WASHINGTON, May 10: Facebook is unwittingly auto-generating content for terror-linked groups that its artificial intelligence systems do not recognize as extremist, according to a complaint made public on Thursday.

The National Whistleblowers Center in Washington carried out a five-month study of the pages of 3,000 members who liked or connected to organizations proscribed as terrorist by the US government.

Researchers found that the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda were “openly” active on the social network.

More worryingly, the Facebook’s own software was automatically creating “celebration” and “memories” videos for extremist pages that had amassed sufficient views or “likes.”

The Whistleblower’s Center said it filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of a source that preferred to remain anonymous.

“Facebook’s efforts to stamp out terror content have been weak and ineffectual,” read an executive summary of the 48-page document shared by the center.

“Of even greater concern, Facebook itself has been creating and promoting terror content with its auto-generate technology.”

Survey results shared in the complaint indicated that Facebook was not delivering on its claims about eliminating extremist posts or accounts.

The company told AFP it had been removing terror-linked content “at a far higher success rate than even two years go” since making heavy investments in technology.

“We don’t claim to find everything and we remain vigilant in our efforts against terrorist groups around the world,” the company said.

Facebook and other social media platforms have been under fire for not doing enough to curb messages of hate and violence, while at the same time criticized for failing to offer equal time for all viewpoints, no matter how unpleasant.

Facebook in March announced bans at the social network and Instagram on praise or support for white nationalism and white separatism. AFP

Facebook has rolled out a dark interface for Messengers app in its new update. Turning on dark mode in Messenger only takes a couple of taps:

Open Facebook Messenger and tap on your profile icon on the top of the left corner.

You will see the Dark Mode toggle under your profile photo.

Once you have turned on Dark Mode, all of the white backgrounds are instantly replaced with black.

However, if your Messenger does not have Dark Mode by default yet, you can wait until Facebook fully rolls out the newest feature to everyone.

Or, you can unlock it as a hidden feature. It will be fun.

Open the Facebook Messenger.

Go to a chat thread (any person).

Send the person the  (moon) emoji.

Once you have sent the moon emoji, tap on it in the thread.

A prompt will appear. Tap on it and activate the Dark Mode in the setting.

The Dark Mode will provide lower brightness while maintaining contrast and vibrancy. It also cuts down the glare from your phone for use in low light situations, so you can use the Messenger features you love no matter when or where you are. Not only it is easier for your eyes, but it also saves battery life.

Facebook on Wednesday said it has suspended more than 400 of thousands of applications it has investigated to determine whether people’s personal information was being improperly shared.

Applications were suspended “due to concerns around the developers who built them or how the information people chose to share with the app may have been used,” vice president of product partnerships Ime Archibong said in a blog post.

Apps put on hold at the social network were being scrutinized more closely, according to Archibong.

The app unit launched in March by Facebook stemmed from the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.

Facebook admitted that up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked by Cambridge Analytica, which was working for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Archibong said that a myPersonality app was banned by the social network for not agreeing to an audit and “because it’s clear that they shared information with researchers as well as companies with only limited protections in place.”

Facebook planned to notify the approximately four million members of the social network who shared information with myPersonality, which was active mostly prior to 2012, according to Archibong.

Facebook has modified app data sharing policies since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“We will continue to investigate apps and make the changes needed to our platform to ensure that we are doing all we can to protect people’s information,” Archibong said.

Britain’s data regulator said last month that it will fine Facebook half a million pounds for failing to protect user data, as part of its investigation into whether personal information was misused ahead of the Brexit referendum.

The Information Commissioner’s Office began investigating the social media giant earlier this year due to the Cambridge Analytica data mishandling.

Cambridge Analytica has denied accusations and has filed for bankruptcy in the United States and Britain.

Silicon Valley-based Facebook last month acknowledged it faces multiple inquiries from regulators about the Cambridge Analytica user data scandal.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the European Parliament in May and said the social media giant is taking steps to prevent such a breach from happening again.

Zuckerberg was grilled about the breach in US Congress in April. AFP

NEW YORK, April 24: If you’ve ever wondered exactly what sorts of things Facebook would like you not to do on its service, you’re in luck. For the first time, the social network is publishing detailed guidelines to what does and doesn’t belong on its service — 27 pages worth of them, in fact.

So please don’t make credible violent threats or revel in sexual violence; promote terrorism or the poaching of endangered species; attempt to buy marijuana, sell firearms, or list prescription drug prices for sale; post instructions for self-injury; depict minors in a sexual context; or commit multiple homicides at different times or locations.

Facebook already banned most of these actions on its previous “community standards” page , which sketched out the company’s standards in broad strokes. But on Tuesday it will spell out the sometimes gory details.

The updated community standards will mirror the rules its 7,600 moderators use to review questionable posts, then decide if they should be pulled off Facebook. And sometimes whether to call in the authorities.

The standards themselves aren’t changing, but the details reveal some interesting tidbits. Photos of breasts are OK in some cases — such as breastfeeding or in a painting — but not in others. The document details what counts as sexual exploitation of adults or minors, but leaves room to ban more forms of abuse, should it arise.

Since Facebook doesn’t allow serial murders on its service, its new standards even define the term. Anyone who has committed two or more murders over “multiple incidents or locations” qualifies. But you’re not banned if you’ve only committed a single homicide. It could have been self-defense, after all.

Reading through the guidelines gives you an idea of how difficult the jobs of Facebook moderators must be. These are people who have to read and watch objectionable material of every stripe and then make hard calls — deciding, for instance, if a video promotes eating disorders or merely seeks to help people. Or what crosses the line from joke to harassment, from theoretical musing to direct threats, and so on.

Moderators work in 40 languages. Facebook’s goal is to respond to reports of questionable content within 24 hours. But the company says it doesn’t impose quotas or time limits on the reviewers.

The company has made some high-profile mistakes over the years. For instance, human rights groups say Facebook has mounted an inadequate response to hate speech and the incitement of violence against Muslim minorities in Myanmar. In 2016, Facebook backtracked after removing an iconic 1972 Associated Press photo featuring a screaming, naked girl running from a napalm attack in Vietnam. The company initially insisted it couldn’t create an exception for that particular photograph of a nude child, but soon reversed itself, saying the photo had “global importance.”

Monica Bickert, Facebook’s head of product policy and counterterrorism, said the detailed public guidelines have been a long time in the works. “I have been at this job five years and I wanted to do this that whole time,” she said. Bickert said Facebook’s recent privacy travails, which forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify for 10 hours before Congress, didn’t prompt their release now.

The policy is an evolving document, and Bickert said updates go out to the content reviewers every week. Facebook hopes it will give people clarity if posts or videos they report aren’t taken down. Bickert said one challenge is having the same document guide vastly different “community standards” around the world. What passes as acceptable nudity in Norway may not pass in Uganda or the U.S.

There are more universal gray areas, too. For instance, what exactly counts as political protest? How can you know that the person in a photo agreed to have it posted on Facebook? That latter question is the main reason for Facebook’s nudity ban, Bickert said, since it’s “hard to determine consent and age.” Even if the person agreed to be taped or photographed, for example, they may not have agreed to have their naked image posted on social media.

Facebook uses a combination of the human reviewers and artificial intelligence to weed out content that violates its policies. But its AI tools aren’t close to the point where they could pinpoint subtle differences in context and history — not to mention shadings such as humor and satire — that would let them make judgments as accurate as those of humans.

And of course, humans make plenty of mistakes themselves. AP

WASHINGTON, April 11: Under fire for the worst privacy debacle in his company’s history, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg batted away often-aggressive questioning from lawmakers who accused him of failing to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. election.

During some five hours of Senate questioning Tuesday, Zuckerberg apologized several times for Facebook failures, disclosed that his company was “working with” special counsel Robert Mueller in the federal probe of Russian election interference and said it was working hard to change its own operations after the harvesting of users’ private data by a data-mining company affiliated with Donald Trump’s campaign.

Seemingly unimpressed, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Zuckerberg’s company had a 14-year history of apologizing for “ill-advised decisions” related to user privacy. “How is today’s apology different?” Thune asked.

“We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company,” Zuckerberg conceded, and Facebook must work harder at ensuring the tools it creates are used in “good and healthy” ways.

The controversy has brought a flood of bad publicity and sent the company’s stock value plunging, but Zuckerberg seemed to achieve a measure of success in countering that: Facebook shares surged 4.5 percent for the day, the biggest gain in two years.

In all, he skated largely unharmed through his first day of congressional testimony. He’ll face House questioners Wednesday.

The 33-year-old founder of the world’s best-known social media giant appeared in a suit and tie, a departure from the T-shirt he’s famous for wearing in public as well as in private. Even so, his youth cast a sharp contrast with his often-elderly, gray-haired Senate inquisitors. And the enormous complexity of the social network he created at times defeated the attempts of legislators to hammer him on Facebook’s specific failures and how to fix them.

The stakes are high for both Zuckerberg and his company. Facebook has been reeling from its worst-ever privacy failure following revelations last month that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which was affiliated with Trump’s 2016 campaign, improperly scooped up data on some 87 million users. Zuckerberg has been on an apology tour for most of the past two weeks, culminating in his congressional appearance Tuesday.

Although shaky at times, Zuckerberg seemed to gain confidence as the day progressed. An iconic figure as a billionaire entrepreneur who changed the way people around the world relate to each other, he made a point of repeatedly referring back to the Harvard dorm room where he said Facebook was brought to life.

At times, he showed plenty of steel. After aggressive questioning about Facebook’s alleged political bias from Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, Zuckerberg was asked if he was ready to take a break.

No need. “That was pretty good,” he said of the exchange with Cruz.

For the most part, his careful but generally straightforward answers, steeped in the sometimes arcane details of Facebook’s underlying functions, often deflected aggressive questioning. When the going got tough, Zuckerberg was able to fall back on: “Our team should follow up with you on that, Senator.”

As a result, he found it relatively easy to return to familiar talking points: Facebook made mistakes, he and his executives are very sorry, and they’re working very hard to correct the problems and safeguard the users’ data.

As for the federal Russia probe that has occupied much of Washington’s attention for months, he said he had not been interviewed by special counsel Mueller’s team, but “I know we’re working with them.” He offered no details, citing a concern about confidentiality rules of the investigation.

Earlier this year Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies in a plot to interfere in the 2016 presidential election through a social media propaganda effort that included online ad purchases using U.S. aliases and politicking on U.S. soil. A number of the Russian ads were on Facebook.

Much of the effort was aimed at denigrating Democrat Hillary Clinton and thereby helping Republican Trump, or simply encouraging divisiveness and undercutting faith in the U.S. system.

Zuckerberg said Facebook had been led to believe Cambridge Analytica had deleted the user data it had harvested and that had been “clearly a mistake.” He said Facebook had considered the data collection “a closed case” and had not alerted the Federal Trade Commission. He assured senators the company would handle the situation differently today.

Separately, the company began alerting some of its users that their data was gathered by Cambridge Analytica. A notification that appeared on Facebook for some users Tuesday told them that “one of your friends” used Facebook to log into a now-banned personality quiz app called “This Is Your Digital Life.” The notice says the app misused the information, including public profiles, page likes, birthdays and current cities, by sharing it with Cambridge Analytica.

In the hearings, Zuckerberg is trying to both restore public trust in his company and stave off federal regulations that some lawmakers have floated.

Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida said he believes Zuckerberg was taking the congressional hearings seriously “because he knows there is going to be a hard look at regulation.”

Republicans have yet to get behind any legislation, but that could change.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked Zuckerberg if he would be willing to work with lawmakers to examine what “regulations you think are necessary in your industry.”

Absolutely, Zuckerberg responded, saying later in an exchange with Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, that “I’m not the type of person who thinks that all regulation is bad.”

Ahead of the hearing, John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said, “This is a serious matter, and I think people expect us to take action.”

At the hearing, Zuckerberg said: “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

He outlined steps the company has taken to restrict outsiders’ access to people’s personal information. He also said the company is investigating every app that had access to a large amount of information before the company moved to prevent such access in 2014 — actions that came too late in the Cambridge Analytica case. AP

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook is getting an unwelcome look at the shady side of the hacking culture that CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrates.

Intruders recently infiltrated the systems running the world’s largest online social network but did not steal any sensitive information about Facebook’s more than 1 billion users, according to a blog posting Friday by the company’s security team.

The unsettling revelation is the latest breach to expose the digital cracks in a society and an economy that is storing an ever-growing volume of personal and business data online.

The news didn’t seem to faze investors. Facebook’s stock dipped 10 cents to $28.22 in Friday’s extended trading.

The main building at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters lists its address as 1 Hacker Way. From there, Facebook serves as the gatekeeper for billions of potentially embarrassing photos and messages that get posted each month.

This time, at least, that material didn’t get swept up in the digital break-in that Facebook said it discovered last month. The company didn’t say why it waited until the afternoon before a holiday weekend to inform its users about the hack.

It was a sophisticated attack that also hit other companies, according to Facebook, which didn’t identify the targets.

“As part of our ongoing investigation, we are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future,” Facebook wrote on the blog.

Online short-messaging service Twitter acknowledged being hacked earlier this month. In that security breakdown, Twitter warned that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 of the more than 200 million accounts set up on its service.

Late last month, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – two of the three largest US newspapers – said they were hit by China-based hackers believed to be interested in monitoring media coverage of topics that the Chinese government deemed important.

Facebook didn’t identify a suspected origin of its hacking incident, but provided a few details about how it apparently happened.

The security lapse was traced to a handful of employees who visited a mobile software developer’s website that had been compromised, which led to malware being installed on the workers’ laptops. The PCs were infected even though they were supposed to be protected by the latest anti-virus software and were equipped with other up-to-date protection.

Facebook linked part of the problem to a security hole in the Java software that triggered a safety alert from the US Department of Homeland Security last month. The government agency advised computer users to disable Java on their machines because of a weakness that could be exploited by hackers.

Oracle, the owner of Java, has since issued a security patch that it says has fixed the problem. In its post, Facebook said it received the Java fix two weeks ago.

Facebook never mentioned the word “hack” in describing the breach. That, no doubt, was by design because hacking is a good thing in Zuckerberg’s vernacular.

To most people, hacking conjures images of malevolent behavior by intruders listening to private voicemails and villains crippling websites or breaking into email accounts.

Zuckerberg provided his interpretation of the word in a manifesto titled “The Hacker Way” that he included in the documents that the company filed for its initial public offering of stock last year.

“The word ‘hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

Paul Ceglia, 39, a one-time wood pellet salesman from Wellsville, New York, was charged with mail and wire fraud over what federal prosecutors and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said was fabricated evidence to support his claim to a large stake in Facebook through a 2003 deal with Zuckerberg.

Ceglia’s accusations against Zuckerberg had marked a bizarre twist to Facebook’s march toward its highly anticipated initial public offering in May. Facebook’s origins were also the focus of a separate legal challenge by Zuckerberg’s Harvard University classmates, the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, in a saga chronicled in the 2010 film, “The Social Network.”

Ceglia sued the Silicon Valley company and its chief executive in 2010, claiming that a 2003 contract he signed with Zuckerberg entitled him to a stake in the social media network. Zuckerberg had done programming work for Ceglia’s company, StreetFax.com, while at Harvard University.

This past March, as part of that case, Facebook attorneys released emails sent by Zuckerberg to show Ceglia’s claims were false. The attorneys cited work by forensic experts who found that Ceglia had typed text into a Microsoft Word document and declared it was the text of emails with Zuckerberg.

Ceglia sought “a quick pay day based on a blatant forgery,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said in a statement announcing the criminal charges. “Dressing up a fraud as a lawsuit does not immunize you from prosecution.”

A lawyer for Ceglia could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Ceglia used the federal court system to perpetuate his fraud and will now be held accountable for his criminal scheme,” Orin Snyder, a partner at law firm Gibson Dunn who is representing Facebook and Zuckerberg in the civil case, said in a statement.

PARTNERSHIP CLAIMS

In his lawsuit, filed in federal court in Buffalo, New York, Ceglia had claimed that Zuckerberg shared his plans for a social networking site with him while working at StreetFax. He contended that their contract granted him part ownership in Zuckerberg’s project in exchange for a $1,000 investment.

To build his case, Ceglia submitted what he said were emails from Zuckerberg that proved the pair had discussed the project that would eventually become Facebook.

But Zuckerberg said he had not even conceived of the idea for Facebook until December 2003, and submitted his own emails to prove his version of the timeline.

Ceglia went through a string of lawyers from prominent firms, including DLA Piper and Milberg, who worked with him on the case but later withdrew.

Ceglia was arrested at his home on Friday morning and appeared in federal court in Buffalo in the afternoon. In the hearing, a federal judge set bail at $21,000 and stayed the bail order until Monday at noon to give prosecutors a chance to appeal it, authorities said.

Each of the charges against him carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Investigators for the Postal Inspection Service, which is conducting the probe, made the arrest following Ceglia’s return to the United States this week after spending time out of the country, according to a source familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly on the case.

The judge in Friday’s hearing ordered Ceglia and his family to surrender their travel documents.

Separately on Friday, Massachusetts fined Citigroup Inc $2 million to settle charges that two bank analysts improperly released confidential information about Facebook’s financials before the technology company went public.

The case is USA v. Paul Ceglia, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

(Additional reporting by Nate Raymond; editing by Martha Graybow, Bernadette Baum and Matthew Lewis)