Facebook | Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion - Part 7
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Careful, now..."artistic nudity" could be coming to a Facebook timeline near you. No, seriously! Facebook updated its "community standards" this week with new instructions on how to keep your content in-bounds in an increasingly diverse online community. That diversity has given rise to a lot of confusion about what sorts of content are allowed, and why other types of content are taken down by site moderators. The BBC spoke to Facebook about how the new standards could help:
Monika Bicket, Facebook's global head of content policy, said the rewrite was intended to address confusion about why some takedown requests were rejected. "We [would] send them a message saying we're not removing it because it doesn't violate our standards, and they would write in and say I'm confused about this, so we would certainly hear that kind of feedback," she told the BBC. "And people had questions about what we meant when we said we don't allow bullying, or exactly what our policy was on terrorism. "[For example] we now make clear that not only do we not allow terrorist organisations or their members within the Facebook community, but we also don't permit praise or support for terror groups or their acts or their leaders, which wasn't something that was detailed before." Ms Bicket stressed, however, that the policies themselves had not changed.
The most controversial tweaks to policy? They involve sex and terrorism, of course.

We've all been there. You read an outrageously mind-blowing headline before downing your mandatory morning cup of joe, you're not firing on all cylinders, share the article with an "incredible!" or "ZOMG!" or "this is an OUTRAGE" caption, only to receive the mockery you earned. Or maybe that's just me (don't judge). Whether is was The Onion when they hit a little too close to home or The Daily Currant, a particularly sneaky satirical news site, we've all been snookered by a satirical headline at least once. If you haven't, your time is coming. Evidently, Facebook wants to make sure users are never subjected to the horror of learning an article they thought was fact is actually complete fiction. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

First spotted by Ars Techinca, the tag clearly flags any Onion headline which shows up in your News Feed as "[Satire]," though the feature doesn't apply to every parody article just yet.

A Facebook rep confirmed the news to Ars Technica, saying "We received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units."

Pew Research is out with another installment on its study of News Use across Social Media Platforms, some of which may be helpful to activists in the political grassroots movement. Facebook leads the way as a social media platform for news consumers.  64% of US adults are on Facebook, with 47% of those using the site to obtain news - this translates to 30% of the US population using Facebook as a source of news. Though in a previous Pew Research report (noted below), most indicated they do not necessarily go to Facebook seeking out news, rather, they get the news while they're there for other reasons. In contrast, only 16% of US adults use Twitter, with just over half of those using it for news, which translates to 8% of the population using Twitter as a source for news.  And while reddit's users are very active news consumers, a very tiny fraction of the US population is even using reddit at all. From the Pew Research report:
The proportions who get news, combined with the total reach of a site, show how many U.S. adults are learning about events and issues through each social networking site. Facebook is by far the largest social networking site among U.S. adults, and with half of its users getting news there, is also the largest among U.S. adults when it comes to getting news. As discussed in an earlier report, roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there—amounting to 30% of the general population. YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at 51% of U.S. adults. Thus, even though only a fifth of its users get news there, that amounts to 10% of the adult population, which puts it on par with Twitter. Twitter reaches just 16% of U.S. adults, but half (8% of U.S. adults) use it for news. reddit is a news destination for nearly two-thirds of its users (62%). But since just 3% of the U.S. population uses reddit, that translates to 2% of the population that gets news there.
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The Facebook page of Iran's Foreign Minister was reportedly hacked, according to the Associated Press.  Details of what exactly was posted and how the account was accessed weren't immediately clear, but reports indicate the message was a comment about Iran's 2009 election. From the Associated Press: The...

We've all heard of the problems faced on Twitter with the #TwitterGulag resulting from false claims of harassment and/or spam. It's also a problem on Facebook, as detailed by Ruthie Blum (sister of John Podhoretz) at The New York Observer. Blum speaks of the problem faced by pro-Israel writers on Facebook...