A statement on its website on June 23 said it had received reports of Catholics having their WhatsApp accounts taken over by scammers who claimed to be helping them with the papal mass ticket registration process.

Pope Francis will visit Singapore from Sept 11 to 13 and will celebrate mass on Sept 12.

More than 40,000 tickets will be available to the public in the online ballot, open to anyone in Singapore with a valid account on the myCatholicSG portal.

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Several countries, including the UK, have criticised China for imposing new security laws, which they say threaten the territory's long-standing autonomy.

Facebook said it would stop considering the requests, "pending further assessment" of the human rights issues.

No personal information about users in the region was held at or disclosed from its Hong Kong office, it added.

"We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and support the right of people to express themselves without fear for their safety or other repercussions," Facebook said. Read more

No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator.

The US Congress has failed.

The EU has failed.

When the Federal Trade Commission fined it a record $5bn for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its stock price actually went up.

Which is what makes this moment so interesting and, possibly, epochal.

If the boycott of Facebook by some of the world's biggest brands - Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks - succeeds, it will be because it has targeted the only thing that Facebook understands: its bottom line.

And if it fails, that will be another sort of landmark.

Because this is a company that facilitated an attack on a US election by a foreign power, that live-streamed a massacre then broadcast it to millions around the world and helped incite a genocide.

I'll say that again. It helped incite a genocide.

A United Nations report says the use of Facebook played a "determining role" in inciting hate and violence against Myanmar's Rohingya, which has seen tens of thousands die and hundreds of thousands flee for their lives.

I often think about that report.

When I watch documentaries showing Facebook employees playing ping-pong inside their Menlo Park safe space.

When I took a jaunt to the suburban Silicon Valley town earlier this year and strolled down the "normal" street where Mark Zuckerberg lives his totally normal life as the sole decision-maker in a company the like of which the world has never seen before.

When I heard that Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who has done so much to warn of Facebook's harms, had been sentenced to jail.

When I read the Orwellian defence that our former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg wrote last week. "Platforms like Facebook hold a mirror up to society," he said.

Facebook is not a mirror. It's a gun. Unlicensed - it is not subject to laws or control - it is in the hands and homes of 2.6 billion people, infiltrated by covert agents acting for nation-states, a laboratory for groups who praise the cleansing effects of the Holocaust and believe 5G will fry our brainwaves in our sleep.

People sometimes say that if Facebook was a country, it would be bigger than China.

But this is the wrong analogy.

If Facebook was a country, it would be a rogue state.

It would be North Korea. And it isn't a gun. It's a nuclear weapon.

Because this isn't a company so much as an autocracy, a dictatorship, a global empire controlled by a single man. Who - even as the evidence of harm has become undeniable, indisputable, overwhelming - has simply chosen to ignore its critics across the world.

Instead, it has continued to pump out relentless, unbelievable, increasingly preposterous propaganda even as it controls the main news distribution channels.

And just as the citizens of North Korea are unable to operate outside the state, it feels almost impossible to be alive today and live a life untouched by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

The #StopHateForProfit campaign is focused on hate speech.

It's what has united six American civil rights organisations in the US to lobby advertisers to "pause" their ads for July, a campaign precipitated by Facebook's decision not to remove a post by Donald Trump threatening violence against Black Lives Matter protesters: "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."

But this is so much bigger than Facebook's problem with hate. Continue reading

Yet for some 10,000 Chilean believers, God is not only alive and well, but he shows up on their phones every day via the popular messaging service WhatsApp.

The success of the initiative suggests that while the abuse scandals may have badly frayed confidence in the institutional church and its leadership, it has not killed off the basic human hunger for faith and community.

Called "The Gospel of the Day," the free service began five years ago, and though it includes seven priests and mobilizes an entire family, the whole operation is basically a one-woman show, who's not shy about saying that if it weren't for the Holy Spirit, she would have thrown the entire thing in the trash more than once.

"It can be frustrating, as people don't understand that behind this ‘service' there's one person who perhaps that day is in the hospital because her son has appendicitis," she told Crux.

Since it's an anonymous service, a decision made in part to combat her own curiosity to know who's on the WhatsApp list, she requested her identity be withheld too.

It all began, she said, when the "Argentine side of the family" began sending her three-minute meditations of the day's Gospel, all by the same priest.

She liked the meditations so much that she began forwarding them to her friends, who in time, invited others to join a "homemade group."

Out of the blue, however, the priest at one point announced he'd stop sending his meditations.

"Another person, who turned out to be a priest I knew but who I had no idea was on the list, sent me a note in private saying, ‘What are you going to do with all these souls?'" she said.

The two met to talk about it, and "somehow, I ended up agreeing to run it."

Together, they summoned seven different priests, both diocesan and from various religious orders or movements, including a Jesuit and a priest of Opus Dei.

"This was a bit historic itself, as the clergy in Santiago is as divided as society, and those who belong to one camp don't really mix with those in the other," she said.

She sent a message to the original group, saying that a Chilean version of the WhatsApp thread would soon be launched.

Some 700 people, most of whom she didn't know, signed up!

A few months later, Radio Maria Chile decided to broadcast the three-minute meditations and gave her phone number to the audience.

In one day, another 2,000 people signed up!

This was five years ago, and the service has only grown since then.

She's changed phones, internet plans and some of the priests have rotated, but only twice she wasn't able to send the daily meditations, though for a period she "contracted" her daughter to help out.

"It's the thing I've been most faithful to my entire life," she said.

"I mean, other than my husband. But I can avoid my husband for a day if the need arises. If I avoid the Gospel of the Day, I get thousands of messages from people, not all of them understanding, asking ‘Where is it?'" Continue reading