Is Facebook killing freedom and liberty?

[Brian Peacock]

merged

[Brian Peacock]

Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content

The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he regrets bowing to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said in a letter to Jim Jordan, the head of the US House of Representatives judiciary committee. “I believe the government pressure was wrong.”

During the pandemic, Facebook added misinformation alerts to users when they commented on or liked posts that were judged to contain false information about Covid.

The company also deleted posts criticising Covid vaccines, and suggestions the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory...

[Brian Peacock]

Facebook preparing to flatter the incoming regime?

Following a week in which Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was getting rid of factchecking, as of Friday the company is also terminating its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, effective immediately.

An internal memo from Meta acknowledged that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing”, while pointing to recent supreme court decisions and the “charged” view some have of DEI as a concept...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ei-program

[pErvinalia]

Amazon is winding back DEI too.

[aufbahrung]

Test with cover page full of swastikas. Would get me banned from facebook before - nobody notices now.

[JimC]

Everybody's trimming their sails to the bitter wind coming from the right...

[Brian Peacock]

Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home.

When Thongbue Wongbandue began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March, his wife Linda became alarmed.

“But you don’t know anyone in the city anymore,” she told him. Bue, as his friends called him, hadn’t lived in the city in decades. And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Bue brushed off his wife’s questions about who he was visiting. “My thought was that he was being scammed to go into the city and be robbed,” Linda said.

She had been right to worry: Her husband never returned home alive. But Bue wasn’t the victim of a robber. He had been lured to a rendezvous with a young, beautiful woman he had met online. Or so he thought.

In fact, the woman wasn’t real. She was a generative artificial intelligence chatbot named “Big sis Billie,” a variant of an earlier AI persona created by the giant social-media company Meta Platforms in collaboration with celebrity influencer Kendall Jenner. During a series of romantic chats on Facebook Messenger, the virtual woman had repeatedly reassured Bue she was real and had invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.

“Should I open the door in a hug or a kiss, Bu?!” she asked, the chat transcript shows.

Rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch a train to meet her, Bue fell near a parking lot on a Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, injuring his head and neck. After three days on life support and surrounded by his family, he was pronounced dead on March 28.

...

An internal Meta policy document seen by Reuters as well as interviews with people familiar with its chatbot training show that the company’s policies have treated romantic overtures as a feature of its generative AI products, which are available to users aged 13 and older.

“It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month...

[Sean Hayden]

What did I just read?

[Brian Peacock]

Exactly.