Tag Archives: Facebook

Musk Watch reports: Meta removed an advertisement earlier this month criticizing Elon Musk’s use of DOGE to seize Americans’ private information. “A single individual now controls sensitive U.S. data, risking our national security. Urge Congress to enforce strict oversight,” read the rejected Facebook ad purchased by Ekō, a watchdog group that says it is committed to curbing corporate power. The …

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump has signed settlement papers that are expected to require Meta Platforms to pay roughly $25 million to resolve a 2021 lawsuit Trump brought after the company suspended his accounts following the attacks on the U.S. Capitol that year, according to people familiar with the agreement. Of that, $22 million will go to a …

The New York Times reports: Instagram and Facebook have recently blurred, blocked or removed posts from two abortion pill providers. Instagram also suspended the accounts of several abortion pill providers and hid the providers from appearing in search and recommendations. The actions ramped up in the last two weeks, and were especially noticeable in the last two days, abortion pill …

404 Media reports: Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned. Meta’s Messenger app allows users to change the color scheme and design of their chat windows with …

Axios reports: They say it’s hard to turn a battleship around, but Mark Zuckerberg just about-faced his globe-spanning, $1.5 trillion-value, 3 billion-user company — transforming Meta from a bastion of Silicon Valley’s socially progressive neoliberalism into a full-on MAGA hive. After Zuckerberg’s embrace of Trump and Trumpism, Silicon Valley is holding its breath to see whether a whole row of …

The Intercept reports: Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal. Examples of newly permissible speech include: “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.” “Gays are freaks.” “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 …

The Daily Beast reports: Facebook’s algorithm angered founder Mark Zuckerberg when he shared a November 2023 post about his knee surgery and it received little engagement, The Wall Street Journal reports. It was this experience that led to the Meta CEO’s Jan. 7 announcement that the platform will divest from a centralized fact-checking process, according to the newspaper. “We’re going …

Mark Zuckerberg writes on Meta’s corporate blog: Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, Child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we …

The Associated Press reports: Donald Trump dined on Wednesday with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, bringing together the Facebook founder and the former president who was once banned from that social network. Stephen Miller, who has been appointed deputy chief of staff for Trump’s second term, said Zuckerberg, like other business leaders, wants to …

NBC News reports: Some major tech companies including Meta are taking steps to combat “pig butchering” scams, which trick Americans out of billions of dollars each year through fake online friendships and romances. Pig butchering scams are elaborate and often take months to unfold. Scammers will patiently strike up an online friendship or romantic relationship with a victim, eventually guiding …

Politico Europe reports: Meta was fined almost €800 million by the European Commission for pushing its classified ads service on social media users. The European Union executive said Meta wrongly tied Facebook Marketplace to its social network Facebook and imposed unfair terms on rival ad providers, it said in a press release. Meta was ordered to halt these practices. The …

Axios reports: Meta will extend its ban on new election ads for the week leading up to the election until several days after the polls close, Axios has learned. The tech giant informed advertising partners about the shift on Monday. The ban on new political ads was initially supposed to expire at 11:59 p.m. PT on Election Day, but Meta …

NPR reports: Did you see those Kamala Harris ads on Facebook? Be careful. They might have duped you. A series of ads that look like they are from the Harris campaign are spreading falsehoods about her current policy positions, including that she wants to institute a mandatory gun-buyback program and give Medicare benefits and drivers’ licenses to undocumented immigrants. None …

Ars Technica reports: Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database …

Reuters reports: Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior officials in the Biden administration had pressured his social media company to censor COVID-19 content during the pandemic, adding that he would push back if this were to happen again. In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg told the judiciary committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that he regretted not …

ABC News reports: Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers, watchdog organizations and journalists to monitor social media posts, notably to track how misinformation spreads on the company’s platforms. Wednesday’s shutdown, which Meta announced earlier this year, has been protested by researchers and nonprofits. In May, dozens of groups, including the …

CNBC reports: Meta agreed to pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit by the state of Texas over the Facebook owner’s unauthorized use of biometric data by users, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday. The suit, filed by Paxton in February 2022, accused Meta of capturing and using the biometric data of millions of Texas residents — …

Bloomberg News reports: Meta Platforms Inc. removed 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria linked to scammers who were using its social media services to blackmail targets after soliciting intimate photos, the company said Wednesday. Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, added that it had deleted thousands of additional Facebook accounts, pages and groups that were sharing scripts on how to …

Ars Technica reports: “Join Your Local Militia or III% Patriot Group,” a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: “Now more than ever. Support the …

Reuters reports: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have failed to tackle deceptive advertising and disinformation in the run-up to European Parliament elections, the European Commission said on Tuesday as it opened an investigation into suspected breaches of EU online content rules. The move by EU tech regulators came amid concerns about Russia, China and Iran as potential sources of disinformation, but …