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Friend,

Facebook has been running a massive ad campaign asserting that it wants nothing more than for Congress to pass updated internet regulations. And Free Press has helped push through meaningful changes this past year at the biggest social-media companies — getting Trump kicked off Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and getting Reddit to adopt strong anti-hate policies.

So you might start to think that maybe Big Tech is really shaping up — though if you keep up with our emails, you probably don’t put much stock in anything Facebook says.

But Facebook recently banned researchers associated with the NYU Ad Observatory — one of the only tools conducting independent oversight of political ads on the platform. So we wanted to take this moment to remind everyone:

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Big Tech has a clear and well-established pattern of blocking the kind of independent oversight we need to ensure that our privacy is protected, algorithms are transparent, anti-hate and disinformation policies are enforced, and more.

Here are just a few examples of how tech companies are trying to hide what they’re up to:

* In 2019, Facebook shut down a ProPublica transparency tool designed to review how advertisers were targeting users.
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[SIDE NOTE: Anyone who remembers when Facebook allowed advertisers to target users based on interest in topics like “Jew hater” already knows how important transparency tools like the one ProPublica built are.]
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* In 2018 and 2019, Twitter delayed or outright halted multiple research projects focused on how to reduce online hate and harassment.
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* In 2020, Amazon tried to discredit research on gender and racial biases in commercial facial-recognition systems and tried to undermine the Black women who led the research project.
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* Over the past year, Google fired staff who published research about the risks of artificial intelligence, including top AI researcher Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, one of the most high-profile Black women in the field of ethical AI.

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* Last spring, Facebook shuttered CrowdTangle, a social-media monitoring tool it acquired that gave journalists and other researchers unique access to public accounts and communities, viral posts on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and more.
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So, while Free Press is proud of the changes we’ve pushed through at Big Tech companies, we know that these corporations want to keep profiting off of hate and lies.

By signing our recent petition demanding that Facebook reinstate the accounts of NYU Ad Observatory researchers, you showed Mark Zuckerberg that his days of putting our political system at risk are numbered. Please consider making a donation today to help provide the resources we need to pressure Big Tech to stop putting their profits above our democracy, safety and health.

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Thank you for everything you do for our movement.

In solidarity,

Rose and the rest of the Free Press team
freepress.net

P.S. Did you know that Free Press doesn’t take a single dollar from business, government or political parties? That means that generous donations from people like you make everything we do possible. Please consider donating today. Every gift matters in our fight against Big Tech’s hate-and-lies-for-profit business model.

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