By Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show. (Listen to a related podcast.)Ĭontinue Story → _04 | Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. Facebook, in response, says any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem. Zuckerberg resisted some fixes proposed by his team, the documents show, because he worried they would lead people to interact with Facebook less. It was making Facebook, and those who used it, angrier. Within the company, the documents show, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect.
Zuckerberg declared his aim was to strengthen bonds between users and improve their well-being by fostering interactions between friends and family. By Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitzįacebook made a heralded change to its algorithm in 2018 designed to improve its platform-and arrest signs of declining user engagement.
(Listen to a related podcast.)Ĭontinue Story → _03 | Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. In response, Facebook says the negative effects aren’t widespread, that the mental-health research is valuable and that some of the harmful aspects aren’t easy to address. In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects, including in comments to Congress, and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it. Repeatedly, the company found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls, more so than other social-media platforms. Researchers inside Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, have been studying for years how its photo-sharing app affects millions of young users.
(Listen to a related podcast.)Ĭontinue Story → _02 | Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Many Teen Girls, Company Documents Show By Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman Facebook says criticism of the program is fair, that it was designed for a good purpose and that the company is working to fix it. Many abuse the privilege, posting material including harassment and incitement to violence that would typically lead to sanctions. Today, it shields millions of VIPs from the company’s normal enforcement, the documents show. The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was intended as a quality-control measure for high-profile accounts. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules. Has said Facebook allows its users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards apply to everyone. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt By Jeff Horwitz
We’re sorry that this attack happened - and we’ll continue to update people as we find out more._01 | Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Use the Graph API to keep information updated regularly and always log users out of apps where error codes show that any Facebook session is invalid.Use our official Facebook SDKs for Android, iOS and JavaScript - these will automatically check the validity of access tokens on a daily basis and force a fresh login when they are reset by Facebook, protecting the security of users accounts.It’s why we recommend developers stick to our Facebook Login security best practices: Security is incredibly important to Facebook. However, out of an abundance of caution, as some developers may not use our SDKs - or regularly check whether Facebook access tokens are valid - we’re building a tool to enable developers to manually identify the users of their apps who may have been affected, so that they can log them out. That investigation has so far found no evidence that the attackers accessed any apps using Facebook Login.Īny developer using our official Facebook SDKs - and all those that have regularly checked the validity of their users’ access tokens – were automatically protected when we reset people’s access tokens. We have now analyzed our logs for all third-party apps installed or logged in during the attack we discovered last week. We’ve had questions about what exactly this attack means for the apps using Facebook Login. Resetting the access tokens protected the security of people’s accounts and meant they had to log back in to Facebook or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. We fixed the vulnerability and we reset the access tokens for a total of 90 million accounts - 50 million that had access tokens stolen and 40 million that were subject to a “View As” look-up in the last year.
This was a serious issue and we worked fast to protect the security of people’s accounts and investigate what happened. We wanted to provide an update on the security attack that we announced last week.