View previous stories
	87 million Facebook profiles harvested to influence choices at the ballot box by The Observer, Channel 4, PBS, agencies   Nov. 2018   The Guardian view on Zuckerberg’s Facebook: regulate it as a media firm. (Editorial)   As long as social media – unregulated – is allowed to spread prejudice and falsehood, and build a dominant position in advertising, it is a threat to democracy.   When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress this spring he insisted he was not running a media company. But it is getting easier to say why he does. Facebook, the site Mr Zuckerberg founded almost 15 years ago, hosts and produces content. It sells advertising against content. It employs thousands of moderators who help patrol the content it “surfaces”. Two months after he gave his testimony Facebook, without irony, announced plans to launch news shows on its video portal. Its database of privately shared information and personal connections has been used to destabilise democracy. Mr Zuckerberg ought to be held accountable for running a media company.   The billionaire will resist this. His no-show at the House of Commons this week was a snub to representatives from nine parliaments. It is part of a deliberate defensive strategy to delay, deny and deflect criticism. This will only make the regulatory backlash bigger.   History shows that political power can be brutally enforced over an influential private enterprise when it has compromised morality for the sake for profit. Facebook might be able to brush off allegations it is too addictive. But it cannot dismiss so easily the charge that it is bad for democracy. The company is long overdue a regulatory reckoning.   Facebook did too little to stop Russian interference in the US election in 2016. The company was fined in the UK for breaking the law after it emerged it had shared the personal data of almost 90 million users with outside third parties without permission. Last week, after a flurry of denials, Facebook admitted hiring lobbyists to disparage critics.   A decade ago Rupert Murdoch fought to discredit the phone-hacking scandal that enveloped News International. In the end, many were convicted, Mr Murdoch closed down the News of the World and the media mogul appeared before MPs in “the most humble day” of his life. He revealed an organisation in ethical and organisational turmoil. Mr Murdoch had lost in the court of public opinion and the verdict handed down diminished his legacy.   Undue dominance of the media always poses a potential threat. In Britain, Facebook has become second only to the BBC as a source of news despite spreading prejudice and falsehood. The media watchdog Ofcom is right to say social media must be regulated.   Around the world, Facebook has been used to disrupt elections, spread viral propaganda and promote deadly campaigns of hate. When an investigative journalist from the Philippines confronted Mr Zuckerberg about Facebook being the “fertiliser” of democratic collapse, noting 97% of her country were on it, the billionaire replied: “Oh well. What are the other 3% doing?”   Mr Zuckerberg is a menace to society because he disputes public accountability for what his company does, and is loth to consider society’s interests as well as his own.   There is strong public interest in having Facebook regulated as a media company. Lawmakers must consider ways of curbing how it uses data to target advertisements and what information it makes available to third parties. Like any other media company, it ought to face strict advertising regulations and tough transparency requirements in elections.   Given its dominance in digital advertising, Facebook, which also runs Instagram and WhatsApp, is a candidate to be broken up. Like many tech firms, Facebook promotes the idea its commercial interest is intertwined with the public interest. That has led to an abuse of power and a threat to democracy, which lawmakers have a duty to find the best protections against. http://bit.ly/2U03nbA   Mar. 2018 (Extract)   The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.   A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.   Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”   Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals (87 million).   The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.   The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.   However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.   Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are one focus of an inquiry into data and politics by the British Information Commissioner’s Office. Separately, the Electoral Commission is also investigating what role Cambridge Analytica played in the EU referendum.   “We are investigating the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used,” said the information commissioner Elizabeth Denham. “It’s part of our ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes which was launched to consider how political parties and campaigns, data analytics companies and social media platforms in the UK are using and analysing people’s personal information to micro-target voters.”   On Friday, four days after the Observer sought comment for this story, but more than two years after the data breach was first reported, Facebook announced that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform, pending further information over misuse of data. Separately, Facebook’s external lawyers warned the Observer it was making “false and defamatory” allegations, and reserved Facebook’s legal position.   The revelations provoked widespread outrage. The Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced that the state would be launching an investigation. “Residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” she said.   Democratic senator Mark Warner said the harvesting of data on such a vast scale for political targeting underlined the need for Congress to improve controls. He has proposed an Honest Ads Act to regulate online political advertising the same way as television, radio and print.   “This story is more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West. Whether it’s the purchase of political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency,” he said..   Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a data protection specialist, who spearheaded an investigative efforts into the tech giant, said: “Facebook has denied and denied and denied this. It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law.   “It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”   Paul Grewal, Facebook’s vice-president, said in a statement: “We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens”.   A majority of American states have laws requiring notification in some cases of data breach, including California, where Facebook is based.   Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels”.   The Observer has seen a contract dated 4 June 2014, which confirms SCL, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with GSR, entirely premised on harvesting and processing Facebook data. Cambridge Analytica spent nearly $1m on data collection, which yielded more than 50 million individual profiles that could be matched to electoral rolls. It then used the test results and Facebook data to build an algorithm that could analyse individual Facebook profiles and determine personality traits linked to voting behaviour.   The algorithm and database together made a powerful political tool. It allowed a campaign to identify possible swing voters and craft messages more likely to resonate.   At the time, more than 50 million profiles represented around a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters.   * Washington Post: Facebook says that “malicious actors” took advantage of search tools on its platform, making it possible for them to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide.   The revelation came amid rising acknowledgement by Facebook about its struggles to control the data it gathers on users. Among the announcements was that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy hired by President Trump and other Republicans, had improperly gathered detailed Facebook information on 87 million people. But the abuse of Facebook’s search tools -- now disabled -- happened far more broadly and over the course of several years, with few Facebook users likely escaping the scam: http://wapo.st/2qf4pCz   * Access the The Cambridge Analytica Files report via the link below: http://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files http://www.channel4.com/news/data-democracy-and-dirty-tricks-cambridge-analytica-uncovered-investigation-expose http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/28/all-the-data-facebook-google-has-on-you-privacy http://reut.rs/2He36uT http://bit.ly/2Hrgsad http://reut.rs/2Dn9BsB http://bit.ly/2Hsrg7Z http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/16/13637310/facebook-fake-news-explained http://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/07/12/confirming-progressive-fears-facebooks-trustworthy-news-project-chock-full-fox-news http://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html   http://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/technology/china-technology-censorship-borders-expansion.html http://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillance-technology.html http://theintercept.com/2018/08/28/google-china-censorship-plan-human-rights/ http://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-links-searches-to-phone-numbers/ http://globalvoices.org/2018/08/03/if-google-goes-back-to-china-it-will-be-on-the-governments-terms-what-will-that-mean-for-human-rights/ http://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/global/article/show/winning-the-war-of-likes-2983/   http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/nigeria_fake_news http://qz.com/1463922/facebooks-answers-to-senators-show-how-little-power-people-have-on-the-internet/ http://qz.com/1464453/just-like-every-internet-troll-facebook-tried-to-paint-george-soros-as-a-villain/ http://www.kofiannanfoundation.org/supporting-democracy-and-elections-with-integrity/msc-technology-democracy/ http://globalvoices.org/specialcoverage/from-the-gv-archives-human-rights-in-the-facebook-era/   * PBS Frontline: http://to.pbs.org/2GbSTlf http://to.pbs.org/2pst9r5 NYT Podcast: http://nyti.ms/2IGUheb http://witness.org/delete-facebook-not-just-yet/ Visit the related web page
	Trust in Ethical Journalism - The Key To Media Futures by Tom Law Ethical Journalism Network   If 2017 was the year the world finally woke up to the threat of disinformation and the way internet technologies are secretly and subtly used to undermine democracy, then 2018 is becoming the year when ethical journalism, a human instinct beyond encoding and algorithmic definition, finally gets the recognition it deserves.   This issue of Ethics in the News looks at how the communications revolution is continuing to pose more questions than answers over a public crisis of confidence, both in democracy and in sources of public information.   How do we build trust in journalism and news media? Must we sacrifice human rights and pluralism in return for free digital services? How do we stem the flow of hate speech, propaganda and malicious lies without endangering free speech? How do we pay for the journalism that democracy needs to survive?   Around the world these debates rage, but in some countries and regions, the arguments are anything but theoretical. The rise of populism accompanied by a discreet use of technology to target voters or promote hate speech is tearing into the fabric of democracy everywhere. In countries wracked by economic and social crisis or in the aftermath of war, these threats are a major obstacle to peace and development.   In this issue we examine the technological, political and social realities of the information crisis: how algorithms and artificial intelligence are setting a new and potentially troubling agenda; how advertising platforms and the business of social media are undermining public trust; how democracy and political elections are open to undue interference.   But it is not all bad news. From the Middle East and the Balkans there are inspiring stories of journalists and media working together, even across political divides, to develop new initiatives to challenge the hate-mongers. In Turkey a new spirit of media solidarity is in the air. In Africa there are new approaches to reporting terrorism and conflict and a fresh debate about the protection of authors’ rights in the digital age.   Everywhere ethical issues abound – improving the role and portrayal of women in media; combating discrimination and intolerance; improving coverage of migration and human trafficking; and, importantly for all journalists and media, building a sustainable future for journalism without surrendering the cardinal principle of editorial freedom and independence.   The messages are mixed, but they point in one direction, towards a communications landscape that people can trust. It won’t happen overnight, but such a vision will not be realised at all unless strategies for the future embrace public interest journalism, good governance in media, and a public information system rooted in ethics and transparency.   * Access the publication via the link below. The 12th International Journalism Festival was held in April in Italy drawing 710 speakers from 50 different countries, becoming the biggest journalism festival in Europe, access video documentation of the discussions here: http://media.journalismfestival.com/ Visit the related web page
	View more stories