On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication's behalf. “A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote. The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

We don’t have to lose our digital public spaces to state manipulation. What if future companies designed media to facilitate democracy right from the beginning? Is it possible to create a form of digital communication that promotes consensus-building and civil debate, rather than divisiveness and conspiracy theories? […] Twitter and Facebook executives often say that their services are modeled on a “public square.” But the public square is more like 1970s network television, where one person at a time addresses the masses. On social media, the “square” is more like millions of karaoke boxes running in parallel, where groups of people are singing lyrics that none of the other boxes can hear. And many members of the “public” are actually artificial beings controlled by hidden individuals or organizations. There isn’t a decent real-world analogue for social media, and that makes it difficult for users to understand where public information is coming from, and where their personal information is going. […] The legacy of social media will be a world thirsty for new kinds of public experiences. To rebuild the public sphere, we’ll need to use what we’ve learned from billion-dollar social experiments like Facebook, and marginalized communities like Black Twitter. We’ll have to carve out genuinely private spaces too, curated by people we know and trust.

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site. But what people actually read on Facebook is what’s in their News Feed … and its contents, in turn, are determined not by giving everyone an equal voice, and not by a strict chronological timeline. What you read on Facebook is determined entirely by Facebook’s algorithm, which elides much — censors much, if you wrongly think the News Feed is free speech — and amplifies little. What is amplified? Two forms of content. For native content, the algorithm optimizes for engagement. This in turn means people spend more time on Facebook, and therefore more time in the company of that other form of content which is amplified: paid advertising.

(Except when it is.) --- Being upfront about the humans who operate behind a curtain of artificial intelligence would mean looking less ingenious, less innovative, less omniscient. But users deserve to be in the know and able to make informed decisions about what devices to allow in their homes and on their persons

Development organizations and Western feminists think that empowering poor women means giving them chickens or sewing machines. It doesn’t. --- [T]he term was introduced into the development lexicon in the mid-1980s by feminists from the Global South. Those women understood “empowerment” as the task of “transforming gender subordination” and the breakdown of “other oppressive structures” and collective “political mobilization.” They got some of what they wanted when the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 adopted “an agenda for women’s empowerment.” In the 22 years since that conference, though, “empowerment” has become a buzzword among Western development professionals, but the crucial part about “political mobilization” has been excised. In its place is a narrow, constricted definition expressed through technical programming seeking to improve education or health with little heed to wider struggles for gender equality. This depoliticized “empowerment” serves everyone except the women it is supposed to help. [...] [T]here is a skirting of the truth that without political change, the structures that discriminate against women can’t be dismantled and any advances they do make will be unsustainable. Numbers never lie, but they do omit. [...] In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.

Proponents of Libra are all yabbering on about “serving the world’s unbanked,” as if it were 15 or 20 years ago. For more than a decade, Kenya has already had M-Pesa, a thriving micropayments system based on trading cell minutes!! M-Pesa predates Bitcoin, and has expanded from Kenya through East and Central Africa, and on beyond to the Middle East and India, covering millions of people who most emphatically do not need Mark Zuckerberg sticking his grubby mitts in their wallets. Bitcoin was meant as a curb on the man, perhaps even as a strike against the Man; Libra is the Man.

It’s time for a digital protection agency. It’s clear ethics don’t scale, and it’s not just Facebook’s problem.

Up until very recently, I'd recount my online experiences with some degree of shame or sheepishness, but in this apocalyptic year of 2012, that embarrassment is beginning to fall by the wayside. I've been having more and more conversations with people grappling with what is gained and lost by how some of our most meaningful musical discoveries-- not to mention life experiences-- have happened in front of, or facilitated by, screens. We're starting to come to terms with the fact that modern life is a constant, awkward/elegant oscillation between the digital and physical, faces and FaceTime, and we're starting to hear music that reflects this reality, the beginnings of a new ordinary.

The old Google made a fortune on ads because they had good content. It was like TV used to be: make the best show and you get the most ad revenue from commercials. The new Google seems more focused on the commercials themselves.

…we should ask: What exactly is it about Facebook that makes people ask if it’s making us lonely?”

On the bright side, by interpreting the confusing policy in the most alarming possible light, the tech press has forced Instagram to toe the line more carefully than it otherwise might have. That's a win for users

Which brings us back to the question: Have we reached peak Facebook? And no, we haven’t. Even if Facebook never adds another user, it will keep growing: It has become a fundamental substrate, a difficult-to-avoid component of any site or app that requires users to register—making it essential to nearly every major web innovation now and in the future. There’s a related question: Is Facebook ever going to be cool again? That’s like asking “Is the phone company cool?” The interface may not be exciting anymore, but the network is very, very cool, in the disruptively awesome way that enormous things are: volcanoes, aircraft carriers, the New Deal.

Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

Instagram succeeded for many good reasons, including its design, its viral qualities, its simplicity, and the fact that its engineers focused so obsessively on making sure that it works all the time. Part of its success, no doubt, is the fact that it was just in the right place, at the right time, with the right, crowd-pleasing mix of features.

‘Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that's where the danger lies.’

‘The emergence of the Social Media Exile essay has been swift and smug. A language expert dissects a genre while also being seduced by its allure.’

Old media (The Epiphinator) is all about stories and endings. New media (Facebook etc.) knows nothing, crafts no careful stories. But we still need those things, so don't expect it to die yet.

A JavaScript that navigates a Facebook fan page and outputs all of the fans into a CSV file. Incredibly useful.

“This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.” Sites using Facebook’s ‘social plugins’ have been chewing up memory in my Safari (stemming from, I think, based on looking at the ‘Activity’ window, a blocked request returning an error and being requested over and over again). I’m still not sure what the issue was (AdBlock or Facebook Cleaner extension conflict, probably?), but with this extension the plugins don’t have a chance to load in the first place, which is fine because I never use them and I think they’re worthless and annoying.

“There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called ‘lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!’ or something like that. Most of them are marked as ‘public’, or ‘visible to everyone’. A lot of folks don‘t understand what that means in Facebook’s context — to Facebook, ‘everyone’ means everyone in the world, whether they’re a Facebook member or not. That includes automated programs like Evil, as well as search engines.”

"Let me think about that." In other words: with a glut of information, we're trying to form opinions and take action on it all just as fast as it's coming in, and we're suffering for it.

Because there's no alternative, and it is valuable. But its privacy practices are awful.

On what Farmville is (not a game) and what it means (nothing good).

Why are so many women willingly giving up their identities and letting their children take over? And are our children being overly coddled as a result?

If you haven't opted-out yet, do so in your Facebook preferences under "Privacy" "External Websites."

Authored by Smarr (Plaxo), Canter, Scoble, and Arrington. Brief but a good summary of recent concerns. Comments interesting, but post needs a follow-up soon, and we can probably expect a lot of activity on this blog after DataSharingSummit.

Definitions for them each. MySpace is an SNS, Facebook a Social OS, Twitter a Social Graph Application.

Facebook as a foundation.

All about "The Platform," ambition, and what is sure to be a huge IPO. A success story, and I'm impressed. Go Facebook!