Facebook 'log out' boycott underway after alleged Black voter suppression // Is 2019 the year you should finally quit Facebook? Arwa Mahdawi

By Dilip -
'The utilisation of Facebook for propaganda promoting disingenuous portrayals of the African American community is reprehensible,' says NAACP president
A civil rights organisation in the US has called for a boycott of Facebook after a report found a Russian influence campaign on the platform was working to suppress African-American voter turnout. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) is leading the #LogOut protest on Tuesday, 18 December, while also calling on Congress to further investigate the social network. A report for the US Senate Intelligence Committee into Russia's online meddling in the build up to the 2016 Presidential election determined black voters were specifically targeted by Russian operatives on social media. Researchers at Oxford University and network analysis firm Graphika found Russians "sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage" black people from voting, as well as other voting blocks that could challenge Donald Trump.
"Over the last year, NAACP has expressed concerns about the numerous data breaches and privacy mishaps in which Facebook has been imtplicated," the NAACP said in a statement.  "And since the onset of the Silicon Valley boom, the organisation has been openly critical about the lack of employee diversity among the top technology firms in the country.".. read more:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-log-out-boycott-logout-black-voter-suppression-a8688436.html

Is 2019 the year you should finally quit Facebook? Arwa Mahdawi
Is the value you get from the platform really worth giving up all your data for? More broadly, are you comfortable being part of the reason that Facebook is becoming so dangerously powerful? Are you comfortable being on a platform that has, among other things, helped incite genocide in Myanmar?

Prepare yourself for an overwhelming sense of deja vu: another Facebookprivacy “scandal” is upon us. A New York Times investigation has found that Facebook gave Netflix, Spotify and the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) the ability to read, write and delete users’ private messages. The Times investigation, based on hundreds of pages of internal Facebook documents, also found that Facebook gave 150 partners more access to user data than previously disclosed. Microsoft, Sony and Amazon, for example, could obtain the contact information of their users’ friends.

Netflix, Spotify and RBC have all denied doing anything nefarious with your private messages. Netflix tweeted that it never asked for the ability to look at them; Spotify says it had no idea it had that sort of access; RBC disputes it even had the ability to see users’ messages. Whether they accessed your information or not, however, is not the point. The point is that Facebook should never have given them this ability without getting your explicit permission to do so... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/21/quit-facebook-privacy-scandal-private-messages



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