 year-old girls.

 

[pwnest injun]

This article so far has been summarily snubbed by all news outlets other than outer right sites. Hacker News is actively blocking its submission. Reddit is deleting it in the major subs.

Suppression is the closest thing around to a verification of authenticity these days.

 

[Medicated]

Well, we all knew they were doing it, but at least it's nice to have it in handy written form to show people who claim it's not happening.

Doesn't matter if they have Mark Zuckerberg telling everyone what they do on video. If CNN and MSNBC and their aggregates don't report on it, it doesn't go to wikipedia, so to normalfags, it never happened. I've talked to these types of people before, that's really the essence of what their reality is.

 

[Fareal]

May I bring something from normiemom FB here?

Elsewhere on the site we've mentioned MLMs (Mary Kay, Scentsy, etc; those companies that recruit usually women to buy shitty product and then resell it).

For Reasons, I'm in a lot of the anti MLM FB groups. Which are pretty much all closed. And the most active members/owners of those get facebook jailed (unable to post with no reason/explanation given) all the fucking time. Like, in high profile groups, a bunch of people are in facebook jail on any given day.

The groups also are hidden when you try to search for them at times, and at times even direct links to them don't work, regardless of the security settings.

I think this sort of content filtering - to hide bad press or negative discussion - by FB, if companies pay them for it, is way more common that this article suggests.

 

[GrungyLawnChlorinate]

Looks like one mainstream source has reported on this:

An anti-Facebook right-wing 'stunt' has shed light on its tactics for tackling targeted harassment

• Leaked documents obtained by a right-wing activist group have provided insight into how Facebook has considered tackling organised harassment campaigns.
• Project Veritas claims it has evidence of an anti-conservative bias at Facebook, but the company says it's misinterpreting the info and it shows nothing of the sort.
• The documents show the unconventional approaches to tackling trolling that Facebook has considered.

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group known for sometimes-misleading stings on organisations and individuals, has found its latest target: Facebook.

With the help of a now-fired Facebook worker, the group got its hands on a bevvy of documents and internal files that it alleges show evidence of anti-conservative bias on the social network. Facebook has pushed back hard, saying Project Veritas has misinterpreted the documents and that they show nothing of the sort, calling the whole thing a "stunt."
But the files do provide a fascinating window into how Facebook has been thinking about the problem of coordinated harassment and trolling campaigns on its platform, and how it has considered novel approaches for trying to stop them — from public shaming to a "Twilight Zone."

Facebook says Project Veritas has it wrong
First, some background on Project Veritas: The organisation bills itself as "investigating and exposing corruption," and often goes undercover in sting operations. It has been accused of taking its "gotcha" material out of context. It has a long history of its projects backfiring, notably when it failed to snare a Washington Post reporter by posing as a sexual harassment victim of former GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore. In 2010, the group's leader, James O'Keefe, was convicted of a misdemeanour after pretending to be a telephone repairman to try and break into the phones of a former Senator.

(Amusingly, one of the documents Project Veritas has released is a screenshot from Facebook's internal workplace chat platform, in which an employee describes the activist group's modus operandi: "There's a recipe here: Find junior person at brand-name company. Record them. Misrepresent their role. Promote wildly.")

The crux of its allegations against Facebook involve a tag that their source alleged was attached to some of the pages of right-wing figures, including the Pizzagate-conspiracy theory-pusher Mike Cernovich: "ActionDeboostLiveDistribution." The tag limits the reach of pages' live video feeds, which Project Veritas alleges is a sign of anti-conservative bias.
Facebook, however, says that's just not how this works. Instead, the tag is applied when users broadcast non-live video using the company's livestreaming tool, in violation of its policies, a spokesperson said — suggesting the pages affected were only being dinged because they were misleading users by using the live tool for non-live footage.

"We fired this person a year ago for breaking multiple employment policies and using her contractor role at Facebook to perform a stunt for Project Veritas," the company said in a statement. "Unsurprisingly, the claims she is making validate her agenda and ignore the processes we have in place to ensure Facebook remains a platform to give people a voice, regardless of their political ideology."

Facebook wants to put trolls in 'Twilight Zone'
That said, one of the documents Project Veritas has obtained still provides interesting insight into how Facebook has thought about trying to police abusive behaviour on its platform without actually banning users.
In a presentation from 2017, the company suggests approaches for tackling trolls who coordinate harassment and trolling campaigns in private Facebook groups, using Kekistan — a far-right group born out of internet meme culture — as an example.

One potential tactic it outlines is putting suspected trolls in a so-called "Twilight Zone" and subtly messing with their ability to use Facebook. This includes things like logging them out every few minutes, randomly redirecting them to the homepage, "magically" making photos and comments fail to upload, and throttling their bandwidth. These methods add friction to users' experiences and making trolling less easy and enjoyable (for the troll), without outright banning them.
Another tactic is the use of shame. It suggests Facebook could tell a user's friends when they've been suspended for something "egregious," displaying a message like "John Smith's account has been suspected for 7 days because he shared hate speech in [a group]."

It adds: "Fear of being outed as a miscreant is what regulates behavior in real like and we should re-introduce that to the online world."

Other ideas include creating a "toxic meme cache," a registry of problematic images, and a "troll classifier" that detects if a user is a troll based on their vocabulary.

Facebook has not disputed the authenticity of the documents, thought it's not clear if any of these tactics have ever ultimately been tested or incorporated into Facebook's systems. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment on it.

source: Business Insider

It's no longer a whisteblowing or leak, it's a 'stunt'.

And one blog reports:
An anti-Facebook right-wing 'stunt' has shed light on its tactics for tackling targeted harassment
source: The Verge

...and here's why it's a good thing!

"It's just a 'stunt', it is not even worth reporting on. Yeah, that's the direction we'll take." The media blackout continues.

 

[2 litre soda]

A Ton of Reports: Facebook manipulates people into thinking things, believing things, actively pursues a particular political agenda, leaks private information, looks at your stuff whenever its employees want to, and avoids paying billions in taxes every year.

Most people: Well, what do you expect us to do, just stop putting our entire personal lives on it and using it as our primary source of information?

Facebook: