The Internet Society and Facebook will collaborate in promoting IXP infrastructure development, training and community engagement with the objective of increasing the number of IXPs and supporting the expansion of existing IXPs to meet the growing demand in Africa.
“infrastructural platforms.” "Instead of thinking about platform companies as the next generation of newspapers, radio stations, or TV channels, we should see them as entirely new entities that shapeshift constantly. Sometimes they are like cities, newsrooms, post offices, libraries, or utilities — but they are but they are always like advertising firms. Do not forget this: They earn the vast majority of their revenue through advertising. They are primarily driven by advertising priorities....5 ways to see platform power...
Flawed as they are (and they often are), we have courts, we have parliaments, we have elections, we have civil societies — we have traditions of democratic legitimacy. And let’s not forget: Platforms need us — our content, out labor, our attention, our money. They are ours to control — if we can figure out how to do it.
Frances Coppola, Forbes 30 June 2019: From a financial perspective, Libra seems fairly harmless. Even if all 2bn of Facebook’s users adopted Libra for some transactions, and all 90m of its small businesses used Libra for purchases and sales, it is not going to pose a major threat to the financial system, let alone replace sovereign currencies. But Libra is in reality a vehicle for bringing about Facebook’s wider aim of becoming the standard setter for digital identity. And that is a much, much bigger issue. Facebook is the last organization on earth that should have anything to do with digital identity or standards setting. For that reason, Libra must be stopped.
The Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) investigates the interaction of algorithms, automation and politics. This work includes analysis of how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, and junk news.
We use perspectives from organizational sociology, human computer interaction, communication, information science, and political science to interpret and analyze the evidence we are gathering. Our project is based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
As Facebook and Twitter are purging alternative media outlets, a neoconservative operative at a US government-funded think tank says more censorship is on its way. Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague discuss how scaremongering over Russia and China is being exploited to silence dissent on social media
By Zeynep Tufekci, part of MIT Technology Review's September/October 2018 Issue. "To understand how digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking it, you have to look beyond the technologies themselves." and perhaps also to look beyond the USA...
"Dissidents can more easily circumvent censorship, but the public sphere they can now reach is often too noisy and confusing for them to have an impact. Those hoping to make positive social change have to convince people both that something in the world needs changing and there is a constructive, reasonable way to change it. Authoritarians and extremists, on the other hand, often merely have to muddy the waters and weaken trust in general so that everyone is too fractured and paralyzed to act. The old gatekeepers blocked some truth and dissent, but they blocked many forms of misinformation too."
"Perhaps the simplest statement of the problem, though, is encapsulated in Facebook’s original mission statement (which the social network changed in 2017, after a backlash against its role in spreading misinformation). It was to make the world “more open and connected.” It turns out that this isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good. Open to what, and connected how? The need to ask those questions is perhaps the biggest lesson of all."
in a syllabus from June 2017, The Supreme Court of the USA underlines the importance of the internet in relation to the first amendment to the US constitution. The internet's forums are decribed as "what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge."
Aug 2017,
"The court continued that although there may have been difficulty in the past identifying the most important places for the exchange of views, today the answer is “clear”—it is “cyberspace,” the “vast democratic forums of the Internet” in general and “social media in particular.”
Finian Cunningham RT 18 Oct, 2017
Facebook, the world’s top social media platform, is reportedly seeking to hire hundreds of employees with US national security clearance licenses.
Online social interactions are no substitute for the real thing. Holly Shakia och Nicholas Christakis; se även Anna Rotkirchs kolumn Facebook gör dig olycklig , Hbl 13.10.2017
The Numbers Speak For Themselves
Skillfully targeting ads based on personal information users share, the site knows what it’s doing.
Annual revenue by year
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
$272M $777M $1.97B $3.71B $5.09B $7.8B
82%
Proportion of first-quarter 2012 revenue from advertising : $872 million
Facebook’s first-quarter 2012 advertising sales: $186 million
The rest of its millions is due in large part to its virtual games... such as selling credits for games like FarmVille