TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNBC: Facebook lost a bunch of talent in 2021 — here are the most notable departures. “Numerous senior executives left in 2021 or announced plans to depart in the coming months. The exodus spanned the company, from its Novi cryptocurrency division to Facebook’s Workplace business software unit. Here’s a list of Facebook’s most notable departures in 2021, ordered by when they were announced.”

Ars Technica: 2021 was the year the world finally turned on Facebook. “Wish 2021 had been a better year? Facebook probably does, too. The company has long been maligned by politicians, media observers, and consumer advocates, but it wasn’t until 2021 that it felt like the tide truly began to turn. Though Facebook had faced scandals in the past, from Cambridge Analytica to the Myanmar genocide, this year’s string of missteps and revelations may have tipped the company and its reputation past the point of no return.”

Techdirt: Oversight Board Overturning Instagram Takedown Of Ayahuasca Post Demonstrates The Impossibility Of Content Moderation. “The Oversight Board overturned Instagram’s decision to take down a post that was promoting ayahuasca as medicine. Instagram took down the post (which had just started trending) because it was promoting it as medical treatment.”

Search Engine Land: Meta will remove targeting options for sensitive topics on January 19. “Meta will remove certain targeting options relating to sensitive topics on January 19, 2022. ‘Health causes,’ ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘religious practices and groups,’ and ‘political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations and figures,’ were among the examples of targeting options slated for deprecation.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: Instagram boss says app will ‘rethink what Instagram is’ in 2022. “Instagram boss Adam Mosseri vowed Tuesday that the social app will ‘rethink what Instagram is’ in 2022. In a video posted to Twitter, Mosseri said Instagram will focus on greater transparency in the New Year, among other goals. He didn’t directly address any of the past year’s scandals that rocked Instagram and parent company Meta (formerly known as Facebook).”

The Daily Beast: How Anime Porn Became a Weapon for Rival Terror Groups on Facebook. “The Facebook group ‘Soldiers of the Righteous Caliphate’ was a bubbling cauldron of noxious extremist support drawn from rival groups including the Islamic State, and the Taliban. It was filled with beheading imagery, military exercises, hand-drawn faceless portraits of the late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and—somehow—plenty of anime porn. With just over 24,000 members, the Facebook group represented a perfect case study in the malicious mix of extremist support on the platform, which continues to evade detection and gain traction. So why was it full of pornography?”

New York Times: A Former Facebook Executive Pushes to Open Social Media’s ‘Black Boxes’. “Mr. [Brandon] Silverman isn’t a leaker or a whistle-blower, and he declined to discuss details of his time at Facebook. But his defection from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill is significant. He arrived with detailed knowledge of perhaps the most effective transparency tool in the history of social media, and he has helped write it into a piece of legislation that is notable for its technical savvy.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Slain officer’s sister sues Facebook in ‘boogaloo’ murder, alleging it pushed extremist content. “The sister of a slain federal officer is suing Facebook’s parent company Meta, alleging it bears responsibility for her brother’s killing during racial justice protests in 2020. Facebook facilitated the hateful far-right ‘boogaloo’ movement, leading an adherent to murder officer Dave Patrick Underwood, the lawsuit filed in a California Superior Court late Wednesday alleges.”

New York Times: The Metaverse’s Dark Side: Here Come Harassment and Assaults. “Harassment, assaults, bullying and hate speech already run rampant in virtual reality games, which are part of the metaverse, and there are few mechanisms to easily report the misbehavior, researchers said. In one popular virtual reality game, VRChat, a violating incident occurs about once every seven minutes, according to the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: Regulate, break up, open up: how to fix Facebook in 2022. “This year the public saw an alarming side of Facebook, after a huge leak of internal documents revealed the extent of vaccine misinformation and extremism on the platform, a two-tier system of who gets to break the rules and the toxic effects of Instagram for teens. Digital rights activists around the world have warned about these issues for years, but with the company facing mounting pressure, next year could provide an unprecedented opportunity for action.”

Tech Xplore: Sharing on Facebook seems harmless, but leaked documents show how it may help spread misinformation. “A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeming to slur her speech at an event tore through the internet, gaining steam on Facebook. Share after share, it spread to the point of going viral. The altered video from May 2019 was a slowed-down version of the actual speech the California Democrat gave but was being promoted as real. Even though Facebook acknowledged the video was fake, the company allowed it to stay on the platform, where it continued to be reshared. That exponential resharing was like rocket fuel to the manipulated video.”

Radio Prague International: Most-shared Czech news report on Facebook in 2021? Covid-19 disinformation. “The most-shared Facebook posts in the Czech Republic this year stemming from news sites, as you might well imagine, concerned the coronavirus pandemic. According to an analysis of nearly 500,000 reports, the top post, shared 41,000 times, was a bogus report by Aeronet.cz, a known spreader of pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation.”

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