CfA's October 23, 2020 Newsletter

This Week:

• TTP Investigation: Facebook Ran Recruitment Ads for Militia Groups: On Monday, CfA and TTP released the results of an investigation showing how Facebook for years allowed militia groups to recruit new members via paid advertisements on the platform. The review — which followed news of the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, which played out on Facebook and other social media — also found more than 50 militia pages and groups that are still active on Facebook. (Press Release, Report)

• US v. Google: In light of the DOJ's anti-trust lawsuit against Google, CfA is joining a number of non-profits focused on government and corporate accountability in drawing attention to this long-overdue examination of Big Tech's anticompetitive practices.
  • Learn more at USvGoogle.org.

What We're Reading:

• Trump Administration Launches New Manifesto With Anti-Choice, Anti-Equality Regimes: "On Thursday, Oct. 22, less than two weeks before an election that could bring the Trump administration to a close, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar are scheduled to join Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, and Uganda in sponsoring a virtual ceremony to sign the “Geneva Consensus Declaration,” reports the Independent, which notes that, other than the U.S., the sponsoring nations involved “have strict laws on both abortion and same-sex or ban each entirely.”" (Right Wing Watch, October 21)
• Facebook touts free speech. In Vietnam, it’s aiding in censorship: "In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village outside Hanoi where residents were fighting authorities’ plans to seize farmland to build a factory.
  Believing a confrontation was inevitable, the 40-year-old Thuan condemned the country’s leaders in a Jan. 7 post. “Your crimes will be engraved on my mind,” he wrote. “I know you — the land robbers — will do everything, however cruel it is, to grab the people’s land.”
  Facebook blocked his account the next day at the government’s insistence, preventing 60 million Vietnamese users from seeing his posts." (Los Angeles Times, October 22)
• Facebook paused efforts to redirect QAnon searches to fact-checks after a glitch showed people information about the conspiracy theory even when they weren't looking for it: "On Wednesday morning, Facebook updated its ban on QAnon content, saying it would redirect people searching for the conspiracy theory "to resources that can help inform them of the realities of QAnon and its ties to violence and real world harm."
  But less than two hours after implementing the redirect, the company had to hit pause after a "glitch" caused people to see QAnon information even when they weren't looking for it." (Business Insider, October 21)

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