Tag: Facebook

Facebook’s New Supreme Court: One Step Closer to Becoming a Virtual Country

Facebook’s announcement of their new “Supreme Court,” an announcement that was triggered by the coronavirus, represents a massive turning point in human history. While this may not be their goal, it looks like they’re on the verge of creating their own virtual country. Read full Article

How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us

In early 2006, I got a call from Chris Kelly, then the chief privacy officer at Facebook, asking if I would be willing to meet with his boss, Mark Zuckerberg. I had been a technology investor for more than two decades, but the meeting was unlike any I had ever had. Mark was only twenty-two. … Continue reading "How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us"

Facebook unveils details of its content-oversight board

IN NOVEMBER 1999 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the web’s address book, held its inaugural annual gathering. Read full Article

All you have to do is register. Read full Article

Facebook deletes, and then restores, Elizabeth Warren’s ads criticizing the platform, drawing her rebuke

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat vying for the presidency, didn’t have to search far and wide for ammunition in her salvo against Facebook and other technology giants. Read full Article

Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism

WE SOMETIMES FORGET that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy startups like Pets. Read full Article

Damage Control at Facebook: 6 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation

For more than a year, Facebook has endured cascading crises — over Russian misinformation, data privacy and abusive content — that transformed the Silicon Valley icon into an embattled giant accused of corporate overreach and negligence. Read full Article

Visualizing the World’s Tech Giants 2018

Technology companies have a unique advantage over other businesses, and it’s called the network effect. Each new user who joins a platform adds value to everyone already on it. Facebook would be boring if you were the only one on it. Read full Article

How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

The internet and near-costless scaling of digital has allowed the concentration of too much power in too few hands. Our systems for accountability can’t or won’t keep up. By building alternatives, the decentralisation of networks, governance and control are a promising antidote. Read full Article

Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media

For 17-year-old Mary Amanuel, from London, it happened in Tesco. “We were in year 7,” she remembers, “and my friend had made an Instagram account. As we were buying stuff, she was counting the amounts of likes she’d got on a post. ‘Oooh, 40 likes. 42 likes. Read full Article

The Observer view on how Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy

Facebook likes to present itself as a tech company, but often appears more like an advertising corporation that happens to use digital technology in order to conduct its core business. Read full Article

Delete Facebook? That’s as hard as giving up sugar

Plenty of people say they’re going to do it, but in the end can’t. Read full Article

Growth At Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection In 2016 Memo — And Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed

On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company’s relentless quest for growth. “We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. Read full Article

Facebook Shared Your Data With Phone Makers Like Apple. Here’s Why This Scandal Could Be Huge

Facebook has been hit with another data-sharing scandal, again over the access that it gives or gave third parties to the data not only of its users, but also of their friends. Here’s what you need to know. Read full Article

Kill the tech bro, save the world: how CEOs became Hollywood’s new supervillains

Hollywood has a history of drawing on collective fears. The dawn of the atomic age saw a boom in world-ending disasters, James Bond battled Russians all throughout the cold war, and the post-9/11 era saw a grimly predictable rise in Arab and Muslim bad-guys. Read full Article

Facebook, Social Media and technology needs to be fixed for the good of humanity

Social media and other attention-based internet platforms have certainly captured our attention: adults in the U.S. spent nearly six hours per day on digital media last year. Read full Article

The Internet Trolls Have Won. Sorry, There’s Not Much You Can Do.

When it comes to online comments and discourse and what you can do to limit their toxicity, you only have a certain amount of power. The real leverage lies with the tech companies. This column is going to be a bit unusual. Typically, I write about a broad tech problem and offer some solutions. Read … Continue reading "The Internet Trolls Have Won. Sorry, There’s Not Much You Can Do."

Facebook is eating the world: a good read on algorithms vs what I like call Androrithms