And another day of a whole mess of FB troubles, the Afghan humanitarian crisis, Tesla trying to keep autopilot investigation secret, ‘The Liberty Way’ (as in Liberty U.), trans women can be Amazons in Themyscira, and relief funds used to purchase a $57,000 Pokemon card comes to a close:
“A political party that stages a coup and blocks investigation ultimately wants that coup to succeed.” — Sarah Kendzior
Deaths
US: 757,849 (+1487)
World: 4,970,164 (+6498)
Cases
US: 46,417,525 (+104,743)
World: 244,817,674 (+393,293)
Facebook says it does not take the political winds of Washington into account when deciding what posts to take down or products to launch. But a trove of internal documents shows that Facebook’s own employees are concerned that the company does just that…The new disclosures come after years of internal and external grumbling at Facebook about the role played by Kaplan, who has angered Democrats in Washington who say he has amassed outsized power at the company and used his position to cater to the GOP. They also follow recent revelations in The Wall Street Journal that Facebook has a private internal system, known as XCheck, that exempted high-profile users such as Trump from the company’s normal rules…In message board conversations dating back to 2019, Facebook employees took particular issue with one aspect of the company’s internal structure: The teams charged with writing and enforcing Facebook’s content rules answer to Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. That’s different from other social media companies such as Twitter, which separates its “trust and safety” team — a group that handles difficult questions around online speech — from its policy team, which interacts directly with governments around the world. A similar firewall exists at Google, where the heads of the company’s content and public policy teams answer to different executives.
People or profit? Facebook papers show deep conflict within. Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.
Two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns about the platform being used as a tool to trade and sell maids in the Middle East. After publicly promising to crack down, Facebook acknowledged in internal documents obtained by The Associated Press that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity” that saw Filipina maids complaining on the social media site of being abused. Apple relented and Facebook and Instagram remained in the app store. But Facebook’s crackdown seems to have had a limited effect. Even today, a quick search for “khadima” – or “maid” in Arabic – will bring up accounts featuring posed photographs of Africans and South Asians with ages and prices listed next to their images. That’s even as the Philippines government has a team of workers that do nothing but scour Facebook posts each day to try and protect desperate job seekers from criminal gangs and unscrupulous recruiters using the site.
Facebook has known it has a human trafficking problem for years. It still hasn't fully fixed it. Facebook has for years struggled to crack down on content related to what it calls domestic servitude: "a form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception," according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by CNN...But while Facebook managed to assuage Apple's concerns at the time and avoid removal from the app store, issues persist. The stakes are significant: Facebook documents describe women trafficked in this way being subjected to physical and sexual abuse, being deprived of food and pay, and having their travel documents confiscated so they can't escape. Earlier this year, an internal Facebook report noted that "gaps still exist in our detection of on-platform entities engaged in domestic servitude" and detailed how the company's platforms are used to recruit, buy and sell what Facebook's documents call "domestic servants."
The Biden administration plans to unveil on Monday its detailed rules requiring nearly all foreign air visitors to be vaccinated against COVID-19 starting Nov. 8.
“The Liberty Way”: How Liberty University Discourages and Dismisses Students’ Reports of Sexual Assaults. Universities across the country have long faced scrutiny for their handling, and mishandling, of sexual assault cases. But Liberty University’s responses to such cases stand out. Interviews with more than 50 former Liberty students and staffers, as well as records from more than a dozen cases, show how an ethos of sexual purity, as embodied by the Liberty Way, has led to school officials discouraging, dismissing and even blaming female students who have tried to come forward with claims of sexual assault.
Afghan baby girl sold for $500 by starving family. Afghanistan is facing the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, with the country seeing a sharp deterioration in the situation since the Taliban seized power in August.
New Wonder Woman comic welcomes DC's first trans Amazon: 'She isn't a box to tick'. The creators of DC’s new series Nubia and the Amazons have confirmed that trans women can be Amazons and are welcomed onto Themyscira – the island nation of the female warrior women known as the Amazons.
Tesla doesn’t want anyone to see its response to the Autopilot investigation. If Tesla’s request is granted, it would effectively bar the public from seeing the company’s response to a host of information that NHTSA has requested regarding its probe into Autopilot and possible defects.
Kellogg's faces lawsuit over amount of strawberries in Pop-Tarts. Popular cereal and pastry brand Kellogg's is facing a multi-million dollar class-action lawsuit in the U.S. that claims the company isn't being forthcoming about the lack of actual fruit used in it's strawberry "Pop-Tarts" food product.
Georgia man got COVID relief loan — and spent $57,000 of it on Pokemon card, feds say. Vinath Oudomsine was charged by criminal information on Tuesday with one count of wire fraud after the government said he lied about how many employees he had and the revenue his business generated in an application for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan, or EIDL, during the pandemic…It wasn’t clear in court filings which Pokemon card Oudomsine is accused of purchasing, but certain rare and valuable Pokemon cards can sell for thousands of dollars.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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