Patrick Bennet 
Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, has admitted that they do scan all messengers sent through Facebook messenger.
Zuckerberg said all messages are scanned, and some read in full, to ensure that the community standards are being complied with. He said this during a podcast with Ezra Klein, editor at Vox.
The images and texts sent through messenger are all scanned, and despite the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica as of late, it is done for a good reason, according to the social media mogul.
During the podcast, he spoke about an incident where this practice helped stop something sinister. He recalled receiving a call from employees at The Mountain View firm. Their system had thwarted attempts to send Messenger messages concerning ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
He says in cases such as that, they block messages from being sent through to the intended recipient.
Messenger doesn’t utilize any data from messages, but instead scans photos and links to seek out find advertising and anything that might be abusive. Messages are supposedly only read in full if they are flagged. Then, the moderators will read them and decide to send them through or not.
One of the spokespersons for the social media platform said that, as an example, in Facebook Messenger, when you instant message a picture, the automated system runs a scan utilizing photo matching in order to detect any exploitation of children, or when a link is sent, it is also scanned for viruses and malware.
Facebook created the automated tools, she said, so abusive behavior can be stopped quickly.
Keeping users’ private messages private is top priority, she continued. The Facebook community is being protected by automated systems that detect things such as any known photos of child pornography or malware. It is not scanned by humans. We are also not listening to your calls.
Things are going downhill for Zuckerberg as of late. Just last month, his net worth reportedly went down by $5.1 billion in just a few hours.
On March 19, the stock of his company dropped by seven percent. This hit him hard.
Zuckerberg’s net worth is now about $69.5 billion due to the drop of about $37 billion in stock market value.
In January, changes in Facebook operations resulted in a $3 billion loss.
Zuckerberg says Facebook was created as a way to help people remain connected and to bring people closer together with those that matter most, but recently, there has been feedback that content, such as posts from businesses and media has crowded out the personal interactions that help us to connect with each other.
Based on that information, Zuckerberg said that the goal for the product teams is enabling users to find content relevant to them, in order to facilitate more meaningful social interactions.
There is a phenomenon known as ‘context collapse’ which means, as people post less about themselves online, the data that The Social media sells to advertisers is, in turn, less valuable.
By helping people to share personal information on the site again, they may be able to increase the commercial value of Facebook.
H/T – Source
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