Tag: facebook

Supreme Court rejects Meta’s appeal in Vermont social media addiction case

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a push to avoid a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a decision that comes as social media companies increasingly face legal scrutiny.

Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. appealed after Vermont’s highest court allowed a suit filed by its attorney general in 2023 to move forward. The company is facing similar lawsuits from states across the country, accusing it of knowingly designing addictive features.

Meta had argued that it can’t be sued in Vermont court because neither the company nor the app design has specific ties to the state. Vermont countered that the sites’ large number of teen users gives its courts jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in a brief, unexplained order, as is typical. The procedural decision comes after court losses for Meta and YouTube in social media addiction lawsuits in California and New Mexico.

Vermont’s lawsuit was filed after an investigation by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in several states. Newspaper reports based on Meta’s own research also found that the company knew about the harms Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues. One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

Almost all teens ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. report using a social media platform, with about a third saying they use social media “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Meta, for its part, has said that it has already introduced dozens of tools to support teens and their families and suggested it would have worked with the states on standards for youth social media use.

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark applauded the decision, saying it affirms “that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids.”

Keep reading

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta kicks off major bloodbath with 8,000 layoffs as AI roils tech giant

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta on Wednesday kicked off a major bloodbath with 8,000 layoffs — among the largest in the social media giant’s history — as a disruptive shift toward artificial intelligence continues to roil the tech giant. 

Employees were told in April that a 10% reduction of the workforce was coming on May 20, and earlier this week, they were reportedly informed that another 7,000 staffers would be reassigned to AI-focused positions.

Meta’s offices are set to be mostly deserted Wednesday after human resources chief Janelle Gale told North American employees to work from home in an email this week, according to an internal document earlier reported by Reuters.

The companywide purge is taking place in three massive waves, as employees across the world are notified in emails at 4 a.m. local time in their respective regions.

Singapore staffers were the first to receive the doomsday emails.

Meta did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Keep reading

Texas Woman Arrested for Facebook Post About Town Water Quality

Jennifer Combs had never gotten so much as a speeding ticket. On May 8, police in Trinidad, Texas, arrested her on a state jail felony charge for writing a Facebook post about the town’s water supply.

The post said residents had been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. The city says that claim was false. So they sent cops to her door.

The charge is felony false alarm or report under Texas Penal Code § 42.06, a statute designed for people who call in fake bomb threats or fabricate emergencies. Trinidad’s police chief and local officials decided it also applies to a woman who ran a community Facebook page and relayed what neighbors told her about getting sick.

Combs’ post, published on her “Southern Belle Watch” account, read in part: “We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state.”

That post got her a night in the Navarro County Justice Center. She has since filed a federal lawsuit alleging the arrest was “an act of deliberate political retaliation.”

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The water is brown. The city admits it.

Trinidad, a small city in Henderson County about an hour southeast of Dallas, has a water problem that nobody disputes.

Keep reading

Meta launches WhatsApp ‘incognito’ mode to address privacy concerns for AI chats

Meta Platforms said Wednesday it’s rolling out an “incognito” mode for WhatsApp users to have private conversations with its AI chatbot, a move intended to ease privacy concerns about sensitive information that users share in chats.

The social media company said in a blog post that incognito chat mode provides a way to have private, temporary conversations with Meta AI, its artificial intelligence assistant that’s been available on WhatsApp for a few years.

Messages will be processed in a “secure environment” that even Meta can’t access, won’t be saved by default and will disappear when exiting a session, Meta said.

Generative AI systems have been dogged by privacy concerns because the large language models that underpin these systems are trained on vast troves of data, sometimes including personal information provided by users themselves in their conversations with AI chatbots.

Rival chatbot makers already have some privacy features. Google’s Gemini chatbot has the option to disable chat history and opt out of allowing one’s data to be used in training its AI models. ChatGPT has similar controls.

Meta says it’s rolling out incognito chats because users often ask chatbots sensitive questions or include private financial, personal, health or work data in their questions.

“We’re starting ask a lot of meaningful questions about our lives with AI systems, and it doesn’t always feel like you should have to share the information behind those questions with the companies that run those AI systems,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, told reporters.

Incognito chat mode has safety features to prevent the chatbot from answering questions about harmful topics, Cathcart said.

It will “steer the user towards helpful information if it can and then refuse (to answer) and eventually even just stop interacting with the user completely,” Cathcart said.

Users will only be able to type in questions and get text responses; they won’t be able to upload or generate images. They’ll also have to confirm their age because Meta doesn’t allow users under 13 on its platforms.

Keep reading

Meta Will Fight Ofcom Over the Math, Just Not the Censorship

Meta filed a judicial review against Ofcom in London’s High Court on Thursday over how the regulator calculates fees and fines under the Online Safety Act, the UK’s online censorship law. The company isn’t challenging the law’s censorship powers, its ability to compel scanning of encrypted messages, or its elastic definition of online “harm.” It is challenging the size of the fine.

The dispute centers on whether Ofcom should base penalties on Meta’s global revenue or just what it earns in the UK and the gap between those two figures is enormous. Meta reported roughly $201 billion in worldwide revenue last year, and the Online Safety Act lets Ofcom fine companies up to 10% of “qualifying worldwide revenue,” which puts Meta’s theoretical penalty ceiling near $20 billion. Calculated on UK-only revenue, that number collapses.

“We and others in the tech industry believe [Ofcom’s] decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”

Ofcom pushed back in a statement, saying: “Disappointingly, Meta are objecting to the payment of fees, and any penalties that could be levied on companies in future, that are calculated on this basis.”

Keep reading

New Mexico’s Meta Trial Opens with Judge Wary of State’s Broad Surveillance Demands

A New Mexico judge spent his first morning of the Meta remedies trial signaling that he doesn’t plan to become “a one-person legislator, judge and executive branch enforcer,” and the privacy stakes of that reluctance run deeper than the child safety framing suggests.

The bench trial opened Monday in Santa Fe before First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid, the second phase of a case that already produced a $375 million jury verdict against Meta in March.
State prosecutors now want the judge to rewrite how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp operate inside New Mexico, with a remedy list that reaches well past algorithm tweaks into the architecture of identity verification and encrypted messaging itself.

Before opening statements, Biedscheid told both sides he held “some concerns” about the New Mexico Department of Justice’s proposals. “I’m probably not the easiest sell on an idea where I would become a one-person legislature, judge and executive branch enforcer of administrative code provisions,” he said.

The warning lands at a moment when several of the state’s requested fixes look like permanent surveillance infrastructure dressed up as protection. It start with age verification. The state wants Meta ordered to confirm the age of every New Mexico user, an obligation that cannot be met by asking people to type a birth year.

Keep reading

EU Pushes Meta Toward Digital ID and Age Verification Under DSA, Threatens 6% Revenue Fine

Brussels has decided Meta isn’t monitoring its users hard enough.

The European Commission issued a preliminary finding on April 29 that Facebook and Instagram violate the Digital Services Act because the company can’t reliably stop children under 13 from creating accounts, opening Meta to fines that could reach 6 percent of its global annual turnover, a sum potentially north of $12 billion.

The official complaint is clearly a regulator demanding more identity checks, more verification, more friction at the door.

Meta’s existing approach, which mostly involves asking users to type in their birthday, lets minors lie their way onto the platform. The Commission says the tool available for reporting underage users requires up to seven clicks to access, is not pre-filled with user information, and frequently results in no follow-up action.

The Commission also pointed to evidence that around 10 to 12 per cent of children under 13 were accessing Instagram and/or Facebook, contradicting Meta’s own internal numbers.

What the Commission wants Meta to do instead carries a cost most of the coverage skipped over. Self-declared birthdays are inadequate, so something stronger has to fill the gap.

That means age estimation systems that infer how old you are from how you behave or age verification that links your account to a government-issued document. Either path turns the basic act of opening a social media account into either a behavioral surveillance event or an identity verification event. There is no third option being seriously proposed.

The implications reach well beyond the under-13 question. Once a platform knows who you are with legal certainty, the entire premise of online speech changes.

Anonymity has historically protected dissidents, whistleblowers, abuse survivors, journalists communicating with sources, and ordinary people who simply don’t want their employer reading their political opinions.

Strip that away and you lose the conditions under which a great deal of valuable speech actually happens. People self-censor when they know they are being watched and a verified internet is a watched internet by definition.

Keep reading

Meta Terminates Contract with Kenya After Workers Shared Intimate Videos Recorded by Smart Glasses

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has ended its contract with Sama, a Kenya-based data annotation company, two months after workers reported viewing sensitive footage ranging from sexual activity to bathroom breaks recorded by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Ars Technica reports that Meta has terminated its business relationship with Sama, a Kenyan data annotation firm, following reports that contracted workers had viewed explicit and private content captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The contract termination, which affected 1,108 workers according to Sama, occurred less than two months after the allegations became public.

In February, multiple workers from Sama reported viewing sensitive, embarrassing, and apparently private footage while performing data annotation work for Meta. The complaints were featured in a report by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, along with Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa. Workers described watching explicit footage shot from Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including people changing clothes, doing drugs, having sex, and using the toilet.

Sama, headquartered in Kenya, had been contracted by Meta to perform data annotation work involving video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems used in Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company’s workers were tasked with reviewing content to help improve the performance of Meta’s AI products.

A Meta spokesperson told Breitbart News, “Last month, we paused our work with Sama while we looked into these claims. We take them seriously. Photos and videos are private to users. Humans review AI content to improve product performance, for which we get clear user consent. We’ve also decided to end our work with Sama because they don’t meet our standards.”

Sama workers believe the contract was terminated in retaliation for speaking out about the disturbing content they encountered during their work. One anonymous Sama employee was quoted in the February report saying workers “are just expected to carry out the work” even when viewing private footage.

Keep reading

Meta Buys Robot Brain Startup As Zuck Wants Humanoids In Homes

After the Oculus and Metaverse bets turned into costly disappointments for Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms, the tech giant’s pivot to real-world humanoid robotics appears to be gaining momentum, with news Friday afternoon that it is acquiring Assured Robot Intelligence.

Bloomberg reports that Meta has closed the acquisition of the humanoid robotics startup, which develops AI models to help robots understand, predict, and adapt to human behavior in complex environments.

What Meta has acquired appears to be a “robot brain” designed to give Zuckerberg’s humanoid robots better control, self-learning capabilities, and whole-body movement, enabling them to operate around people and perform physical tasks. Eventually, Zuckerberg wants these bots in your home.

Under the deal, co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang will join Meta Superintelligence Labs and work with the Meta Robotics Studio.

There is no information about the robot brains on ARI’s website. Using the commercial risk intelligence firm Sayari, we can see the founders and directors of the startup.

Keep reading

Meta raises specter of shutting down service to New Mexico in legal clash over child safety

Meta is raising the prospect of shutting down its social media services in New Mexico in response to a push by state prosecutors for fundamental changes to the company’s platforms, including Instagram, to protect the mental health and safety of children.

The possibility emerged amid legal gamesmanship in the runup to a bench trial next week on allegations that Meta poses a public nuisance. It’s the second phase of a case that already resulted in $375 million in civil penalties on a jury’s determination that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Prosecutors are asking the court to order a series of changes to child accounts on social media aimed at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings and closer oversight.

Meta executives have emphasized that the company continuously improves child safety and addresses compulsive social media use. The company says its being singled out among hundreds of apps that teens use.

In a court filing unsealed Thursday, Meta said it was unfeasible for the company to meet a proposed requirement for 99% accuracy in verifying that child users are at least 13 years old, among other demands.

“As a practical matter, this requirement effectively requires Meta to shut down its services — for all users in the state — or else comply with impossible obligations,” Meta said in the filing.

Such a shutdown across a population of 2.1 million residents in New Mexico could silence personal communication on Meta’s immensely popular platforms, which also include Facebook and WhatsApp, and also impact their use for commercial advertising.

By withdrawing from New Mexico, Meta would satisfy any concerns about harm to children, but the message could appear intentionally hostile and might lead to unintended consequences, said Eric Goldman, codirector of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law in California.

Keep reading