Tag: facebook

Algeria jails state TV journalist for three years over Facebook posts

A court in Chéraga, west of Algiers, sentenced journalist Abdelali Mezghiche on Sunday to three years in prison and a fine of 200,000 Algerian dinars (about US$1,500), the New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported Monday.

CPJ says the case stems from posts on his Facebook page about public anger over the jailing of local figures in the southern city of Djanet.

Mezghiche was convicted on five misdemeanour counts, including publishing content deemed harmful to the national interest, inciting unarmed gatherings and spreading hate speech. A local journalist told CPJ he was convicted under Articles 96 and 100 of Algeria’s penal code.

Prosecutors had asked for five years at an October 25 hearing. His defence team plans to appeal.

A presenter of cultural programs on Algeria’s state-owned broadcaster since 2005, Mezghiche has also published three poetry collections, CPJ says. In February, CPJ said his Facebook page has more than 130,000 followers and that the posts had since been taken down.

State security officers arrested him in Algiers on February 5, according to CPJ, and an investigating judge ordered him held in pretrial detention four days later. He has been in Kolea Prison in Tipaza province since.

A February alert on the Eu SEE website gave a different account. It said he was arrested on February 9 on charges that included disturbing public order, spreading false information and belonging to a subversive group.

CPJ regional director Sara Qudah called the sentence “a blatant weaponization of the Algerian judiciary to silence critical voices.”

Emails CPJ sent to Algeria’s justice and interior ministries asking for comment went unanswered. At least seven journalists are jailed in Algeria for their work, the group says.

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Meta’s AI Will Now Guess Your Age On Instagram… Even If You Say You’re An Adult

Meta Platforms is expanding its AI-powered age-estimation technology to identify Instagram users suspected of being teenagers, even if they registered with an adult birthdate, and automatically apply stricter safety settings to their accounts.

Meta said in a Nov. 9 statement that the expansion will mean millions more teenagers worldwide will receive Teen Account protections, offering built-in safeguards that automatically limit the content they see, time spent on the app, and who can contact them.

Starting this month, U.S. parents on Instagram will receive a notification explaining how Meta will apply the age-appropriate protections for teens and how they can help ensure that their teenage child is logged in with the correct age, Meta said.

Meta uses AI and other signals to estimate a user’s age, including information from profiles, comments, posts, captions, and bios, such as references to school grades or birthdays, Larry Magid, CEO of nonprofit ConnectSafely, wrote in a Nov. 6 post on Meta’s website.

The company can also analyze photo and video visual patterns to determine a person’s age.

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Michigan Man Arrested for Threatening to Kill FBI Director Kash Patel in Facebook Messages

Federal agents arrested a Michigan man on Friday after he allegedly threatened to kill FBI Director Kash Patel and an unnamed “associate” in a series of Facebook messages, emails, and voicemails.

The Justice Department announced the charges against Anthony Daniel Palazzolo, 42, of Chesterfield Township, on Friday.

Palazzolo’s arrest stems from a Facebook message sent to an individual identified in court records only as Victim-1 on October 8.

In that message, Palazzolo, who referred to himself as “Baby Bird,” wrote that he had “put a hit out” on the recipient and that Patel was “a dead mf too,” adding “Tell his punk ass I said it.”⁠

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan stated that after FBI agents interviewed Palazzolo at his home the following day, he continued to contact a Detroit FBI agent by phone.

Palazzolo allegedly left voicemails threatening to come to the office and “use deadly force against every single one of you government officials—FBI Secret Service will all be f[——] killed.”

Agents also alleged that he emailed the agent, a federal court in Texas, the Secret Service, and the Supreme Court with graphic threats of sexual violence involving objects and torture.

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Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion Penalty for Misleading Facebook Users About Data Privacy

A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion penalty for misleading Facebook users about data privacy.

The judgment is related to the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal from nearly 10 years ago.

The jury found that Meta had more than 40 million violations of New Mexico’s unfair practices act.

CNBC reported:

Meta was ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy case that stemmed from the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal from nearly a decade ago.

The penalty, revealed in a court filing, comes after a jury in a Santa Fe courthouse found in September the social media giant liable for misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data and prevents harmful information from flourishing on its services.

Although the jury concluded that Meta had over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000, a New Mexico judge was responsible for determining the ultimate fine. The Wednesday filing showed that the state was awarded $219.5 billion, but the penalty was ultimately reduced to $25 billion.

“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act – $5,000 per violation found by the jury,” New Mexico district court judge Francis Mathew wrote in the filing.

The judge added that interest on the penalty shall accrue at the rate of 15% each year until the fine is paid off in full.

In August, a court ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund over child harm.

New Mexico Judge Bryan Biedscheid compared Meta to air pollution and called it a “public nuisance.”

“Although Meta is not alone in this regard, its social media platforms are a significant contributing factor to the current mental health crisis among New Mexico’s youth established by the substantial evidence in this case,” Judge Bryan Biedscheid wrote in the ruling over the summer, CNBC reported.

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Meta Muse Exposes Users’ Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations

Security researchers say Meta’s Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users’ shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports:Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available… […]. “If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”

[…] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database.

Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.

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Florida Seeks Meta ID Checks For All Users

Florida’s attorney general is asking a court to make sure Meta (Facebook and Instagram) puts in place a system to check the age of all its users in that state.

If the court grants the motion, every user in Florida will have to surrender their privacy and will have to verify their age to access speech and, if they are under 14, Meta will have to remove them from the platforms. And if Meta can’t do that within 30 days, it will have to cut off every user under 18 until it implements the age-checking system.

In the meantime, the court is asked to order Meta to set limits on the use of its platforms by teenagers, including hours when they can use them, and features they can access.

“Request proof of age for Instagram and Facebook accounts belonging to users that Meta’s systems know or predict to be under the age of 14, and mark for deletion the accounts of those who do not verify their age within 30 days,” the filing says.

It also wants Meta to “Adopt and apply an age assurance framework to every Teen User.”

It asks Meta to “Treat users who Meta has reason to believe are under 14 or under 18 years of age as under those respective ages unless the users age verify.”

The motion spells it out: “If within 30 days of the entry of this injunction, Meta cannot implement the measures for user-age verification and removal in this and the prior sections, Meta must cease to allow any Young Users access to its Platforms in Florida until these measures are implemented.” Young Users means users under 18.

The default mode for teens should be “quiet mode from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. year-round, and from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on academic-year weekdays”, the filing says. It also wants Meta to hide “like” counts from teenagers by default, disable autoplay and infinite scroll unless a parent turns them on, and limit the time spent on the platforms to “not more than 60 hours per month.”

The motion mentions internal Meta communications, including one that says “IG is a drug” and another that reads, “We’re basically pushers.”

Another employee is quoted as saying about hiding “like” counts, “It’s a social comparison app, fucking get used to it.”

The court is yet to rule on the motion, but Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the filing on X, saying, “We just asked a Florida court to order Meta to turn off the features that addict teenagers and to leave Florida kids alone when they’re in school or sleeping.”

Uthmeier also revealed that Meta tried to get Florida to accept a settlement, but was rebuffed. “Meta tried to get us to take their low-ball settlement, but we wont sell out our kids,” he wrote.

The attorney general’s motion calls the national settlement a “mere slap on the wrist” for a company that is valued at “roughly $1.86 trillion.”

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New Mexico Found a Way to Fine Platforms for Speech It Didn’t Delete

A civil jury has found Meta liable for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and now the judge is being asked to order the company to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion.

At a hearing on October 1 in Santa Fe, special prosecutor Randi McGinn asked Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court to order Meta to pay this amount, while a lawyer for the social media giant said such a penalty would be “an astronomical” one, violating “a host of constitutional provisions.”

Meta is being punished for making false statements about user privacy, and also for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough.

The verdict was delivered on September 25, finding Meta had made 26 false or misleading statements, resulting in nearly 43.9 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.

This would translate to a maximum of $5,000 per violation, or $219 billion in all – more than the $206 billion the tobacco industry had to pay in a settlement in 1998. The state asked for about 20% of this amount.

The number of violations was arrived at by counting the number of people in New Mexico, and the number of Facebook users in the state, and then multiplying these numbers by the number of times Meta made false statements in news outlets and on its own platforms.

The state had to show only that harm was likely, not that it actually occurred.

Meta is being punished for lying about how it handled user data, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw a third party harvest data from about 87 million profiles. The company is also being punished for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough – and the number of violations in this category is about a quarter of the total.

The New Mexico case is not the only one where Meta is being forced to pay up – in March, a Santa Fe jury ordered it to pay $375 million in a case involving child safety on Facebook and Instagram, and in August, the judge in that case added another $567 million for a youth mental health fund.

In August, 47 states reached a settlement with Meta, along with other social media companies, that will see them pay $17 billion. Judge Mathew mentioned this during the October 1 hearing, saying that due process suggests he should opt for a much lower amount than what the state of New Mexico is asking for.

During the hearing, Meta’s lawyer Matt Nicholson described the case as “about 26 statements over 11 years” and said that the state “made absolutely no showing that anyone in the state of New Mexico ever saw them, relied on them or were harmed by them in any way.”

McGinn countered that “the one thing you didn’t hear from counsel is an apology.”

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BEYOND PARODY: Maine Democrat Troy Jackson Booted From Facebook Group Supporting His Campaign

Troy Jackson is the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Maine who was chosen by party insiders after Graham Platner was forced out of the race over credible accusations of sexual assault.

Jackson has his own issues as a candidate, as he has been accused of some bad behavior in social situations.

Now, Jackson has reportedly been kicked out of a Facebook group that was set up to support his candidacy.

You could not make this up.

Maine Wire reports:

Troy Jackson Gets the Boot From ‘Mainers for Troy Jackson’ Facebook Group

An account bearing Troy Jackson’s name got kicked out of a Facebook group devoted to supporting him after members decided its replies were so insulting they couldn’t possibly have come from their candidate.

Screenshots from “Mainers for Troy Jackson” show members arguing over whether they were dealing with the real Jackson, an impostor or someone else using his account. One member posted images identifying the profile as Jackson’s personal page, complete with a Facebook designation that made for an awkward endorsement: “Former member of Mainers for Troy Jackson.”

According to a Maine Wire investigation, the account profile picture matches the personal profile account Jackson has used for several years.

The dispute comes amid complaints about Washington’s growing influence over the Democratic Senate nominee. In a Sept. 22 New York Magazine report, Rebecca Traister described progressive organizers frustrated as Jackson deferred to national consultants. She reported that local organizers had been sidelined and town halls reworked or canceled. Jackson’s campaign denied screening questions at events and said his positions on ICE, Gaza and Medicare for All had not changed.

Inside the Facebook group, supporters were having trouble recognizing the man whose name was on the door.

“This cannot be Troy speaking. He would not speak so insultingly and patronizingly to regular people let alone supporters,” wrote Carla Poindexter White. “Whoever this is, it is horrifying.”

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Ads Featuring Real Children’s Faces in Sexual AI Videos Persist on Meta’s Platforms

Researchers say more than 250 ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material have appeared on Meta’s platforms including Facebook and Instagram since early August, weeks after the company removed dozens of similar ads following reporting from Wired.

Wired reports that the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project says that in early August, Meta deleted roughly 53 ads across Facebook, Instagram and Threads that contained child sexual abuse material, telling the outlet at the time that most of the abusive ads predated the rollout of new AI tools designed to “better detect and block” harmful content. Now, the same watchdog group says ads containing sexual imagery of children are back, some of which are identical to those previously removed.

The problem didn’t stop there. Researchers say Meta has published more than 350 abusive video ads since the end of last year. Many link to so-called “nudification” apps tied to Chinese developers. Unlike the initial batch of 53 ads, the new ones used images of real children, not stock or generic photos.

One ad used an official photograph of a minor from a European royal family, transformed into a video depicting a graphic sex act. Researchers declined to name the royal in order to protect the victim.

“Researchers identified the real-world identities of four minors used in the ads,” according to TTP, whose director is Katie Paul. Three of the four are from the United States. One is a teenager who runs a social media influencer account on a Meta platform. Another is a teen influencer with a public account. The third is a stock photo model, a real person, labeled as “pre-teen” on stock photo websites.

The ads typically open with an innocuous photo of a preteen or teen girl (only one involved a boy), paired with text claiming the image is “not just a photo” and that “there are no restriction” on how it can be used. The videos morph the children’s faces into explicit sexual content, often depicting sex acts. Clicking the ads sends users to download AI face-swapping or video apps from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Many carry the tagline: “This is the AI that men actually use.”

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Meta Settlement Ignites Global “Child Safety” Digital ID Push

The ink on the multi-billion dollar settlement agreement that Meta struck with 47 US states, the District of Columbia and a number of US territories has barely had time to dry – and already, officials and campaigners in the US, the EU, the UK, and at the UN are using it to press for similar rules to be imposed elsewhere.

In the UK, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said that Meta should apply the new rules in that country as well, while the government there has its own plans to ban social media for under-16s and impose nighttime curfews.

“We don’t want a situation where young people in America have got a higher rate of protection than young people in the UK,” he said.

The British plan is to ban social media for those under 16 by spring 2027, and impose nighttime curfews on older teenagers, the Independent is reporting. To enforce this, platforms will have to know whether a user is a child or an adult, stepping up the pressure on companies to introduce age checks.

In the EU, the Commission is also piling on the pressure on Meta to “export” the US deal.

“We expect adequate management of screen time, appropriate parental controls on these platforms,” said digital spokesperson Thomas Regnier. “It is now up to the company to propose these commitments within the European Union in order to also protect our children here.”

The official revealed that the Commission has already been in talks with Meta since the US agreement was announced, and that the goal is to give children in the EU “at least” the same protections as those in the US.

Meanwhile, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk is using the settlement to call for global protections for children from what he says is the harm caused by excessive social media use.

In the US, District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb, one of those behind the lawsuit that led to the settlement, said that Meta “will not be the last” company to be forced to agree to such terms.

His California counterpart, Rob Bonta, said that Meta is “not the only player in the industry” to have “visited enormous mental health harms on kids through their products and their designs,” and added, “others rightfully must be held accountable.”

The settlement contains financial incentives for states to bring similar cases against other companies. Snap, TikTok, and YouTube are mentioned by name in this context.

Not everyone is happy with the deal, however. Arturo Béjar, a former Meta employee who was a witness in the trial, said the protections are insufficient and that the product remains harmful.

“The limitations that are in the agreement are the equivalent of saying: ‘Well, you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can in two hours a day,'” he said. “It doesn’t make the cigarettes any safer.”

Meta responded by saying that Béjar is ignoring some of the other provisions of the settlement, such as non-algorithmic feed defaults and stronger parental controls.

“We have a huge raft of built-in protections,” a spokesperson said, and argued that teenagers also derive “substantial” benefits from using social media.

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