Surveillance-Capitalism

Facebook Internal Research Confirms Instagram Toxic for Teen Girls, Conceals Findings While Targeting Youth

| Importance: 9/10

Facebook’s internal research definitively confirms that Instagram is toxic for teenage girls, causing body image issues, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, but the company conceals these findings from the public while continuing to aggressively target youth users to drive engagement …

Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Instagram Wall Street Journal Frances Haugen facebook instagram teen-harm mental-health body-image +5 more
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Amazon Launches HQ2 Bidding War—238 Cities Compete to Offer Billions in Subsidies

| Importance: 9/10

Amazon announced in September 2017 that it would build a second headquarters (HQ2) equal to its Seattle campus, sparking a bidding war among 238 North American cities desperate to win 50,000 promised jobs. Cities competed to offer the largest subsidy packages—with bids averaging $6.75 billion from …

Amazon Jeff Bezos corporate-welfare economic-extraction race-to-bottom surveillance-capitalism
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Facebook Algorithm Amplifies Myanmar Military Hate Speech Enabling Rohingya Genocide

| Importance: 10/10

Facebook’s engagement-maximizing algorithm proactively amplifies Myanmar military’s anti-Rohingya hate speech and genocide propaganda, directly contributing to systematic ethnic cleansing that kills thousands and displaces over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims. The platform’s surveillance …

Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Myanmar Military (Tatmadaw) Rohingya Muslims United Nations +1 more facebook genocide myanmar rohingya algorithm-harm +6 more
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Francisco Partners Acquires 70% Stake in NSO Group for $130 Million

| Importance: 7/10

San Francisco-based private equity firm Francisco Partners acquires a 70% controlling stake in NSO Group from its founders for approximately $120-130 million. The acquisition represents a major influx of Western capital into the Israeli surveillance technology sector and marks the beginning of NSO …

Francisco Partners NSO Group Shalev Hulio Omri Lavie nso-group francisco-partners private-equity pegasus-spyware surveillance-capitalism
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Jeff Bezos Purchases Washington Post for $250 Million

| Importance: 9/10

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos personally purchased The Washington Post and its affiliated publications for $250 million, ending the Graham family’s four-generation stewardship of one of America’s most influential newspapers. The sale marked a watershed moment in billionaire media capture, …

Jeff Bezos Donald Graham Washington Post Company media-capture billionaire-control corporate-power surveillance-capitalism
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Google Fined Record $22.5M for Deliberately Overriding Safari Privacy Settings

| Importance: 9/10

On August 9, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Google would pay a record $22.5 million civil penalty—the largest ever levied against a single company in FTC history—to settle charges of deliberately circumventing Apple Safari browser privacy settings to track users without their …

Google Federal Trade Commission Apple Jon Leibowitz (FTC Chairman) Stanford Web Security Research google privacy-violation ftc tracking safari +3 more
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