Category Archives: Facebook

Missing apostrophe in Facebook post lands NSW real estate agent in legal hot water

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Court declines to dismiss defamation case against Anthony Zadravic, who said failure to punctuate social media post was trivial

A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.

Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.

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Facebook’s role in Myanmar and Ethiopia under new scrutiny

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Whistleblower Frances Haugen adds to long-held concerns that social media site is fuelling violence and instability

Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony to US senators on Tuesday shone a light on violence and instability in Myanmar and Ethiopia in recent years and long-held concerns about links with activity on Facebook.

“What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it,” Haugen said in her striking testimony. Haugen warned that Facebook was “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US.

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Senator urges more Facebook whistleblowers to come forward – live

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• Richard Blumenthal also calls on Mark Zuckerberg to testify

• Senator Chris Coons says there may be 50 votes for filibuster reform

• Senate to vote on raising debt ceiling

So now that the Democrats don’t have the 50 votes needed to make a change to the filibuster rules ahead of the debt ceiling vote today, they could always appeal to the Republicans...by not calling it a filibuster, or a change to filibuster rules with the debt ceiling, etc.

However, that route doesn’t look promising either, according to Republican senator Josh Hawley:

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Mark Zuckerberg hits back at Facebook whistleblower claims

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Frances Haugen’s testimony that social networking company puts profit before people ‘just not true’

Mark Zuckerberg has hit back at the testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, saying her claims the company puts profit over people’s safety are “just not true”.

In a blogpost, the Facebook founder and chief executive addressed one of the most damaging statements in Haugen’s opening speech to US senators on Tuesday, that Facebook puts “astronomical profits before people”.

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Facebook explains error that caused global outage

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Engineers’ command accidentally disconnected company’s network from rest of world, blogpost says

Facebook has said an error during routine maintenance of its network of data centers caused a cascade of problems that took down its platforms for more than six hours on Monday.

In a blogpost published on Tuesday, Santosh Janardhan, vice-president of engineering, said the global outage that saw Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go dark for billions of users had begun when the company’s engineers issued a command that unintentionally disconnected Facebook data centers from the rest of the world.

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Facebook outage highlights global over-reliance on its services

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Shutdown heavily impacts ability to communicate and do business for many of platform’s 2.8 billion users

From bereft Brazilians to relaxed Russians and internet-savvy Indians, Facebook’s outage highlighted the dependence much of the world has developed on its social media products, and put the spotlight on its global power.

The fallout of Facebook’s unprecedented almost six-hour outage has mostly focused on the financial impact to the $1tn social media empire: $50bn (£37bn) was wiped off the company’s market value by jittery investors, founder Mark Zuckerberg’s paper fortune shrunk by $7bn and more than $13m of the advertising dollars that are its lifeblood disappeared each hour the platform was offline.

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‘Moral bankruptcy’: whistleblower offers scathing assessment of Facebook

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Frances Haugen’s animated remarks were a striking contrast to Mark Zuckerberg’s robotic testimony before Congress

It might, as one senator put it, be remembered as “the big tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth”.

The truth-teller was former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify that the online platform knowingly harms children, just as cigarette makers did before they were brought to heel.

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Facebook whistleblower to take her story before the US Senate

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Frances Haugen, who came forward accusing the company of putting profit over safety, will testify in Washington on Tuesday

A former Facebook employee who has accused the company of putting profit over safety will take her damning accusations to Washington on Tuesday when she testifies to US senators.

Frances Haugen, 37, came forward on Sunday as the whistleblower behind a series of damaging reports in the Wall Street Journal that have heaped further political pressure on the tech giant. Haugen told the news program 60 Minutes that Facebook’s priority was making money over doing what was good for the public.

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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hit by outage

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Users in UK, US and other countries find services inaccessible as company apologises

Facebook’s network of services including Instagram and WhatsApp has been hit by an outage in several countries including UK and the US, as the company admitted users were having “trouble accessing our apps”.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for large numbers of people at around 5pm UK time, with the downdetector.com site reporting more than 120,000 outages for Facebook users.

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How ‘losing friend to misinformation’ drove Facebook whistleblower

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Frances Haugen was frustrated that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging the harm its platforms could cause

Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind a series of damaging revelations about Facebook, is adamant that she wants to help the social media company and not foment hatred of it.

The 37-year-old leaked tens of thousands of internal company documents after becoming frustrated that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging the harm its platforms could cause.

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Facebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attack

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Former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes

A whistleblower at Facebook will say that thousands of pages of internal company research she turned over to federal regulators proves the social media giant is deceptively claiming effectiveness in its efforts to eradicate hate and misinformation and it contributed to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.

The former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes ahead of a scheduled appearance at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

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Donald Trump asks Florida judge to force Twitter to reinstate account

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The request follows the former president suing Twitter, Facebook and Google in July accusing them of censoring conservative voices

Donald Trump, the former US president, has asked a federal judge in Florida to force Twitter to reinstate his account.

In July Trump sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, as well as their chief executives, alleging they unlawfully silence conservative viewpoints.

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Facebook ‘overpaid in data settlement to avoid naming Zuckerberg’

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Lawsuit alleges settlement in Cambridge Analytica case driven by desire to protect founder

Facebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Mark Zuckerberg, a lawsuit has claimed.

The lawsuit alleges that the size of the $5bn settlement was driven by a desire to protect Facebook’s founder and chief executive from being named in the FTC complaint.

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Facebook slams Wall Street Journal reports as ‘deliberate mischaracterisations’

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The company’s vice-president of global affairs said the paper had not presented the whole picture on the ‘difficult issues’

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, has slammed the Wall Street Journal for reporting that the social media giant was aware of negative impacts of some of its products.

Related: Teenage girls, body image and Instagram’s ‘perfect storm’

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Facebook steps up fight against climate misinformation – but critics say effort falls short

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New efforts will let vast amounts of false material slip through the cracks, according to climate advocates

Facebook has announced new efforts to combat climate crisis misinformation on its platform, including by expanding its climate science center to provide more reliable information, investing in organizations that fight misinformation, and launching a video series to highlight young climate advocates on Facebook and Instagram.

But critics say the new push, announced on Thursday, falls short and will allow vast amounts of climate misinformation to slip through the cracks.

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Facebook and Google condemned over ads for ‘abortion pill reversal’

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Adverts promoting ‘dangerous, unproven and unethical’ procedure shown millions of times, study finds

Facebook has served “abortion reversal” adverts 18.4m times since January 2020, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), promoting an “unproven, unethical” and “dangerous” procedure.

Google shows the adverts on more than four-fifths of searches related to abortion across a number of US cities, according to the CCDH research, targeted at search terms such as “unwanted pregnancy” and “abortion pill”.

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Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals

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Social media firm reportedly kept own research secret that suggests app worsens body image issues

Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm.

Since at least 2019, staff at the company have been studying the impact of their product on its younger users’ states of mind. Their research has repeatedly found it is harmful for a large proportion, and particularly teenage girls.

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Facebook office cleaner who led protests at London site fears for his job

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Suspended union rep calls on social media giant to intervene after exhausted workers complain of extra workload

Facebook’s facilities management firm has demanded the removal of a union activist leading a campaign against “impossible workloads” imposed on exhausted cleaners at the US tech giant’s London offices.

Emails seen by the Observer show JLL @ Facebook, which manages the social media firm’s London sites, asked Churchill Group, which employs the cleaners, to remove the workers’ elected union rep, Guillermo Camacho, from Facebook’s offices after he helped organise protests against a doubling of cleaning duties in July.

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Facebook encryption could prevent detection of child abuse, NCA says

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Police claim plans for end-to-end encryption will stop officers being able to access ‘incisive intelligence’

Facebook’s plans to allow encrypted messaging across all its platforms could prevent the detection of up to 20m child abuse images every year, a senior investigating officer has claimed.

Rob Jones, the director of threat leadership at the National Crime Agency, said the social media company’s goal of rolling out end-to-end encryption will stop officers from accessing “incisive intelligence” that allows them to rescue abused children.

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Social media giants increase global child safety after UK regulations introduced

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TikTok, Twitter and Facebook among companies bringing in new measures worldwide that protect children

TikTok has turned off notifications for children past bedtime, Instagram has disabled targeted adverts for under-18s entirely and YouTube has turned off autoplay for teen users: moves seemingly triggered by Britain introducing a new set of regulations aimed at protecting children online.

On Thursday the UK introduced a new set of regulations aimed at protecting children and at a stroke became a global leader in the field, with the prospect of multimillion-dollar fines for companies that breach its new “age appropriate design code” leading to a cascade of last-minute changes across some of Silicon Valley’s largest players.

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