Archives: Controversies

Facebook and Google pressured and "arm-wrestled" European Union experts to soften European guidelines on online disinformation and fake news, according to a testimony from insiders. The EU expert group met last year with the task to help prevent the disinformation, particularly during the European parliamentary elections.

Facebook has been awarded a patent for a technology which lets the social network scan through users' photos, see what products they like, and send the data to advertisers to be able to sell you more of the product. The patent also allows the social network to track "other demographic information" and generate a "heat map" so that the product owners can finely tune their query demographics. The official title of this patent is called Computer-vision content detection for sponsored stories'.

Facebook will no longer allow content supporting white nationalism and white separatism it announced in March 2019. The new policy change comes after Facebook was condemned for failing to stop the New Zealand white supremacist attacker's livestream showing the attack on mosques, which left 50 people dead.

More than 83 million Facebook accounts (8.7 per cent of total users) are fake. These consist of duplicate profiles, accounts for spamming purposes and personal profiles for business, organisation or non-human entities such as pets. Following this revelation, the share price of Facebook dropped below $20. Facebook estimated that duplicate or false accounts were lower in developed markets like the United States or Australia, and higher in developing markets that include Indonesia and Turkey, according to the filing.

In March 2019, Facebook admitted it had mistakenly stored stored "hundreds of millions" of passwords of Facebook and Instagram users in plaintext on multiple internal systems accessible only to Facebook engineers, dating as far back as 2012.

An explosive new leak of Facebook's internal documents in March 2019 revealed that Facebook had spent years lobbying extensively against privacy protection laws around the world. The documents also revealed a secretive global lobbying operation by Facebook which targeted hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to gain influence across the world including the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 member states of the EU.

A Wall Street Journal investigation in late February 2019, found that Facebook was able to receive information from numerous apps, even when the user did not have a Facebook account. The Journal tested more than 70 popular apps to find that 11 sent potentially sensitive information to Facebook. These included Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which reportedly shared with Facebook when its users were having their periods or trying to become pregnant.

After facing scrutiny about the role fake news and divisive content on Facebook played in the 2016 election, Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and families, while decreasing content from brands and publishers. That move drew ire from organizations with revenue models built around Facebook. Some news organizations would go on to experience more than 80% drops in referral traffic from Facebook.

A 2018 academic study found out that Facebook targeted users with location-based advertisements even if they blocked the company from accessing location services on their phones and configured all relevant settings within the app to maximise location privacy.

A New York Times story in December 2018 revealed that Facebook during 2010-2018, had granted more intrusive access to users personal data to some of the world's largest technology companies than it had disclosed. These special arrangements were detailed in the hundreds of internal documents of Facebook obtained by the New York Times. These documents underscored how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by powerful companies.