Facebook Continues Handing Data To Governments Worldwide

Facebook Continues Handing Data To Governments Worldwide

TOPICS:Aaron KeselFacebookSurveillance

December 22, 2017

By Aaron Kesel

Facebook is continuing to show its disregard for privacy as it hands its user data to governments all over the world.
According to a new report released by the social media giant on Dec. 18th, the company has increasingly received requests for data from governments worldwide.
In the U.S., the requests rose by as much as 26% from the last six months of 2016 to the first six months of 2017; while, globally, requests increased by about 21% since 2013 when the company first started providing data on government requests, QZ reported.
Facebook explained that it would only provide user data to governments if that request is legally sufficient, and will push back in court if it’s not. Despite Facebook’s desire to eventually operate in China and Zuckerberg’s flirtation with the country’s leaders, the company is still unwilling to compromise as much as the government wants it to in order to enter, Bloomberg reported.
This comes from a company that wants to, in Orwellian fashion, “allow users to communicate using only their minds.”
Quite worrying to say the very least. Facebook also supports paid censorship as it tested burying posts from news outlets and businesses in 6 countries unless they pay for it.
For a company connected to the Defense Advanced Project Agency (DARPA), and the CIA’s research venture capital funding arm In-Q-Tel. this is all scary beyond belief for privacy advocates.


The social media giant has also taken it upon itself to begin censoring accounts it deems are spreading “fake news,” in a post published to its blog in April this year.
Facebook has also announced that soon it will decide what is “Russian propaganda” for its users, which is incredibly frightening that we may soon live in a society where unknown arbitrators of truth are paid to decide what is and isn’t “propaganda” on the largest social network.
Last year the social behemoth began testing “features” according to Mashable which allowed Facebook users to mark a story in their newsfeed as fake.
This will result in a story having a “Disputed by” pop-up of chosen fact-checkers under its title, along with a link to a corresponding article explaining why it might be false, as seen by a Gizmodo reporter on Twitter.
These posts will then appear lower in the news feed, throttled by Facebook’s algorithm, and users will receive a warning before sharing the story on their Facebook feeds, RT reported.
In its war against “fake news” Facebook testified last month to Congress that 29 million Americans saw content created by Russian agents directly in their news feed, while 126 million shared posts that were shared or linked to by their friends, with that number rising to roughly 150 million when including Instagram, the New York Times reported.
“It’s a much more challenging issue to identify and notify reliably people who may have been exposed to this content on an individual basis,” Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel, said during the appearance before Congress.
This shows their complete compliance to governments when information is requested. It should be soundly alarming that government and and a social network are involved in an incestuous relationship involving politics.
Yet that’s not all. Facebook hasn’t only decided what you should think is true or false, but has taken it upon themselves to implement a suicide detection algorithm that will get innocent people arrested because you posted a ‘troubling comment.’
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Facebook’s founding President, Sean Parker, has admitted to the other main flaw of all social networks — they manipulate human psychology. He’s not the only one to admit it; another Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, also issued a warning on the damages he and his colleagues have caused to society.
“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” Chamath Palihapitiya said.
Though that’s a flaw that all online social networks potentially carry. Thus we all have to be careful not to let our egos get in the way while engaging with other people online no matter what social network we use.