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The U.S. Justice Department and 11 state attorneys general have filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Google, accusing it of being an illegal monopoly because of its stranglehold on Internet search.

The government alleged Google has come by its wild success — 80% market share in U.S. search, a valuation eclipsing $1 trillion — unfairly. It said multibillion-dollar deals Google has struck to be the default search engine in many of the world's Web browsers and smartphones have boxed out its rivals.

Google's head of global affairs, Kent Walker, said the government's case is "deeply flawed." The company warned that if the Justice Department prevails, people would pay more for their phones and have worse options for searching the Internet.

Luckily for us, and Congress, Haugen came with not only information, but also solutions. Smart ones, too, according to Tae Kim and Parmy. To sum them up: Order Facebook to stop engagement-based ranking algorithms. Order Facebook to spend more on content moderation. Establish an agency to audit Facebook’s algorithms and features. Mandate regular disclosure for researchers.

Not only does its sheer size make it imperative for regulators to do something about Facebook, but it also makes that job way harder.

Take Step 3, for example: establishing an agency to audit Facebook’s algorithms. Cathy O’Neil makes a living auditing algorithms. Her usual process would be to consider who is affected, find out whether certain stakeholders are being treated unfairly, and suggest ways to eliminate or mitigate that harm. Unfortunately, this approach is too difficult to apply to the algorithms at Facebook. “They’re just too big. The list of potential stakeholders is endless. The audit would never be complete, and would invariably miss something important,”

Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from her role as Chief Operating Officer at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.Sandberg joined Facebook in early 2008 as the No. 2 to Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and helped turn Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and one of the most powerful companies in the tech industry, with a market cap that topped $1 trillion at one point.

Meta has come under fire in recent years for its massive influence, its lack of success in stopping the spread of misinformation and harmful material, and its acquisitions of one-time rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg and other execs have been forced to testify before Congress multiple times in the last three years, although Sandberg has largely escaped that spotlight. The company currently faces an antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and could see scrutiny from other agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission after a whistleblower filed a complaint about its efforts to combat hate on its platform.

In 2013, she released the book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” focusing on the challenges women face in the workplace and what they can do to advance their careers.In 2015, she was faced with the unexpected death of her husband Dave Goldberg, who suffered cardiac arrhythmia and collapsed on a treadmill. Sandberg has spoken at length about dealing with the grief of Goldberg’s passing, and in 2017, she released a book titled “Option B” centered around the topic.

The social network remains massive, indispensable for many, and isn’t going away anytime soon. This is not Facebook’s “Myspace moment,” at least not yet.

it’s a harbinger of a shift already well underway in Menlo Park, one in which Facebook is no longer the center of Meta’s attention or the locus of its most important innovations, but a profitable legacy product to be maintained.

When they built Facebook, Zuckerberg and company didn’t just want to build the largest social network. They set out to build something truly ubiquitous, something that everyone would use, something that would become part of the fabric of global society — something that everyone had to use, if only because everyone else was. And they got further than almost anyone could have imagined. Just not all the way.

It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.

During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.

I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.

Google’s AdSense and the Facebook Audience Network allow websites to easily place digital ads on their pages. Instead of going out and selling ads on their own, websites can lean on Google and Facebook to do that legwork for them. The networks act as middlemen, allowing online advertisers to “bid” for space on websites that have signed up.

Google said Monday that it will no longer allow websites access to its ad network if they “misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose.” Pornography or hate-speech websites are already banned from using the AdSense platform.

Facebook, too, tweaked its policies for its Facebook Audience Network, although the company insisted the change was just a clarification. The company’s policy already banned apps and sites with “illegal, misleading, or deceptive” content, a spokesperson said. On Monday, the company updated the document to “explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news.”

Leading

Hezbollah

commander and key Israel target killed in Syria

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

in a high-stakes competition for domination of the Internet, in which Google wields high-altitude balloons and high-speed fiber networks and Amazon has experimental delivery drones and colossal data centers, Facebook is under pressure to show that it, too, can pursue projects that are more speculative than product.

“The Amazons, Googles and Facebooks are exploring completely new things that will change the way we live,

Facebook’s drone team, which came to the company through the acquisition last year of the drone maker Ascenta, say they believe their solar-powered craft can eventually be aloft up to three months at a time, beaming high-speed data from 60,000 to 90,000 feet to some of the world’s remotest regions via laser. Test flights are to begin this summer, though full commercial deployment may take years

News Share this:FacebookTwitterGoogleFacebook MessengerWhatsAppEmailCopy Trump’s hard-line approach clashes with Tillerson on Qatar

President Trump on Friday demanded that Qatar stop funding terrorism, striking a hard line against the tiny emirate just hours after his State Department had urged other Gulf nations to end their blockade of the besieged country. “The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has been a funder of terrorism at a very high level. The time has come to call on Qatar to end its funding,” Trump said at the White House. “Hopefully it will be the beginning of the end of funding terrorism. It will, therefore, be the beginning of the end to terrorism. No more funding.”

After the events of Jan. 6, researcher Laura Edelson expected to see a spike in Facebook users engaging with the day's news, similar to Election Day.

"The thing was, most of that spike was concentrated among the partisan extremes and misinformation providers," Edelson told NPR's All Things Considered. "And when I really sit back and think about that, I think the idea that on a day like that, which was so scary and so uncertain, that the most extreme and least reputable sources were the ones Facebook users were engaging with, is pretty troubling."

A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement.

Mr. Zuckerberg has said that it’s not the company’s job to “be arbiters of truth” and that allowing posts from well-known people allows the public to make informed decisions. Yet every day Facebook blocks or deletes posts from Average Joes who violate its policies, including propagating untruths and hateful speech.

If the oversight board were to restore Mr. Trump’s account, it would stand as an affirmation of Facebook’s self-serving policies permitting the most divisive and engaging content to remain and a clarion call to leaders like Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro, who have similarly peddled in misinformation, to keep on posting.

Even two years into Mr. Trump’s term, Facebook admitted it hadn’t done enough to prevent its site from being used “to foment division and incite offline violence.” But nothing much changed.

Facebook will temporarily stop showing ads that “promote weapon accessories and protective equipment in the U.S. at least through Jan. 22,” two days after Inauguration Day, according to a statement by the company.

The social media platform had been showing ads for military equipment, like body armor and gun holsters, to users who were engaging with content promoting misinformation about the presidential election and news about the Capitol riot, according to an article by Buzzfeed News. Ads for weapon accessories were also being shown to people who followed right-wing extremist pages or groups on Facebook, according to the article, which cited data from the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Much of the planning for last week’s attack on the Capitol was conducted in the open on social media networks, including on mainstream sites like Facebook and Twitter, and also on lesser-known sites used by the far right such as Parler and Gab.

In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Facebook kept up posts that it had been warned contributed to violence. In India, activists have urged the company to combat posts by political figures targeting Muslims. And in Ethiopia, groups pleaded for the social network to block hate speech after hundreds were killed in ethnic violence inflamed by social media.

But last week, Facebook and Twitter cut off President Trump from their platforms for inciting a crowd that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Those decisions have angered human rights groups and activists, who are now urging the companies to apply their policies evenly, particularly in smaller countries where the platforms dominate communications.

David Kaye, a law professor and former United Nations monitor for freedom of expression, said political figures in India, the Philippines, Brazil and elsewhere deserved scrutiny for their behavior online. But he said the actions against Mr. Trump raised difficult questions about how the power of American internet companies was applied, and if their actions set a new precedent to more aggressively police speech around the world.

Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn't bother voting for her.

Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S. Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.

"It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides," Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business. In a statement responding to the news, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said, "We applaud Facebook for disclosing the existence of these fake accounts and shutting them down. ... [But] Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform. If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump's ads that attempt to gaslight the American people."

n India, Latin America and Africa, its services are essentially the internet for many people — almost a public utility, usually cheaper than a phone call and depended upon for much of the communication and commerce of daily life.

India accounted for about a quarter of those installations, while another quarter were in Latin America, according to Sensor Tower. Just 4 percent, or 238 million downloads, were in the United States.

In the global digital space, everyone could experience a shutdown,” Thierry Breton, the European commissioner drafting new tech regulations, said on Twitter. “Europeans deserve a better digital resilience via regulation, fair competition, stronger connectivity and cybersecurity.”

Facebook’s alarming power. The company is among the largest collectors of humanity’s most private information, one of the planet’s most-trafficked sources of news, and it seems to possess the ability, in some degree, to alter public discourse. Worse, essentially all of Facebook’s power is vested in Zuckerberg alone.

This feels intolerable; as the philosopher Kanye West put it, “No one man should have all that power.”

Persily proposes piercing the black box before we do anything else. He has written draft legislation that would compel large tech platforms to provide to outside researchers a range of data about what users see on the service, how they engage with it, and what information the platform provides to advertisers and governments.

Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

“social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist

THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform

We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.

I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want

Sessums received a notification from Facebook that the post violated the company’s “community standards” and that he was barred from posting for 24 hours.

“What will the cyber world be like under a Trump administration?” he asked, referencing Facebook board member Peter Thiel’s support of the president-elect. “This is chilling to me.”

For Sessums, the temporary banning was particularly significant because he uses his Facebook page as a “personal blog”. The author has about 20,000 friends and followers, and he considers his frequent posts a “meta-memoir”