Facebook is tracking users and ex-employees it considers to represent “threats” to its staff via a “BOLO” list. The practice has been called “very Big Brother-esque” – even for the social media giant. Facebook “mines” its network for threatening comments, according to CNBC, which spoke to more than 12 former employees about how the company deals with perceived threats. Then,... 

A novelist who blames Instagram for the suicide of her daughter has demanded a crackdown on social media sites. Nicola Harlow says 11-year-old Ursula killed herself after viewing ‘horrific and distressing’ images on the social network. The accusations will heap fresh pressure on the internet giant, which is owned by Facebook. MPs and campaigners have accused it of dismal failures in policing the... 

Two of Facebook’s US “fact-checkers” tasked with keeping fake news from proliferating have chosen to quit doing the job for the social media giant while issuing cryptic statements concerning their continuing relationship. Snopes and the Associated Press have both ended their fact-checking partnerships with Facebook, releasing carefully-worded statements that leave open the possibility of future... 

YouTube star and fashion blogger Dina Torkia has received a wave of abusive and offensive comments on social media since she stopped wearing a hijab, the Daily Mail reports. Dina, who has more than a million followers on Instagram, said she had made a ‘personal decision to wear it when I want to’. In a video called The Bad, The Worse And The Ugly she reads out the torrent of abuse she has received... 

Tech giants will now pay more tax in France, after the country decided not to wait for the rest of the EU to introduce the measure. The so-called GAFA tax targeting major digital firms comes into force on January 1. The French government hopes to raise €500 million ($572 million) with levies specifically aimed at multinational tech firms, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, Finance Minister... 

Even for a company as serially scandalous as Facebook, it’s been a bad week for the social network. Separate investigations revealed that Facebook gave more than 150 firms access to people’s private messages, while also making it impossible for users to avoid location-based ads. After months of fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, US prosecutors also finally got around to filing a lawsuit... 

The National Religious Broadcasters group has sent out a final ultimatum to Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter warning that if they don’t stop censoring Christian and conservative viewpoints, the NRB will lead its organization of 60 million members into a campaign to remove their Section 230 legal protections. NRB President Jerry Johnson disputed claims by those tech companies which suggest they’re... 

Patents recently issued to Google provide a window into their development activities. While it’s no guarantee of a future product, it is a sure indication of what’s of interest to them. What we’ve given up in privacy to Google, Facebook, and others thus far is minuscule compared to what is coming if these companies get their way. These patents tell us that Google is developing smart-home products... 

German police stopped a mother from searching for the alleged sexual molester of her 12-year-old daughter on Facebook. Her post was soon shared thousands of times containing pictures of a black man. The post did not go into further detail other than asking if people knew this man. The man supposedly sexually molested her daughter on a train from Freiburg to Schiengen on Sunday. A police spokesperson... 

A recent purge by Facebook and Twitter of a host of independent media sites has pushed thousands of people out of work and has killed one of the most effective forms of expressing political dissent. On Thursday last week, Facebook purged more than 800 pages and accounts, accusing them of engaging in “inauthentic behaviour” and violating Facebook’s anti-spam policies. According to a statement... 

Some 800 anti-establishment accounts and pages have been yanked from Facebook in a sweeping crackdown the social media giant framed as a fight against spammers. RT talked to those who were targeted in the cleansing. Among the hundreds of pages and accounts Facebook and Twitter took down were those both on the political left and right, ranging from conspiracy theorists and police brutality watchers,... 

The girls sat waiting for a bus to arrive and joked about a Facebook video. Then a woman suddenly appeared, screaming and accused the girls of being “racists” and cut one of them in the ear with a knife. The bizarre event took place on the evening of 28 December 2017 in central Gothenburg. The three girls sat quietly on a bench and waited for a bus while joking about a known immigrant on Facebook. The... 

Internal research commissioned by Google confirms Orwellian-scale censorship powers enjoyed by tech giants. It says free speech is a “utopian idea,” and creating “ordered spaces for safety and civility” is Google’s new mission. The name of the briefing, leaked to Breitbart, says it all. ‘The Good Censor,’ prepared by a host of prominent industry researchers and “cultural leaders,”... 

Add “a phone number I never gave Facebook for targeted advertising” to the list of deceptive and invasive ways Facebook makes money off your personal information. Contrary to user expectations and Facebook representatives’ own previous statements, the company has been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes—or that users never provided at all—for targeted... 

Deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma, Pyotr Tolstoy, says that both Instagram and Facebook have deleted his posts on the recent killing of the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic, Aleksandr Zakharchenko. “Instagram has deleted my post about Aleksandr Zakharchenko’s death together with his photo. This is “freedom of speech” according to [Facebook founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg,”...