0 Pulse survivors sue Twitter, Google, Facebook; claim companies support ISIS

ORLANDO, Fla. - Sixteen survivors of the deadly 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting are suing tech giants Google, Twitter and Facebook, claiming the companies “provided support and resources to … ISIS,” according to a court document released Thursday.

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The suit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, claims the companies "have knowingly and recklessly provided the terrorist group ISIS with accounts to use its social networks as a tool for spreading propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits."

"This material support has been instrumental to the rise of ISIS and has enabled it to carry out, or cause to be carried out, numerous terrorist attacks," the lawsuit claims.

Pulse survivors file lawsuit against Twitter, Google and Facebook https://t.co/yBIh4d1MJM — WFTV Eyewitness News (@WFTV) April 5, 2018

Attorneys for the Pulse survivors are using the Anti-Terrorism Act, enacted in 1992 and amended in 2016 by the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, to pursue the suit. The complaint is based on the companies providing “the infrastructure which provides material support to ISIS” and not on the content of ISIS’s social media posts.

"Despite extensive media coverage, complaints, legal warnings, petitions, congressional hearings and other attention for providing its online social media platforms and communications services to ISIS, prior to the Orlando attack, (the) defendants continued to provide these resources and services to ISIS and its affiliates, refusing to actively identify ISIS Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts, and only reviewing accounts reported by other social media users," according to the lawsuit.

"The explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible" without the companies, the suit claimed.

The plaintiffs seek damages and a declaration from the court that the companies have and are continuing to violate the Anti-Terrorism Act.

The man behind the June 12, 2016, attack at Pulse nightclub, Omar Mateen, was killed by law enforcement officers on the night of the attack. The shooting left 49 people dead and 58 others injured.

Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, was found not guilty last week on charges of obstruction of justice and providing material support to a terrorist organization.

WFTV.com contributed to this report.

© 2019 Cox Media Group.</s>Twitter is the latest online company to support a proposed law to regulate political ads amid growing public pressure after revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections.

The social media company announced on its public policy Twitter feed Tuesday that it will follow Facebook in supporting the Honest Ads Act, a Senate bill that would require tech companies to disclose how political ads are targeted and how much they cost. The bipartisan bill is sponsored by senators Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota; Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia; and John McCain, a Republican from Arizona.

"Twitter is pleased to support the Honest Ads Act," the company said in a tweet. "Back in the fall we indicated we supported proposals to increase transparency in political ads."

In a followup tweet, the company said it's moving forward on providing transparency for online ads. "We believe the Honest Ads Act provides an appropriate framework for such ads and look forward to working with bill sponsors and others to continue to refine and advance this important proposal."

Warner applauded Twitter's public support, and urged Google to do the same. "Huge step forward for the #HonestAds Act. I hope @Google will soon join @Facebook and @Twitter in supporting this bipartisan bill to bring accountability and transparency to online political ads," Warner said in a tweet.

Google has not responded to requests for comment.

The legislation, which would require online companies to adhere to the same disclosure rules as those governing television and radio ads, was drafted after federal law enforcement and US intelligence services disclosed that Russian trolls abused Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to stir up controversy and split the American electorate during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said he supports political advertising regulation.

"Election interference is a problem that's bigger than any one platform, and that's why we support the Honest Ads Act," he said in a Facebook post. "This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online."

Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify at Congressional hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, where he'll be discussing online privacy and data protection. Facebook has been engulfed in controversy since it was made public that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy with ties to the Trump presidential campaign, harvested data on up to 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

Blockchain Decoded: CNET looks at the tech powering bitcoin -- and soon, too, a myriad of services that will change your life.</s>Following Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data from almost 90 million Facebook users was compromised, and Google’s ongoing battle in Europe over antitrust issues, users on the web are starting to worry who’s playing around with their data and how much of their private information is available to advertisers.

The big three internet companies that store your data for various purposes actually make it pretty easy to see what they’re tracking. This week’s “News You Can Use”: how to find out what technology giants — Facebook, Google and Amazon — know about me.

If you want to know what kind of data Facebook is keeping on your file, there are just a few easy steps to download it. Go to your home page, click on the settings tab from the drop down arrow on your toolbar. In your “General Account Settings” there is a blue hyperlink that reads “Download a copy of your Facebook user data.” Click that link, select “Start My Archive,” enter your password and wait for an email with all of the status updates you’ve ever posted and embarrassing videos you shot with your friends in middle school.

You can also see the way Facebook categorizes your demographics, interests and political affiliations for targeted advertising. This is the information Cambridge Analytica was after. Just go to your settings again and click the “Ads” tab in the left-hand column. This will show your ad preferences, advertisers you’ve interacted with and your advertising categories.

Google is where everything starts for many internet users. Have a homework question? Start with Google. Looking for somewhere to eat? Google it. Find a strange growth on your skin and want to know whether you should worry? Google will tell you. Google knows your darkest secrets. It answers the questions you wouldn’t ask anyone else. It knows how often you search for Kardashian news and how much you paid for that authentic 49ers jersey despite the cheaper option Google recommended for you.

If you want to see exactly what Google remembers about you, go to Google Takeout, select which Google products you want to include in your archive (why not go for all of them to be safe) and select “Next.” Then tell Google how you want your archive delivered. It can be an email or it can go straight to your Google Drive.

While Facebook knows who you talk to and Google knows what you think about, Amazon knows what you buy, and that can be the most revealing of the three, especially for potential advertisers. It’s easy to find out how well Amazon knows your shopping habits just by paying attention to the products they recommend to you. But, if you need to see if they remember everything you’ve bought (they do) there’s a way to see that.

Go to your account settings on the Amazon website. Look under the “Ordering and shopping preferences” section and click “Download order reports.” This will bring up a search tool where you can find your orders by date.

Amazon also keeps all of your Alexa voice recordings if you have one of those, and they organize your advertising preferences just like Facebook. Those can be managed and deleted on the Alexa app and on your Amazon account.

Ryan Suppe can be reached at rsuppe@sagebrush.unr.edu and on Twitter @salsuppe.</s>Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the bill last October as a direct response to Russian attempts to influence elections. Specifically, it would do this by:

Twitter's call to back the Honest Ads Act came hours before Facebook CEO Zuckerberg went before a Congressional committee to answer for user data mismanagement with Cambridge Analytica and others. Sen. Warner took to Twitter to applaud the platform's support of his legislation, and hoped that Google -- another host for Russian advertising that sought to interfere with American elections -- would follow soon.</s>The war between Facebook and Google appears to be on the rise after it was revealed the social-networking site will not be releasing an app for the Android OS.

Issues between the two brands appeared when Facebook blocked Google's Friend Connect, citing security issues over the competing application.

However, it's also worth noting that Facebook is ad-served and invested in by Microsoft, which is hardly Google's biggest supporter.

Facebook was quick to release an application for the iPhone, doing so internally, and although it didn't produce the RIM version of the site, it did lend engineers to help develop it.

Fans of Facebook's clean and open interface are sure to be disappointed by the news, as many surely expected to be able to update their status and poke all sorts of things with great ease on the new OS.

However, Facebook hasn't ruled out an app on the handset... but it says Google or a third party will have to do it for the site, as it won't be dedicating any resources to the project.

And, according to TechCrunch, off the record comments are much more scathing: "Android sucks, it doesn't matter."</s>Fred Campbell, a former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Wireless Bureau Chief, told Breitbart News Sunday in an exclusive interview how “Conservatism itself is at stake” thanks to Google and Facebook’s censorship.

Campbell argued that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), similar to Silicon Valley, wants to use conservatives’ opposition to free-market regulation to Facebook and Google’s benefit.

Campbell told Breitbart News Sunday, “Generally we want the market to solve all of these kinds of problems. The problem with privacy in the United States is that it is a mess. There are these sector-specific regulations, the FCC has a certain set of laws and rules that apply to telephone companies, and you have got other laws that apply to Googles of the world.”

“It is not that we need a massive regulatory intervention. On the other hand, it would be wise to have all of the companies on the Internet subject to a single set of rules, rules that are clear and the consumers can understand as well,” the former FCC bureau head explained.

Facebook’s reputation plummeted after reports revealed data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica used the social media platform to gain access to the personal data of more than 87 million users. A recent Reuters poll suggests that only 41 percent of consumers trust Facebook to comply with American privacy laws.

The Facebook CEO will testify before the Senate Judiciary and the Senate Commerce Committees on April 10 at 2:15 p.m. Eastern.

On April 11, Zuckerberg will also appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee “regarding the company’s use and protection of user data.”

Campbell also noted that Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) sponsored a bill, the Browser Act, to “harmonize” the privacy laws between edge providers such as Facebook and Google and Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Comcast and Verizon. The director of Tech Knowledge noted that not a single Democrat supported the bill. The Browser Act would require Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Comcast and Verizon – as well as content providers such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter – to obtain a user’s consent before collecting and selling their information for marketing.

Blackburn asked during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, “Who owns the digital you? Is it you or the search engine or the edge provider that is providing the service?”

Breitbart News Sunday host Matthew Boyle asked Campbell about how, through the Safe Harbor provision in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Facebook and Google can censor conservative voices “with no liability.”

“Conservatism itself is at stake. I do not think a lot of people on our side get that. Democrats have gotten very good at using our own free-market arguments against us,” Campbell argued.

The former FCC bureau chief added, “If we try to do something about it, they [Democrats] say that you are hypocritical because you’re over-regulatory.”

Campbell continued, “They have set it up and what they’re pushing for is the companies that support them, that support them full-time, they say, Google, Facebook, and the like, Silicon Valley, they have the right to edit the Internet whenever they like. They actually have a law that says that they can do that called Section 230 of the Communications Act. They can go ahead and delete conservative voices left and right.”

Breitbart News’s Matthew Boyle noted that, “Government has regulated their competitors. They are thriving because the government is picking winners and losers and leaving them alone.”

Campbell argued that Congress needs to repeal the safe harbor provision in the Communications Act.

He told Breitbart News Sunday, “I’ve argued that Section 230 should be repealed. It protects the Silicon Valley companies’ ability to support the Democrats by deleting our content with no liability.”

Campbell suggested that Section 230 “gives them complete ability to say whatever they want with no liability or slander, or libel, or whatever they like.”

Campbell also told Breitbart News Sunday that we need antitrust to resolve Google’s monopoly.

“We need antitrust action. Google is a clear monopoly over the advertising market. Most online news outlets get a large amount of money, and it is largely relying on Google’s ad network,” Campbell charged. “It is difficult to criticize Google, you risk your bottom line. I think Google needs to be looked at a from an antitrust standpoint. They have become dominant in a lot of markets.”

Roslyn Layton, a visiting scholar for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told Breitbart News Saturday that “Google and Facebook have such an oligopoly” on advertising and that “we need to stop regulating Facebook’s competitors.”

Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell told Breitbart News Saturday that the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal “is a watershed moment for how people will perceive privacy.”

Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview ahead of Facebook’s hearing on the privacy scandal that “Unless you get it right, look for us to make you get it right” on privacy.

Campbell concluded, “We have not gotten behind antitrust again because our free-market arguments get used against us. There’s nothing free market about a monopoly.”</s>Twitter on Tuesday became the next internet giant after Facebook to publicly support the Honest Ads Act, the first and most significant form of internet regulation aimed at requiring transparency for online political ads.

In a statement, Twitter said that its backing of the bill comes after it had previously expressed support for similar proposals to bring more transparency to political ads.

The announcement comes days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post last week that his company, too, welcomed government regulation to make it harder for misinformation or divisive content to spread on the internet.

“These steps by themselves won't stop all people trying to game the system,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads.”

With Twitter on board, lawmakers and transparency advocates brought the issue back to the forefront of the national conversation as Zuckerberg prepared to testify before Congress to answer questions about his company’s role in Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of profile data of up to 87 million users.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, one of the co-sponsors of the bill, called Twitter’s backing a “huge step forward” and said he hoped to see Google also throw its weight behind the bill.

The Honest Ads Act would require internet companies to keep copies of political ads, information about the media buyers, their intended target audiences and rates charged for the ads. The bill would make companies keep that information on file for no less than four years and make that information public.

The requirement would apply to anyone spending $500 or more in a political ad, a higher bar than previously set. The requirements would apply to any site that has at least 50 million unique monthly visitors in the previous 12 months.

Among the backers of a version of the bill in the U.S. Senate are its co-sponsors Warner, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, and John McCain, R-Arizona. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Washington, and Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colorado, have co-sponsored a version of the bill in the House of Representatives.

Google has yet to publicly support the bill despite sending executives to testify at a Senate judiciary committee hearing on Russian election meddling last year. Executives for Google, Facebook and Twitter said they do not know how Russian-backed accounts used their ad platforms to spread content to sow political divisions but vowed to do more.

At a tech conference on Monday, Allan Thygesen — a Google president in the Americas — told an audience that it was launching three initiatives to flag ads that were deemed inappropriate, Mediapost Agency Daily reported.

“At times, Google has fallen short,” Thygesen was quoted as saying. “Underlying this belief is that healthy ad ecosystem must be transparent, trustworthy and valuable.”

As of Wednesday morning, the company had not publicly commented on the Honest Ads Act but we will updated this story if or when it does.</s>In contrast, Apple’s firm stance on not having encryption keys or other ‘back door’ methods for accessing the encrypted data on an iPhone recognizes this nature. If they have the method, someone sometime will use it for ‘evil’.

Our Founding Father’s knew this well and put into place checks and balances to protect against it. As long as MZ holds to his ‘people are basically good’ view, FB and its users will be at risk and will continue to be exploited.

Unfortunately this view is not correct. We are surrounded by the facts of history and day to day life that show that humanity is not good by nature. Lustful desires for sex, power, position, and possessions are at the core of the human ‘heart’. This nature can not be trusted, because it will and does act.

For example, FB (the company itself) is very open, providing access to all of its data to all employees. It is surprising to anyone when they begin to work there given the normal closed/secret culture of Silicon Valley.

A fundamental worldview is at play. Mark Z has the view that humanity is basically good (Humanist). [JF note: I’m not so sure about this, either.] This then leads to a particular level of trust afforded to users/advertisers/developers/ employees/etc., MZ feeling that people will use the platform for ‘good’ and that they can prevent the ‘bad actors’ from doing ‘evil’.

As for the root of this issue, I would claim that the core issue stems from the collection and recording of the data to begin with. Once collected, it can and will be used for ‘evil’ in addition to ‘good’. This is true at our Intelligence Agencies and it is true here as well.

The conflation by the media of these two cases (advertising and apps) is obviously not good, and of course various parties are using it to their political/business advantage.

Aside from this, I do agree that regulation is probably in order for all advertising, and should especially be there for the direct sharing of user data (i.e. the FB app case)

So back to the article. Michael Jones's claim that "To be clear, THE USER INFORMATION LEAVES FB AND GOES TO THE ADVERTISER/ POLITICAL MANIPULATOR/ whatever." is false . Advertisers have no access to specific user data. It works exactly like Google. Advertisers specify the parameters of who should receive the ads/content and FB executes that. It is only FB applications that receive user data, and the user knowingly and explicitly grants permission to the app to receive this information.

When the survey app downloaded the user info, they received not just the survey users data, but their friends data as well. That is how they came to receive such a large data set (270,000 users * ~320 friends per user = 87M fb users). Again, this practice of allowing the "friends" data to be downloaded was stopped several years ago. Today, the only data accessible to a FB app is that data for the users that have granted access to the app. [JF note: I disagree on this point. The “permissions” for a range of apps have been buried within Facebook’s settings, and were turned on by default. Most users would “grant” this access without realizing they were doing so.]

Now to the "data breach" topic. This was a case involving a FB A pplication (or really *all* FB applications). The professor at Cambridge built a survey application that was accessed via Facebook as part of their research. There were a large number of users that completed the survey (~270,000), each one knowingly (explicitly) granting access to their information for the survey app.

And, from another reader who, like Michael Jones, has worked at Google—and more recently than Jones has:

What disturbs me is that, if we weren't able to predict where we were going to end up on this road (and we weren't), and if we don't particularly like where we are (and many of us don't), it's far from clear how to regulate in a way that addresses people's real concerns and doesn't just entrench the existing players

I'd further add [also for quotation] that all those years ago, Facebook was a small upstart while Google was already a behemoth in internet advertising. The fact that Google would not share or sell your personal data was a real challenge for Facebook, and Facebook had to work continuously and cleverly to build a powerful ad system without Google data. Which they did.

Facebook learned from this that people don't care. But it wasn't just Facebook that learned this. Everyone in the industry could see it and decided "full speed ahead," which meant different things to different industry participants. Now, 12 years later, Facebook may be paying some price. But for all those years, if you wanted to promote data silos like Jones described, that's what you had to fight.

Facebook's Graph API—what Cambridge Analytica used to siphon out everyone's data—was, to us in the industry, an audacious disclosure of your friends' personal data without their informed consent. But again, no one seemed to care.

The News Feed, for example, used not to exist. It was a new use of Facebook users' personal information; while it wasn't a violation of privacy, it was a violation of expectations because what you did on Facebook was suddenly being actively pushed out to your friends. And people got upset. But people got over it and eventually seemed to agree with Facebook that it was better to have the News Feed.

One thing I want to put out there is that Facebook was clearly, structurally playing fast and loose with people's personal information.

Now, back to Michael Jones, for a follow-up to his original message and a response (beyond his Twitter dispatches) to his Google/Facebook comparisons:

Thanks for reaching out for a follow-up. I confess that I under-appreciated how strongly people feel about this topic.

When I wrote to you I focused on the "what the risk is" and not so much on the instructions on how to accomplish harm in the Facebook apps and advertising models. As I've seen in questions in the Twitter feed—doubts and disagreements that I answered clearly and conclusively—there are some people who misunderstood the precise phrasing.

This is my fault as I should have been more clear and more detailed to prevent misunderstanding. Glad to have a chance to clear this up, though I fear that the details will cause most reader's eyes to glaze over.

Based on the Twitter feedback, readers including Facebook employees realize that the Facebook API and the apps that live on it do indeed have access to private user information. Apps had more freedom in the past but still retain enough risk of data exfiltration by app developers that Facebook is having to scrutinize them one by one looking for other than the publicly acknowledged abusers among their millions of app developer customers. Even if it was just Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's business model was sufficient to start and enflame the firestorm that grows day by day in Congress, Wall Street, and around the world.

Where there seems to be disagreement with what I wrote to you, and very strong disagreement indeed, is in the realm of Facebook ads. (I wrote "...the advertiser can find out...") As stated above, I should have realized that with their app ecosystem under such investigation and suspicion, the need to protect the sacred cash-cow of advertising would expose me to the strongest counterpunch. Although I answered this in tiny Twitter dribbles, let me say it as clearly as I can here for the benefit of those who care enough to understand the mechanisms.

At Google (and Bing and Amazon and most every other web-advertising company) the user searches for "Cabo San Lucas" at Google or clicks on a pizza oven at Amazon and this is taken as intent on the part of the search engine, and is used to match that user (whoever they may be) with a matching ad.

This is called targeting. Google will give natural results and also information on hotels and flights, Amazon will tell you that customers who bought a pizza oven also bought a Pizza Cutter or a Pizza Tray. This is natural and comfortable because it correlates with your immediate expressed intent.

It is a different situation at Facebook because users are not generally directly searching for things this way. Instead, Facebook came up with a different (and very clever!) way to target users to match them with appropriate advertising.

What they did was to realize that since they know your name and quite a bit more (city, state, address, education, past employers, etc.) from things that you've entered yourself or people that you know (friends and family) that that is enough to identify you in the many external commercial databases of credit history, purchases, property tax records, court cases, or other kinds of reports about people that can be disambiguated ("yes, it is definitely THAT James Fallows") based on the kinds of information that Facebook knows about you internally.

The result is the finest intelligence operation on Earth. Facebook knows more about you than the FBI could in 52,000 categories from "breastfeeding in public" to “total liquid investible assets $1-$24,999" and "Away from family."

Now where the clever part comes in is that Facebook allows advertisers to micro-target ads, not just to Facebook users that "Hate Noise" but to "Hate Noise AND breastfeeding AND frequent transactor at lower cost department or dollar stores." This means that "women looking for inexpensive quiet leaf-blowers" can be targeted with extraordinary specificity. Genius!

However, and this is where I part with the people who argued about my "Facebook Ads Leak Private Information" belief, the story is a little more nuanced than just the extraordinary specificity that has made Facebook so wealthy. To understand this we must explain the some nuance about web advertising and a little about binary arithmetic.

Imagine a quiet leaf blower ad, a photo and some text about the "QuietClean 1000" that is on my website and for which I contract ad display service from Facebook. Facebook chooses who to show the ad to, people click on it, and they are sent to a landing page on my website.

All I know is that they responded to the ad. I don't know their gender, sexuality, credit history, or anything else. This first-level cleanliness underlies the arguments of those who will write to disagree with me. That's fine, but that position is short of obligation number two in the courtroom's "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

The whole truth comes in when I create two ads, looking just alike maybe, but linked to two different places on my website. For add #1, I do a micro-targeting of "only show to males" and for #2 it is "only show to females." Now, when Facebook uses its data (user entered, from friend links, from licensed credit data, etc.) the men are sent to link #1 and the females to #2. That means that as a Facebook user clicks on the ad, I have been told by Facebook "here comes a woman" before the QuietClean ad even appears on her screen.

Because computer ads are not like physical ads, it is not much harder to have 8 or 1024, or 16,777,216 different ads that differ only in the web address on my website, each of which is designed as follows:

When "sex=male" AND "bixesual=NO" => Link to Quiet1

When "sex=male" AND "bixesual=YES" => Link to Quiet2

When "sex=female" AND "bixesual=NO" => Link to Quiet3

When "sex=female" AND "bixesual=YES" => Link to Quiet4

This is termed an ad campaign. (You will often see this as one page with a web tag starting with a "?") It has the remarkable property that everyone who clicks on a QuietClean ad (as micro-targeted by Facebook) has their gender and an aspect of sexuality sent to me before they even see the ad (which I serve from my website).

Each yes or no question doubles the number of individual ads in the campaign. 1 question = 2 ads, 2 questions = 4, 3 = 8, ... and 24 questions = 16,777,216 ads, all of which look alike but are my advertiser part of paying Facebook to tell me if you're looking for a new partner, have been bankrupt, your income range, and maybe someday, medical history. This would be tedious in physical ads, but just a day's work for programmers working for advertisers whose ads you see on Facebook.

As you see above, the 1 or 24 or more facts about you are shared with the advertiser. Facebook makes billions of dollars just this way, in part because advertisers enjoy being able to leech out the otherwise inaccessible private information in your credit report and other information from the unique interest categories that Facebook has exposed this way. (You can download the list of what they know from ProPublica, one of which is "reads The Atlantic" by the way.)

As one former Facebook employee and ad-system said yesterday in your Twitter feed, "yes, but that's less than one click in a thousand that does that." Maybe so! The exact rates are secret, but Harvey Weinstein is not in trouble because every interaction was a grope or rape. If one in a thousand ad clicks in Facebook leaks very private and personally-risky information, that would still be the greatest leak of private information in human history. Keep this in mind if someone writes to say that I am factually and completely wrong, even if might be Mr. Zuckerberg himself. He may believe what he's saying, but I will gladly explain the above to him so that he can know and testify to the whole truth.

Another ex-Facebook respondent said, "well, maybe so, but Google's just as guilty." Another said my description was from an earlier time when honor and respect were greater at Google.

They may be right, though I hope not. Even though I was the official explainer of these kinds of things for years while sharing an office with Eric Schmidt and discussing right and wrong with Larry Page (and admiring both men from up close in an honest appraisal), I left Google a few years ago not long after Eric passed the CEO baton to Larry. Things could have changed and as I told one of your followers, "I can only speak for what I saw in my decade there."</s>Google will be partnering Facebook to sell ads on the social network which may mean that you start seeing more varied marketing messages in your news feed.

But you won't be seeing ads for Google itself on the social network, as Google will be selling space on Facebook to its existing advertisers who already buy space on Google's sites.

They'll be using bespoke bidding software - Google's DoubleClick Bid Manager for Facebook's Ad Exchange (FBX) - to buy premium spots in an auction style.

Given that Facebook is a key competitor to Google's own social networking efforts - the oft-abused Google+ - it's interesting to see the two companies working together.

Google's senior product manager for Doubleclick, Payam Shodjai, explained that Google is keen to partner with more companies because "a rising tide lifts all boats" - so when one of them makes money, they all make money.

This partnership could also mean that ads purchased through DoubleClick will land on Facebook Home, that is if the OS-like overlay survives.

And with Facebook purchasing Instagram, we could see the fruits of this partnership landing in your filtered-photos stream in the near future with Instagram ads on their way.
• Google recently implemented a new ads policy that would allow it to use your photos and names in a very Facebook-ads-type manner – and the change came with quite the backlash.</s>Twitter is the latest online company to support a proposed law to regulate political ads amid growing public pressure after revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections.

The social media company announced on its public policy Twitter feed Tuesday that it will follow Facebook in supporting the Honest Ads Act, a Senate bill that would require tech companies to disclose how political ads are targeted and how much they cost. The bipartisan bill is sponsored by senators Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota; Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia; and John McCain, a Republican from Arizona.

"Twitter is pleased to support the Honest Ads Act," the company said in a tweet. "Back in the fall we indicated we supported proposals to increase transparency in political ads."

In a followup tweet, the company said it's moving forward on providing transparency for online ads. "We believe the Honest Ads Act provides an appropriate framework for such ads and look forward to working with bill sponsors and others to continue to refine and advance this important proposal."

Warner applauded Twitter's public support, and urged Google to do the same. "Huge step forward for the #HonestAds Act. I hope @Google will soon join @Facebook and @Twitter in supporting this bipartisan bill to bring accountability and transparency to online political ads," Warner said in a tweet.

Google has not responded to requests for comment.

The legislation, which would require online companies to adhere to the same disclosure rules as those governing television and radio ads, was drafted after federal law enforcement and US intelligence services disclosed that Russian trolls abused Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to stir up controversy and split the American electorate during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said he supports political advertising regulation.

"Election interference is a problem that's bigger than any one platform, and that's why we support the Honest Ads Act," he said in a Facebook post. "This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online."

Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify at Congressional hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, where he'll be discussing online privacy and data protection. Facebook has been engulfed in controversy since it was made public that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy with ties to the Trump presidential campaign, harvested data on up to 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

Blockchain Decoded: CNET looks at the tech powering bitcoin -- and soon, too, a myriad of services that will change your life.
Sixteen survivors use anti-terror legislation to sue Google, Twitter and Facebook, alleging the firms "provided support and resources" to the Islamic State.