The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
Three of New Jersey’s five medical marijuana dispensaries have had their business pages shutdown by Facebook, cutting off what advocates call an integral place for customers to learn about which plant strains best treat their illness and where to find discounts. Associated Press Read more
You can only count on about four of your friends, and most don’t even care if anything bad happens to you
Andrew Griffin
Friday 22 January 2016
Most of your Facebook friends don’t care about you and probably wouldn’t even sympathise with your problems, according to a new study.
Many people have hundreds of Facebook friends. But people can only really depend on four of them, on average, according to new research.
Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, undertook a study to find out the connection between whether people have lots of Facebook friends and real friends.
He found that there was very little correlation between having friends on social networks and actually being able to depend on them, or even talking to them regularly.
The average person studied had around 150 Facebook friends. But only about 14 of them would express sympathy in the event of anything going wrong.
The average person said that only about 27 per cent of their Facebook friends were genuine.
Those numbers are mostly similar to how friendships work in real life, the research said. But the huge number of supposed friends on a friend list means that people can be tricked into thinking that they might have more close friends.
By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A federal judge has certified two shareholder class actions accusing Facebook Inc of hiding concerns about its growth forecasts prior to the social media company’s May 2012 initial public offering.
U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan said retail and institutional investors who claimed to lose money from buying Facebook shares at inflated prices in connection with the $16 billion IPO may pursue their respective claims as groups.
The decision is dated Dec. 11 but had been kept under seal, which Sweet lifted in an order made public on Tuesday.
Other Facebook defendants include Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and other officials.
Facebook is appealing the class certifications, which the Menlo Park, California-based company said are “without merit” and conflict with “well-settled” precedent.
Shareholders accused Facebook of concealing internal projections prior to its IPO of how growth in mobile devices, an area in which it generated little ad revenue, might hurt its prospects, even as it quietly warned underwriters to cut their forecasts.
Facebook made its market debut on May 18, 2012 at $38 per share. Its share price fell to $17.55 on Sept. 4, 2012 and stayed below the IPO price for more than a year.
The stock ultimately rebounded, and closed on Tuesday up $1.33 at $107.26 on Nasdaq. That gave Facebook a roughly $303 billion market value, Reuters data show.
Facebook Prods Users to Share a Bit More
Amount of new content posted has slipped, leading social network to try to prompt conversation
By DEEPA SEETHARAMAN
Nov. 2, 2015 10:18 p.m. ET
Sharing isn’t what it used to be on Facebook.
Surveys show users post less often on the social network, which relies on users for an overwhelming majority of its content. In the third quarter, market researcher GlobalWebIndex said 34% of Facebook users updated their status, and 37% shared their own photos, down from 50% and 59%, respectively, in the same period a year earlier.
Facebook users still visit the network often. Some 65% of Facebook’s 1.49 billion monthly users visited the site daily as of June. But these days, they are more likely to lurk or “like” and less likely to post a note or a picture.
That isn’t a problem today for Facebook, which makes money by showing ads to users. The company is expected to report a 36% jump in revenue when it reports third-quarter financial results Wednesday.
But it could be a problem down the road. In a 2009 paper, Facebook researchers said it was “vital” for social networks to encourage a broad range of users to contribute content.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-prods-users-to-share-a-bit-more-1446520723
By Megan McArdle
October 10, 2015 | 5:15am
Facebook is following you around the Web. You knew that, right?
How else would Facebook know to serve that panda video straight into your news feed, and leave your college friend’s ill-informed rant about Pacific trade deals in the dark bowels of its servers? How else would it know to serve you with 7,000 ads for wedding dress vendors the very day you announce your engagement?
Facebook knows what you like. It knows what you don’t like. It probably knows whether you have been naughty or nice, and will be selling that data to Santa this Christmas season.
This bothers many people, especially since Facebook keeps expanding the list of things it knows about you, and the ways it is willing to use that data to make money.
The recent announcement that Facebook would soon target ads using your “likes” and “shares” has triggered some Olympic-level teeth- gnashing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because Facebook will get information from you not just when you actually like, “like” something, but when you load a page that has a “like” button on it.
The EFF wants Facebook to agree to use a “Do Not Track” standard that will keep all that potentially profitable data from the greedy eyes of advertisers.
Of course people should be able to hide data about what sites they use. But there’s a perfectly good way to do this: Stay signed out of Facebook and tell your browser not to accept cookies or otherwise let advertisers follow you around.
The problem is, this level of security is incredibly inconvenient, because you have to spend a lot of time painfully re-entering data. The other problem is that naive users, who probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about privacy, won’t bother.
https://nypost.com/2015/10/10/yes-facebook-is-stalking-you-thats-the-price-of-free-social-media/
An absurd Coby Persin YouTube video wants parents to panic over nothing.
Lenore Skenazy|Aug. 12, 2015 1:55 pm
Here’s the latest “Parents, Please Commence Freak Out” video. It reminds me of the Joey Salads video, obviously, but also of the parents who had their 6-year-old snatched, blindfolded, and taken to a basement where the “kidnapper” threatened to nail him to the wall—all of that, just to teach him not to talk to strangers. That boy’s mom and grandma wanted to keep their child safe, but I would not be surprised if any natural “gut instincts” of his have been shattered for life. (Not to mention his trust in his loved ones.)
The same goes for these young ladies exploited by admitted prankster Coby Persin. The video shows Persin, who looks to be about 30, pretending to be a teen as he chats with underage girls online. The girls eventually agree to meet him in person; Persin secretly brings along their parents, who jump out from around the corner and terrify the poor girls as Persin berates them for agreeing to the meeting in the first place.
“I could be anyone…you shouldn’t talk to strangers,” insists Persin to the girls.
https://reason.com/blog/2015/08/12/are-your-kids-on-facebook-rapists-will-a
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/02/2015 21:15 -0400
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using “psychology-based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public discourse online. If we do not stand up and object to this kind of Orwellian behavior, it is only going to get worse and worse.
In the UK, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) is a specialized unit within the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). If it wasn’t for Edward Snowden, we probably still would never have heard of them. This particular specialized unit is engaged in some very “questionable” online activities. The following is an excerpt from a recent piece by Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman…
Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealedthat the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online.
We are told that JTRIG only uses these techniques to go after the “bad guys”.
But precisely who are the “bad guys”?
It turns out that their definition of who the “bad guys” are is quite broad. Here is more from Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman…
JTRIG’s domestic and law enforcement operations are made clear. The report states that the controversial unit “currently collaborates with other agencies” including the Metropolitan police, Security Service (MI5), Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Border Agency, Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and National Public Order and Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The document highlights that key JTRIG objectives include “providing intelligence for judicial outcomes”; monitoring “domestic extremist groups such as the English Defence League by conducting online HUMINT”; “denying, deterring or dissuading” criminals and “hacktivists”; and “deterring, disrupting or degrading online consumerism of stolen data or child porn.”
Particularly disturbing to me is the phrase “domestic extremist groups”. What does someone have to say or do to be considered an “extremist”? For example, the English Defence League is a non-violent street protest movement in the UK that is strongly against the spread of radical Islam and sharia law in the UK. So if they are “extremists”, how many millions upon millions of ordinary citizens in the United States would fit that definition?
When conducting operations against “extremists”, psychology-based influence techniques are among the tools that JTRIG uses to combat them online. The following comes from one of the documents that was posted by Greenwald and Fishman…
ANDREW GRIFFIN
Tuesday 31 March 2015
A new report claims that Facebook secretly installs tracking cookies on users’ computers, allowing them to follow users around the internet even after they’ve left the website, deleted their account and requested to be no longer followed.
Academic researchers said that the report showed that the company was breaking European law with its tracking policies. The law requires that users are told if their computers are receiving cookies except for specific circumstances.
Facebook’s tracking — which it does so that it can tailor advertising — involves putting cookies or small pieces of software on users’ computers, so that they can then be followed around the internet. Such technology is used by almost every website, but European law requires that users are told if they are being given cookies or being tracked. Companies don’t have to tell users if the cookies are required to connect to a service or if they are needed to give the user information that they have specifically requested.
But Facebook’s tracking policy allows it to track users if they have simply been to a page on the company’s domain, even if they weren’t logged in. That includes pages for brands or events, which users can see whether or not they have an account.
Facebook disputes the accusations of the report, it told The Independent.
Facebook conducted secret psychology experiment on users’ emotions
By Harriet Alexander
12:00PM BST 28 Jun 2014
Facebook has conducted a secret massive psychology experiment on its users to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages – without telling participants
Over 600,000 Facebook users have taken part in a psychological experiment organised by the social media company, without their knowledge.
Facebook altered the tone of the users’ news feed to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends, which were seen on their news feed.
They then monitored the users’ response, to see whether their friends’ attitude had an impact on their own.
“The results show emotional contagion,” wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal – Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States.
“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10932534/Facebook-conducted-secret-psychology-experiment-on-users-emotions.html
Facebook: new app feature listens to users’ conversations.
Facebook says the feature will be used for harmless things, like identifying the song or TV show playing in the background, but it actually has the ability to listen to everything — including your private conservations — and store it indefinitely.
Not only is this move just downright creepy, it’s also a massive threat to our privacy.This isn’t the first time Facebook has been criticized for breaching our right to privacy, and it’s hoping this feature will fly under the radar. No such luck for Facebook. If we act now, we can stop Facebook in its tracks before it has a chance to release the feature.
Tell Facebook not to release its creepy and dangerous new app feature that listens to users’ conversations.
Facebook says it’ll be responsible with this feature, but we know we can’t trust it.After all, just a few months ago Facebook came under fire for receiving millions of dollars for working with the National Security Agency’s PRISM, a wide-scale and highly controversial public electronic data surveillance program — something its CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially denied. This is also the company that lied about its now-scuttered Beacon program — an advertisement system that sent our “private” data from external websites to Facebook.
It seems like every few months, there’s another big Facebook privacy scandal, and yet the social media giant is pushing this new app anyway. Why? The information it gathers by listening to its 1.2 billion users worldwide can be sold for huge profits to advertisers and corporations looking for better information on consumer tastesand preferences.
Facebook is acting in the best interests of its bank account, not its users. This has gone too far – we have to stop it now.
Facebook: This is an extreme invasion of your users’ privacy. Do not release this new feature, and do not listen to us through our phones’ microphones.
Facebook May Lose 80% of Its User Base by 2017
Social networks function like infectious diseases, according to Princeton researchers. They spread fast—and then disappear
Like the bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually come to an end.
According to new research from Princeton, which compared the ”adoption and abandonment dynamics” of social networks by “drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease,” Facebook is beginning to die out.
Specifically, the researchers concluded that “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.”
https://www.vocativ.com/01-2014/facebook-will-lose-80-user-base-2017/
More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled Facebook Since 2011
According to one analyst estimate
Skeptics of Facebook’s business model have long pointed to anecdotal evidence that the social network is losing its luster with teens as evidence that the firm will ultimately be unable to justify its $140 billion valuation. Indeed, even Facebook itself admitted last fall that it had lost younger users. “”We did see a decrease in [teenage] daily users [during the quarter], especially younger teens,” Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman said during a call with analysts.
But it’s always been difficult to gauge exactly what the magnitude of this lost interest has been. On Wednesday, the digital consultancy iStrategy Labs released a study that draws from Facebook’s Social Advertising platform to glean exactly how many young users have left the social network in recent years. The resulting estimates are pretty staggering. According to iStrategy, Facebook has 4,292,080 fewer high-school aged users and 6,948,848 college-aged users than it did in 2011.
Read more: More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled Facebook Since 2011 | TIME.com https://business.time.com/2014/01/15/more-than-11-million-young-people-have-fled-facebook-since-2011/#ixzz2qVnUTJCf
