A Los Angeles jury has found Meta and Google liable in a landmark social media addiction trial, and they’ve awarded $3 million in damages to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who claims she became addicted to social media, causing her significant mental health problems.
A former senior Facebook executive has told the BBC how the social media giant worked “hand in glove” with the Chinese government on potential ways of allowing Beijing to censor and control content in China.
Sarah Wynn-Williams – a former global public policy director – says in return for gaining access to the Chinese market of hundreds of millions of users, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, considered agreeing to hiding posts that were going viral, until they could be checked by the Chinese authorities.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, blamed the company’s fact-checking partners for some of Facebook’s moderation issues, saying in a video that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.”
Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is kissing up to President-elect Donald Trump, trying to worm his way into the MAGA sphere and pretend he is enthusiastic for reform. But as a victim of devastating Facebook censorship warned, Zuckerberg is not to be trusted, especially since he has yet to apologize to and restore the data for multiple users whose lives were transformed by online censorship.
He should be in jail for election interference.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that the government pressured his company to censor content during the Covid-19 pandemic and said he regrets following their wishes. The committee described his comments as a “big win for free speech.”
Losing the ability to share news on Facebook has hurt Theresa Blackburn’s bottom line and her newspaper’s ability to serve her community — and as she works around the clock to keep her business afloat, she’s pleading with lawmakers to make a deal with Meta so publishers can once again share their content.
Blackburn’s free newspaper, the River Valley Sun, covers “ultra-local” news in New Brunswick’s Western Valley, a rural stretch of the western part of the province serving about 35,000 to 40,000 people.
The fact-checking director who oversees Mark Zuckerberg’s misinformation program on Facebook has been caught in secret emails colluding with a now disgraced operation which suppressed journalism during Australia’s Voice referendum.
International Fact Checking Network Director Angie Holan runs the body which certifies Facebook fact checkers and has the power to investigate allegations of bias and strip fact checkers of certification in the event rules are broken.
A bill that mandates tech giants pay news outlets for their content has come into effect in Canada amid an ongoing dispute with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta over the law.
Some have hailed it as a game-changer that sets out a permanent framework that will see a steady drip of funds from wealthy tech companies to Canada’s struggling journalism industry.
But it has also been met with resistance by Google and Meta – the only two companies big enough to be encompassed by the law.
Facebook parent Meta said on Tuesday it had shut down a so-called “Spamouflage” campaign to covertly boost China’s image on its platforms.
Meta said it removed some 7,700 Facebook accounts plus hundreds of other pages, groups and Instagram accounts that pushed pro-China narratives online.
The accounts typically praised China and its policies in Xinjiang, and criticized the United States, Western foreign policy, and individuals critical of Beijing, including journalists.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram Threads, which some say could rival Elon Musk’s Twitter, has seen a drop-off in users and engagements in recent days after a relatively strong showing in early July, according to analytics companies.
“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, the managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC.
Canada’s federal government has said it will pull all its advertising from Facebook and Instagram.
It follows parent company Meta’s move to restrict news content for Canadians after parliament passed a law that will force tech firms to pay media for news.
Canadian officials said on Wednesday that they stand by the law and will not be “intimidated” by Meta.
They said they have been in contact with other countries who plan to pass similar laws.
I must be a bad person because I just can’t seem to care about this at all.
In Justin Trudeau Mark Zuckerberg fortunately found someone even more loathed than himself to have a fight with. I can’t pick a side.
“We’re not backing down on this. This goes to the core of a free and informed society that is able to take responsible decisions in a democracy,” says PM Trudeau when asked about possible next steps on C-18 following govt’s suspension of its ads on Facebook & Instagram.#cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/4fGCeCwEbP
— CPAC (@CPAC_TV) July 5, 2023
Canadian lawmakers are locked in a dispute with internet technology companies over a law that would compel them to pay news publishers for content, years after a similar regulatory saga played out in Australia.
On Thursday, Google followed Meta in announcing plans to block news for Canadian users now that the Online News Act has become law. It is expected to take effect later this year.
I don’t think this is a an overwhelming hardship for end users, but it’s likely not so good for the news organizations that may go out of business thanks to Junior.
The social media giant Meta has confirmed that it will end access to news on its social media sites for all Canadian users before Bill C-18, the Online News Act, comes into force.
The tech company made the announcement Thursday, the day after Parliament passed Bill C-18. The law will force tech giants like Meta and Google to pay news outlets for posting their journalism on their platforms.
OTTAWA—Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, will soon start blocking the sharing and posting of news content for some Canadians on those platforms as part of a testing strategy that could become permanent — and rolled out nationwide — if Ottawa’s online news bill passes unchanged.
In the coming days, Meta will introduce the tests in preparation for the potential passage of Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, which it opposes.
Facebook owner Meta has hit out against a ‘flawed and unjustified’ fine after it was ordered to pay a record $1.3billion and stop transferring European data to America.
The European Union handed Meta the privacy fine on Monday and ordered it to stop transferring user data across the Atlantic by October, the latest chapter in a decade-long case sparked by US cyber snooping fears.
The penalty fine from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) after a three-year probe into the social media giant is the biggest since the EU’s strict data privacy regime took effect five years ago, surpassing Amazon’s $807million penalty in 2021 for data protection violations.
