+Comment Faced with an obvious falsehood pushed on its platform by a politician seeking re-election, Facebook has finally taken action… in the most grudging, useless way imaginable.
Facebook filed a lawsuit against EU competition regulators on Monday alleging that enforcers were improperly seeking access to sensitive employee personal data.
It also removed thousands of fake accounts linked to conservative media outlet The Epoch Times that pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories about coronavirus and protests in the U.S.
Again?
Facebook has upgraded its Linux Foundation membership and by doing so will assume a seat on the organisation’s board.
Facebook’s open-source group has been a long-time member of the Foundation, but has now decided a top-tier platinum membership is its best option. Doing so sees it join the likes of Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel.
Facebook will force users of its Oculus VR headset to sign up for and log into the antisocial network.
Owners of the virtual-reality goggles have been able to install games and other software in their gear via the Oculus online service, using accounts directly registered with Oculus. That’s coming to an end: you’ll need to log in via Facebook, not Oculus, if you want to use your device as expected. If you refuse, your apps “may no longer work.”
And this is why I never gave any consideration to Oculus whenever I had thoughts of building a VR rig (something I still haven’t done, because hardware that isn’t being subsidized by Facebook knowing they’ll get their hooks into it fully in due time is still a lot more expensive). Anyone who thought Facebook would leave Oculus well enough alone after they broke their promise not to merge WhatsApp with Facebook’s back-end and start siphoning all of that sweet sweet contact data wasn’t paying attention.
For sure, this is to the surprise of absolutely nobody who knows anything of facebook history. So many people are incredibly pissed off about this and, boy, is now ever the time to enforce some proper antitrust regulation and stop these massive tech companies doing this. What’s that thing Beschizza said about capitalism seeking anything it can jam its proboscis into for profit…
At the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic in April, 82 websites spreading health misinformation attracted an estimated 460 million views on Facebook.
This is according to research by US-based global activist org Avaaz, which found that bogus health claims on Facebook accrued an estimated 3.8 billion views in one year.
Facebook has followed Twitter and decided that QAnon’s Qnonsense represents sufficient risk that it should be turfed out. Or at least some of it.
It’s not all good, in fact it’s fucking terrible
Fashbook were forced into doing something about Qanon, so they also take down left wing organisations in retaliation.
Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.
The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.
They say “failed” but isn’t “declined” or “refused” more appropriate?
