The world’s largest social network has more than 2 billion daily users, and is expanding rapidly around the world. Led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook undergirds much of the world’s communication online, both through its flagship app and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Despite huge financial success, Facebook is also confronted with questions about data privacy, hate speech on the platform, and concerns that frequent social media use can lead to unhappiness. The Verge publishes a nightly newsletter about Facebook and democracy, subscribe here.
Poor Mark Zuckerberg. Imagine calling the 2024 election a “cultural tipping point” for “prioritizing speech” and then the guy who got elected starts bragging about how he threatened you into self-censorship. At least Trump won’t throw him in jail?
After user outrage, Meta is deleting its small army of AI bot profiles in order to fix a bug that removed the ability to block the accounts. As I reported earlier today, the bots have been around since 2023, but many users just discovered them in the last few days following news coverage and social media posts.
The Irish Data Protection Commission announced the fine following an investigation into a data breach that affected 29 million Facebook users. The incident stemmed from an exploit of Facebook’s video upload feature, allowing hackers to obtain users’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more.
Meta, which has already faced several fines from the DPC, plans to appeal the decision, according to the Associated Press.
[Data Protection Commission]
In the coming days, Instagram and Facebook users within the bloc will be given the choice to receive “less personalized ads” that are full-screen and temporarily unskippable, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The offering, which Meta says is likely to negatively impact its business, follows pressure from European Union regulators who opposed users having to pay to avoid targeted ads.
“Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. “The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access. The onus won’t be on parents or young people. There’ll be no penalties for users.”
Legislation will be introduced this month and would come into force 12 months after ratification.
Forbes reports that advertisers have paid Meta more than $1 million to place hundreds of ads promoting lies about the upcoming presidential election. The ads are running despite Meta’s own rules against election misinformation, including posts that “call into question the legitimacy of an upcoming or ongoing election.”
A t-shirt company is running thousands of ads claiming to donate a portion of sales to Trump, Harris, and other political causes, 404 reports. In reality, the company appears to be based abroad — which means it’s either lying about making campaign contributions, or illegally making campaign contributions.
While campaigning for the US Senate in 2021, Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance filmed a Facebook Live using his smartphone’s selfie camera, which mirrored the image, and therefore his campaign signs.
That can be fixed, but Vance’s idea — rotating the phone — is not it. (I recommend waiting a moment to turn on the volume, unless you’re a fan of TikTok’s text-to-speech voices.)
Focus grouping upcoming films is a pretty standard practice. But according to Variety, the rise of toxic online fandoms who treat review bombing and leading harassment campaigns like it’s their job has prompted many of Hollywood’s studios to start soliciting feedback from “superfans” about how to avoid potential backlash from trolls who “are just out for blood, regardless.”
NBC News reports the following statement from an unnamed Meta spokesperson:
After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.
The move follows warnings by the Biden administration that RT is part of Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the 2024 US election and a State Department notice last week saying, “[W]e now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.”
The update will start impacting Facebook and Instagram users in the UK over the coming months, meaning any public posts, comments, and photos on adult accounts (including those featuring children) will be scraped.
Meta says this will bring its generative AI products to the UK “much sooner,” and help them to reflect “British culture, history, and idiom” ...whatever that bloody means.
With exceptions for users under 18, posts that weren’t set to public, or EU accounts that opted out.
Now ABC reports on Australian senator David Shoebridge’s question to Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh.
Shoebridge: “...Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?”
Claybaugh: “Correct.”
Creators who break Facebook’s rules for the first time can now waive a warning from their account by completing in-app training. They’ll be eligible to remove another warning if they don’t violate Facebook’s policy for one year.
This feature is only available to professional mode users for now, and it doesn’t include serious violations, such as posting content containing sexual exploitation.
[Facebook for Creators]
