Tag: facebook

Jihadi complaining

The Journal has obtained correspondence, purportedly between Abu Izzadeen and Facebook, which took place after his profile was banned by the site’s administrators. In it Izzadeen urges the administrators to “reconsider your hasty and unjust decision,” going on to write “Inshallah (God willing) I can return to making use of your otherwise fantastic site”. After the appeal was rejected Izzadeen ended the correspondence by writing: “You are mad. I joined this site so my supporters could add me and show their support. I am not surprised. [You take] any opportunity to stamp the ummah under your heel. This is why we rise up.”

FAIL. customer service indifference saves the day.

Toward Social Science

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say. Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.

could “social science” actually become science one day?
2013-11-02:

The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit to having a major impact on the world. To facilitate these important developments, universities, funding agencies, and governments need to shore up and adapt the infrastructure that supports social science research. We discuss some of these developments here, as well as a new type of organization we created at Harvard to help encourage them — the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. An increasing number of universities are beginning efforts to respond with similar institutions. This paper provides some suggestions for how individual universities might respond and how we might work together to advance social science more generally.

RIP Facebook?

What’s surprising here is the speed with which this thing is coming undone — and the ease with which it could have been avoided. What’s harming Facebook – perhaps to a terminal degree – is enormously bad PR. For a social media company, these folks don’t understand the first thing about communication; they have alienated the press by being arrogant, aloof and dishonest. Their idea of press relations is sending a stupid message to a What’s New at Facebook Group that directs you to another website for a canned statement.

haha cnn is trolling.

Facebook Beacon

As follow-up to Ben’s look at Facebook’s Beacon system, I began investigating the extent of its privacy implications. What I found is extremely disconcerting. Facebook is collecting information about user actions on affiliate sites regardless of whether or not the user chose to opt out, and regardless of whether or not the user is logged into Facebook at that time. The evidence I present below directly contradicts both public statements made by Facebook, and direct email correspondence from their privacy department, demonstrating that Beacon is a serious threat to user privacy.

more greed. if they continue like that they are toast.

Zuckerberg Privacy

The independent magazine, which is aimed at Harvard alumni, put up a series of court documents in a downloadable format here it obtained from a court in Massachusetts related to a hard-hitting story it recently published about the origins of Facebook at Harvard, and had inadvertently not redacted that sensitive personal information in all places at first.

hehehe