Platforms

Black activists say hate speech policies and content moderation systems formulated by a company built by and dominated by white men fail the very people Facebook claims it's trying to protect. Not only are the voices of marginalized groups disproportionately stifled, Facebook rarely takes action on repeated reports of racial slurs, violent threats and harassment campaigns targeting black users, they say. Many of these users now think twice before posting updates on Facebook or they limit how widely their posts are shared.

In the age of technological innovation, people of color find themselves embattled with upholding the same fight for equal rights. This time, the fight is online and offline. One such area is algorithmic bias. Algorithms are quantitative data, a process or set of rules involving mathematical calculations that produces more data that helps people make decisions. Algorithmic bias (machine learning bias) or AI bias, is a systematic error in the coding, collection, or selection of data that produces unintended or unanticipated discriminatory results.

Compared with the US public overall, which voices are represented on Twitter? The analysis indicates that the 22 percent of American adults who use Twitter are representative of the broader population in certain ways, but not others. Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated, and have higher incomes than US adults overall. Twitter users also differ from the broader population on some key social issues.

President Donald Trump lobbed another attack against Twitter on its own platform, calling the company “very discriminatory” and saying “they don’t treat me well as a Republican." It turns out the President was scheduled to meet Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter policy head Vijaya Gadde notified employees that their boss was supposed to meet with President Trump in a 30-minute, closed-door meeting. Later the President tweeted, "Great meeting this afternoon at the @WhiteHouse with @Jack from @Twitter.

President Donald Trump said Congress should "get involved" in a battle against "discriminatory" practices by Twitter that the President has alleged unfairly target conservatives. 'The best thing ever to happen to Twitter is Donald Trump,'" President Trump tweeted, quoting a guest on the Fox Business Network. "So true, but they don’t treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory, hard for people to sign on. Constantly taking people off list. Big complaints from many people. Different names—over 100 M.

The European Commission published the latest reports by Facebook, Google and Twitter covering the progress made in March 2019 to fight disinformation. The three online platforms are signatories to the Code of Practice against disinformation and have committed to report monthly on their actions ahead of the European Parliament elections in May 2019.

When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook called for regulating harmful internet content in an op-ed, Republicans in Washington expressed outrage that he was calling on the government to regulate speech. Within hours, the company’s top lobbyists started spreading another message to conservatives: Don’t take his suggestion too seriously. The operatives said Zuckerberg was not encouraging new limits on speech in the United States.

Federal regulators investigating Facebook for mishandling its users’ personal information have set their sights on the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, exploring his past statements on privacy and weighing whether to seek new, heightened oversight of his leadership. Apparently, the discussions about how to hold Zuckerberg accountable for Facebook’s data lapses have come in the context of wide-ranging talks between the Federal Trade Commission and Facebook that could settle the government’s more than year-old probe.

The redacted Mueller report highlighted, at least from a tech perspective, much of what we’d already known since the indictments were first announced, including of course the top-line takeaway that Russia indeed sought to use Facebook and Twitter, largely through the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, to influence the 2016 election in then-candidate Donald Trump’s favor. Particularly noteworthy is that high-ranking members of the president’s inner circle including Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr.

In what will stand as among the most definitive public accounts of the Kremlin’s attack on the American political system, the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation laid out in precise, chronological detail how “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” The Russians’ goal, Mueller emphasized at several points, was to assist Donald Trump’s run for the White House and to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.