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March 19, 2018: Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review's chief digital writer, on the Facebook Armageddon

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This evening, Mathew Ingram, the chief digital writer for Columbia Journalism Review (cjr.org), on the "Facebook Armageddon."

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News we'll be covering:

• The Facebook Armageddon: The social network’s increasing threat to journalism. As Facebook increases its control, “they’ll decide which brands they are going to elevate and which they will filter out..Facebook effectively decides which media outlets survive and which don’t.”

• Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time - and Money - for Arts Nonprofits, by Steve Lambert, associate professor of new media at the State University of New York at Purchase College, and co-founder and co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism (c4aa.org).

• Good summary of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook mess by Zeynep Tufekci. "Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, wrote that 'the claim that this is a data breach is completely false.' He contended that Facebook users 'knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.' ... Mr. Grewal is right: This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance."

• Facebook Failed To Protect 30 Million Users From Having Their Data Harvested By Trump Campaign Affiliate, a story about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook breach, published in The Intercept by Mattathias Schwartz in March 2017! But, you know, Facebook was shocked to find out about the issue last weekend.

• James Gleick on the Cambridge Analytica news: "This is the essence of the Facebook debacle. They insist it’s not a ‘breach.’ It’s worse. It’s their business model."

• Gizmodo's Raju Narisetti: That key Facebook execs and its apologists are spending more time arguing with everyone on Twitter about the definition of "breach" vs the calamitous nature of what actually happened with data of tens of millions of its users says a lot about that company's tone-deaf leadership.

• Facebook's Andrew Bosworth: "This is the opposite of [Facebook's] business model... We are able to show better ads when we know more about people relative to other businesses, so giving data to them is the opposite of a good strategy."

• Zeynep Tufekci: "If your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used & misused. Hacked, breached, leaked, pilfered, conned, 'targeted', 'engaged', 'profiled', sold.. There is no informed consent because it's not possible to reasonably inform or consent."

• Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time - and Money - for Arts Nonprofits, by Steve Lambert, associate professor of new media at the State University of New York at Purchase College, and co-founder and co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism (c4aa.org).

...and finally...

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