Facebook's Zuckerberg drops annual challenges to focus on longer-term goals

The move would see him focus more on his role as CEO and the problems that have afflicted Facebook.

Company News : Facebook Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday he was dropping his annual challenges this year to take a longer-term focus on the decade ahead.

Zuckerberg said he plans to work on a new private social platform, decentralised technology, generational issues and new forms of digital governance among others.

The move would see him focus more on his role as CEO and the problems that have afflicted Facebook instead of personal goals such as learning Mandarin and reading two books a month.

"Rather than having year-to-year challenges, I've tried to think about what I hope the world and my life will look in 2030 so I can make sure I'm focusing on those things," he said.

Zuckerberg, whose company is under pressure for failing to adequately police content and protect user privacy on its platform, said he expects governments to come up with clearer rules for the internet over the next decade.

"Platforms like Facebook have to make tradeoffs on social values we all hold dear - like between free expression and safety, or between privacy and law enforcement, or between creating open systems and locking down data and access," he said.

"I don't think private companies should be making so many important decisions that touch on fundamental democratic values."

Over the next decade, Zuckerberg plans to fund and give a platform to younger entrepreneurs and scientists to cure, prevent and manage diseases.

He pointed out that while the internet helped people to connect with each other across the world, it also made people crave for intimacy.

"For the next decade, some of the most important social infrastructure will help us reconstruct all kinds of smaller communities to give us that sense of intimacy again," he said.

Facebook to block housing, job and bank ads that are age, gender specific

The changes to Facebook's advertising methods which generate most of the company's enormous profits are unprecedented.

Business Standard : Facebook will overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing , credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement.

For the social network, that's one major legal problem down, several to go, including government investigations in the U.S. and Europe over its data and privacy practices.

The changes to Facebook's advertising methods which generate most of the company's enormous profits are unprecedented. The social network says it will no longer allow housing, employment or credit ads that target people by age, gender or zip code. Facebook will also limit other targeting options so these ads don't exclude people on the basis of race, ethnicity and other legally protected categories in the U.S., including national origin and sexual orientation.

The social media company is also paying about $5 million to cover plaintiffs' legal fees and other costs.

Facebook and the plaintiffs a group including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Fair Housing Alliance and others called the settlement "historic."

It took 18 months to hammer out. The company still faces an administrative complaint filed by US Department of Housing and Urban Development in August over the housing ads issue.

What's not yet clear is how well the safeguards will work. Facebook has been working to address a slew of social consequences related to its platform, with varying degrees of success. Last week, it scrambled to remove graphic video filmed by a gunman in the New Zealand mosque shootings, but the footage remained available for hours on its site and elsewhere on social media.

Earlier in March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new "privacy-focused vision" for the company to focus on messaging instead of more public sharing but he stayed mum on overhauling Facebook's privacy practices in its core business. Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU and the group's lead attorney on its suit, praised the settlement as "sweeping" and said she expects it to have ripple effects through the tech industry.

Facebook agreed to let the groups test its ad systems to ensure they don't enable discrimination. The company also agreed to meet with the groups every six months for the next three years, and is building a tool to let anyone search housing-related ads in the U.S. targeted to different areas across the country.

World Wide Web turns 30: Google celebrates invention with a doodle

The WWW is the primary tool billions of people today use to interact on the Internet.

Google on Tuesday celebrated 30 years of World Wide Web (WWW) with a doodle. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1989 and wrote the first web browser in 1990.

Working at CERN, Switzerland, Berners-Lee laid out the basic concepts of the WWW in a proposal which included ideas like HTML, URL and HTTP.

In a document titled "Information management: a proposal", he envisioned the use of hypertext to link documents.

The WWW, commonly known as the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).

The first web browser was released in 1991 -- first to the research institutions and then to the general public on the Internet in the same year.

The WWW is the primary tool billions of people today use to interact on the Internet.

In addition to text, web pages may contain images, video, audio and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content.

Before the WWW, remote computers communicated directly for the first time in 1969 and in 1983, TCP/IP standard was adopted.

Business Standard

Why Facebook's effort to fight hate speech with external experts won't work

Facebook has long faced criticism for doing too little to block hate speech, incitements to violence, bullying and other types of content that violate its 'community standards'.

Facebook's new effort to bring outside experts into its content review process promises to be complicated and possibly contentious, if discussions this week at a meeting in Singapore are any indication.

Over the course of two days, 38 academics, non-profit officials and others from 15 Asian countries who were invited to a Facebook workshop wrestled with how a proposed "external oversight board" for content decisions might function.

The gathering, the first of a half-dozen planned for cities around the world, produced one clear recommendation: the new board must be empowered to weigh in not only on specific cases, but on the policies and processes behind them.

(Business Standard)

Facebook has long faced criticism for doing too little to block hate speech, incitements to violence, bullying and other types of content that violate its "community standards."

In Myanmar, for example, Facebook for years took little action while the platform was used to encourage violence against the Rohingya minority.

But the company also draws fire for not doing enough to defend free speech. Activists accuse the company of taking down posts and blocking accounts for political or business reasons, an allegation it denies.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the idea of an independent oversight board last November and a draft charter was released in January.

"We want to find a way to strengthen due process and procedural fairness," Brent Harris, director of global affairs and governance at Facebook, said at the opening of the Singapore meeting. A Reuters reporter was invited to observe the proceedings on the condition that the names of participants and some details of the discussions not be disclosed.

Facebook's initial plan calls for a 40-person board that would function as a court of appeal on content decisions, with the power to issue binding rulings on specific cases.

But as attendees peppered Facebook officials with questions and worked through issues such as how the board would be chosen and how it would select cases, they repeatedly came back to questions of policy. Rulings on individual postings would mean little if they were not linked to the underlying content review procedures, many attendees said.

Hate speech policies were a big focus of discussion. Many attendees said they felt Facebook was often too lax and blind to local circumstances, but the company has held firm to the concept of a single set of global standards and a deliberate bias towards leaving content on the site.

Three ways Facebook, other social media companies could clean up their acts

A more significant change social media companies could make would be to introduce democratic oversight of how they collect and use people's data.

Facebook is in crisis mode, but the company can take major steps to fix itself – and the global community it says it wants to promote. Facebook founder, CEO and majority shareholder Mark Zuckerberg need not wait for governments to impose regulations. If he and other industry leaders wanted to, they could make meaningful changes fairly quickly.

It wouldn’t be painless, but Facebook in particular is in a world of hurt already, facing criticism for contributing to civil unrest and sectarian turmoil around the world, delayed responses to disinformation campaigns, misleading users about data-handling policies, and efforts to discredit critics – not to mention a budding employee revolt.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media companies are causing society-wide damage. But they tend to describe the problems as much smaller, resulting from rogue individuals and groups hijacking their systems for nefarious purposes. Our research into how social media can be exploited by manipulative political operatives, conducted with Joan Donovan at the Data & Society research institute, suggests the real problem is much larger than these companies admit.

We believe the roots lie in their extremely profitable advertising systems, which need a major overhaul. We have identified some key changes that these giant powerhouses could make right away. These moves could reduce opportunities for political manipulation and limit the harm to democratic societies around the world.

Users’ minds in the crosshairs

Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media companies have built an enormous digital influence machine powered by user tracking, targeting, testing and automated decision-making to make advertising more effective and efficient. While building this supercharged surveillance system, companies have promised users and regulators that targeted advertising is mutually beneficial for both consumers and advertisers.

In this bargain, users are supposed to receive more relevant ads. Facebook, for instance, explains that its “interest-based advertising” serves users who “want to see ads that relate to things they care about.” It’s true that these methods can identify ads that connect with users’ actual interests. But the very same data-driven techniques that tell a surfer about a new board design can also identify strategic points where people are most vulnerable to influence.

In particular, the leading social media advertising systems let political operatives experiment with different ads to see which are the most effective. They can use these tools not only to see if certain issues resonate with particular targets but also test for fears or prejudices that can be invoked to influence political behavior... Read More

Business Standard

As Facebook's page visits drop, YouTube to replace it as No 2 website in US

Amazon is projected to overtake Yahoo as the fourth most-visited website in the US in the next couple of months.

Although Facebook's app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, CNBC reported on Wednesday citing the study by market research firm SimilarWeb.

Owing to a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, Facebook is set to cede its long-held second position among the top websites in the US to YouTube, according to a new study.

Facebook earlier reported that in the second quarter of this year, its number of daily active users remained flat in North America and went down in Europe.

Also Read : After 4 years, Orkut founder to launch 'Hello' social network app in India

Owned by Google parent Alphabet, YouTube, on the other hand, has seen increased traffic and rise in viewership, said the study that found Google's position as the biggest website in the US remaining unshaken.

The researchers project that Amazon is set to overtake Yahoo as the fourth most-visited website in the US in the next couple of months.

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