Why Facebook Filtering Will Ultimately Fail

In its content-moderation report released this week, Facebook revealed that it had removed a whopping 3.2-billion fake accounts from March through September 2019.

That’s a lot of disinformation, wrote tech reporter Aditya Srivastava: “To put it in perspective, the number is [nearly] half of living human beings on planet earth.”

Facebook also claims to have removed or labeled 54-million pieces of content flagged as too violent and graphic, 18.5-million items deemed sexual exploitation, 11.4-million posts breaking its anti-hate speech rules, and 5.7 million that violated its bullying and harassment policies.

Facebook’s News Initiative Papers Over a Deeper Problem

Originally published at Seattle Times

On Friday, Facebook unveiled its “News Tab,” a feature that will promote to the social network’s users news articles from a handpicked collection of outlets.

Facebook says it created the feature because “we want new forms of journalism in the digital age, including individual, independent journalism, to flourish.”

In exchange, some of the participating news outlets will be compensated for their content, receiving up to $3 million a year. The social-media giant rolled out the News Tab to a limited subset of Facebook’s 2.5-billion users; the company hopes to expand the feature so it’s available to more people by early 2020.

While the News Tab isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, it doesn’t address a larger issue that’s long festered between Facebook and the news business... [More at Seattle Times]

How Twitter and Facebook Both Get Political Ads Wrong

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to ban political ads from the platform lit up Twitter with praise Wednesday night.

But this issue isn’t as straightforward as many believe.

To his credit, Dorsey’s announcement is a clear rebuke of Facebook’s hands-off approach to campaign ads, which amounts to giving politicians carte blanche to lie and mislead voters.