Social Media, Facebook

Social Media

Facebook has promised to use artificial intelligence to stop suggesting dead friends are invited to parties. Its “emotionally intelligent” AI is part of a rash of changes to how the social network handles “memorialised” accounts – pages kept in the owner’s memory.

Memorialisation of accounts allows images, videos and posts to be kept online, and provides a focal point for friends and relatives to share memories. But the feature has caused its fair share of pain: since the account is treated like any other Facebook user, it is used for the same algorithmic features too. That means users have been sent recommendations to invite dead relatives to parties, suggestions to wish them a happy birthday, and more.

…More recently, Facebook lost a three-year court battle over access to the private messages of a 15-year old girl who had been killed by a train at a Berlin station in 2012. Her mother wanted to see her messages to find out whether she was being bullied when she died, and the German courts ruled social media accounts can be inherited in the same way as diaries and private letters.

(The Guardian, 2019)

Confusion all around.

A Girl Leaning on a Pedestal (The Laughing Girl), 

Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) (after)

Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]

*…Part of the problem for the media is everyone denies they’re racist. Someone could set up the Extremely Racist Party, and the leader would appear on Newsnight to say: “I haven’t got a racist bone in my body.” Also, there’s confusion about “balance”, so a report about climate change has to be balanced with someone who refutes scientific evidence because they were told to by a voice that lives in their bath.

You expect to hear the newsreader say: “Thanks to our correspondent for that report on the fire at Notre-Dame, and now I’m going to talk to Jimmy, an arsonist speaking to us from a secure institution in Anglesey.”

The one time an interviewer became really angry with a guest this week was when Sky’s Adam Boulton said: “You’re a bunch of incompetent, middle-class, self-indulgent people who want to tell us how to live our lives” – to a teenage climate change protestor.

Exactly. If the protestor really wanted to make his point, he should have blamed carbon emissions on refugees and the EU, and he’d be reviewing the papers with Andrew Marr by Sunday.

(Mark Steel, The i, 2019)

*Worried your mobile phone provider knows too much about you already. Then worry on…

…According to a Facebook whistleblower, 100 different mobile companies in 50 countries were offered user data which included not just technical gen about Facebook members’ devices and use of networks, but their past locations, interests and social groups too – none of which users had ever explicitly consented to being shared with these companies and which could then be used to determine their credit worthiness, target them with more ads, or anything else the companies wanted.

(Private Eye, No 1497)

Does anyone care that their information is being bandied around in this way? Don't most Facebook users know what is happening?