The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
In his new book, Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Siva Vaidhyanathan lays out why Facebook may be good for some people, but not good for democracy as a whole.
The book is divided into sections delineating the ways in which we can look at Facebook: as a pleasure machine, a surveillance machine, an attention machine, a benevolence machine, a protest machine, a politics machine or a disinformation machine. Continue reading
When Facebook recently removed several accounts for trying to influence the 2018 midterm elections, it was the company’s latest move acknowledging the key challenge facing the social media giant: It is both an open platform for free expression of diverse viewpoints and a public utility on which huge numbers of people – and democracy itself – rely for accurate information. Continue reading
The House of Lords Communications Committee has launched an inquiry into how the regulation of the internet should be improved. Oral and Written evidence has been provided to the Committee by a very wide range of companies, NGOs and individuals from a variety of perspectives. Continue reading
In an important decision the CJEU has found that the administrator of a Facebook ‘fan page’ was a joint data controller with Facebook Ireland and Facebook Inc, and that a German data protection supervisory authority is competent to assess the lawfulness of data processing carried out by Facebook Germany, applying German data protection law. Continue reading
Facebook has for the first time made available data on the scale of abusive comments posted to its site. This may have been done under the growing pressure by organisations for social media companies to be more transparent about online abuse, or to gain credibility after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Either way, the figures do not make for pleasurable reading. Continue reading
It would be the ultimate under-statement to say that recent events concerning the appalling breaches of privacy permitted and indeed orchestrated by Facebook have raised public awareness to new heights over what happens when internet intermediaries are allowed to do just about whatever they want. Continue reading
Urban spaces are often designed to be subtly hostile to certain uses. Think about, for example, the seat partitions on bus terminal benches that make it harder for the homeless to sleep there or the decorative leaves on railings in front of office buildings and on university campuses that serve to make skateboarding dangerous. Scholars call this “hostile urban architecture.” Continue reading
In the wake of Facebook’s massive breach of personal data of 87 million users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered questions from US politicians over two days of congressional hearings. These questions mostly focussed on the tight link between Facebook’s business model of selling targeted personalised advertising and its need to capture, and exploit, large amounts of personal information from its users. Continue reading
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to congress highlights one of the key issues of our time – data acquisition by digital corporations and its lack of regulation. The kernel of the issue is in this exchange: Continue reading
Public concern about Facebook’s power in society – and in politics – has skyrocketed in the wake of revelations that users’ data was analyzed by a U.K.-based marketing firm and used to construct highly targeted political propaganda in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Continue reading
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