Among the issues investigators on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are digging into are whether IRA and other Russian organizations used any Facebook data, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Also, whether the use of such data had any impact on the U.S. election, and how much Facebook data may have been acquired by Russian entities, the sources said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear before the US House Commerce Committee on 11 April to explain his company's part in the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal. The hearing will be broadcast on C-SPAN and be available to stream online on the channel's website. The story broke on 17 March that Cambridge Analytica, a "strategic communications" consultancy, had harvested information from the profiles of 50m Facebook users - now thought to be closer to 87m - and sold it on to the Donald Trump campaign for use in the micro-targeting of swing voters in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. The Vote Leave campaign pushing for Britain to quit the European Union are also understood to have employed the company's services prior to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data from Global Science Research (GSR), a firm run by academic Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who had been carrying out a personality test using a third-party app called This is Your Digital Life that required its 270,000 paid participants to provide access to their Facebook pages.

Australian authorities say they are investigating whether Facebook breached the country's privacy law when personal information of more than 300,000 Australian users was obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-linked political consulting firm, without their authorization.

On the same day that Facebook announced that 87 million users may have had their personal data improperly accessed -- updated from the "tens of millions" figure the social network previously reported -- the company's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a rare question-and-answer session with the media Wednesday, admitting that the company made a "huge mistake" by not taking more steps to protect user data and privacy early on. When asked if he thinks he is still the best person to run Facebook, Zuckerberg said, "Yes, I think life is about learning from the mistakes and figuring out what you need to do to move forward." Questions about Zuckerberg's leadership come after it's been revealed that Cambridge Analytica might have improperly obtained data from as many as 87 million people, mostly in the United States. The firm had ties to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. "At the end of the day, this is my responsibility," Zuckerberg said, when asked if anyone at Facebook had been fired over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The ability to identify sentiment in text, referred to as sentiment analysis, is one which is natural to adult humans. This task is, however, not one which a computer can perform by default. Identifying sentiments in an automated, algorithmic manner will be a useful capability for business and research in their search to understand what consumers think about their products or services and to understand human sociology. Here we propose two new Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for the task of automated text sentiment analysis. The GAs learn whether words occurring in a text corpus are either sentiment or amplifier words, and their corresponding magnitude. Sentiment words, such as 'horrible', add linearly to the final sentiment. Amplifier words in contrast, which are typically adjectives/adverbs like 'very', multiply the sentiment of the following word. This increases, decreases or negates the sentiment of the following word. The sentiment of the full text is then the sum of these terms. This approach grows both a sentiment and amplifier dictionary which can be reused for other purposes and fed into other machine learning algorithms. We report the results of multiple experiments conducted on large Amazon data sets. The results reveal that our proposed approach was able to outperform several public and/or commercial sentiment analysis algorithms.

INFORMATION wants to be free. This decades-old slogan is the philosophical heart of the internet, putting nearly all human knowledge at our fingertips, free to anyone with a connection. Here is another old slogan: if you're not paying, you're the product. We might not hand over cash for many of the services we get from the internet giants, but we do pay in cold, hard data. On the whole, we have been happy to make that pact.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Facebook disclosed in a blog post on Wednesday that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the private data of a considerably larger number of people than was previously known. "In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people--mostly in the US--may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica," he wrote. The New York Times and other outlets have been reporting that about 50 million people were affected based on information from whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who formerly worked at Cambridge Analytica. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg clarified later in a press call that 87 million was the maximum number of accounts that Cambridge Analytica could have accessed, though the actual number is probably lower.

Facebook said Wednesday that personal data for up to 87 million people--tens of millions more than originally thought--may have been "improperly shared" with Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. Most of those affected were in the United States, the company said. Facebook included the disclosure in the second-to-last paragraph of a company statement that also described new measures to restrict third-party access to user data. Recent stories in the New York Times and the British Observer cited a former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, who said that the Facebook data of more than 50 million people had been harvested and provided to Cambridge Analytica in 2014. The data was acquired, Wylie said, in the hopes of building personality-based models to target and influence voters in US elections.

I'm using this as way to familiarize myself with bookdown so I don't make as many mistakes with my web scraping field guide book. That book is out of distribution and much of the content is in Matthew's "Mining the Social Web" book. There will be many similarities between his "21 Recipes" book and this book on purpose. I am not claiming originality in this work, just making an R-centric version of the cookbook. As he states in his tome, "this intentionally terse recipe collection provides you with 21 easily adaptable Twitter mining recipes".

This article originally appeared in the Motley Fool. In 2014, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook penned a missive regarding Apple's approach to privacy. In the letter Cook famously noted, "A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer, you're the product." Cook was mostly looking to contrast the business model of Apple, which involves mostly making money on device sales, versus that of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), which often sells devices at breakeven to make money from advertising and data collection. However, Cook drew the ire of Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who responded in an interview with Time magazine.