‎Facebook App

Facebook users may advertise events, which can be offline, on a website other than Facebook, or on Facebook. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. The developer, Meta Platforms, Inc., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below.

Meta Business Suite

In 2020, the government of Thailand forced Facebook to take down a Facebook group called Royalist Marketplace with one million members following potentially illegal posts shared. In response, Facebook is planning to take legal action against the Thai government for suppression of freedom of expression and violation of human rights. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook found that troll farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines pushed coronavirus disinformation. In July 2019, Facebook advanced its measures to counter deceptive political propaganda and other abuse of its services.

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Facebook notified users affected by the exploit and logged them out of their accounts. In March 2019, Facebook confirmed a password compromise of millions of Facebook lite application users also affected millions of Instagram users. The reason cited was the storage of password as plain text instead of encryption which could be read by its employees.

Userbase

Especially for anthropologists, social researchers, and social historians—and subject to proper preservation and curation—the website “will preserve images of our lives that are vastly crisper and more nuanced than any ancestry record in existence”. The class action could include thousands of Quebec residents who have been using the platform as early as April 2016, who were seeking jobs or housing during that period. Facebook has 60 days after the court’s December 22 ruling to decide to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Features

Mark Zuckerberg built a website called “Facemash” in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person”. Zuckerberg was reported and faced expulsion, but the charges were dropped. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age requirement is 14 years.

Tumblr: Social Media & Art

• Facebook enables users to control access to individual posts and their profile through privacy settings.
• Facebook later identified and removed an additional 1,907 accounts linked to Russia found to be engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”.
• Facebook introduced key features like the News Feed, which became central to user engagement.
• The group has a history of actively exposing high-profile social media profiles’ vulnerabilities.
• After acquiring Onavo in 2013, Facebook used its Onavo Protect virtual private network (VPN) app to collect information on users’ web traffic and app usage.
• (A hot article generates many impressions and news feed impressions that cause huge data skews.) Batches are taken every 1.5 seconds, limited by memory used when creating a hash table.

This was a violation of Facebook’s consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. This violation potentially carried a penalty of $40,000 ($50,087 in 2024 dollars) per occurrence, totalling trillions of dollars. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal offered another example of the perceived attempt to influence elections.

Facebook

• In the run-up to the 2020 United States elections, Eastern European troll farms operated popular Facebook pages showing content related to Christians and Blacks in America.
• According to the company’s data at the July 2010 announcement, half of the site’s membership used Facebook daily, for an average of 34 minutes, while 150 million users accessed the site by mobile.
• This was a violation of Facebook’s consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.
• Facebook has 60 days after the court’s December 22 ruling to decide to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In late July 2018, Facebook suspended the personal profile of InfoWars head Alex chicken road app Jones for 30 days. In early August 2018, Facebook banned the four most active InfoWars-related pages for hate speech. There are ads on Facebook and Instagram containing sexually explicit content, descriptions of graphic violence and content promoting acts of self harm. Many of the ads are for webnovel apps backed by tech giants Bytedance and Tencent. Force v. Facebook, Inc., 934 F.3d 53 (2nd Cir. 2019) was a case that alleged Facebook was profiting off recommendations for Hamas. In 2019, the US Second Circuit Appeals Court held that Section 230 bars civil terrorism claims against social media companies and internet service providers, the first federal appellate court to do so.

In 2017, a former Facebook executive went on the record to discuss how social media platforms have contributed to the unraveling of the “fabric of society”. Facebook customer Global Science Research sold information on over 87 million Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica, a political data analysis firm led by Alexander Nix. While approximately 270,000 people used the app, Facebook’s API permitted data collection from their friends without their knowledge. At first Facebook downplayed the significance of the breach, and suggested that Cambridge Analytica no longer had access. Facebook then issued a statement expressing alarm and suspended Cambridge Analytica. Review of documents and interviews with former Facebook employees suggested that Cambridge Analytica still possessed the data.

In a blog post in December 2017, the company highlighted research that has shown “passively consuming” the News Feed, as in reading but not interacting, left users with negative feelings, whereas interacting with messages pointed to improvements in well-being. On March 6, 2018, BlackBerry sued Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp subdivision for ripping off key features of its messaging app. In October 2018, a Texan woman sued Facebook, claiming she had been recruited into the sex trade at the age of 15 by a man who “friended” her on the social media network. Facebook responded that it works both internally and externally to ban sex traffickers.

The company removed more than 1,800 accounts and pages that were being operated from Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Honduras. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was announced that the internet regulatory committee would block access to Facebook. On October 30, 2019, Facebook deleted several accounts of the employees working at the Israeli NSO Group, stating that the accounts were “deleted for not following our terms”. The deletions came after WhatsApp sued the Israeli surveillance firm for targeting 1,400 devices with spyware.

Africa, Middle East, and India

The practice was initially discovered in 2019, though reports indicate passwords were stored in plain text since 2012. Facebook has been criticized for allowing users to publish illegal or offensive material. Specifics include copyright and intellectual property infringement, hate speech, incitement of rape and terrorism, fake news, and crimes, murders, and livestreaming violent incidents.

Facebook was criticized for allowing InfoWars to publish falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Facebook defended its actions in regard to InfoWars, saying “we just don’t think banning Pages for sharing conspiracy theories or false news is the right way to go.” Facebook provided only six cases in which it fact-checked content on the InfoWars page over the period September 2017 to July 2018. In 2018, InfoWars falsely claimed that the survivors of the Parkland shooting were “actors”. Facebook pledged to remove InfoWars content making the claim, although InfoWars videos pushing the false claims were left up, even though Facebook had been contacted about the videos. Facebook also allowed InfoWars videos that shared the Pizzagate conspiracy theory to survive, despite specific assertions that it would purge Pizzagate content.

In May 2020, Facebook agreed to a preliminary settlement of $52 million ($63.2 million in 2024 dollars) to compensate U.S.-based Facebook content moderators for their psychological trauma suffered on the job. In September 2020, the Government of Thailand utilized the Computer Crime Act for the first time to take action against Facebook and Twitter for ignoring requests to take down content and not complying with court orders. The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler, in collaboration with Jadali, opened Fowler’s private Facebook photo in a browser with a compromised browser extension. To validate this proof-of-concept, they searched for Fowler’s name using NA, which yielded his photo as a search result.

In 2017, Facebook partnered with fact checkers from the Poynter Institute’s international fact-checking network to identify and mark false content, though most ads from political candidates are exempt from this program. As of 2018, Facebook had over 40 fact-checking partners across the world, including The Weekly Standard. Critics of the program have accused Facebook of not doing enough to remove false information from its website.