A new study shows that privacy on social media is like second-hand smoke. It's controlled by the people around you. Individual choice has long been considered a bedrock principle of online privacy. If you don't want to be on Facebook, you can leave or not sign up in the first place. Then your behavior will be your own private business, right?

PSA: This is a security and privacy nightmare that will get your Facebook account banned.

As innocuous as it may seem, the viral “10 Year Challenge” flooding social media feeds everywhere may have been created to collect large amounts of data for future facial recognition software, according to one prominent tech writer.

Facebook is making yet another attempt to win back teens to its platform — this time, with memes, TechCrunch reported Friday. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch it is privately testing a hub for memes on its platform, called LOL. Facebook said a small number of U.S. users are testing the app, which replaces its Watch section for videos in the app. Facebook told TechCrunch it does not have plans to roll out LOL in Watch and is still determining whether it will become a feature in Facebook's app or a separate app entirely.

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV, the company has been quietly developing another product targeted at the kids. According to a new report, the company has spent months building LOL which is a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch late Friday that it was experimenting with the “LOL” hub for kids. “We are running a small scale test and the concept is in the early stages right now,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" is such an anodyne way of describing weaponizing information to poison attitudes and democracies. That's the euphemism that Facebook is employing to talk about its latest purge of accounts and pages that may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. More than 500 pages and accounts have recently been removed, according to a report by Facebook's cybersecurity policy chief.

I am really sad about Facebook. I got involved with the company more than a decade ago and have taken great pride and joy in the company’s success … until the past few months. Now I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. With more than 1.7 billion members, Facebook is among the most influential businesses in the world. Whether they like it or not–whether Facebook is a technology company or a media company–the company has a huge impact on politics and social welfare.

The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of its investigation into whether Facebook violated privacy rules and is expected to seek large fines from the company, according to two people familiar with the inquiry. The five members of the commission met in mid-December to discuss the investigation, according to the people, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is not public. The meeting is a sign that the investigation is far along, the people said, because the commissioners rarely meet in the early stages of an inquiry.

Campbell Brown: "We are going to continue our work with head publishers. We’re not backing away from that, but it is a shift to local and an emphasis on local that is new for us."

Today we removed multiple Pages, groups and accounts that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram.

If you use social media, you've probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year.

Once again, Facebook is embroiled in a scandal where it was caught violating millions of people's privacy. By Trevor Timm.

Nick Winke, a photographer in the Pacific northwest, was perusing internet forums when he came across a complaint that alarmed him: On certain Samsung Electronics Co. smartphones, users aren’t allowed to delete the Facebook app.

Older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share fake news on Facebook, according to a new analysis by researchers at New York and Princeton Universities. Older users shared more fake news than younger ones regardless of education, sex, race, income, or how many links they shared. In fact, age predicted their behavior better than any other characteristic — including party affiliation.

Facebook continues to be the number 1 social networking app on overall downloads, especially due to the first position in the Google Play store. However, on Apple Store, TikTok was the number 1 app installed worldwide, according to SensorTower data. Julia Chan, Market Analyst at SensorTower, says Facebook and TikTok accounted for 50 percent of the top 10 apps’ total installs.

Facebook has long said that it doesn’t use location data to make friend suggestions, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t thought about using it.

Spending too much time on “social media” sites like Facebook is making people more than just miserable. It may also be making them depressed. A new study looked at 504 millennials who actively use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Snapchat, individuals who met the criteria for a major depressive disorder scored higher on the “Social Media Addiction” scale.

Since the birth of facebook in 2004, it has seen a lot of criticism a timeline of facebook controversies which is the largest social media .

Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about the prospect of disciplining the social network. Lawmakers, consumer advocates and even former commission officials were clamoring for tough action against Facebook, arguing that it had violated an earlier F.T.C. consent decree barring it from misleading users about how their information was shared.

After The New York Times revealed last month that Facebook continued to share personal information of millions of consumers with companies like Netflix, Yahoo, Spotify and Google — despite contrary assertions to Congress — many people decided to delete their Facebook accounts. But if Facebook’s actions, as described by The Times, violated the law, consumers should be able to send an even more powerful message, one that could leave a much larger imprint on the company’s ledger books: suing the company for damages.

So-called “fake news” has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data.

The term “social network” has become a meaningless association of words. Pair those two words and it becomes a tech category, the equivalent of a single term to define a group of products.

Facebook isn't responsible for government decisions to clamp down on free expression. But the question remains: How can companies stop assisting authoritarian governments, inadvertently or otherwise?

The New York Times obtained more than a thousand pages of internal guidelines. They shed light on how Facebook decides what should be kept off the platform.

Facebook data, once created, is unlikely to remain in the control of US entities (let alone Facebook)—and the country best positioned to exploit it is China, given its investments in AI, and its creation of extensive systems for vacuuming up its own citizens' data, writes Aziz Huq, professor of law at The University of Chicago Law School.

A fine, another fine, a break-up threat, users leaving - all potentially on the cards for Facebook this year. This year, the apologies will make way for accountability, and the talk of regulation will (potentially) turn to action. But what does that mean exactly? How severe might any punishments be? Here’s what might happen to Facebook over the next 12 months.

For the first time ever, more Americans now get news from social media sites than from print newspapers, Pew Research said on Monday. Twenty percent of U.S. adults polled by the company say they "often" get news from social media while 16 percent "often" turn to newspapers. Last year the two media were "about equal," Pew Research said. The results are based on a survey of 3,425 U.S. adults conducted over the summer. Pew said the survey respondents were all part of a "nationally representative" panel.

A new report for the Senate exposes how the IRA used every major social media platform to target voters before and after the 2016 election.

As a freshman in high school, in the year of our lord 2002, I made a website called “Jason’s Site.” While a website named after myself and devoted to updates about my own life was unspeakably vain for the time, it was also quite forward looking: The site has a news feed, an “about me” page, and an email mailing list for people to receive updates. I intended for it to be funded by reader donations. It had a section for Flash videos and photos, a guestbook, and a “friends” page that was literally a list of my friends.

If there is one message Facebook has been trying to send to the world in 2018, it's that the company understands it needs to rethink the way it operates. Facebook says it understands that it must better police the content that appears on its platforms. And as a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal early this year, Facebook says it must be more effective in how it protects user data, more transparent about all the data it collects, and more clear about who has access to the data.

What is the price of trust? Or, to put the question another way, what is the cost of becoming known for doing things that don’t match your words? To put a number on that, Tony Simons, a management professor at Cornell, took an unusually detailed look inside the hotel industry. In 1999, Simons and a fellow-researcher, Judi McLean Parks, interviewed employees at seventy-six Holiday Inn hotels in the United States and Canada.

If the past teaches us anything, it will happen one day. In fact, the process might have already started.

So you’ve decided you’ve had enough with Facebook and its continuing antics, or all the times it’s been hacked this year, or perhaps you’re just sick of how much time you spend on it. You’ve finally made the plunge to delete it from your life. And after all, between apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, you’ve got all the social media you need. Sadly, I am here to burst your bubble, if you weren’t already aware: Instagram and WhatsApp are both run by Facebook.

Genevieve, 37, was online the other day when she got a friend request from her college boyfriend on Facebook. Through her profile, he found out where she worked and soon called her at the office to catch up. This married father of three proceeded to tell Genevieve how much he had thought of her over …

Nigerian police say “fake news” on Facebook is killing people. BBC Africa EYE investigates how viral misinformation and hate speech is inflaming tensions in a region already ablaze with ethnic violence.