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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.
Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk, and Artificial, filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.
Meta’s bringing Instagram’s “Your Algorithm” feature to Facebook, and using LLMs more to rank content.
Facebook pulled back on moderation after Trump’s election, and The Guardian reports on one of the groups that benefited, a popular health-misinformation-filled community called Crunchy Moms:
Another Crunchy Moms member, Emily Loving-Rodriguez, said she had made dozens of reports to Facebook, and possibly hundreds, since she joined earlier this year. The Idaho resident has a personal interest in child welfare and misinformation, and noted a post she had seen recently in Crunchy Moms where someone said herpes could be cured with the dietary supplement zeolite. She said her reports rarely had any effect.
These alerts, which Meta first brought to Instagram in February, also apply to conversations about self-harm with its AI chatbot across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.
If you or anyone you know is considering self-harm or needs to talk, contact the following people who want to help: In the US, text or call 988. Outside the US, contact https://www.iasp.info/.
The future of computing might be always-on, autonomous agents, but should we hand Meta or OpenAI this much personal data?
Aaron Sorkin’s follow up to The Social Network puts the Facebook Files scandal on the timeline.
Semafor’s editor-in-chief on billionaire owners, news influencers, and the anti-scale era of media.
After initially being tested by “select creators,” Creator Studio is now available for iOS users in the US and Canada. The original Creator Studio page manager experience was shut down in 2023, but Meta describes this revived version as an “AI-powered companion app” that helps creators to grow and engage with their audience.
[How creators are using Creator Studio to experiment and grow]
How TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube copied their way to victory.
The AI translations are expanding to Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Italian on Instagram and Bahasa, Indonesian, Arabic, French, Vietnamese, and Thai on Facebook, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.
The company’s new agentic developer tools are giving the discontinued smart displays a second life as a smart home controller, family message board, art display, or anything you can dream up. The move comes shortly after Microsoft announced Project Solara. Meta says the tools are hardware-agnostic and work with many existing devices. Still, anything that breathes new life into a defunct gadget is a good thing.
The EU’s General Court said the European Commission’s decision to designate Facebook Marketplace as a gatekeeper service under Digital Markets Act rules “lacks sufficient reasoning,” and that it should be exempt from the regulation. Meta also tried to appeal Messenger’s designation, but that decision stands firm.
The app, available on iOS, lets you browse groups that you’re a part of, make posts to groups, and ask questions to a chatbot to get information sourced from groups. Saw this one thanks to Matt Navarra.
The New York Times and Reuters report that a memo was sent to Meta employees on Monday reassigning 7,000 of them, and said that “As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles ⁠into their new org structures.”
The memo told employees to work remotely on Wednesday, when it will lay off about 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, with emails sent at 4AM local time.
Now that a jury has ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark trial, the sharks are circling, and what better place to find potential clients than on those social media platforms? The only problem is that Axios reports Meta pulled “more than a dozen” such ads from firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law on Thursday.
Why nuclear options like age limits and repealing Section 230 won’t make social media safer.
Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.
While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drugs sales or scams.
At around 5:30PM ET, Downdetector showed a recent peak of more than 11,000 user reports of problems, but reports of issues have fallen dramatically. At 5:48PM ET, NetBlocks said the platform was experiencing “international outages.” A Meta status page was showing “high disruptions” for Facebook Ads Manager, including ads creation and delivery, but that has been “resolved.”
Following Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 taking effect last month, Meta says it has now removed almost 550,000 Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts that it believes were run by kids under that age threshold. Despite its compliance, Meta is still voicing opposition to the law.
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