CfA's October 1, 2021 Newsletter

This Week:

• TTP Investigation: Facebook’s Continued Failure on Harmful Teen Ads Contradicts Senate Testimony: Today, CfA's Tech Transparency Project (TTP) released a report showing that Facebook continues to allow ads promoting alcohol, drugs, gambling, and extreme weight loss to teens as young as 13, despite testimony by Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, claiming the opposite. (Press Release, Report)
  • Today’s report mirrors a May TTP investigation about a set of six test ads submitted to Facebook for approval, promoting pill abuse, alcoholic drinks, anorexia, smoking, dating services, and gambling. Both in the initial test, and in this month’s repeat, all ads were approved quickly—some of them in less than an hour.

What We're Reading:

• Facebook whistleblower isn't protected from possible company retaliation, experts say: "While federal whistleblower protections can provide a shield when a current or former employee cooperates with regulators or lawmakers to expose wrongdoing or a cover-up, obtaining confidential corporate records and sharing them with the press is legally precarious, potentially opening the individual up to legal action from Facebook, according to three whistleblower lawyers who spoke to NPR.
  
  "Problems do arise when you take information and provide it to the press," said Lisa Banks, a longtime Washington whistleblower lawyer. "That's where you can get in trouble with their employer or the law."
  
  A Facebook spokesman declined to comment." (NPR, October 1)

• Past storms haven’t fazed Facebook. Instagram Kids might: "Legislators have failed to regulate the tech companies in a meaningful way, despite dozens of hearings in recent years in which politicians publicly assailed Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for making big money off of Americans’ data and privacy.
  
  But Facebook had a harder time defending itself on Thursday to a U.S. senators who came prepared with research and tough questions, noted Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University. The hearing was starkly different from the Senate’s 2018 grilling of Zuckerberg in which senators asked him basic questions — like how Facebook makes money." (AP, October 1)

• Is Sheryl Sandberg’s Power Shrinking? Ten Years of Facebook Data Offers Clues: "Ms. Sandberg, a veteran of government and business, joined in 2008 as chief operating officer, and has long been seen as Mr. Zuckerberg’s No. 2. Her portfolio has included policy, communications and legal. At the start of 2014, 43% of Facebook’s staff employees reported up to her. Though Ms. Sandberg remains a top figure at Facebook, recent data show her share of Facebook's staff employees this year at 31%. That doesn't include the growing army of contract workers she oversees." (Wall Street Journal, October 1)

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