Facebook's content oversight board hasn't met yet, but it's already the focus of calls to "speak up" or "step down." Accountable Tech, a progressive nonprofit, launched a campaign Tuesday to persuade the members of Facebook's independent oversight board to demand more authority over content decisions. It is several months before the board will start reviewing cases.

An explosive new report from The Washington Post claims Facebook has weakened its hate speech and misinformation policies because of Donald Trump's ascent to power. In 2015, when Trump was a presidential candidate, he posted a video advocating a ban on Muslims entering the US. The video provoked outrage internally, the report said. Sources told The Post that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in favor of taking action against the post but was persuaded not to by Joel Kaplan, Facebook's senior vice president of global public policy and former aide to President George W. Bush.

A boycott of Facebook by major advertisers is hammering the social media giant's stock price and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune. Zuckerberg's net wealth is down by $7.21 billion as of Saturday, while Facebook's share price dropped more than 8% at the close of Friday trading, as the ad boycott snowballs.

Facebook has said it will start to label potentially harmful posts that it leaves up because of their news value. The more hands-on approach comes as the social media firm is under pressure to improve how it moderates the content on its platform, including posts by US President Donald Trump.

Coca-Cola on Friday announced it will be pausing paid advertising on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days. The company clarified it was not joining the official boycott, but said “we are pausing” advertising.

The largest union federation in the United States on Friday blasted Facebook after it was revealed the company was offering to let employers limit unionization efforts on its platform. Facebook's Workplace functions as an internal message board for corporate clients, an answer to Slack or Microsoft Teams. This week, The Intercept reported that Facebook was promising those clients the ability to exert "content control" over their respective news feeds. Specifically, it said companies could suppress the word "unionize."

LinkedIn prides itself on being the highly professional, troll-free antithesis to all other social-media platforms. But on Wednesday, the company’s own internal meetings looked more like a “dumpster fire” Facebook comments section than anything on the company’s famously civil website. Earlier this week, the career networking website announced that it would hold a virtual global town hall to address the nationwide social unrest sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.

When Mark Zuckerberg took to CNBC earlier this week to defend President Donald Trump’s ability to use social media to lie to the American public, he insisted that he didn’t believe Facebook and other private companies should be in the business of censorship, gravely warning that “political speech is one of the most sensitive parts in a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians say.”

There's an ongoing spat between Twitter and Facebook right now over whether social media platforms should fact-check politicians, after Twitter slapped warning and fact-check labels on President Trump's recent tweets. The latest salvo is from Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo, who pitched in to criticize Facebook.

A planning commissioner of a Northern California city was removed from his post Friday night after saying that just as a forest fire clears dead brush, “the sick, the old, the injured” should be left to meet their “natural course in nature” during the coronavirus outbreak. Via a Zoom meeting, the five-member City Council of Antioch, a city of about 110,000 people 35 miles east of Oakland, voted unanimously to remove Ken Turnage II from his post as chairman of the city’s planning commission.

Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel (1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that allowed them to live comfortably – but without any real control over their lives.

YouTube removed at least 20 channels posting false or divisive content to generate ad dollars. The channels used voice-over actors to read scripts. At least one of them was hired on Fiverr, the freelance marketplace.

Over the last few years, Facebook has had a slew of privacy and security blunders and more details about one of them have come to light through a new court filing as the social media company is suing the spyware company NSO Group. It turns out Facebook tried to buy controversial government spyware to monitor iPhone and iPad users.

The Zoom iOS app is sharing data with Facebook, without declaring it in the privacy policy. This happens whether or not you have a Facebook account. Data shared with Facebook includes your iPhone or iPad model, your time-zone, city, phone carrier and a unique identifier which can be used for ad-targeting... The discovery was made by Motherboard and confirmed by iOS security researcher Will Strafach.

Australia’s privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data breach — which, back in 2018, became a global scandal that wiped billions off the tech giant’s share price yet only led to Facebook picking up a $5BN FTC fine. Should Australia prevail in its suit against the tech giant the monetary penalty could be exponentially larger.

Both 'cum ex' and Enron scandals show how traders can manipulate complex financial regulations to their advantage.

Michael R. Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has been experimenting with novel tactics to cultivate an online following, or at least the appearance of one. But one of the strategies — deploying a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages — has backfired. On Friday, Twitter began suspending 70 accounts posting pro-Bloomberg content in a pattern that violates company rules.

Ring doorbells are providing customer data to companies such as Facebook and Google, an investigation suggests. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found the Ring app was "packed" with third-party tracking, sending out customers' personally identifiable information. Five companies were receiving a range of information, including names, IP addresses and mobile networks, it said.

Facebook is still reckoning with its role in the 2016 election as it heads into a contentious 2020 presidential race, according to a newly leaked executive memo and a shifting set of policies around manipulated content issued Tuesday.

Big tech behaves as though power absolves them of responsibility. Have we learned nothing since the financial crash?