Six In The Morning Monday 25 October 2021

 

Facebook is ‘unquestionably making hate worse’, says whistleblower Frances Haugen 

Follow evidence to the joint committee of MPs and peers considering the draft online harms bill

Andrew Sparrow

 @AndrewSparrow

Mon 25 Oct 2021 15.57 BSTFirst published on Mon 25 Oct 2021 09.25 BST

Q: Are you saying anonymity exists to protect the identity of the abuser from the victim, not the identity of the abuser from the platform?

Haugen says Facebook has much more information about users than people realise.

15:55

Q: As a prominent whistleblower, do you think anonymity needs to be protected on social media for the sake of whistleblowers?

Haugen says it would be difficult to mandate the use of real names.

But Facebook knows a huge amount of people, so the idea that users are anonymous is not really correct, she says.

She says if people get more content from family and friends, they will get safer content. That is a better solution, she says.

China passes new border law amid concerns about India, Afghanistan

The new regulation gives expanded powers to the Chinese army to patrol or shut the country's 14 land borders. Beijing cited worries about the pandemic and security as a reason for the law.

China passed a new law on Saturday, the first in the country's modern history to deal explicitly with how it patrols its massive 22,100-kilometer (13,700-mile) land border with 14 other countries.

The Land Borders Law, which will go into effect on January 1, comes at a time when China is concerned with security on its frontier with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, COVID-19 entering the country via illegal border crossings from its southeast Asian neighbors and a tense standoff with India over their mutual border that has seen deadly skirmishes in the past year.

 Sudan’s General Burhan dissolves government, declares state of emergency

Sudan’s leading general declared a state of emergency Monday, hours after his forces arrested the acting prime minister and other senior government officials in what the information ministry said amounted to a military coup.

• UN chief condemns Sudan 'coup', urges PM's 'immediate release'

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the Sudanese military's takeover and urged the immediate release of civilian prime minister Abdalla Hamdok. "I condemn the ongoing military coup in Sudan. Prime Minister Hamdok and all other officials must be released immediately," Guterres wrote on Twitter.

• Federal workers on strike; information ministry, Sudanese Professionals Association, others announce ‘civil disobedience’

The ministry of culture and information also announced on Monday that “workers of federal and state ministries and civil service institutions” are going “into a strike” as well as starting a campaign of “total civil disobedience” as a “refusal of the military coup until the power is handed over to civilians”, it wrote on Facebook.

‘Children going to die’: UN warns of ‘acute’ Afghan food crisis

UN says more than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million population is facing acute food insecurity and ‘marching to starvation’.

Millions of Afghans, including children, could die of starvation unless urgent action is taken to pull Afghanistan back from the brink of collapse, a senior United Nations official has warned, calling for frozen funds to be freed for humanitarian efforts.

The World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley told Reuters news agency that 22.8 million people – more than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million population – were facing acute food insecurity and “marching to starvation” compared with 14 million just two months ago.

The Facebook Papers may be the biggest crisis in the company's history

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business

Updated 1157 GMT (1957 HKT) October 25, 2021

Facebook has confronted whistleblowers, PR firestorms and Congressional inquiries in recent years. But now it faces a combination of all three at once in what could be the most intense and wide-ranging crisis in the company's 17-year history.

On Friday, a consortium of 17 US news organizations began publishing a series of stories — collectively called "The Facebook Papers" — based on a trove of hundreds of internal company documents which were included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's legal counsel. The consortium, which includes CNN, reviewed the redacted versions received by Congress.

CNN's coverage includes stories about how coordinated groups on Facebook (FB) sow discord and violence, including on January 6, as well as Facebook's challenges moderating content in some non-English-speaking countries, and how human traffickers have used its platforms to exploit people.

Saudi crown prince suggested killing King Abdullah, ex-official says

Saudi Arabia's crown prince suggested using a "poison ring" to kill the late King Abdullah, a former top Saudi intelligence official has alleged.

In an interview with CBS, Saad al-Jabri said Mohammed bin Salman told his cousin in 2014 that he wanted to do so to clear the throne for his father.

There were tensions within the ruling family at the time over the succession.

The Saudi government has called Mr Jabri a discredited former official with a long history of fabrication.

In his interview with CBS's 60 Minutes programme Mr Jabri warned that Crown Prince Mohammed - Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler and the son of King Salman - was a "psychopath, killer, in the Middle East with infinite resources, who poses threat to his people, to the Americans and to the planet".