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Facebook Inches Toward More Transparency and Accountability (eff.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Facebook took a step toward greater accountability this week, expanding the text of its community standards and announcing the rollout of a new system of appeals. Digital rights advocates have been pushing the company to be more transparent for nearly a decade, and many welcomed the announcements as a positive move for the social media giant. The changes are certainly a step in the right direction. Over the past year, following a series of controversial decisions about user expression, the company has begun to offer more transparency around its content policies and moderation practices, such as the "Hard Questions" series of blog posts offering insight into how the company makes decisions about different types of speech.
The expanded community standards released on Tuesday offer a much greater level of detail of what's verboten and why. Broken down into six overarching categories -- violence and criminal behavior, safety, objectionable content, integrity and authenticity, respecting intellectual property, and content-related requests -- each section comes with a "policy rationale" and bulleted lists of "do not post" items. Facebook's other announcement -- that of expanded appeals -- has received less media attention, but for many users, it's a vital development. In the platform's early days, content moderation decisions were final and could not be appealed. Then, in 2011, Facebook instituted a process through which users whose accounts had been suspended could apply to regain access. That process remained in place until this week.
The expanded community standards released on Tuesday offer a much greater level of detail of what's verboten and why. Broken down into six overarching categories -- violence and criminal behavior, safety, objectionable content, integrity and authenticity, respecting intellectual property, and content-related requests -- each section comes with a "policy rationale" and bulleted lists of "do not post" items. Facebook's other announcement -- that of expanded appeals -- has received less media attention, but for many users, it's a vital development. In the platform's early days, content moderation decisions were final and could not be appealed. Then, in 2011, Facebook instituted a process through which users whose accounts had been suspended could apply to regain access. That process remained in place until this week.
Even if I did believe any of this, and why exactly should I, why does Facebook think they deserve anything resembling trust anymore?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
help ads and brands better track you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I can attest to their increased transparency. Yesterday when I logged into the mobile website, it went straight into a full page ad for their mobile app. It is now more transparent than ever that what they really want is access to everything else that the browser alone cannot pull off my smartphone.
Previously I'd only seen this when I tried to access messages, when one of my friends had posted a limited time video, or recently, when someone posted a GIF as a comment (apparently browsers are not capable of displaying GIFs these days, just as they can't view messages).
Which of these did Diamond and Silk violate?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Firstly the one thing people need to understand is that the data mining that has been going on is by third parties through Facebook's APIs with API keys aka Facebook Apps, that anyone has the ability to create and get immediate public access to Facebook's user base without any scrutiny from Facebook. Now they've made a number of revisions to their APIs and wound back a lot of the privileges however the lack of scrutiny is the issue.
Developing apps on most other platforms which open up users in an ecosystem to data mining by a third party usually involves submitting the app to the company that created the ecosystem. The process of getting an app published on Google or Apples market places is quite involved. Many apps never get authorised by Google's/Apple's platforms due to the app not meeting the platforms technical or privacy standards.
What Facebook needs is to stop this free for all public access to their APIs and restrict public access to apps that have passed some form of review process administered by a team at Facebook.