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<font face="Verdana"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.skynews.com.au/news/tech/2014/06/30/facebook-under-fire-over--creepy--secret.html?cid=BP_RSS_TECHNOLOGY_1_Facebookunderfireovercreepysecret_300614">http://www.skynews.com.au/news/tech/2014/06/30/facebook-under-fire-over--creepy--secret.html?cid=BP_RSS_TECHNOLOGY_1_Facebookunderfireovercreepysecret_300614</a><br>
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<pre class="western" style="margin-left: 1cm; margin-right: 1cm">“<font size="3">Facebook has secretly manipulated the feelings of 700,000 users to understand 'emotional contagion' in a study that has prompted anger and forced the social network giant on the defensive. “</font>
“<font size="3">For one week in 2012, Facebook tampered with the algorithm used to place posts into users' news feeds to study how this affected their mood, all without their explicit consent or knowledge.”</font></pre>
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<font face="Verdana">These are very ominous revelations. They show
the kind of pervasive social control that some Internet
mega-corporates have begun to have on our lives - personal and
social... Just to present a scenario to illustrate the point -
lets say that Facebook is able to establish that being shown more
happy news rather than sad ones, people, in a particular area,
tend to get more inclined to one strand of political thought
rather than other. Now Facebook also knows the swing voters in
that area - by far the most important group politically close to
elections, just by having profiled people on their political
preferences. And then Facebook feeds either more happy news or
more sad news just prior to election and causes a certain vote
swing that directly and deeply interferes with the democratic
rights and expression of the people... (This is about human rights
as well, not just FoE and privacy)<br>
<br>
Do not consider it far fetched; US government was found recently
to have used US companies to<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/world/us-ran-social-media-programs-in-afghanistan-and-pakistan.html?_r=3">
seed special social networks</a> in not only Cuba but also
Kenya, Pakistan and some other countries with the clear purpose of
politically influencing local people. Why would they then not
think of using Facebook some day, that is, if they are not already
doing so... Additional information - Facebook as a company is
still largely the private property of one individual. Further,
that one individual, and also some other facebook founders, are
known to be somewhat strongly of one particular political bend of
mind.....<br>
<br>
We can reject all this as a desperate doomsday prediction. Or be
alive to our social and political responsibilities to do something
about them, as having some vantage and privileged position in the
IG related global public sphere. . IMHO, there is no other option
than to build global norms, and if possible policy frameworks, to
reign in such behaviours of global Internet mega-corporations.
Country level polities, expect that of the US, do not have muscle
and reach to do much about them. While the US is so much more
interested in the global economic exploitation that its mega
corporations assist it in doing that it will mostly overlook such
problematic behaviour. A perfect catch 22 situation, which can
only be broken by an much improved global governance of the
Internet.<br>
<br>
In this regard it has been painful to note that a civil society
organisation active in civil society debates and global IG forums,
Access Now, has actually opposed the proposal of the Human Rights
Council to begin work towards negotiating a treaty to reign in
global mega corporations with regard to their human rights abuses
- over which national polities have increasingly limited control.
Maybe Access Now reps here will like to explain to us why they
take such a stand, at the same time when, very rightly so, they
are currently one of the most active participants in and push-ers
for human rights council's outcomes that relate to governmental
behaviour. <br>
<br>
Please see
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.accessnow.org/blog/2014/06/26/access-voices-concern-about-resolution-on-business-and-human-rights-treaty">https://www.accessnow.org/blog/2014/06/26/access-voices-concern-about-resolution-on-business-and-human-rights-treaty</a>
<br>
<br>
Can they honestly say that they would have taken the same stand if
a HRC working group would have been set up to begin negotiating a
treaty to specifically address governmental interference with
freedom of expression, including over the Internet (a process that
I would support). <br>
<br>
parminder</font><br>
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