(Reuters) — Facebook on Thursday sued a Hong Kong company that it said baited people into clicking on celebrities’ photos and bogus advertising links, so it could install malware and run ads for counterfeit goods, diet pills and male enhancement supplements. The social media company accused ILikeAd Media International software developer Chen Xiao Cong and…
Facebook has acquired PlayGiga, a Madrid-based cloud gaming startup. The company confirmed the deal to CNBC today, the week after Cinco Dias reported it was in talks to buy PlayGiga for about 70 million euros ($78 million). PlayGiga was founded in 2013 and received Series A funding from Adara Ventures, according to Crunchbase. In May,…
Screenshot: FacebookYesterday, Donald Trump became the third president in the history of the United States to get impeached, and Trump is obviously not happy. But as things get worse for the president, his message becomes more and more extreme, especially on social media platforms like Facebook. The Trump campaign buys new Facebook ads every day,…
Smartly.io, a company helping advertisers automate their campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, has sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners for €200 million (approximately $223 million). Helsinki-headquartered Smartly.io says it automates ad production, ad buying “and everything in between.” Founded in 2013, the company has more than 350 employees across 16 global offices,…
GLAAD said it contacted Facebook’s public policy team and reached out to five fact-checking agencies, but the social network answered by pointing to a public ad policy page explaining why ads can be removed. In response, GLAAD posted an open letter asking Facebook to remove the ads, with support coming from 50 organizations, New York…
Amid the tense debate over online political advertising, it may seem strange to worry that Facebook gives campaigns too little control over whom their ads target. Yet that’s the implication of a study released this week by a team of researchers at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the progressive nonprofit Upturn. By…
Oculus headsets advertised at the Facebook developer conference in San Jose in April 2019.Photo: Tony Avelar (AP)Owners of pricey Oculus hardware could soon have their data harvested by the company’s owner, Facebook, for use in “more relevant content, including ads,” UploadVR reported on Wednesday.The move comes as Oculus is adding a bevy of Facebook-powered social…
Image: APHere’s one more leak in the drip drip drip of evidence that Facebook is totally out of control, even if and when it tries to get it together. Buzzfeed reports that an extremely predatory scammer that exploited Baby Boomers (also previously exposed by Buzzfeed in October) had a helper on the inside at Facebook.An…
To say the Ad Library bugged out at the worst possible time would be an understatement. On Thursday, people in the UK will vote in what will likely go down as one of the most important elections in the country’s history. Who they decide to lead their parliament will have major implications on Brexit, as…
In 2016, Brendan Eich, the controversial creator of the JavaScript programming language and cofounder and former CTO of Mozilla, announced the launch of a new browser called Brave. The pitch was simple but ambitious: Brave would block invasive ads and tracking scripts, but it would also show its own, privacy-friendly ads in their place. And…
Image: DENIS CHARLET (Getty)Facebook finally bent earlier this year to public pressure to do something about the trash heap of anti-vaccine-related misinformation that’s managed to fester on its site, but not before anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists were able to exploit its tools to spread harmful and factually inaccurate information on the platform. New research recently published…
They reportedly used a technique called “celeb baiting” that uses images of celebrities in ads to entice people to click on them. Victims unknowingly installed malware on their systems by clicking on those ads, allowing the infiltrators to take over. Their accounts were then used to run ads that promote counterfeit products, diet pills and…
A network of scammers used a ring of established right-wing Facebook pages to stoke Islamophobia and make a quick buck in the process, a new report from the Guardian reveals. But it’s less a vast international conspiracy and more simply that Facebook is unable to police its platform to prevent even the most elementary scams…
Under the terms of a settlement with the ACLU and other civil rights groups earlier this year, Facebook has been taking steps to prevent discriminatory ad targeting. Specifically, the company says ads in the United States that involve housing, employment or credit can no longer be targeted based on age, gender, ZIP code or multicultural affinity.…
Image copyright Reuters British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has said if Facebook had existed in the 1930s it would have allowed Hitler a platform for his anti-Semitic beliefs.The Ali G star singled out the social media company in a speech in New York.He also criticised Google, Twitter and YouTube for pushing “absurdities to billions of…
Welcome back to our discussion about platforms and democracy! I had a great time meeting Interface readers last week at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay and the Conference on New Media and Democracy at Tufts University. I also made great progress on a special report I plan to have for you here before…
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Information about our health is supposed to be sacred, but the internet has basically thrown that tenet of society out the window. A new report from the Financial Times has found that the extent to which consumer medical websites share data with internet advertisers like Google, Facebook, and others, is vast. The report specifically looked…
