Facebook

Wikipedia coverage: Read the full Wikipedia article, including its references. The material below is the existing Deep Politics Wiki article.

Big Tech, Social media

Facebook  link () Campfire Wiki NNDB Sourcewatch Twitter Wikiquote
Formation	February 4, 2004
Founders	Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes
Headquarters	Menlo Park, California, US
Subgroups	Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, PrivateCore
Interests	Platformization
Owners	Mark Zuckerberg
Sponsor of	Poynter Institute,Institute for Strategic Dialogue,Kofi Annan Foundation,Rappler,Democracy and Culture Foundation
The world's most popular social network, with over 1,000,000,000 users in 2014.

Facebook is the world's most widely used social website. It has a great - and often poorly understood - ability to influence its users. The first board member was Bilderberg/Steering committee member, Peter Thiel. Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, asked people to consider "the value that Facebook brings to society".

Origins

File:Zuckerberg-lifelog-facebook.jpg

The 2004 Wired article.

Facebook was officially founded on 4 February 2004, the same day that DARPA shut down the LifeLog universal surveillance project. The Facebook CEO was Mark Zuckerberg, at Harvard University.

The official narrative declares that Zuckerberg was a computer genius who coded the site himself. Another version has him as a front man for the US Deep state's DARPA-backed LifeLog project.

It stands to reason that data from Facebook feeds into projects like Sentient World Simulation or others of similar nature, officially acknowledged or not. The initiative to predict behavior of populations goes back to counter insurgency planning after the second world war.

George Soros has called Facebook a "menace to society" and a "near monopoly distributor" of information that should be regulated as a utility.

Activities

Watch on YouTube

Facebook failed to remove sexualised images of children - BBC News

Pedophilia Hub?

Facebook was the target of a lawsuit in New Mexico for being a breeding ground for child predators, according to a 2023 lawsuit. The attorney general claimed his team made fake accounts of teens who were immediately found by predators and asked to perform and send pictures and images of them engaging in sexual acts, with footage of these acts being "ten times" more prevalent on Facebook than porn sites.

The AG of New Mexico explained in the lawsuit his offices also found that Facebook; "especially promoted child porn" to teens, even when the algorithm had no history of this Facebook user searching for this images; coupled adult child predators together and suggested closed off groups to new users, and found that Meta recommended kids joined unmoderated groups devoted to facilitating underage prostitution. The office of the AG went even further, and was not sanctioned on Meta's platforms after starting an account where a fictitious mother offered her 13 year old daughter to child rapists.

Time reports in 2025 that "Meta was aware that millions of adult strangers were contacting minors on its sites" and that "child sexual abuse was frequently detected, yet rarely removed".

BBC Investigation

In 2017 BBC journalists requested an interview with Facebook because they weren't removing child abuse photos. Facebook asked to be sent the photos as proof. The US firm says it has improved this system since an investigation by the BBC last year in 2016. That BBC undercover probe found "secret" groups were being used by paedophiles to meet and swap images. Information the BBC provided to the police led to one man being sent to prison for four years. To test Facebook's claim, the BBC used the report button to alert the company to 100 images which appeared to break its guidelines. They included: pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children; images of under-16s in highly sexualised poses, with obscene comments posted beside them;groups with names such as "hot xxxx schoolgirls" containing stolen images of real children; an image that appeared to be a still from a video of child abuse, with a request below it to share "child pornography". Of the 100 images only 18 were removed, according to the BBC. They included images from groups where users were discussing swapping what appeared to be child abuse material. When journalists sent the photos, Facebook reported the journalists to the police because distributing child abuse imagery is illegal.

Gatekeeping

WhoWhatWhy reports that gatekeeping is a common phenomenon in Facebook, as editors reported regular manual intervention to add or remove particular news stories from the 'trending' news feed.

Influence on elections

In May 2018, Facebook established a partnership with the Atlantic Council, an influential Washington-based organization that "galvanizes US leadership and engagement in the world together with allies”. The specific purpose of the partnership is to guarantee “the correct use of Facebook in elections around the world, monitoring disinformation and foreign interference, helping to educate citizens and civil society”.

Censorship

Full article: Facebook/Censorship

File:Facebook trolls.png

"Destructive behaviors" of trolls, as defined by an internal Facebook document

Facebook reported a 21% rise in takedown requests in the latter half of 2017, up from 64,279 to 78,890. The US accounts for 57% of all requests.

"Fake News"

Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2017 that "Right now, we're starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about "terrorism" and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization." In 2019, Facebook complied with demands from the Singaporean government about labeling "fake news" as such.

"Hate Speech"

On May 31, 2016, Facebook agreed with Google, Microsoft, and Twitter to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours. In 2018, Breitbart News reported that "Britain's police have stumbled into another public relations disaster after threatening to track down and prosecute Facebook users for ridiculing them."

Frances Haugen

Watch on YouTube

Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook's civic integrity team, is testifying at an internet safety hearing on Capitol Hill. Facebook's leaders know how to make their products safer but won't, she says

Full article: Facebook Files

According to whistleblower Frances Haugen Facebook "harms children, stokes division and weakens our democracy".

Mass surveillance

File:Facebook listening.jpg

Facebook is recording a lot of data about a lot of people. Together with other social media, in 2016, Facebook "accounted for 43 percent of all traffic to major news sites. Nearly two-thirds of Facebook and Twitter users access their news through their feeds." Hundreds of millions of Facebook profiles are reportedly for sale on the Dark Web.

Data Harvesting

Brittany Kaiser, a staffer of Cambridge Analytica reported in April 2018 that over 87 million users' details were accessed by the company.

Content moderation

A 2015 estimate put 1/3 of Facebook's entire staff as moderators, but Facebook claimed this was an overestimate - although without offering an alternative figure.

The editor of Norway's largest newspaper found his Facebook feed censored after he posted the 1972 image of Kim Phúc running away from a US napalm attack. In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg he complained that "First you create rules that don't distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs. Then you practice these rules without allowing space for good judgement. Finally you even censor criticism against and a discussion about the decision – and you punish the person who dares to voice criticism."

Tracking of Users

Facebook admits to using the microphone to listen to users' environments, but has claimed that it does not record conversations.

Since 2012, Facebook has been "better understanding of our ecosystem" by encouraging users to report if their friends use the network under an assumed name. Mark Zuckerberg has been consistent in his explanation of the plan to shareholders, a plan to be the middle-man in all personal communication.

Documents leaked in 2019 suggested that "Facebook planned to spy on Android phone users, internal emails reveal".

Edin Jusupovic revealed in July 2019 that he had detected "hidden codes" in photos downloaded from from the site, leading him to conclude that "Facebook is embedding tracking data inside photos you download". In essence this is not different from North Koreas operating system Red Star OS, which also changes metadata to track users and their connections to others offline.

Tracking of Non-users

In April 2015, after research bu Belgian privacy regulators, Facebook admitted that it was placing a cookie on "some" people's browsers, even if they were not Facebook users and had never visited the site. It claimed that this was due to a "bug".

Advertising

Since 2012, Facebook has been buying sensitive data about users' offline lives from data brokers and combining this information with the online data it collects in order to sell this information to advertisers.

Research on users

File:Facebook profiles.jpg

Facebook has the ability to surveil popular users in a finely grained and intrusive manner, including by mapping their motivations, frustrations and signals over the course of their usage of the site, reports Reclaim The Net in January 2022.

Facebook is used as a research tool by ordinary users, but the company itself also carries out undisclosed research on users. An internal document leaked in 2017 showed how by monitoring posts, comments and interactions on the site, Facebook can figure out when people as young as 14 feel “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “stressed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.

Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg reportedly ordered employees to conduct "research" on Soros following his remarks on the company at the World Economic Forum in 2018 .

Emotional Contagion

Multiple experimenters have used data from Facebook to study 'emotional contagion', how mood is transferred between friends. It was announced in 2014 that some research was not merely observational, but involved investigations in manipulating users' moods through the skewing of data presented through Facebook. For 7 days, 689,003 users were presented with modified newsfeeds which included more or less "happy" or "sad" phrases from friends. The study concluded "that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness."

Face recognition

Facebook announced in 2014 that it has developed a program called "DeepFace," which can determine whether two photographed faces are of the same person with 97.25% accuracy - compared with a human ability of discriminating faces at about 97.5%.

Research by users

In 2014, Matt Honan, a journalist for Wired magazine notes the effects of an experiment he tried out - "liking" everything which Facebook served up to him for 48 hours.

Factchecking

In July 2021, Facebook announced a partnership with Logically, a UK-based fact checker that uses artificial intelligence.

CIA operatives

A 2022 study by Alan Macleod found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation. Macleod wrote that "In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability.".

Ben Nimmo was Facebook's global threat intelligence lead for influence operations. Between 2011 and 2014, he worked as NATO's press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft/Integrity Initiative, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO's semi-official think tank.

In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA, until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. At Meta, he became manager of "the team that writes the rules for Facebook", determining "what is acceptable and what is not."

Deborah Berman spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before in 2022 being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta. Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. As of 2022, he was director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta.

Cameron Harris, a CIA analyst until 2019, became a Meta trust and safety project manager. Emily Vacher was an FBI employee between 2001 and 2011, rising to the rank of supervisory special agent. From there she was headhunted by Facebook/Meta, and became director of trust and safety. Between 2010 and 2020, Mike Bradow worked for USAID, eventually becoming deputy director of policy for the organization. Since 2020, Meta employed Bradow as a misinformation policy manager. Neil Potts, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, became vice president of trust and safety at Facebook. In 2020, Sherif Kamal left his job as a program manager at the Pentagon to take up the post of Meta trust and safety program manager.

Lawsuits

Since 2011, Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer has repeatedly requested all information Facebook hold on him arguing that under European law he was entitled to this. Multiple legal resubmissions later, on 2 December 2015, Schrems resubmitted his original complaint against Facebook with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. He has set up a website at http://europe-v-facebook.org to promote his viewpoint.

Funding the Integrity Initiative

The Integrity Initiative received £100,000 for research and education activities in 2018-2019. However, an essay from August 2018 on "Discernment" stated that {{#subobject: |Has superobject=Facebook |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=|+sep=, |Has text=“it seems every day we uncover information about how platforms like Facebook have used our personal data to target us with highly-tailored messaging that merges advertising for goods and services with political messages that reflect our interests and values through our online viewing reinforced by viewpoints we like and follow. This is exacerbated by a financial model that gives financial reward to content that is clicked and shared most widely.” |Is about=Facebook,Facebook, Fake news|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=6 August 2018 |Sourced from=Integrity Initiative/Leak/4 |Has sourceDetails=Discernment paper_BR2018_08.06_proposal2.pdf |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName=Integrity Initiative/Leak/4 |Has sourceURL= }}“it seems every day we uncover information about how platforms like Facebook have used our personal data to target us with highly-tailored messaging that merges advertising for goods and services with political messages that reflect our interests and values through our online viewing reinforced by viewpoints we like and follow. This is exacerbated by a financial model that gives financial reward to content that is clicked and shared most widely.”

Facebook on Wikispooks

References