Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Writes To European Commission About Facebook's Lack of Ad Transparency (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Facebook has been no stranger to controversy and scandal over the years, but things have been particularly bad over the last twelve months. The latest troubles find Mozilla complaining to the European Commission about the social network's lack of transparency, particularly when it comes to political advertising. Mozilla's Chief Operating Officer, Denelle Dixon, has penned a missive to Mariya Gabriel, the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. She bemoans the fact that Facebook makes it impossible to conduct analysis of ads, and this in turn prevents Mozilla from offering full transparency to European citizens -- something it sees as important in light of the impending EU elections.
If anyone should be investigating them, it should be the SEC and DoJ because of all of the hinky things that have come out like their tolerance for "friendly fraud," the number of bots (goosing stats to sell ads) and such.
While we're at it, what we really need is something like Brave's wallet/patron system to go global and burn the ad industry to the ground.
It's publically available if you would have taken two seconds to look. Mozilla bought and owns Pocket.
https://assets.mozilla.net/ann...
I hate fat people.
<div style="opacity: 0;">ad</div>
#DeleteFacebook
Trouble is no one can agree what unnecessary features are.
You might reasonably argue that anything that can be an extension should be an extension.
Unfortunately that makes Firefox out of the box kind of annoying and useless. For many users if they have to download a bunch of extensions to stop it sucking, they'll just think it sucks and go right back to chrome. So features that are technically unnecessary are socially necessary in order for Firefox to maintain its market share.
Also another thing is that Mozilla is championing the cause of the open web without spying. In practice that means they need to provide services that people like Google provide in order to do so in a way that isn't evil.
That's their reasoning and its sound in general. No idea if its sound in the case of pocket though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You might reasonably argue that anything that can be an extension should be an extension.
Unfortunately that makes Firefox out of the box kind of annoying and useless.
I see that response to that argument all the time, but it's silly. Just bundle all the extensions needed to make it a typical browser with the install. This has obvious benefits. I can just not install them, or at least disable them once the install is complete. Also, they can be updated by the user independently of the browser, so it's an opportunity to deliver updates for those components without the user having to redownload everything.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Facebook has been given every chance in the world to act right. It was just a couple of years ago where Mark Z. thought it was "ridiculous" that his platform could be used to cause chaos in elections. If these people wanted to actually do something right for the world, they would rebuild this platform from the bottom up. If they wanted to help, they would shut the misinformation pipelines down and lead by example. I do not know one person that uses the site that appreciates political advertisements.
People should not have to be on high alert for propaganda every single second that they are on some site while checking their kids soccer schedule. People do not work this way. It is not an OK policy to teach people to recognize and ignore "fake-news" while acting like it doesn't affect people. One of the primary ways propaganda works is by bombarding people with misinformation, even if they know its a tabloid, click-bait headline. Simply by using brain power to try to ignore what one is trying to see, it registers in people's thoughts that they have seen this. Human beings do not simply ignore this stuff. It is not how the human mind works. Human beings can not be bombarded with this stuff without it affecting them.
Facebook's game plan seems to be, if something happens, don't change the model but add an investigative department to sort out the worst of the worst. This may work in a court of law to "prove" they are trying but this does not solve the issue, and its not genuine. For these platforms to not be propaganda machines, it can not be allowed in the first place.
At this point, because Facebook will not take action themselves, it is time to regulate Facebook. As far as I'm concerned, Facebook and the rest of its platforms should only be able to run ads for products and services until there is a true method to the madness. It is not OK to test these new band-aids on their user-base, when their user-base is 2.1 Billion people, 1/4 of the planet.
These platforms are causing immediate and irreparable harm to the world, and it is not possible for them to unwind this one ad at a time. These products and their models need to be rewritten from the ground up for the common good of the planet, and to genuinely work in favor of the end-user and society in general.
--
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. - Mark Zuckerburg
But you'd still run into the situation of figuring out just what the non-exetension version of Firefox would include.
Browsing, bookmarks, preferences, and the most basic of pop-up blockers would be included — and all of those but browsing should be an extension. Everything else including Pocket, Web Developer tools, etc. would also be extensions, but which were not enabled by default.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"