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Immigration

Two Major Tech Leaders Quit Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Group Over Ads Supporting Keystone XL

By Judd Legum on May 10, 2013 at 8:42 pm

Mark Zuckerberg

(Credit: Guillaume Paumier)

Two major tech leaders have resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, FWD.us, in protest of the organization’s controversial decision to bankroll ads supporting Keystone XL and drilling in the Arctic National Refuge.

The Zuckerberg group publicly says its top priority is immigration reform. But through two subsidiary organizations it has quietly spent millions on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes. The ads were created in support of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mark Begich (D-AK), and although neither ad mentions the issue, both support immigration reform.

The strategy has alienated Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and David Sacks, the founder of Yammer. Both Musk and Sacks were listed as “major contributors” on an archived version of the FWD.us website. Neither are listed on the site today.

AllThingsD, which broke the story, talked to Musk:

“I agreed to support FWD, because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes,” Elon Musk said in a statement to AllThingsD. “I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause.”

Om Malik, founder of the influential tech site GigaOm, is now calling on other members of FWD.us to follow Musk’s lead:

This week, a coalition of liberal groups announced they would suspend advertising on Facebook, in protest of the ads supporting Keystone XL. Earlier, Facebook rejected an ad by the activist group CREDO highlighting the controversy.

Politics

Facebook Rejects Ad Highlighting Zuckerberg Group’s Support For Keystone XL

By Aviva Shen on Apr 30, 2013 at 3:01 pm

CREDO's rejected Facebook ad (Credit: CREDO)

When a subsidiary of Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group started airing ads for expanded oil drilling and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, CREDO Action decided to post an ad of their own calling Zuckerberg out — on Facebook.

This morning, Facebook rejected CREDO’s Facebook ad (pictured right). According to CREDO Action, Facebook initially informed them they rejected the ad because it used Facebook trademarks — specifically, Zuckerberg’s image. Though the image used was fully licensed for creative commons use, a Facebook representative told ThinkProgress that any images of Zuckerberg are off-limits, as he is part of the Facebook brand. The rules governing Facebook brand usage specify “trademarks, names, domain names, logos” but does not explicitly restrict images of Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s group, FWD.US, is ostensibly focused on passing comprehensive immigration reform, with long-term goals of expanding scientific research and reforming education. However, the group soon started funding ads promoting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and constructing the Keystone XL pipeline. In the past, Zuckerberg has called for reducing fossil fuel usage in favor of more clean energy sources. FWD.US defended the ads as a way to shore up vulnerable Republican lawmakers who support immigration reform.

CREDO recently protested outside Zuckerberg’s recent fundraiser with Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), and decided to launch a Facebook advertising campaign “to make the connection about how political Mark Zuckerberg has become,” as CREDO told Politico. They’re not the only group taking to Facebook to challenge Zuckerberg’s political causes; the Sierra Club also asked members to share a graphic saying, “Zuckerberg promoting dirty fuels? DISLIKE.”

Health

Why Facebook Could Actually Be Good For Your Mental Health

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 19, 2013 at 9:05 am

Go ahead — check those notifications. According to a new pilot study conducted by Dr. Alice Good of the University of Portsmouth, the vast majority of Facebook users use the social network to lift their spirits when they’re feeling down by navigating their old photos and wall posts in which they’ve interacted with family and friends — a “self-soothing” coping mechanism somewhat akin to flipping through a photo album or watching old home videos.

Researchers argue that that could be a big boost for users who are prone to anxiety or depression by providing a healthy emotional conduit for reminiscing about the good times in one’s life. The findings also shed new light into what, exactly, users are looking to achieve when they use social media to share their feelings and experiences:

Psychologist Dr Clare Wilson, also of the University of Portsmouth, said: “Although this is a pilot study, these findings are fascinating.

“Facebook is marketed as a means of communicating with others. Yet this research shows we are more likely to use it to connect with our past selves, perhaps when our present selves need reassuring.

“The pictures we often post are reminders of a positive past event. When in the grip of a negative mood, it is too easy to forget how good we often feel. Our positive posts can remind us of this.”

Dr Good’s study has concluded that looking at comforting photos, known as reminiscent therapy, could be an effective method of treating mental health. [...]

The act of self-soothing is an essential tool in helping people to calm down, especially if they have an existing mental health condition.

The findings are particularly interesting given past studies that have indicated that Facebook users end up feeling depressed after a browsing session. For instance, one German study found that “one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most.”

But those findings derived from users’ envy at their friends’ vacations, life milestones, and various successes. The new preliminary data from Dr. Good’s study suggests that, used in a different way — i.e., actively “self-soothing” rather than passively sulking — browsing through one’s Facebook history could be a net benefit. And that could be very good news from a global mental health perspective for the social network, which has over a billion users worldwide and counting.

LGBT

Nearly 300 Companies And Municipalities File Brief Against DOMA

By Zack Ford and Adam Peck on Feb 27, 2013 at 4:34 pm

Nearly 300 companies, along with several law firms and municipalities, have submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. Many recognizable companies signed on, including Adobe, Amazon, Apple, CBS, Cisco Systems, Citigroup, eBay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Google, Intel, JetBlue Airways, The Jim Henson Company, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss, Mars, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nike, Pfizer, Planet Fitness, Starbucks, Sun Life Financial, Twitter, Viacom, the Walt Disney Company, and Xerox. They are joined by the cities of Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Providence, San Francisco, and Seattle, among others. One interesting signatory of note is Bain & Company, the management consultant firm that Mitt Romney once worked for — not to be confused with Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital.

The brief argues that DOMA places burdens on companies that impede their ability to recruit and retain productive employees because of the strains on benefits. In many ways, these companies are bound by the law to discriminate against their employees against their wishes, and they often incur financial burdens to simply find ways to navigate around DOMA. These companies make it clear that it violates their business models to comply with DOMA:

DOMA imposes on amici not simply considerable burden of compliance and cost. DOMA conscripts amici to become the face of its mandate that two separate castes of married persons be identified and separately treated. As employers, we must administer employment-related health-care plans, retirement plans, family leave, and COBRA. We must impute the value of spousal health-care benefits to our employees’ detriment. We must treat one employee less favorably, or at minimum differently, when each is as lawfully married as the other. We must do all of this in states, counties, and cities that prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and demand equal treatment of all married individuals. This conscription has harmful consequences. [...]

Our principles are not platitudes. Our mission statements are not simply plaques in the lobby. Statements of principle are our agenda for success: born of experience, tested in laboratory, factory, and office, attuned to competition. Our principles reflect, in the truest sense, our business judgment. By force of law, DOMA rescinds that judgment and directs that we renounce these principles or, worse yet, betray them.

These companies have made it clear that inequality harms not just the families of LGBT people, but American businesses as well. As Joe Jervis suggests, conservatives would have a difficult time boycotting so many ubiquitous companies.

Economy

Facebook Paid No Corporate Income Tax Last Year, After Making More Than $1 Billion In Profits

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 14, 2013 at 6:35 pm

Between 2008 and 2011, 26 major corporations were able to pay no federal corporate income tax, despite making a combined $205 billion in profits. According to a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice, Facebook joined that illustrious club last year, receiving $429 million in tax rebates despite making more than $1 billion in profits:

Earlier this month, the Facebook Inc. released its first “10-K” annual financial report since going public last year. Hidden in the report’s footnotes is an amazing admission: despite $1.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, Facebook did not pay even a dime in federal and state income taxes.

Instead, Facebook says it will receive net tax refunds totaling $429 million.

Facebook’s income tax refunds stem from the company’s use of a single tax break, the tax deductibility of executive stock options. That tax break reduced Facebook’s federal and state income taxes by $1,033 million in 2012, including refunds of earlier years’ taxes of $451 million

Facebook will be able to carry further tax rebates forward, according to CTJ, for a total of $3 billion in tax deductions.

“When profitable corporations can use the stock option tax deduction to pay zero corporate income taxes for years on end, average taxpayers are forced to pick up the tax burden,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) when this issue arose as Facebook was preparing its initial public offering last year. This tax preference for corporations costs the U.S. about $2 billion in revenue per year.

Alyssa

How Facebook Handles Threats Against Women—And How It Handled Its Female Employees

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 9, 2013 at 10:06 am

Over at Wired, entertainment editor Laura Hudson (formerly the editor in chief of Comics Alliance) explores the understandable confusion that women who find themselves the target of violent threats on Facebook feel about Facebook’s refusal to take down some of that content, despite the clear statements in its terms of use that forbid bullying or the use of threats or hate speech against other users. Facebook, which responded to Hudson’s request for comment, didn’t clarify things as much as they seem to hope that they might:

Wired reached out to Facebook for a comment, and a representative clarified the site’s position:

“We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. In general, attempts at humor, even disgusting and distasteful ones, do not violate our policies. When real threats or statements of hate are made, however, we will remove them. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site.”

What’s a threat and what’s a joke are both subjective things that depend on both the intent of the speaker and what’s heard by the person who is the target of their speech. What Facebook is effectively saying with this decision calculus that it’s willing to give more deference to speakers who say that they’re trying to be funny—a rationale that can be a very convenient shield for people who don’t want to be responsible for how their speech is received—than the fear of people who feel threatened. A joke doesn’t have to be “real” or effective in the same way a threat apparently does, a hugely subjective standard, to be actionable.

After I read Laura’s post, I read Melissa Gira Grant’s review of Katherine Losse’s memoir of working at Facebook, The Boy Kings. Grant urges us to recall Facebook’s origins as a site that scraped photos of women from existing databases and its transition to a site that got women to give up those images of themselves voluntarily. And she explains how Losse’s experience was part of a larger organizational disdain for customer service, even as a comfortable customer service experience was integral to the idea of getting people to be excited to and feel safe about sharing images and accounts of their personal lives online:

Facebook’s most valued employees—software engineers—relied on customer support staff largely in order to avoid direct contact with Facebook’s users. Rather than valuing their work as vital to operations, Facebook’s technical staff looked down on the support team, as if they were not much better than users themselves. “Personal contact with customers,” Losse writes, was viewed by the engineers as something “that couldn’t be automated, a dim reminder of the pre-industrial era…”…Women workers at Facebook, the customer service buffer between programmers and users, were charged with the social upkeep of this “safe space.” Hundreds of times a day, Facebook users would email Losse and the support team to ask, “What does poking mean?” “We always responded innocently,” Losse writes. “Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace.”

It’s not particularly surprising to me that an organization that started with a culture of putting women in subordinate service positions, that regarded customer service as an irritant, and that’s reliant on getting people to put up data on the site might end up with some of the problems that Facebook has now. All of those tendencies militate against taking down content, against taking customer complaints seriously, and against valuing women’s perspectives over the overall needs of the site. But if Facebook continues to want women to feel safe living their digital lives openly on its platform, it may have to start communicating more clearly, and being more responsive, to women who feel threatened on its digital streets.

Climate Progress

Deniers Finally Discover Twitter, Social Media, Where Climate Hawks Soar

By Joe Romm on Jan 7, 2013 at 7:43 pm

It’s 2013, and the deniers have finally figured out that twitter and other social media are important tools — and that they are way behind.

How big is the social media gap between deniers and hawks?

The world’s most well-known climate science denier, Sen. James Inhofe, has a whopping 13.3 thousand followers. The world’s most well-known climate hawk, Al Gore, has 2.58 million followers on Twitter (subscribe here).

Famous writer-denier James Delingpole (one of the UK Guardian‘s four suggested deniers to follow on Twitter) has 12,900 followers. Compare that to these writer-hawks:

  • Bill McKibben: 69,400 (subscribe here)
  • Dave Roberts: 28,800 (subscribe here)
  • Kate Sheppard: 38,600 (subscribe here)

Grist itself has 97,500 followers (subscribe here).

Climate Progress has 36,900 followers (subscribe here). And, as I noted recently, a key reason our traffic has been growing in the past year is social media, which also routinely brings CP headlines to hundreds of thousands of people.

Let’s compare that to the self-proclaimed “world’s most viewed climate website” (not!)  WattsUpWithThat, with its astounding 6,130 followers. I guess it’s not the most viewed via social media.

Heck, even Watts’ bête noire, climatologist Michael Mann, has 6,800 followers! And you should really follow Mann (here) if you don’t already. He tweets links to the science and to debunkings of deniers. That way you can join the growing ranks of those who don’t read the deniers’ websites. The traffic of WattsUpWithThat, like ever other major denial site, has been flat or declining since Copenhagen (check it out at quantcast.com).

I don’t think it is a big mystery why climate science hawks soar on social media and deniers don’t.

Read more

LGBT

Washington Anti-Equality Campaign Bought Facebook Likes From Germany, Thailand, Lithuania, And The Philippines

By Zack Ford on Oct 31, 2012 at 9:55 am

Preserve Marriage Washington (PMW), the campaign against Referendum 74 to approve marriage equality in the northwest state, apparently felt the need to buy friends to look like a relevant player. Washington United for Marriage (WUM) researched some conspicuous activity on the anti-gay group’s Facebook page and found that its growth was marked by huge sudden spikes in “Likes” corresponding with days the “most popular city” supporting the page was in a foreign country.

The first spike took place between August 20 and 22, when PMW jumped from about 2,500 Facebook fans to over 10,000. During the same time, the most popular city was New York City, then finally Makati, Philippines. Shortly thereafter, Facebook started cracking down on fake “Likes” and PMW suddenly lost 4,000 fans. Since then, there have been three additional spikes, corresponding with apparent popularity in Chemnitz, Germany; Bangkok, Thailand; and Vilnius, Lithuania. Every spike had a similar drop-off days later as Facebook weeded out the fake fans. In total, the group has tried to add 16,000 fake “Likes” since August (click to see full-size):

WUM campaign manager Zach Silk pulled no punches in calling out PMW’s blatant dishonesty:

SILK: It’s probably not surprising that the same group that distorts the truth and tries to confuse voters would go so far as to buy their supposed ‘grassroots’ fan base and violate the terms of Facebook. Clearly, our opponents don’t give a hoot about the truth. It’s just hard to believe that people in Southeast Asia or Northern Europe care all that much about Referendum 74 in Washington.

There does seem to be a fair correlation between a campaign’s honest advocacy and the support that it garners. The Approve 74 campaign showed what a normal progression of Facebook support looks like:

LGBT

Facebook Privacy Policy Outs LGBT Users

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 15, 2012 at 3:02 pm

The outing of University of Texas-Austin students to their parents as a consequence of a little-known Facebook privacy glitch has reignited longstanding concerns over the social network’s treatment of its LGBT users’ private information. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the two students — Bobbi Duncan and Taylor McCormick — had placed highly restrictive privacy controls on the information , but were unintentionally outed by the head of their LGBT choir when they joined its Facebook group to get access to the rehearsal schedule:

The president of the chorus, a student organization at the University of Texas campus here, had added Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick to the choir’s Facebook group. The president didn’t know the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of the chorus.

The two students were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook’s privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents.

The consequences for Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick were dire — the former’s father “left vitriolic messages on her phone, demanding she renounce same-sex relationships, she says, and threatening to sever family ties,” causing her to spiral into a depression (she’s thankfully improved since). The latter’s dad “didn’t talk to his son for three weeks.”

The Journal notes that Facebook is making an admirable effort to make its privacy policies clearer to LGBT users, but this isn’t the first time the company’s opaque rules have outed LGBT individuals. In 2009, Library of Congress employee Peter TerVeer was outed to his supervisor as a consequence of a Facebook policy change; he was met with a systematic pattern of discrimination that cost him his job and ultimately his home. A glitch in Facebook’s advertising programming had previously sent confidential information on users’ sexual orientation to third-party advertisers.

Economy

How Europe Is Taking Online Privacy Far More Seriously Than The U.S.

By Andrea Peterson on Sep 25, 2012 at 5:05 pm

Last week, Facebook announced it would cease using facial recognition technology on European Union users and delete all data following complaints from member states and an inquiry by the Irish Data Commissioner. While the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission here in the U.S. over Facebook’s use of the same technology, the complaint remains pending — repeating a familiar narrative of online giants facing higher levels of scrutiny in European Union countries than in the United States.

In the U.S. numerous agencies enforce a “patchwork” of laws defining online privacy protections in different sectors, leaving some areas with very little oversight and users without a clear path to pursue if they feel their rights have been violated. It’s a different story in the E.U., where online privacy policy is guided by the Data Protection Directive — a sort of bill of rights for online users that provides member nations with guidelines for national level laws guaranteeing a base level of control for users.

European protections are on the cusp of becoming even more robust with proposed regulation this year that would implement rules superseding national level laws and extending the scope of protections to apply to all foreign companies processing the data of EU residents. The new regulation also comes with some teeth: Penalties up to two percent of global revenues for offending companies.

To put that into perspective, this summer Google agreed to pay the largest Federal Trade Commission settlement ever to an individual company: It amounted to five hours of 2011 revenues. Under the proposed European Commission Data Protection rules it could have amounted to one hundred seventy-five hours of revenue.

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