CNET: Tech groups urge Supreme Court to block Texas social media law. “Two lobbying groups for Big Tech companies like Google, Meta and Twitter have asked the US Supreme Court to block a Texas law that prohibits large social media sites from banning users or removing posts based on political viewpoints.”
Reuters: Meta withdraws Ukraine war content policy guidance request. “Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc said on Wednesday it has withdrawn a request for policy guidance from its Oversight Board about the content moderation of posts related to Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine.”
Reuters: Google, Meta must find and remove online child porn, say EU draft rules. “Companies that fail to comply with the rules face fines up to 6% of their annual income or global turnover, which will be set by EU countries. The EU executive said its proposal announced on Wednesday aimed to replace the current system of voluntary detection and reporting by companies which has proven to be insufficient to protect children.”
CNET: Facebook and Instagram Turn Off AR Filters In Texas and Illinois. “Meta has turned off augmented reality filters for Facebook and Instagram in Texas and Illinois due to facial recognition and privacy laws in those states.”
Motherboard: Facebook’s New AI System Has a ‘High Propensity’ for Racism and Bias. “Facebook and its parent company, Meta, recently released a new tool that can be used to quickly develop state-of-the-art AI. But according to the company’s researchers, the system has the same problem as its predecessors: It’s extremely bad at avoiding results that reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.”
India Today: Canada passes Act on revenue sharing between Google, Facebook and news outlets as India’s wait continues. “Canada passing a law on a fair revenue-sharing system has rekindled the hope for India’s news outlets that a similar law would be introduced in the country. But that may have to wait a bit longer. IndiaToday takes a deep dive into the matter and tries to explain how such a system has impacted countries around the world, including India.”
TechCrunch: Meta faces years of tougher antitrust oversight in Germany. “Facebook’s rebranded parent, Meta, has become the next tech giant to be confirmed as subject to a special competition abuse control regime in Germany, following a 2021 update to its digital competition rules that are focused on large digital companies which are considered to be of ‘paramount significance for competition across markets’, as the law puts it. The designation, which stands for five years, empowers the regulator, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), to take faster action to respond to competition concerns linked to Meta’s operations by imposing operational conditions intended to correct antitrust abuses.”
PYMNTS: Meta Challenges Order to Kill $315M Deal to Acquire Giphy. “Meta Platforms Inc. is fighting allegations by the United Kingdom’s antitrust watchdog that the tech giant is violating anticompetitive rules, Bloomberg reported Monday (April 25). Meta has accused the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of being ‘irrational’ and ‘inconsistent’ when it determined Giphy, the GIF search engine, was a competitor in the display advertising market.”
Just Security: Facebook Provided Warning to FBI Before January 6, GAO Report Reveals. “A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that seven federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies were aware of open source information on social media about ‘potential violence’ planned for January 6, 2021. The report suggests that federal agencies had ample authority and information to anticipate and prepare for a violent assault on the Capitol.”
Wall Street Journal: Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say. “When Facebook blocked news pages last year to pre-empt Australian legislation that would force it to pay for content, it also took down hospitals, emergency services and charities. The company says that was inadvertent; whistleblowers allege it was a negotiating tactic.”
PennState: Outage outrage: Facebook outage may reveal depth of social media dependency. “In a study of user reactions to a six-hour Facebook outage in the fall of 2021, the researchers said that members of the site flooded rival Twitter with nearly a quarter million tweets about the outage, quickly making #facebookdown a top trending topic. While many comments reflected anger about the situation and others ridiculed Facebook, users also expressed a need to find other social media outlets, according to S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State.”
Business Insider: Facebook is freezing hiring. Here’s why, who it impacts, and when it’s happening.. “Facebook is pausing on hiring and scaling back plans to acquire new talent across the company. CFO David Wehner said the company, which has rebranded to Meta, is doing so as part of its ‘reprioritization’ as it tackles challenges that caused it to miss revenue targets, according to an internal memo shared on Wednesday seen by Insider. Insider’s Kali Hays and Rob Price were the first to report Facebook’s hiring freeze.”
Bloomberg: Facebook Plans to Leave the Podcast Business After Just a Year. “Facebook is pulling out of podcasts and plans to remove them altogether from the social-media service starting June 3. Part of Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook will stop letting people add podcasts to the service starting this week, according to a note sent to partners. It will discontinue both its short-form audio product Soundbites and remove its central audio hub.”
Gizmodo: We’re Publishing the Facebook Papers. Here’s What They Say About the Ranking Algorithms That Control Your News Feed.. “Today, as part of a rolling effort to make the Facebook Papers available publicly, Gizmodo is releasing a second batch of documents—37 files in all. In our first drop, we shared 28 files related to the 2020 election and the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. Only a few of the pages had ever been shown to the public before. Gizmodo has partnered with a group of independent experts to review, redact, and publish the documents.”
The Robesonian: Social media causes controversial start to one-stop voting. “An investigation is underway after a Facebook page presenting itself as the Robeson County Board of Elections posted a cover photo with the words ‘re-elect John Cantey.’ The post comes at the start of one-stop early voting which began Thursday and will run through May 14. John Cantey is running for re-election to his Lumberton City Council seat, in which he represents Precinct 5 residents.”
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