Odds and Ends 

Facebook pulls pseudoscience from its list of targeted ad categories

Even as Mark Zuckerberg touted the “hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19” that the site had pulled in recent months, Facebook continued to offer targeted ads classified as “pseudoscience.” It was an odd choice from a social network so publicly declaring its own campaigns to remove junk science amid a global pandemic. Using Ad Manager, advertisers were able to serve ads to some 78 million people “who have expressed an interest in pseudoscience.” Following an investigation by The Markup that found the site buying ads to…

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Odds and Ends 

Dem Groups Begin Digital Assault of Trump Over Coronavirus

Swing state voters are being targeted with political ads hammering President Donald Trumps response to the coronavirus pandemic. But the organizations behind the ads are taking steps to ensure that they and their funders remain shrouded from public view. This week, Not In Our America, a new Facebook advertiser, began buying up promoted space on the platform to attack the administrations coronavirus response in the key 2020 states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. The ads are the newest addition to a handful of Democratic and progressive groups suggesting…

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Headlines 

Facebook to remove misleading Trump ‘census’ ads

Presidents re-election campaign had sponsored misleading ads, which actually linked to Republican fundraising site Facebook has announced it will remove a series of misleading ads from Donald Trumps re-election campaign. The Trump Make America Great Committee posted 2,000 iterations of an ad this week, asking users to respond to the Official Congressional District Census. Instead of information at the Census Bureau, however, the posts linked to a once-in-a-decade event that seeks to count every person in the country, with drastic consequences for resource allocation and government representation nationwide. Trumps campaign…

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Odds and Ends 

Why was a Republican Party Facebook page co-managed by someone in Turkmenistan?

The managers of the official Facebook page for the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) until recently included someone in Turkmenistan. Forensic News reports that the RPOF page, along with those of Republican parties in nine Florida counties, were co-managed by someone in Turkmenistan. Because Facebook does not require page managers to reveal their names, there is no way to know who was managing the pages from Turkmenistan (4) — Eric Levai (@ericlevai) February 20, 2020 Experts told Forensic News that it is possible that the RPOF outsourced social media management,…

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Headlines 

Stop sharing the ‘I’m in a mental hospital’ Facebook post. It’s not funnyit’s harmful

People love Facebook posts that invite them to create silly lists of their friends and family members, and most of the time, it’s all in good fun. But a “mental hospital” post that keeps circulating is nowhere near good fun, and it needs to go away, now. The post begins, “This is Hilarious!” before telling people to follow the directions to fill the following list with Facebook friends’ names: “I’m in a mental hospital My roommate: Licks the glass: Helps me escape: My psychiatrist: Asleep in the corner: Shouts at…

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