“This conclusion is not solely one report, or one Facebook employee’s perspective,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said at Thursday’s hearing. (TechCrunch has a nice blow-by-blow recap.) “It is a pattern of findings repeated across sophisticated and extensive studies that Facebook itself conducted over the past four years.”
Facebook has a new name now. The name is Meta. Meta, Mark Zuckerberg told us in his presentation today at Facebook Connect, comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond.” I think Meta was the right call. And not just because I called it. Writing about this move last week, I reported that the company has been considering something like this for years. Face…
Today let’s talk about the violent political protests in Brazil, and how the situation informs a closely watched decision that Meta is on the verge of making: whether to end Donald Trump’s suspension and allow him to begin posting on Instagram again. More than 1,200 people were arrested on Monday
Bonus links Meta has begun telling publishers it does not plan to renew deals to host their stories on its News Tab amid broader spending cuts. (Sara Fischer / Axios) Meta said it lost $2.8 billion on its Reality Labs division, down slightly from its loss in the previous quarter. (Nelson Wang / CoinDesk) Google said it would delay its plan to kill off third-party cookies until 2024 to give the ad industry more time to test alternatives. (Lara O’Reilly and…
Today let’s talk about whether there should be an Instagram for children. Last month, BuzzFeed reported that Facebook had begun to explore building a separate version of Instagram for children under the age of 13. (No code has yet been written.) Instagram’s terms prohibit pre-teens from using the service, but in practice milli…
Today let’s catch up on the many developments in the Frances Haugen saga, with an eye toward answering two questions that have proven to be surprisingly slippery so far: what is the actual scandal here? And what do we want Facebook to do about it? I. The Frances Haugen global world tour One thing that makes Frances Haugen di…
The Ratio Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech companies. ⬇️ Trending down: Democratic members of the House of Representatives called on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to make sweeping changes in response to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. “For YouTube, lawmakers said they would like to see the company disable auto-play and stop recommending any conspiratorial content alongside videos or on users’ homepages.” (Makena Kelly / The Verge)
Related: WhatsApp is testing encrypted cloud backups on Android. (Richard Lawler / The Verge) And: You can now join a WhatsApp group call after it starts. (Jay Peters / The Verge) Apple removed Fakespot from the App Store after Amazon complained the fake review-spotting service created security vulnerabilities. The circumstances are in dispute, but it seems clear Amazon isn’t doing enough to weed out fakes itself.(Sean Hollister / The Verge)
The conventional wisdom around the “widely viewed content report” that Facebook released last week is that it obscured more than it revealed. The company’s effort to demonstrate that most users do not regularly see divisive news stories in their feeds received widespread criticism, including here, for offering only the highest-level view of the data possible. The most-shared domain on Facebook is YouTube.com? Great, thanks.
Governing ⭐ Epic appealed Friday’s ruling in its lawsuit against Apple. While the judge ruled that Apple has to let developers link to third-party payment systems, Epic lost on most of its claims. Here’s Kim Lyons at The Verge: At trial, Epic argued Apple had a monopoly because of how it requires developers to use its payments system for in-game purchases. But Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Friday that Epic should pay damages to Apple for violating rules around its in-app purchasing system, while…
