Category Archives: Meta

eSafety commissioner orders X and Meta to remove violent videos following Sydney church stabbing

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Julie Inman Grant issues notices compelling companies to remove offending material within 24 hours

Facebook’s parent company Meta and X/Twitter have been told to remove violent and distressing videos and imagery of the stabbing of a prominent Orthodox Christian leader in Sydney’s west on Monday evening.

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told reporters on Tuesday that X and Meta had been issued with notices to remove material within 24 hours that depicted “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact or detail”, with the companies facing potential fines if they fail to comply.

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Google blocking links to California news outlets from search results

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Tech giant is protesting proposed law that would require large online platforms to pay ‘journalism usage fee’

Google has temporarily blocked links from local news outlets in California from appearing in search results in response to the advancement of a bill that would require tech companies to pay publications for links that articles share. The change applies only to some people using Google in California, though it is not clear how many.

The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) would require large online platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” for linking to news sites based in the Golden state. The bill cleared the California assembly in 2023. To become law, it would need to pass in the Senate before being signed by the governor, Gavin Newsom.

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Andrew Forrest accuses Facebook of ‘blatantly refusing’ to take action against scam ads

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The Australian billionaire’s criminal case against Meta in WA was discontinued on Friday by the commonwealth prosecutor

The Australian billionaire and philanthropist Andrew Forrest has accused Facebook’s parent company of “blatantly refusing” to take action against scam ads on its platform, as a criminal case he brought against Meta in WA was discontinued.

On Friday, the commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions filed a discontinuance motion in the criminal case brought by Forrest in the Western Australia district court over scam cryptocurrency ads bearing his likeness on Facebook.

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Canada school boards accuse social media firms of ‘rewiring’ how kids think

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District education authorities launch multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Meta, Snap Inc and ByteDance

Four of Canada’s largest school boards have launched a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the social media companies Meta, Snap Inc and ByteDance, accusing them of acting in a “high-handed, reckless, malicious, and reprehensible manner” with products the boards claim harm student learning and “rewire” how children think.

The four district boards – Ottawa-Carleton, Toronto, Peel and Toronto Catholic – filed four separate statements of claim in Ontario’s superior court of justice on Wednesday.

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Fears grow Meta will block news on Facebook and Instagram as Australian government faces pressure to act

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Publishers and politicians are siding against Meta and urging the government to force the company to pay for news

Meta will either reduce the amount of news people see or block it entirely on Facebook and Instagram, experts and publishers warn, as the government faces pressure to require Meta to show news content and pay for it.

Meta informed publishers nearly a month ago that it would not enter new multimillion-dollar deals for content when the current contracts expire this year. Since then the Albanese government has kicked off a process to potentially designate the tech company under the news media bargaining code (NMBC).

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EU investigates Apple, Meta and Google owner Alphabet under new tech law

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Technology groups face hefty fines if they are found guilty of breaching Digital Markets Act

Apple, Google’s parent company and Meta are being investigated by the EU for potential breaches of the bloc’s new laws designed to police anti-competitive behaviour by big technology companies.

The trio face significant fines if they are found guilty of breaching the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a landmark piece of regulation that came into force on 7 March and is aimed at increasing choice for online consumers.

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How Facebook Messenger and Meta Pay are used to buy child sexual abuse material

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Court documents and interviews detail the products’ role in alleged exploitation – and how some payments go undetected

When police in Pennsylvania arrested 29-year-old Jennifer Louise Whelan in November 2022, they charged her with dozens of counts of serious crimes, including sex trafficking and indecent assault of three young children.

One month earlier, police said they had discovered Whelan was using three children as young as six, all in her care, to produce child sex abuse material. She was allegedly selling and sending videos and photos to a customer over Facebook Messenger. She pleaded not guilty.

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Australian eSafety commissioner puts tech companies on notice over reports terror-related content still being shared

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Julie Inman Grant has asked companies including Google, Meta and Telegram to explain how they are taking action against violent and extremist material

Australia’s online safety regulator has issued notices to Telegram, Google, Meta, Reddit and X asking how they are taking action against terror material on their platforms.

It is five years since an Australian murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, and broadcast the massacre on Facebook live. Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said she still receives reports that video and other perpetrator-produced material from terror attacks are being shared on mainstream platforms, although there were now slightly less on mainstream platforms such as X and Facebook.

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EU calls on tech firms to outline plans to tackle deepfakes amid election fears

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Move involving companies such as Google, Facebook and X comes after evidence of Russian online interference in polls

The EU is calling on eight major tech companies including Google, Facebook and X to detail how they identify and tackle deepfake material amid concerns about the use of the technology to influence elections.

In a world first, they will be using new laws on artificial intelligence to force companies to root out fake video, imagery and audio.

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Australian news media could seek payment from Meta for content used to train AI

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News media bargaining code could apply to tech companies using massive amounts of online information for generative AI, researchers say

Australian media companies could seek compensation from Meta for its use of online news sources in training generative AI technology, researchers have said.

When Meta announced last week that it would not sign new deals to pay for news in Australia for use on Facebook, it downplayed the value of news to its services, stating that just 3% of Facebook usage in Australia was related to news.

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Meta on collision course with Australian government after announcing end to journalism funding deals

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Publishers informed on Friday Meta would not enter new deals when current contracts expire and Facebook news tab would shut down in April

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has set itself on a collision course with the Albanese government after announcing it will stop paying Australian publishers for news, and plans to shut down its news tab in Australia and the United States.

Meta informed publishers on Friday that it would not enter new deals when the current contracts expire this year.

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AI firm considers banning creation of political images for 2024 elections

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Midjourney’s CEO David Holz says company close to ‘hammering’ images of Donald Trump, Joe Biden and others ‘for next 12 months’

The groundbreaking artificial intelligence image-generating company Midjourney is considering banning people from using its software to make political images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of an effort to avoid being used to distract from or misinform about the 2024 US presidential election.

“I don’t know how much I care about political speech for the next year for our platform,” Midjourney’s CEO, David Holz, said last week, adding that the company is close to “hammering” – or banning – political images, including those of the leading presidential candidates, “for the next 12 months”.

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Instagram and Facebook delete the accounts of Iran’s supreme leader

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supported Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which Meta said violated its policies

Meta has removed Instagram and Facebook accounts run on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, following criticism over his support for Hamas after the group’s 7 October attack on Israel that sparked the months-long war still raging in the Gaza Strip, the company confirmed on Friday.

Meta, based in Menlo Park, California, offered no specifics about its reasoning. However, it said it removed the accounts “for repeatedly violating our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy”.

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Mark Zuckerberg to receive $700m from Meta dividends

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Facebook’s parent company to pay out to shareholders as it reports $40bn revenues for final quarter

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is expected to receive $700m (£549m) a year in dividends.

On Thursday, Meta announced it would pay its first-ever quarterly dividend to investors since Facebook floated on the stock market in 2012, after beating Wall Street expectations with $40bn in revenues for the final quarter last year.

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‘It was forced’: grieving parents unfazed by sorry tech CEOs at US Senate hearing

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Many parents held up images of the children who died after falling prey to abusers on apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat

Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the parents of children who killed themselves after being subjected to online sexual exploitation during a US Senate hearing Wednesday. Evan Spiegel offered condolences to parents whose children obtained deadly illegal drugs via Snapchat. The words were too little, too late for their intended audience, though. The grieving guardians expressed only frustration with the social media CEOs’ responses to their plight and to questions from members of Congress.

“I’m not happy with the answers the CEOs are giving. They can’t give a straight answer. Not even ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” said Tammy Rodriguez, the mother of Selena Rodriguez, who was 11 when she died by suicide three years ago after being solicited for sexually exploitative content by strangers on Instagram and Snapchat.

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Big tech boom or bust? Experts see signs of strength after wave of layoffs

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Even as more job cuts await, some analysts see the beginnings of a bull market in the coming season of earnings reports

Will 2024 be a boom or a bust for big tech? By one estimate, there have been more than 7,500 layoffs in the sector since the start of the year – a dispersal of pink slips that many hoped would have ceased after the deep job cuts of 2023.

However, as the US’s big tech earnings season gets under way this week, some analysts are predicting strong numbers. This batch of quarterly financial results may show that the industry has cleared out its pandemic-era overhiring and reorganised itself around cloud computing and AI - necessitating cuts in sectors with less rosy prospects. Analysts keen on AI say we are at the start of a tech bull market.

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Sheryl Sandberg to leave board of Facebook parent Meta

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Former chief operating officer was lead architect of Facebook’s digital advertising-driven business model

Sheryl Sandberg is to step down from the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, nearly two years after quitting her executive role at the business.

Sandberg was the lead architect of Facebook’s digital advertising-driven business model as Meta’s chief operating officer.

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Zuckerberg derided for his ‘high quality beef’ ranch where cows are fed macadamia nuts and beer

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Critics call cattle-raising project on Hawaii ranch ‘a billionaire’s strange sideshow’ and bad for the environment

The social media tycoon Mark Zuckerberg’s latest business venture raising “world-class” beef cattle on his sprawling luxury Hawaiian hideaway has been derided as out of touch and environmentally irresponsible.

The Meta billionaire posted a picture of himself on Wednesday eating a steak – medium rare, no sides – from his Ko’olau ranch, a 1,400-acre compound on Kauai, Hawaii’s oldest island.

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Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims

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Rights group says Facebook and Instagram routinely engage in ‘six key patterns of undue censorship’ of content supporting Palestine

Meta has engaged in a “systemic and global” censorship of pro-Palestinian content since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war on 7 October, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a scathing 51-page report, the organization documented and reviewed more than a thousand reported instances of Meta removing content and suspending or permanently banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram. The company exhibited “six key patterns of undue censorship” of content in support of Palestine and Palestinians, including the taking down of posts, stories and comments; disabling accounts; restricting users’ ability to interact with others’ posts; and “shadow banning”, where the visibility and reach of a person’s material is significantly reduced, according to HRW.

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Tech giants could be forced to share secret news deals under Australia’s media bargaining code

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New legislation will help ensure sustainability of public interest journalism, Labor says

Tech giants could be forced to hand over sensitive details on how they distribute news on their platforms to Australia’s competition watchdog as part of the federal government’s commitment to levelling the playing field for public interest journalism in the digital age.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will undertake periodic reporting into how platforms subject to the media bargaining code are distributing news content on sites and whether significant bargaining power imbalances between the tech giants and media organisations exist.

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