Facebook has built a Frankenstein's monster. When will it admit that?

Pedro_P

In the wake of the latest highly critical reports into Facebook and Google, it’s time for the tech giants to relinquish their hold over our lives.

Life-sized cutouts depicting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wearing “Fix Fakebook” T-shirts are displayed by advocacy group, Avaaz, on the South East Lawn of the Capitol on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, ahead of Zuckerberg’s appearance before a Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees joint hearing. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
▼ “We need to do more.” This is the now standard refrain from big tech’s executives caught in yet another civil rights scandal or breathtaking data breach. Sometimes I wonder if they need to do less. Less invasive surveillance into our lives. Less PR-managed spin. Less dissembling before lawmakers. Less lobbying against regulation. Fewer reasons to quit, or wish you could quit.
This week marks the release of two reports commissioned by  the Senate select committee on  intelligencestudying the special counsel-indicted Internet Research Agency’s digital influence campaign. Two groups of independent researchers analyzed data provided to Congress by Facebook, Google and Twitter and came to parallel conclusions. The report by New  Knowledge with support from  the intrepid researcher Jonathan  Albright, who singlehandedly caught Facebook downplaying the scope and scale of the operation, offers clear evidence that the tech companies provided the absolute bare minimum of datasets necessary to study the attack. In particular, Facebook still refuses to disclose the conversion pathways of American users through its targeting and measurement systems, the very analytics it sells to advertisers to prove campaign effectiveness.
This would tell us with considerable precision just how many Americans were targeted and influencedby the hostile foreign operation. There is no evidence that votes were swayed because no control group experiments were conducted, but ample evidence indicates that people engaged deeply with the troll factory’s disinformation, were duped into attending false events, purchased bogus merchandise, and fell into kompromattraps where they divulged incriminating personal information to foreign agents impersonating fellow citizens.
A second report issued by the Computational Propaganda  Group (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full note/article here: Source