The Listening Post

Resolutions vs reality: Facebook’s disastrous 2018

Facebook’s end-of-year wrap glossed over most of its own bad news. Plus, US immigration raids caught on camera.

On The Listening Post this week: Facebook’s end-of-year wrap glossed over most of its own bad news. Plus, what happens when US immigration raids are caught on camera.

Facebook 2018: Resolutions vs reality

New Year’s resolutions can be difficult to keep. That didn’t stop Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowing at the outset of 2018 that this would be the year he would fix things.

Since then, multiple controversies, including the Cambridge Analytica data breach and the United Nations‘ report on Facebook’s role in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, have exposed some of the pragmatic business calculations the company has made, which contradict the feel-good image the company has worked hard to sell.

Contributors

Siva Vaidhyanathan – University of Virginia, author ‘Anti-Social Media’
David Gilbert – Tech reporter, Vice News
Bernie Hogan – Oxford Internet Institute
Ina Fried – Chief Technology correspondent, Axios

On our radar

Richard Gizbert speaks to producer Will Yong about the latest effort at media consolidation in Hungary, the Central European Press and Media Foundation, and TIME magazine’s Person of the Year, which honours journalists under fire.

ICE watch: Turning the lens on the US immigration agencies

Before President Donald Trump took office, most media junkies in the United States would not have known that ICE stands for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

But the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies have changed all that.

And with the president’s ceaseless talking and tweeting about threats like a government shutdown if Democrats refuse to fund his border wall, or that migrant caravan from Honduras, stories about ICE and its sister agency, CBP – Customs and Border Protection – are right up there on the mainstream media’s agenda.

But the role the media are playing in this particular narrative is going well beyond just covering the story.

The Listening Post‘s Flo Phillips reports from the US on some of the media collaborations that are turning the lens on the immigration authorities to track enforcement abuse.

Contributors

Palika Makam – Programme coordinator, WITNESS
Ryan Devereaux – Immigration reporter, The Intercept
Muzaffar Chishti – Director, Migration Policy Institute
Dara Lind – Immigration reporter, Vox