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Brazilian rainforest land for sale on Facebook’s Marketplace

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Plots as large as 2000 acres are being sold on the hyperlocal Marketplace section of the platform.

The Bolsonaro administration has taken criticism for looking the other way on encroachment into protected areas and deforestation, and indigenous groups have told the BBC that it is unwilling to stop these sales. “A common strategy is to deforest the land and then plead with politicians to abolish its protected status, on the basis it no longer serves its original purpose,” said the BBC report.

Illegal deforestation for timber often clears the land for cattle grazing, increasing its value as much as three-fold, and the practice is creating a growing land rush investment opportunity with Marketplace as its platform.

Facebook, for its part, says that its policies require users to follow the law, and reportedly said it is “willing to work with authorities,” but that it would not take unilateral action to take down the ads.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Facebook to restore news feeds in Australia after government agrees to change its approach to force tech companies to pay for news content

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Reversing a decision to block all news in Australia which was broadly seen as a heavy-handed move and which ended up taking down health and emergency services along with government pages, the technology giant said the government had agreed to change a proposed Media Bargaining Code that would have dictated compensation for linking to news.

In comparison to Facebook’s reaction to Australia’s recent new law, Google struck a deal in which it would provide news publishers with some money for the links Google Search used.

By Milan Sime Martinić

Facebook deletes main page of Myanmar military

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Under a policy not to allow the platform to be used to incite violence, Facebook announced that the Myanmar military’s “continued spread of misinformation” violated its use policies and that Facebook was “treating the situation in Myanmar as an emergency” and acting to “significantly reduce the distribution of all content” on pages and profiles run by the that military.

By Milan Sime Martinić

Facebook limiting political content in news feeds

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The move, which will first affect Brazil, Canada and Indonesia before being tried out in the US in a few weeks, is part of a company goal to “lower the temperature and discourage divisive conversations” globally, and was announced by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at a January conference. The change will initially impact only a small percentage of users as the company explores different ways of classifying political content and finding a balance for the types of things that people want to see.

By Milan Sime Martinic

WhatsApp is changing today – Users must give the app permission to send their private data to Facebook or lose account

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WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014, but has thrived while promoting itself as a privacy-respecting messaging app that now has 1.5b monthly active users. This week, though, WhatApp sent out an update to users’ phones that they must ‘consent’ to a new policy or lose access.

Whatsapp will now share more of your data, including your IP address (your location) and phone number, your account registration information, your transaction data, and service-related data, interactions on WhatsApp, and other data collected based on your consent, with Facebook’s other companies. Facebook has been working towards more closely integrating Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

Users who do not agree to ‘consent’ to the new policy will see their WhatsApp account become inaccessible until they do ‘consent.’ These accounts will remain dormant for 120 days after which they will be ‘deleted.’

The biggest change to the user policy, which many people ignored and clicked ‘agree’ to, thinking it was just another unimportant app update message, now reads,

‘We collect information about your activity on our Services, like service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (including how you use our Services, your Services settings, how you interact with others using our Services (including when you interact with a business), and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities and interactions), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports. This also includes information about when you registered to use our Services; the features you use like our messaging, calling, Status, groups (including group name, group picture, group description), payments or business features; profile photo, “about” information; whether you are online, when you last used our Services (your “last seen”); and when you last updated your “about” information.’

Notably, Elon Musk tweeted on the news, saying that WhatsApp users should switch to Signal, one of several popular privacy-focused messaging apps similar to WhatsApp.

The data sharing policy change doesn’t affect people in Europe due to GDPR data protection regulations.

Tech Stocks Continue Downward

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The drop started last Friday, and continued over the weekend and on Monday. The big tech stocks, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, which have been on a long upward trend, have dropped significantly.

The drop is considered possibly overdue given the high out-performance and positioning of the stocks.

Facebook: ‘Governments Exploit Us’

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Facebook has acknowledged that they are exploited by governments in manipulating public opinion, and also said they would try to do something about reducing these types of “information operations.”

Governments use Facebook to amplify a view, sow distrust, and spread confusion, according to the company.

Recently, Facebook made an attempt to cut down this use of their platform by suspending 30,000 accounts in France before the French presidential election.

Facebook was a key tool in the campaign of current U.S. President Donald Trump as well, according to his campaign team.

Source: Facebook Newsroom

Facebook Explains How It Picks What to “Trend”

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Facebook this week published a blog post in its newsroom in response to recent accusations that the social network promotes liberal news while downplaying conservative, explaining how it picks posts for its “Trending Topics” section, a decision-making process which depends on people and machines at different stages.

Facebook’s VP of Global Operations Justin Osofsky wrote the blog post Thursday in which he explained that in Facebook’s ambition to connect people around major news events and let them together discuss ideas freely, the Trending Topics team reviews themes identified as potentially trending by the website’s algorithms, which measure Facebook user engagement. They confirm the topic is current news, find corroborating news stories, apply a label to the topic, and check if the story is getting attention from a lot of news outlets nationally and/or globally.

Osofsky further explained that because Facebook’s programs deliver posts based on what a user has demonstrated interest in, users will see different Trending Topics.

Once a user clicks to see more about a Trending Topic, however, they are seeing an organization of posts within that topic which are arranged algorithmically — the ones at the top are those that have seem to have the most social engagement because the most people have liked, shared or commented on them.

Justin Osofsky
Justin Osofsky

As far as measures Facebook takes to prevent the type of political bias that was part of the recent accusations, Osofsky wrote that it “does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period,” and that, of course, the algorithm that “surfaces” potentially trending topics has no such bias.

Facebook’s review guidelines include not permitting “the suppression of political perspectives” or “the prioritization of one ideological viewpoint over another,” and that the company regularly reviews the work of the review team members.

In a specific response to the recent allegations, Osofsky wrote, “We take these reports very seriously, and will continue to investigate the allegations. We have found no evidence to date that Trending Topics was successfully manipulated, but will continue the review of all our practices.”

Facebook Open Sources Its AI Server

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Facebook’s AI hardware is now, like its software, open source, joining a broad movement towards outsourcing the world’s artificial intelligence intelligence. Facebook also stated it hoped independent AI technicians would develop deep learning tech superior to what the company currently uses, and that it would buy this technology.

The tech giant has developed deep learning technology, which it uses for Facebook-related functions like identifying faces in pictures and curating news feeds, but can also apply to a wide range of computing tasks.

Through the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s custom hardware designs — a GPU-based server called “Big Sur” — will join Google’s and others’ open source deep learning designs. The hope is that more workers will devote themselves to these projects and become familiar with using the technology.

Deep learning technology involves building computers that function similar to the neural networks of animal brains. The computers store masses of data, form neural networks between the data, and draw inferences from the data based on need.

Yann LeCun, head of the Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research lab, commented on the move to make the company’s AI open source, “This is a way of saying, ‘Look, here is what we use, here is what we need. If you make hardware better than this, we’ll probably buy it from you.'”

By Andy Stern

New changes in how Facebook shows users newsfeeds

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Who knows best what content users of social media want to see? According to Facebook in statements accompanying the roll out of their latest news feed update, users themselves.

“We know that ultimately you’re the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you and that is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see,” said Facebook’s product manager Jacob Frantz.

“Today we are announcing even better tools for you to actively shape and improve the experience. We’ve redesigned and expanded Facebook’s News Preferences to give you more control.”

With the new algorithm, Facebook users will choose their own top 30 friends or pages. This will leave all the others further below when users check their newsfeeds.

For businesses, this could be boon or misfortune, according to social media expert Dionne Lew, whose remarks were reported by SmartCompany. “I think this is a really good change to the algorithm,” said Lew.

“People have been unhappy about the decline in reach as a result of the changes with the last news feed update and there’s been general unhappiness — from people using it personally, but also businesses who have seen a significant decline in organic reach.”

The companies that have the best relationships with their customers will have the best chances of rising to the top in the new newsfeed, Lew predicted.

“It’s going to work really well for those brands who’ve put the effort into building relationships.”

In order to get prioritized, though, businesses on Facebook may need to ask for it.

“For some brands it might be appropriate to ask directly for some people to prioritize them,” said Lew.

“But it’s a bigger ask. When it was a click of a button [to like a page] it was just click and off you go. But what you’re saying here is we know you have limited space and you’re actually going to have to find that option in your settings. It’s not something that’s as easy as clicking a button – it needs to be a more thoughtful ask and you need to give them a bit of a reason and a call to action.”

By Andy Stern