Facebook smeared United States senators

This video from the USA says about itself:

Facebook Paid To Discredit Senators

Facebook tried to get dirt on Senators ahead of their hearing on Capitol Hill. Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian and Matt Kirshen, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

“A small [Republican party connected] firm called Definers Public Affairs brought the dark arts of Washington’s back-room politics to Silicon Valley when, while working for Facebook, it began disparaging other tech companies to reporters.

But a few days before Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, testified to Congress in September, Definers set its sights on a different target: the senators about to question Ms. Sandberg.

In one document circulated to reporters, Definers tallied what software the 15 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track visitors to their Senate websites. Another document detailed how much each senator spent on Facebook ads and how much they had received in campaign donations from Facebook or other big tech companies.

Known in the political business as opposition research, the documents pushed out by Definers neatly provided reporters with the ammunition they would need to suggest the senators grilling Ms. Sandberg were hypocrites for criticizing Facebook.”

Facebook Tries to Stop Next Crisis After British Lawmaker Gets Internal Documents: here.

Facebook has had another very bad week.

The two hundred and fifty pages of internal Facebook documents show, irrefutably, that the company did, indeed, whitelist a number of lucrative business partners, including Netflix, Lyft, and Airbnb, allowing them continued and unfettered access to the accounts of Facebook users and their friends after the company claimed that it had stopped the practice. The documents also reveal that, in 2015, a permissions update for Android devices, which users were required to accept, included a feature that continuously uploaded text messages and call logs to Facebook: here.

Internal tensions at Facebook are boiling over.

TEEN BRIDE SOLD ON FACEBOOK A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off as a child bride on Facebook, according to a children’s rights organization. [HuffPost]