Facebook confirms spying on your Facebook Messenger conversations

Facebook is going through its worst moments since it was born, back in 2007. The scandal of data leaks to the Cambridge Analytics agency (which could have influenced the results of the last US elections) has exposed the most popular social network today. The user had to be aware, at all times, of what many warned at the time, and continue to do: 'If the product is free, the product is you'.

Facebook and hate speech

Now it has been known that Mark Zuckerberg's social network has been spying on each and every conversation through his messaging application, Messenger FacebookThe CEO of Facebook, in an interview with the American journalist Ezra Klein, tried to justify the "lack of privacy" of the social network by alluding to the resolution of international conflicts, such as ethnic cleansing in Burma: the company was aware of everything that was happening in the Asian country thanks to the interception of messages in its Messenger app.

Apparently, Facebook is practically the only source of information that the Burmese have: 14 million inhabitants count on this social network as their particular 'newscast', believing at face value everything that is she exposes herself. A situation that the radical group Ma Ba Tha used to generate hate speech, through fake news, towards the ethnic group of the RohingyaThe fact that Facebook knew at all times what were the messages that were being sent and the news that was published was not an impediment for this discourse to be responsible, in part, for the mass exodus suffered by the Rohingyas.

It is difficult to justify the reading of private messages by moderators on Facebook in order, according to Zuckerberg's own words, to moderate the content that is posted and to prevent fanatic speeches , hate and terrorist acts Sri Lanka, without going any further, accused Facebook of not preventing the hate speech that had been brewing against the country's Muslim population, and which led to a revolt in the middle of last month, which left 3 murdered in its wake.

Does content moderation work as expected on Facebook?

Facebook, for its part, continues to defend itself even though the international community questions its prevention plan against fake news and hate speech.According to statements to Bloomberg, the social network analyzes the conversations, photographs, links and audios that we share through its messaging application exactly the same as it does with the 'public' content. Messages flagged as abusive by company moderators can be removed or blocked if necessary.

When we send a photo, Facebook's internal system is able to detect if we are committing a crime such as sharing child pornography or trying to infect other computers with infected links or executable programs. Facebook has automated tools that automatically remove all these links and photos. In Facebook's own defense, they claim that the data they have obtained from private Messenger conversations has not been used for commercial purposes, but for security purposes.

The latest Facebook scandal has hit the country of India: more than half a million users of the social network have seen their data compromised by using, through the social network, an application called 'thisisyourdigitallife '.Facebook has not been slow to respond to this new scandal, announcing that the user should be aware that their data will not be private while they are on the social network.