Should I stay or should I go — from Meta’s social media platforms?
That’s what some Facebook, Instagram and Threads users are wondering after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this month that the company is relaxing rules on harmful content such as hate speech and abandoning its fact checking program and replacing it with crowdsourced notes.
The changes have renewed interest among some users about deleting their Meta social media accounts. If you want to stop using platforms owned by Meta, here are some pointers:
Save your data
Before deleting your Facebook account, you should download a copy of all your personal information, which includes details about your activity on the platform, things you’ve shared and data that the company has collected about you.
You’ll have to go to your settings or the accounts center — the master control panel for all your Meta accounts — where you can choose to download everything or just items such as your profile, posts, messages, comments and reactions, and list of friends, even the ads you’ve clicked on and IP addresses you’ve used to connect to Facebook.
You can download information from a certain date range, such as the past month or six months, or for all the time you’ve had an account. If you’re downloading photos, you can select their quality level: low, medium, high.
For security purposes, you’ll only have four days to download your file. The process is similar for Instagram and Threads users.
Instagram users will need a password to download and access files and it could take up to 30 days to receive a download link by email, the platform sayson its help page.
Maybe you don’t want to download all your personal information but instead want to get any photos and videos you’ve posted. Facebook provides a separate option to transfer these files to another online service, with options including Google Photos, Dropbox or Photobucket.
Staying in touch
A tip for Facebook users: before you pull the plug, check if you have friends or connections you don’t want to lose complete contact with.
Send them a message asking for their phone, email or other non-Meta contact details. You could also make a final post telling people that you’re leaving, though there’s a chance not everyone will see it.
Take a break
If you’re not ready to go all the way, Facebook allows users to temporarily shut down their accounts in case they just want to take a break from social media.
You can do this through the account center, where you can click on the Personal details section, and then the Account ownership and control setting.
Temporarily deactivating an account means other users won’t see it anymore, but your posts, photos and videos won’t be deleted and you can still use Facebook Messenger. You can reactivate the account at any time.
Don’t change your mind too often: Instagram and Threads users can only temporarily deactivate their accounts once a week.
Deletion
Ready to take the plunge and delete your account permanently?
After tying up any loose ends, head back to the accounts center, click the Personal details section, and then Account ownership and control, where you can choose to delete it.
Once you’ve triggered the deletion process, you’ve got 30 days to change your mind, which you can do by logging back into your account and clicking the Cancel Deletion button.
“After 30 days, your account and all your information will be permanently deleted, and you won’t be able to retrieve your information,” Facebook warns on its help center.
Take note: Deleting a Threads account won’t have any effect on your corresponding Instagram account. But deleting an Instagram account will also result in the deletion of the linked Threads account because Instagram accounts are used to manage Threads accounts.
What about WhatsApp?
Meta also owns WhatsApp, although Zuckerberg’s content policy changes aren’t likely to affect the chat app.
Similar to Meta’s social platforms, WhatsApp users can export a copy of their chat history or ask for information on their settings or channels.
If you decide you want to get rid of WhatsApp and perhaps switch to competing chat services like iMessage or Signal, it’s easy to do through the app’s settings.
Deleting WhatsApp will erase your account info, your chat history backup and your presence from any chat groups as well as any channels you set up where you’re the only admin.
Fresh claims of alleged unfair pay for Africans working for Meta have emerged in a landmark battle pitting the social media giant and a Kenyan labour outsourcing company against former employees.
In court documents filed before the Employment and Labour Relations Court, 185 former moderators allege that they were paid less than their colleagues working in Europe and the US.
They also alleged that they did not get proper medical cover, including dedicated psychiatrists owing to the graphic contents they were to moderate.
They alleged that those who work in other countries are paid between Sh2,322 ($18) to Sh2,580 ($20) per hour while those in Kenya get about Sh283 ($2.20) per hour.
They have sued Meta Platforms INC, Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd, Samasource Kenya EPZ, Majorel Kenya and Majorel Kenya Solutions EPZ. They listed Attorney General, Labour Cabinet Secretary and the Director of Occupational Safety and Health Services as interested parties.
“The work of a moderator is in itself not easy and is inherently toxic and dangerous. This is because moderators are exposed to the worst of humanity which they must consume in order to keep the Facebook platform healthy for everyone else,” say the suit papers.
Examples of the posts include pictures and videos of people being raped and children being molested, people being killed alive, people committing suicide or committing other forms of self-harm.
Meta in its responses stated that it cannot be sued in Kenya. It denied being an employer.
Nevertheless, they argued that the arrangement between the social media giant and the labour outsourcing companies meant that it was actively engaged as an employer.
The court heard that a moderator gets around Sh50,000 inpatient and outpatient cover.
“Moderators came into the job whole and as promising young Africans. They leave as broken shells of themselves with no hope as to whether they will ever be well again. They have built the 1st and 2nd respondents’ product into the giant that it currently is and now leave their employment with nothing to show of it apart from psychological scars of inhuman and degrading treatment from all four respondents,” the moderators’ lawyers claim.
Meta, Samasource and Majorel denied the claims. They asserted that the workplace had professionals who ensured moderators’ mental health is taken care
Meta owned social media platform, Facebook, has firmed its position as Kenya’s top social media platform with a share of 49.4pc.
Audience Measurement and Industry Trends report covering the third quarter of financial year 2023/24 by the Communications Authority indicates that the social media giant with an estimated 2.9 billion active monthly users globally as enhanced its position in three successive quarters as the most used network for social interactions and source of news.
The social media network enhanced its position from 45.2pc in first quarter to 47.5pc in the second quarter.
Another Meta platform, Whatsapp which boasts of at least three billion active monthly users worldwide had 47pc of users.
“The prevalence of Facebook and WhatsApp in social media mentions highlights their extensive adoption and influential presence in the Kenyan digital landscape,” said CA.
YouTube emerged as the third most popular social media platform in Kenya with a market share of 29.5pc while TikTok grew to 23pc from 17.8pc to 23pc.
Instagram, a popular photo and video sharing social media platform site had a share of 13.3pc while X,, formerly Twitter commanded a market share of 10.7pc after growing from 7.9pc in the previous quarter.
Other sites used in Kenya to get news include Google, Operamini, Chrome, Telegram, email, Snapchat and LinkedIn.
Mobile phones still remain the most popular devices Kenyans use to access internet at 87.2pc.
“The most mode of internet access is primarily through smartphones, underscoring the pivotal role these devices play in facilitating connectivity and information access for a wide range of users. As mobile technology continues to advance, ensuring equitable access to smartphones becomes crucial for fostering digital inclusion and bridging gaps in connectivity across various demographics,” stated the regulator.
Laptops emerged second most preferred mode of access the internet with a share of 5pc, smart TV 1.9pc, tablet 0.5pc and desktop with 0.9pc.
Latest data from the authority indicates that the country currently has 51 million mobile data subscribers.
During the period under review, total advertisement expenditure dropped to Ksh 15 billion from Ksh 17 billion.
The European Commission is formally investigating Meta to establish whether the design and algorithms used by Instagram and Facebook are addictive for children, regulators announced Thursday.
The investigation comes under the auspices of the Digital Services Act, a law passed in 2022 that requires online platforms to have strict child safety measures. In a statement, the Commission said Meta’s products may “exploit the weakness and inexperience of minors,” and that their apps’ algorithms create “rabbit-hole effects.”
The Commission also questioned the effectiveness of the apps’ age verification tools, and minors’ privacy on the apps. If found in violation of the DSA, Meta could face a fine of up to 6% of its global revenue, and be forced to make major changes to the apps if it wants to keep doing business in the EU.
The investigation mirrors allegations in lawsuits against Meta in the United States: To date, 41 states and Washington, DC have sued the company, alleging Meta knowingly made both Instagram’s and Facebook’s designs and algorithms addictive and did not do enough to safeguard children on the platforms.
A former Facebook content moderator in Kenya has put Mark Zuckerberg on notice of 21 days to iron out issues at the Nairobi office or face a lawsuit.
Daniel Motaung, the whistleblower from a report in TIME, sent a legal letter to Facebook and their outsourcing company in Kenya, Sama, telling them to make 12 big changes to improve conditions for moderators – or we’ll sue.
The office in Nairobi, Kenya, where Facebook content moderators began working in 2019, photographed on Feb 10, 2022. Sama was known publicly as Samasource until early 2021. Khadija Farah for TIME
“There is no doubt that Meta not only knew of Sama’s unlawful treatment of its employees but also ratified it in order to keep the cost of content moderation in Kenya low,” the demand letter says.
“This is regrettable and shows how little respect Meta has not only for human rights in general but also for the rights of Kenyans and Africans at large… It is not only discriminatory but also amounts to neo-colonialism in the worst possible form.”
The letter continues: “Sama’s dishonest branding as an ethical company committed to lifting the status of disadvantaged youth falls flat. Their business practices are not only immoral but also
unlawful.”
The letter says that Motaung’s lawyers are requesting the Kenyan government to revoke Sama’s license to operate as an outsourcing business in Kenya.
The list of demands, in full.
The letter adds: “SHOULD Meta and Sama fail to adhere to ALL our client’s demands within twenty-one (21) days of receiving this letter, we will institute a civil suit against both Meta and Sama.”
Screenshots credits Billy Peringo.
The letter accuses Meta and Sama of breaking section 45 of Kenya’s data protection act, by surveilling employees’ screen time during working hours.
And it accuses Meta and Sama of breaking section 5 of Kenya’s employment act, through discriminatory treatment, including pay discrimination and sub-par psychological support compared to content moderation offices in other countries.
Content moderation is essential to Facebook. It would go down overnight without it. But it is backbreaking, dangerous and poorly paid. Some moderators in Kenya were paid less than $2 an hour.
Their job is to sift through the social media posts of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion monthly users and remove posts that violate its rules – such as graphic violence, hate, and misinformation.
And it accuses Sama of breaking Kenya’s labor relations act in its handling of the unionization effort described in my story. The letter says Motaung was unlawfully terminated.
Sama fired Daniel after he began organising with his co-workers to form a trade union to fight for better conditions at his office in Nairobi. Not only is that despicable, it’s also against Kenyan law.
So much for a so-called ‘ethical AI company’
TIME revealed moderators from Kenya miss out on a monthly relocation bonus paid to staff from outside the country, worth $1.46 per hour, after tax. Bosses also warned Kenyan moderators they were more easily replaceable than staff from outside the country, which many took as a threat of being fired.
Sama had previously come under fire for its low wages. In 2018, company founder Leila Janah justified the levels of pay: “One thing that’s critical in our line of work is to not pay wages that would distort local labour markets. If we were to pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off.”
It also provides new detail on the consequences that Daniel Motaung suffered as a result of his work, including a PTSD diagnosis.
In his legal battle against Facebook supported by not-for-profit Foxglove. His confidence is fuelled by a legal settlement in 2020, in which 11,250 moderators from outsourcing company Cognizant received $52 million from Facebook in damages, including widespread symptoms of PTSD. This worked out to a minimum of $1000 of compensation, roughly enough to cover twenty hours of therapy. As a result, Facebook promised moderation tools such as muting audio by default and changing videos to black and white to minimise distress.
These latest revelations The about abuses at the content moderation centre in Nairobi, Kenya, expose a rot at the heart of Facebook.
On taking Facebook to court Daniel says, ““The violence I witnessed working for Facebook changed my life – I’m determined not to let Facebook damage others in the same way. I’m bringing this case for all the colleagues I left behind and for everyone who relies on Facebook to read the news and seek the truth. Facebook is one of the richest companies in the world and engages in colonial exploitation in Africa just to keep its profit margins high. And Sama, which claims to be ‘ethical’, is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, exploiting impoverished Kenyans and other Africans under the guise of social uplift. We must force these companies to clean up their act.”
Facebook parent company, Meta, has announced it will require owners of political advertisements In Kenya to provide their real identity as proof before publishing the ads on the platform including Instagram.
Meta says the tools and resources which target political ads ahead of the 2022 general election slated for August 9, 2022, are meant to enhance elections integrity and transparency in political advertising.
This is expected to help voters know who is behind the political ads they see on Facebook and Instagram while equipping political advertisers with key resources to reach and engage their supporters and potential voters throughout the election period.
Meta says advertisers seeking to run political ads in Kenya will undergo a verification process to prove who they are and that they live in the country.
Meta will then run additional checks to ensure compliance with its policies. Political ads in Kenya will also be labelled with a “Paid for by” disclaimer to show who’s behind the ad.
Additionally, the firm will put political ads that run in Kenya on its Ads Library in order to be seen ensure voters are able to see what ads are running, information about targeting, and how much was spent.
Meta Public Policy Director for East and Horn of Africa Mercy Ndegwa said the fully searchable archive will store the ads for seven years.
“Meta has continued to invest in technology towards election integrity. We believe political discussion and debate should be transparent to every voter, which is why over the past few years we’ve introduced a number of tools that provide more information about political ads on Facebook and Instagram,” said Ndegwa.
Meta announced last year that it was rolling out new controls so that people can choose to see fewer social issues, electoral, and political ads.
When people use these controls, they’ll no longer see ads that run with a “Paid for by” disclaimer, said the firm.
Nearly half the world is on Facebook or one of its apps. The social media platform has revolutionised the way that humans communicate – but only now are we beginning to understand the consequences of this revolution. Fake news, conspiracy theories, hate speech, incitements to violence: these all thrive on Facebook, thanks to an algorithm that has been trained to prioritise shares and likes over our safety.
The Continent is the first African publication to obtain access to thousands of documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist. These documents prove that Facebook knows that its platform can cause immense harm to the people that use it. They prove that Facebook has not done nearly enough to protect the people who use it – especially if those users happen to live outside of the English- speaking western world.
Ethiopia is a case study in how Facebook can inflame tensions and fuel real-world violence. But unless Facebook – and the other social media giants – change the way they operate, it may also be a sign of things to come everywhere else.
On August 30, nine months into Ethiopia’s brutal civil war, a Facebook user who goes by the name Northern Patriot Tewodros Kebede Ayo posted a clear incitement to violence on his page.
He accused the Qimant, an ethnic minority in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, of supporting the opposition forces. He called them “snitches”, and singled out the Qimant residents of Aykel, a small town in Amhara.
Writing in Amharic, he said: “The punishment has been imposed … the clean-up continues.”
Two days later, between September 1 and 2, more than a dozen Qimant in Aykel were dragged from their homes and butchered on the street, allegedly by members of the feared Fano militia – an Amhara nationalist paramilitary group that has been implicated in multiple atrocities. This was reported at the time by Al Jazeera, and two sources have independently confirmed this account to The Continent.
On September 1, users on another Facebook account – a page called “The Fano Patriotic People’s Radical System Change” – joined in the online lynch mob: “No mercy for the Qimant,” one post said, even as the killings in Aykel were happening. Another user on the page had previously, in May 2020, laid out a 14-page road map on how to organise the Fano militia, with both violent and non- violent options.
There is no evidence that there is a direct causal link between these Facebook posts and the massacre in Aykel. What we do know, however, is that Facebook staff already knew about both of these accounts, and were worried about their potential to incite violence.
Months earlier, in a leaked internal document seen by The Continent, a team within Facebook had found that these accounts were key nodes in a major online disinformation network aligned to the Fano militia, codenamed Disarming Lucy.
According to Facebook’s own data, this network was co-ordinating “calls for violence and other armed conflict in Ethiopia”; and “promoting armed conflict, co-ordinated doxxing, recruiting and fund-raising for the militia”.
The Facebook team that had discovered Disarming Lucy recommended that all the accounts associated with it be taken down. This was in March 2021. But as of today, The Continent can reveal that every single one of those accounts is still active – and many are still spreading hate speech and inciting violence.
The Continent reached out to Facebook for comment on this and other issues raised in this article, but received no response prior to publication.
The algorithm is the problem. Between Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, more than 3.6-billion people regularly use one of Facebook’s apps (the company has recently rebranded and is now known as Meta). Ironically, for a company that is built on the sharing of personal information, Facebook’s inner workings have always been relatively opaque. Until now.
In May 2021, a data scientist named Frances Haugen resigned from her job with Facebook’s civic integrity unit. That’s the unit, based in Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters, that was supposed to monitor – and, crucially, mitigate – all the ways in which Facebook causes harm, including the spread of hate speech and disinformation on the platform. It was disbanded in the wake of the American election last year.
Haugen had grown increasingly disillusioned with Facebook, coming to believe that it was putting profit ahead of providing users with meaningful protection.
Before she left the company for good, Haugen took more than 10,000 documents with her. She copied them by taking photos of her computer screen – in some of the documents, her silhouette is even visible in the reflection.
She shared these documents first with the United States Congress, and then with the Wall Street Journal.
Now she’s shared them with a small
consortium of journalists from around the world, including The Continent, which is the only African newspaper represented. The documents are drawn largely from the civic integrity unit and Facebook’s internal workplace forum.
They paint a damning picture of a company that understands exactly how dangerous its platform can be – but which has repeatedly failed to take actions to make it safer, especially outside of the US. Haugen describes herself as “an algorithm person”. She is an expert in the intricacies of Facebook’s back-end, rather than the political complexities of individual countries, which gives her an insider’s perspective on how hate speech spreads so wildly on the platform.
The key point, confirmed in a number of internal experiments, is that content that is inflammatory and extreme is more likely to go viral, generating what Facebook calls Meaningful Social Interaction (MSI) – a metric that measures reach and impact on Facebook (and which is central to how Facebook makes money).
Most of Facebook’s features are designed to maximise MSI, which means that the algorithm has a tendency to promote extreme content.
Or, in Facebook-speak, according to one leaked internal memo: “Analyses consistently document that harmful content and low quality Producers disproportionately garner distribution from unconnected reach compared to benign content and high quality Producers.” And, from another leaked document: “It’s no secret Facebook’s growth-first approach to product development leads us to ship risky features.”
In other words: it appears that the prevalence of hate speech and disinformation on Facebook is not a bug. It’s a feature. An unprofitable trade-off
There are, broadly, two ways in which Facebook can tackle this problem. The first is by tweaking the way Facebook works, to make it harder for people to share problematic content. These changes can be subtle, but have an enormous impact nonetheless.
Guards oversee food aid being delivered to local communities in the wake of Ethiopia’s conflict with Tigrayan rebels in Chena, Ethiopia, on Oct. 10. JEMAL COUNTESS/GETTY IMAGES
One change favoured by Haugen is to make it more difficult for Facebook users to reshare content from people who are not in their friends list. Currently, it’s as easy as pressing the share button, which requires little effort or thought. Internal experiments have shown that disabling the share button in these contexts leads to an instant, dramatic reduction in the spread of fake news and hate speech. Users are still free to reshare the content, but they have to copy and paste it to do so – and even this minimum level of effort makes most people think twice.
Technical solutions like this work across different countries and languages. It’s a quick, comprehensive fix. The only problem, as far as Facebook is concerned, is that it also has a strongly negative impact on MSI: people share things less, they like things less, they engage less. In a briefing with the civic integrity team, the notes of which are among the leaked documents, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes his position clear, directing the team not to go ahead with any changes “if there was a material trade-off with MSI impact”.
This left the civic integrity team with an impossible task, according to another document. “…integrity teams spend months searching for win/wins – pro- safety features that are also pro-growth. But there’s the thing: these solutions- without-downside almost never exist.”Or, as Haugen put it in a briefing with journalists on Thursday: “Facebook knows how to make these harms better. But they also know that no one can catch them. So they keep falling on the side of profits.”
Underfunded and understaffed
The second option available to Facebook is to tackle hate speech and disinformation on a case-by-case basis, using a combination of human moderators and machine learning to analyse individual posts. This approach requires enormous financial and human resources, which Facebook appears to be reluctant to commit outside of the United States.
For Ethiopia, for example, two sources told The Continent that there are fewer than 100 people working on content moderation across the four Ethiopian languages that are supported by Facebook (Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya). With some 6.4-million Ethiopians on Facebook, this works out to less than one moderator per 64,000 people.
To compound the problem, the vast majority of Facebook’s spending is directed towards the US. According to financial records, in 2020 just 13% of the company’s budget to combat misinformation went to countries outside of the US – even though these countries account for 90% of Facebook’s user base.
Nor is machine learning an effective solution. Not at the moment, anyway. Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist who studies algorithmic bias, told The Continent that major errors can happen when computers are responsible for translating and assessing content for languages they do not prioritise.
“You have to have people who are following, investigating and understanding the context very clearly, like journalists. However, the social media platforms working on this don’t seem to have that.”
“Facebook needs to do better as far as content moderation on the continent goes,” said Eric Mugendi, Africa programme manager at Meedan, a tech non-profit that aims to improve the quality of online discourse. “Additionally, the platform needs to allocate more resources to local languages that are spoken widely in the continent and used on the platform, but are not properly monitored for potential harm. They need to acknowledge the real world harm that their inaction has led to, and much more needs to be done.”
Violating community standards
In Ethiopia, a country engulfed in a civil war that has been characterised by multiple accounts of massacres and atrocities, that real-world harm is all too visible.
Earlier this month, Facebook deleted a post by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that called on citizens to “bury the terrorist TPLF”. The post violated its community standards against inciting violence, the company said. (If anyone understands the power of Facebook, it is Abiy: he was swept into power on the back of the grassroots, youth-led Qeerroo movement, which was itself enabled and then supercharged through Facebook).
But even more explicit posts by other prominent figures remained online. Berhan Taye, a digital rights researcher and activist, personally reported one post by media personality Mesay Mekonnen, which called for all Tigrayans to be placed in concentration camps. Multiple media reports confirm that Tigrayans in Addis Ababa are currently being rounded up and held in detention facilities around the capital.
Taye was told by Facebook that the post was reviewed, but “doesn’t go against one of our specific community standards”. Only after she escalated her complaint, using her own connections within Facebook, was the post removed.
The problems Ethiopia is experiencing are mirrored elsewhere in the developing world, Taye told The Continent. “[Facebook claims] less than 10% of Ethiopians use Facebook, implying investing in a place like that doesn’t make sense. But when you look at markets like India, Philippines or Brazil where Facebook has over 500-million users, Facebook has equally failed. Either they don’t care, or don’t know the impact the platforms have and are figuring out things after they have transpired.”
‘We are still blind’
“People across Africa should be concerned about Facebook’s poor handling of the Ethiopa crisis because it is indicative of the quality of the response we are likely to see in other African countries,” said Rosemary Ajayi of the Digital Africa Research Lab.
Facebook – or rather Meta, now – insists it is taking its responsibilities in Ethiopia seriously. In a statement on Tuesday, the company said that “for more than two years, we’ve been implementing a comprehensive strategy to keep people safe on our platform given the severe, long-standing risks of conflict”.
But the leaked documents tell a different story. As of December 2020, Ethiopia was categorised as having the weakest level of protection among the countries the civic integrity team had identified as at risk. In an attached rubric, this level is described as: “We are still blind to the extent of the problem”.
And basic safety features that are available to US and western audiences are not available to many Ethiopian users, the same document shows; despite the clear risks, Ethiopian users are without protection against misinformation, civic harassment, civic spam and fake accounts.
This leaves them vulnerable to the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that accompanied the massacre in Aykel, and has been a consistent, hate-filled soundtrack to Ethiopia’s civil war.
(Reuters) – Facebook is now called Meta, the company said on Thursday, in a rebrand that focuses on its ambitions building the “metaverse,” a shared virtual environment that it bets will be the next big computing platform.
The name change comes as the world’s largest social media company battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, algorithmic decisions and the policing of abuses on its platforms.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the company’s live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference, said the new name reflected its ambitions to build the metaverse, rather than its namesake social media service.
The metaverse, a term first coined in a dystopian novel three decades ago and now attracting buzz in Silicon Valley, refers broadly to the idea of a shared virtual environment which can be accessed by people using different devices.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” said Zuckerberg.
The company, which has invested heavily in augmented and virtual reality, said the change would bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. It said it would not change its corporate structure.
The tech giant, which reports about 2.9 billion monthly users, has faced increasing scrutiny in recent years from global lawmakers and regulators.
In the latest controversy, whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugenleaked documents which she said showed the company chose profit over user safety. Zuckerberg earlier this week said the documents were being used to paint a “false picture.”
The company said in a blog post that it intends to start trading under the new stock ticker it has reserved, MVRS, on Dec. 1. On Thursday, it unveiled a new sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, replacing its thumbs-up “Like” logo with a blue infinity shape.
Facebook shares were up more than 3% late on Thursday afternoon.
Facebook said this week that its hardware division Facebook Reality Labs, which is responsible for AR and VR efforts, would become a separate reporting unit and that its investment in it would reduce this year’s total operating profit by about $10 billion.
In an interview with tech publication the Information, Zuckerberg said he has not considered stepping down as CEO, and has not thought “very seriously yet” about spinning off this unit.
The division will now be called Reality Labs, its head Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said on Thursday. The company will also stop using the Oculus branding for its VR headsets, instead calling them “Meta” products.
This year, the company created a product team focused on the metaverse and it recently announced plans to hire 10,000 employees in Europe over the next five years to work on the effort.
The company has had multiple hits to its reputation over recent years, including over its handling of user data and its policing of abuses such as health misinformation, violent rhetoric and hate speech. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has also filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging anticompetitive practices.
“While it’ll help alleviate confusion by distinguishing Facebook’s parent company from its founding app, a name change doesn’t suddenly erase the systemic issues plaguing the company,” said Forrester Research Director Mike Proulx.
Zuckerberg said the new name, coming from the Greek word for “beyond,” symbolized there was always more to build. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday tweeted out a different definition “referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.”
Zuckerberg said the new name also reflects that over time, users will not need to use Facebook to use the company’s other services.
Social media giant Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name next week, the Verge reported on Tuesday, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about the name change at the company’s annual Connect conference on 28 October, but it could be unveiled sooner, the Verge report said.
Similar to how Google rebranded under the Alphabet umbrella, the rebrand would likely position Facebook’s social media app as one of many products under a parent company, which will also oversee groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and more, the report added.
It has come at a time Facebook faces significant pressure following revelations from whistleblower France Haugen, who told US Congress the company had put “astronomical profits before people” and that it harms children and is destabilising democracies. Haugen has been behind the leak of a number of documents to the Wall Street Journal, including showing internal research revealing 30% of teenage girls felt Instagram made dissatisfaction with their body worse.
Earlier this month Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram also went out for five hours after routine maintenance went wrong, disrupting all of Facebook’s services including its own internal communications and physical security services.
“For more than five hours Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilise democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies,” Haugen told Congress.
Oct 4 (Reuters) – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp at least partially reconnected to the global internet late on Monday afternoon Eastern time, nearly six hours into an outage that paralyzed the social media platform.
Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark at around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT), in what website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure it had ever seen.
The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get to 100%.”
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9% on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks. Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trade following resumption of service.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
Soon after the outage started, Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or say how many users were affected by the outage.
The error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested an error in the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work.
Facebook, which is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in U.S. ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.
On Sunday, Frances Haugen, who worked as a product manager on the civic misinformation team at Facebook, revealed that she was the whistleblower who provided documents underpinning a Wall Street Journal investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram’s harm to teen girls.
Haugen was due to urge the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to regulate the company, which she plans to liken to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters.
Facebook has began labeling posts that discuss safety of shots and COVID-19 Vaccines after they were criticized by researchers and for allowing misinformation to be spread on its platform.
The company said in a blog post that it is also launching a feature in the United States that will give people information about where to get the vaccines with the COVID-19 information section also added to its photo-sharing site Instagram.
The move comes after claims and conspiracies about the vaccines proliferated on social media platforms during the pandemic but Facebook and Instagram have now moved in to tighten their policies after keyword searches found misinformation in its pages, groups and large accounts.
The company’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox revealed that they have taken viral false claims “very seriously” but added that there was “a huge gray area of people who have concerns…some of which some people would call misinformation and some of which other people would call doubt.”
The best thing to do in that huge gray area is just to show up with authoritative information in a helpful way, be a part of the conversation and do it with health experts,” Cox added.
The giant social media company clarified that it was labeling Facebook and Instagram posts that discuss the safety of COVID-19 vaccines with text saying the vaccines go through safety and effectiveness tests before approval.
The company also revealed in its post that it has removed 2 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram after it expanded its list of banned false claims touching on the vaccines and the virus in February.
Facebook had also implemented temporary measures including reducing the reach of content from users who still go ahead to share information that has been labeled as false by fact-checkers.
Other social media platform like YouTube has its home section filled with a playlist of videos that promote vaccination and counteract vaccination misinformation from WHO while Twitter has a warning under posts with fake or misleading COVID-19 information.
The Facebook-owned Whats App posted a security advisory about the bug, named CVE-2019-11931, which affects earlier versions of the app on both Android and iOS devices. They quoted India’s Computer Emergency Response Team that issued a warning over a malicious video allegedly intended to remotely access WhatsApp accounts.
The security agency issued the advisory after the Indian government said it is empowered to “intercept, monitor or decrypt… any information generated, transmitted, received, or stored” on the phones or devices of its citizens.
According to The Independent, the video allows hackers to access people’s messages when they share the MP4 file with their contacts.
“These users were instead targeted with spyware developed by controversial Israeli technology firm NSO Group,” The Independent quoted a spokesperson.
WhatsApp confirmed the warning, however, they refuted claims linking the hacking attempts to a shared video file.
“We make public reports on potential issues we have fixed consistently with industry best practices. In this instance, there is no reason to believe that users were impacted.”
Last month, WhatsApp revealed that around 1,400 activists and journalists were targeted with spyware developed by controversial Israeli software firm NSO Group.
The same bug was also installed in the messenger’s video calling system in May this year.
“In May we stopped an attack where an advanced cyber actor exploited our video calling to install malware on user devices. There’s a possibility this phone number was impacted, and we want to make sure you know how to keep your mobile phone secure,” the message stated.
WhatsApp users are being urged to update to the latest version of the app due to fears that spy agencies are snooping on people through a major security vulnerability.
App giant Facebook Inc yesterday unveiled a new logo for the company to distinguish it from the apps that they own.
The social media company said it would start using the new brand within its products and marketing materials, and would update the Facebook for Business website over the coming weeks.
“Over the coming weeks, we will start using the new brand within our products and marketing materials, including a new company website,” Facebook’s CMO Antonio Lucio said.
The company has been rebranding since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. For instance, in June, the company began including from Facebook within its owned apps;Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“This brand change is a way to better communicate our ownership structure to the people and businesses who use our services to connect, share, build community and grow their audiences.” Facebook’s CMO Antonio Lucio said.
In what could be the dumbest of them all, the Kenya Information and Communication (Amendment) Bill, 2019 has sparked debate by Kenyans after the Bill masquerading as a law to get rid of offensive content on the inter-webs has turned into pure idiocy and an attempt to gag citizens from raising issues that would otherwise not be highlighted by the mainstream media
The Bill which requires Facebook And WhatsApp group admins to apply for licences from the government also targets bloggers who the Bill defines as those involved in “collecting, writing, editing and presenting of news or news articles in social media platforms or in the internet.”
Those who run blogs without CA’s authority could spend up to two years in jail or pay fines of up to Sh500,000. The regulator will have a register of bloggers in the country and develop a bloggers’ code of conduct. The Bill’s memorandum of objects and reasons, states; “The new part will introduce new sections to the Act on licensing of social media platforms, sharing of information by a licensed person, creates obligations to social media users, registration of bloggers and seeks to give responsibility to CA to develop a bloggers’ code of conduct in consultation with bloggers.”
The Bill sponsored by Malava MP Malulu Injendi is clearly a sneaky way of curtailing freedom of expression, we’ve seen African leaders coming with dumbest legislations like in Uganda the social media tax. Facebook and Twitter for example are micro blogging platforms where people share information, basically, everyone is a potential blogger.
However, we know the real motive is to curtail the voices of those most vocal and the big bloggers in Kenya so the mainstream media can have the monopoly of news dissemination. Government has been successful in controlling the mainstream media unlike the bloggers.
This stupid bill must not see the light of the day, we’re past the dark days of the state controlling information. This is not only unconstitutional but goes further to tell how scared the government is on social media and how foolish some like the Malava MP can get. Any competent constitutional court will throw away this nonsense in the filthiest dustbin.
On Wednesday, the US Justice Department stated that they have launched investigations on Facebook to determine whether the social media giant violated Federal antitrust laws.
The investigation, reportedly begun at the urging of US Attorney General William Barr, come as the Federal Trade Commission conducts its own investigation into whether the social media giant illegally harmed competition.
While the FTC’s probe focuses on whether Facebook’s acquisitions were intended to stifle competition, the Justice Department’s probe will focus on separate behavior, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter. Attorneys general from several states and Washington DC are also investigating Facebook over potential antitrust violations.
As the largest social network in the world, Facebook has become an integral part of people’s lives online, and critics charge that the social network has gained its prominence by simply buying up its competition. The double investigations come after months of lawmakers arguing that tech giants like Facebook need to be broken up. The Justice Department and the House antitrust subcommittee are also looking at antitrust concerns regarding Facebook, as well as Apple, Google, and Amazon.
In July this year, Facebook revealed that FTC had launched an antitrust investigation into the company, but the social network didn’t provide many details. The FTC’s investigation reportedly focuses on whether Facebook’s purchases of companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp were part of the social media giant’s strategy to hobble competition.
The FTC and Justice Department share antitrust enforcement responsibilities but typically reach jurisdiction agreements to avoid overlap. The two agencies divided the investigations of the four tech giants between the two, with Facebook and Amazon going to the Justice Department, while Apple and Google probes went to the FTC.
But the agreement between the two agencies didn’t cover all conduct by the companies, and Barr pressed for the Justice Department to retain jurisdiction over Facebook. Facebook and the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the Bloomberg.
Are you a group admin on Facebook or whatsApp? You might soon be required to obtain clearance from the Communication Authority (CA). Before setting up groups on WhatsApp and Facebook group admins will be required to apply for licences from the CA if a Bill sponsored by Malava MP Malulu Injendi gets passed.
The Bill which is headed to Parliament this week also proposes that users and group administrators who allow offending content on their social media platforms be jailed. Should the Bill pass, social media group administrators will be required to inform the CA their intent to form any groups and shall be responsible for the contents posted and discussion on the platform they control. This means taking full responsibility of whatever information is posted in that group, with or without the admins approval.
“A social media user shall ensure that any content published, written or shared through the social media platform does not degrade or intimidate a recipient of the content,” reads part of The Kenya Information and Communication (Amendment) Bill, 2019.
The group administrators will be tasked with kicking out those who post offending content, they shall also be required to carry out due diligence to ensure that all its users “are of age of majority.”
The Bill will put a huge burden of a fine not exceeding two hundred thousand shillings for administrators whose groups are found to be allowing offending content. “Any person who contravenes the provision of this section commits an offence and shall be liable upon conviction to a fine not exceeding two hundred thousand shillings, or to an imprisonment of a term not exceeding one year,” the bill states.
To establish a group on both those platforms, the Bill proposes that one must have a physical address and data showing all its members.
The world App giant Facebook has purged tens of thousands of apps involved in data mining from its platform. According to facebook insiders, the decision was arrived at after the company being slapped with thousands of privacy glitch summons and legal suits.
Facebook co-founder Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, an American technology entrepreneur, and philanthropist stated that the removals come as part of an ongoing investigation into how developers use data, which the company started after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018.
Under that agreement Facebook will also be held to a new set of requirements to bring oversight to app developers, requiring them to comply with policies and undergo annual certifications. The news also reveals that the platform is home to more problematic apps than previously thought.
“App developers remain a vital part of the Facebook ecosystem. They help to make our world more social and more engaging. But people need to know we’re protecting their privacy.” Facebook said.
Facebook said on its official blog on Friday that tens of thousands of apps Facebook that have been removed come from just 400 developers, and millions more have been investigated. The review is ongoing and comes from hundreds of contributors, including attorneys, external investigators, data scientists, engineers, policy specialists, and teams within Facebook.
“We promised then that we would review all of the apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform policies in 2014. It has involved hundreds of people: attorneys, external investigators, data scientists, engineers, policy specialists, platform partners and other teams across the company. Our review helps us to better understand patterns of abuse in order to root out bad actors among developers.” Ime Archibong Facebook’s VP of Product Partnerships said.
According to the blog, Facebook banned an app called myPersonality that refused to comply with the company’s audit and reportedly shared information with researchers and companies with only limited protections in place.
They, Facebook, also took legal action against the data analytics company Rankwave, filing a lawsuit in California after the South Korean firm failed to comply with its investigation.
Facebook also filed legal action against companies LionMobi and JediMobi, companies that used apps to infect users phones with malware to generate profit and against two Ukrainian men for using quiz apps to scrape user data from Facebook.
The increased scrutiny comes after the record FTC fine and as dozens of US states have announced they will launch antitrust and privacy investigations into Google and Facebook. Several presidential candidates have also called for Facebook to be broken up.
“In a few cases, we have banned apps completely. That can happen for any number of reasons including inappropriately sharing data obtained from us, making data publicly available without protecting people’s identity or something else that was in clear violation of our policies. We have not confirmed other instances of misuse to date other than those we have already notified the public about, but our investigation is not yet complete. We have been in touch with regulators and policymakers on these issues. We’ll continue working with them as our investigation continues.” Facebook said.
The company said it is far from finished investigating and that it has expanded the team dedicated to investigating these violations, restricted the APIs used to connect to Facebook and set more specific policies around developing on Facebook.
“As each month goes by, we have incorporated what we learned and re-examined the ways that developers can build using our platforms. We’ve also improved the ways we investigate and enforce against potential policy violations that we find. We have clarified that we can suspend or revoke a developer’s access to any API that it has not used in the past 90 days. And we will not allow apps on Facebook that request a disproportionate amount of information from users relative to the value they provide.” Ime Archibong Facebook’s VP of Product Partnerships said.
Facebook is at it again and this time around the App’s giant is working on an upgrade that will be removing the like counts and, probably like button from all user accounts and pages.
Thumbs up or as it is popularly known LIKE has been a universally recognized sign of approval for Facebook posts which has been so integral to the service’s experience pretty much since its inception, for both good and ill.
As time as gone on, more attention has been paid to the effect that chasing likes and addiction to social media has on peoples’ health, which is why Facebook-owned Instagram has been experimenting with hiding like counts on posts from everyone but the user.
Facebook, meanwhile, is reportedly wrestling internally with the similarities of that very question. According to App researcher Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane on Twitter) who is constantly drilling down into app code to discover unannounced features being tested, has disclosed that Facebook is considering an Instagram-like test that would hide like counts on a post from the user’s followers.
Wong stated this on her blog after sharing the same on her twitter account:
Currently, with this unreleased feature, the like/reaction count is hidden from anyone other than the creator of the post, just like how it works on Instagram. The list of people who liked/reacted will still be accessible, but the amount will be hidden.
The fact that Facebook is following suit after Instagram indicates they have confidence the pros of hiding like counts outweigh the cons https://t.co/WnUrM12aZg
Along these lines, Facebook has confirmed to the media that it is indeed considering this test but has not gotten underway with it yet.
“By hiding the like/reaction counts from anyone other than the post creator, users might feel less anxious about the perceived popularity of their content. It has been shown in multiple papers that social media use may influence mental health, including leading to depression and anxiety.” Jane wrote on her blog
“It takes time to develop, observe, research and release experimental features like this. Experimental features could come and go. But I am certain hiding the public like counts will be beneficial to the digital wellbeing of a large chunk of users.” She added
Facebook Inc will now rely on professional journalists that the company plans to hire instead of relying solely on algorithms to deliver trending news n what the company terms as a positive step to shake up the media industry.
On Tuesday, the social media giant said that it would build a small team of journalists to select the top national news of the day to ensure they’re highlighting the right stories.
According to Facebook, stories will appear in a section called the “news tab,” which the media giant has separated from the traditional news feed that displays updates and content from users’ friends and relatives.
“In theory, I see this as a really positive development. It is something quite promising,” Danna Young, a communications professor at the University of Delaware, told media.
Facebook’s journalists will be curating stories from news sites and won’t be editing headlines or writing content, the California-based company has less to change according to experts even though Facebook has consistently said it does not want to be considered a media organization that makes major editorial decisions.
“It’s not transformative because it’s not going to change necessarily the behavior of individuals who are referencing stories on their feeds. That’s where the power comes from individuals you know and trust putting their tacit stamp of approval on stories by sharing them,” Danna Young said
News Tab will be Facebook’s first news feature using human moderators since it shut down its hapless “trending topics” section last year after they were accused of suppressing stories about conservative issues.
Facebook, however, says that the Articles that have not been deemed as top news stories will still be collated using algorithms based on the user’s history, such as pages they follow, publications they subscribe to and news they have already interacted with.
“Our goal with the news tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience for people,” Facebook head of news partnerships Campbell Brown told media.
The comes at a time when Facebook has embarked on a series of initiatives to boost journalism, with traditional media organizations accusing it of benefitting financially from their hard work.
Internet platforms are dominating the internet advertising space making it difficult for established news organizations to transition what were very profitable print advertisements online. Facebook announced in January that it will invest $300 million over three years to support journalism, particularly local news organizations.
According to Facebook insiders, the company will pay some publishers to license news content for the tab but Mathew Ingram, who writes about digital media for the Columbia Journalism Review, doesn’t expect that to trickle down to hard-up organizations that need it the most.
“The companies they are going to choose are ones already doing well I assume. It might give them a little extra cash but I don’t see it driving a huge amount of traffic,” Mathew Ingram said
Print journalism in the US is in free-fall as social media overtakes newspapers as the main news source for Americans.
“The death of local news has such destructive effects for democrac.sty. It’s a complex issue that Facebook alone cannot fix,” said Young.
“Facebook is not a journalism company and so before working for Facebook I would want to see their commitment to ethical, robust journalism,” Said the 30-year-old Stephen Groves, who recently earned a master’s in journalism at New York University
When Buzzfeed cut 200 jobs in January, 29-year-old Emily Tamkin was let go from a position she had held for just a few months.
“I’m personally not cheered by the fact that Facebook is swooping in and hiring journalists. If that’s the silver lining then we have a very big cloud here,” Ms. Tamkin said
Kiswahili and other nine African languages have been added to Facebook’s third-party fact-checking after the company partnered with Africa Check and will include 10 African languages.
Facebook uses the Third-Party-Fact-Checking program to help its algorithms assess the accuracy of news on the Facebook community and also, seek to reduce the spread of misinformation/fake news.
Africa Check is an independent fact-checking organization that was launched in 2018 and they are collaborating with Facebook to add the following languages to Facebook’s 3rd-Party program:
Yoruba and Igbo, adding to Hausa which was already supported in Nigeria
Kiswahili in Kenya
Wolof in Senegal
Afrikaans, Zulu, Setswana, Sotho, Northern Sotho and Southern Ndebele in South Africa
“We continue to make significant investments in our efforts to fight the spread of false news on our platform, whilst building supportive, safe, informed and inclusive communities. Our third-party fact-checking programme is just one of many ways we are doing this, and with the expansion of local language coverage, this will help in further improving the quality of information people see on Facebook. We know there is still more to do, and we’re committed to this.” Noko Makgato who is the Executive Director of Africa Check
Facebook will be fact-checking alongside the verification of images and videos of all local articles. If any of Facebook’s partners in the program identifies a story as false, that story will feed will be censored and suppressed to significantly reduce its distribution.
“We’re thrilled to be expanding the arsenal of the languages we cover in our work on Facebook’s third-party fact-checking programme. In countries as linguistically diverse as Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Senegal, fact-checking in local languages is vital. Not only does it let us fact-check more content on Facebook, but it also means we’ll be reaching more people across Africa with verified, credible information.” Noko Makgato said.
