7/30/2018

Headline July 31, 2018/ '' ' FACE BOOK FAIR' ''


'' ' FACE BOOK FAIR' ''




FACEBOOK TRULY FACES a day of reckoning on Wall Street..... And there's a large scratch in  Facebook's Teflon coating.

The social network's user base and revenue grew more slowly than expected in the second quarter as the company grappled with privacy issues, sending its stock tumbling after hours.

OF 47 ANALYSTS covering Facebook, 43 still rate the stock as ''buy'', two rate it ''hold'' and only  two rate it ''sell''. Their median target price is $219.30 

MoffetNathanson analysts called  the company's forecast ''either the new economic reality of their business model or a very public act of self immolation to stave off further regulatory pressure."

Rahul Shah, chief executive officer at Ideal Asset Management in New York, a Facebook shareholder, said executives were trying to reset expectations about growth but the outlook caught  Wall Street by surprise.

ONE CRUCIAL LINE OF questioning - on how much influence Russians bought advertisements and content had on users - was the result of the work by Ms. DiResta and others with Facebook owned tools.

'' Facebook has the tools to monitor how far this content is spreading.,'' Ms. DiResta said.

''The numbers they were originally providing were trying to minimize it.''

Indeed, at the congressional hearings, the tech companies admitted that the problem was far larger than they had originally said.

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said it was ''crazy idea'' that misinformation on Facebook had influenced the election.

But the company acknowledged to that more than 150 million users of its main site and a subsidiary, Instagram, potentially had inflammatory political ads bought by a Kremlin-linked company, the Internet Research Agency.

Ms.DiResta contended that that is still just the tip of the iceberg, Minimizing the scope of the problem was a ''naive form of damage control,'' she said.

''This isn't about punishing Facebook or Twitter, This is us saying, this is important and we can do better.''

In response, Facebook said it had begun organizing academic discussions on disinformation.

''We regularly engage with dozens of sociologists, political scientists, data scientists and communications scholars, and we both read and incorporate their findings into our work,'' said Jay Nancarrow, a Facebook spokesman.

''We value the work of the researchers, and we are going to continue to work with them closely.''

A graduate of Stony Brook University in New York, Ms. DiResta wrote her college thesis on propaganda in the 2004 Russian elections. She then spent seven years on Wall Street as a trader, watching the slow introduction of automation in the market.

She recalled the initial fear of overreliance on algorithms, as there were ''bad actors who could come in and manipulate the system into making bad trades.

'' I look at this now and I see a lot of parallels today, especially for the need for nuance in technological transformations, '' Ms. DiResta.

''Just like technology is never leaving Wall Street. Social Media companies are not leaving our society.''

Ms. DiResta moved to San Francisco in 2011 for a job with O' Reilly Alpha Tech Venture Capital firm. But it wasn't until the birth of her first child a few years later, that Ms. DiResta started to examine the dark side of social media.

''When my son was born, I began looking into vaccines. I found myself wondering about the clustering effects where the anti-vaccine movement was concentrated,'' Ms. DeRista recalled.

''I was thinking. ' What on earth was going on here? Why is movement gaining so much momentum here?''

She started tracking posts made by anti-vaccine accounts on Facebook and mapping the data.

What she discovered, she said, was that Facebook platform was tailor-made for a small group of  vocal people to amplify their voices, especially, if their views veered toward the conspiratorial.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research on Social Media and Facebook continues.

With respectful dedication to the giants of Social Media, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all ''register'' on : wssciw.blogspot.com - The World Students Society - for every subject in the world and Twitter- !E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Scarps & Scrubs '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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