Platforms

Facebook is banning personality quiz apps, which have for years been able to collect and store a great deal of information about their users. The ban comes a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it came out that the data firm had acquired information on up to 87 million people through the quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife.”

New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into Facebook’s unauthorized collection of 1.5 million Facebook users’ email contact databases. While Facebook claims that 1.5 million contact databases were directly harvested by its email password verification process for new users, the total number of people whose information was improperly obtained may be hundreds of millions. Email verification is a standard practice for online services such as Facebook.

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and stood by the company’s decision to permit a tweet from President Donald Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman.

The Federal Trade Commission’s coming resolution of its yearlong investigation of alleged privacy lapses at Facebook looms as a defining moment for US policy on consumer data, one with lasting ramifications for companies that collect it. A large penalty could serve as an important warning shot, particularly for tech firms that are already operating under FTC consent decrees from past missteps.

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.