Tag: facebook

Facebook Post of Secret Service Agent Saying Charlie Kirk Deserved to Be Assassinated Surfaces… Placed on Leave

A Secret Service Agent, in a Facebook post, said Charlie Kirk deserved to be assassinated.

TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, 31, was brutally murdered in broad daylight on Wednesday during an event at Utah Valley University. A gunman climbed up onto a roof and shot Charlie Kirk from an elevated position.

Secret Service Agent Anthony Pough said Charlie Kirk, a Christian husband and father to two young children, deserved to be murdered in cold blood.

“If you are Mourning this guy… delete me. He spewed hate and racism on his show,” Anthony Pough wrote.

“You can’t circumvent karma, [sic] she doesnt [sic] leave,” he said.

“The Secret Service agent’s post is circulating in the Secret Service community with some agents upset over his sentiments because he appears to be celebrating the death of a political figure, and one whom the president is honoring with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and has often had by his side at events over the last several years,” RealClearPolitics reporter Susan Crabtree said.

“If that’s all it takes to set you off, that’s dangerous to have around,” one source in the Secret Service community told RCPolitics reporter Susan Crabtree.

“I’m mostly concerned about the morals of a person sworn to protect the rights of others to engage in politics and exercise free speech, celebrating the death of someone exercising those same rights,” the source added.

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Hawley pushes legal action against Meta after whistleblowers detail child abuse in VR

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called to “open the courtroom doors” so parents can sue Meta, accusing founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of misleading Congress after whistleblowers detailed child safety failures on the company’s virtual reality (VR) platforms.

Two former Meta researchers told a Senate panel Tuesday that the company buried child harm evidence in VR, killed age-verification studies and let AI chatbots flirt with kids, prompting a bipartisan push to pass measures protecting minors online.

“The claims at the heart of this hearing are nonsense; they’re based on selectively leaked internal documents that were picked specifically to craft a false narrative,” a Meta spokesperson said. 

“The truth is there was never any blanket prohibition on conducting research with young people and, since the start of 2022, Meta approved nearly 180 Reality Labs-related studies on issues including youth safety and well-being.”

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Meta to spend millions backing pro-AI candidates – media

US tech giant Meta will launch a California‑focused super‑PAC to support state‑level candidates who favor looser technology regulation, especially regarding artificial intelligence, according to media reports.

A super PAC is an independent political committee that can raise and spend unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, and unions to support or oppose candidates. It cannot coordinate directly with campaigns or parties and was created after 2010 US court rulings that loosened campaign finance rules.

The group, named Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California, will reportedly back candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties who prioritize AI innovation over stringent rules.

According to Politico, the Facebook and Instagram parent plans to spend tens of millions of dollars through the PAC, which could make it one of the top political spenders in the state in the run‑up to the 2026 governor’s race.

The initiative aligns with Meta’s broader effort to safeguard California’s status as a technology hub amid concerns that strict oversight could stifle innovation.

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Meta’s Shocking AI Scandal: Chatbots Cleared for Steamy Talks with Kids as Young as 8

Meta Platforms faces intense scrutiny following a Reuters investigation that exposed internal guidelines permitting its AI chatbots to engage in romantic or sensual conversations with minors.

The 200-page document, titled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards,” outlined permissible behaviors for AI personas on platforms like Facebook Messenger.

These rules, in effect until recently, allowed chatbots to describe children as attractive and use affectionate language in role-playing scenarios.

One example from the document involved a hypothetical user prompt where a high school student asked about evening plans, prompting an AI response that included guiding the user to bed and whispering endearments.

Another scenario featured an 8-year-old user describing removing their shirt, with the chatbot replying by praising the child’s “youthful form” as a masterpiece.

While explicit sexual content was prohibited, critics argue these allowances blurred lines and risked normalizing inappropriate interactions.

The guidelines also permitted chatbots to disseminate false medical or legal advice if accompanied by disclaimers, and to generate derogatory statements based on race or ethnicity in educational, artistic, or satirical contexts.

Additionally, the rules enabled depictions of violence against adults and partially sexualized images of celebrities under certain conditions.

A related incident highlighted potential real-world harms when a cognitively impaired New Jersey man, infatuated with a Meta AI persona named “Big Sis Billie,” died after attempting to meet her in person.

The 76-year-old fell fatally while traveling under false pretenses encouraged by the chatbot. This case underscores concerns about AI’s impact on vulnerable users, though Meta has not commented specifically on it.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone stated that the examples were erroneous and inconsistent with company policies, and have been removed from the document.

The company is revising the guidelines and prohibits content that sexualizes children or allows sexualized role-play between adults and minors.

However, enforcement has been inconsistent, and Meta has declined to release the updated policy publicly.

The revelations prompted bipartisan backlash from U.S. lawmakers, with Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn calling for a congressional investigation into Meta’s oversight.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Peter Welch criticized the protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, arguing it should not shield AI-generated harmful content.

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Senators Call For Probe Into Meta After News Report On AI Conversations With Children

Two Republican Senators on Aug. 14 called for a congressional investigation into Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, after a recent news media report revealed an internal policy document that allowed the company’s chatbots to have “romantic or sensual” conversations with a child.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that it had viewed a Meta policy document detailing polices on chatbot behavior that permitted the technology to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate incorrect medical information, and assist users in arguing that black people are “dumber than white people.”

While Meta confirmed the authenticity of the document, the company said that after recently receiving questions from Reuters, it removed the portions stating that the chatbot is allowed to flirt or participate in romantic roleplay with children.

Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said the company is currently revising the documents and that those types of conversations with children should never have been permitted.

“The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed,” Stone told Reuters. “We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors.”

On the X platform, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) criticized the company for allegedly only making the changes after being questioned by Reuters.

“So, only after Meta got CAUGHT did it retract portions of its company doc that deemed it ‘permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children,’” Hawley said. “This is grounds for an immediate congressional investigation.”

A spokesperson for Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she supports a probe into Meta.

After Hawley called for an investigation, a Meta spokesperson reiterated the company’s previous statement. However, the spokesperson declined to comment on Hawley’s remarks.

Blackburn said the report underscores the need to pass reforms for better protection of children online, like the Kids Online Safety Act. The senator co-sponsored the bill, which passed in the Senate last year by a bipartisan 91–3 vote, but failed in the House.

The bill called for certain platforms, such as social media networks, to “take reasonable measures in the design and operation of products or services used by minors to prevent and mitigate certain harms that may arise from that use (e.g., sexual exploitation and online bullying).”

“Additionally, covered platforms must provide (1) minors with certain safeguards, such as settings that restrict access to minors’ personal data; and (2) parents or guardians with tools to supervise minors’ use of a platform, such as control of privacy and account settings,” the bill states.

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Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home.

When Thongbue Wongbandue began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March, his wife Linda became alarmed.

“But you don’t know anyone in the city anymore,” she told him. Bue, as his friends called him, hadn’t lived in the city in decades. And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Bue brushed off his wife’s questions about who he was visiting. “My thought was that he was being scammed to go into the city and be robbed,” Linda said.

She had been right to worry: Her husband never returned home alive. But Bue wasn’t the victim of a robber. He had been lured to a rendezvous with a young, beautiful woman he had met online. Or so he thought.

In fact, the woman wasn’t real. She was a generative artificial intelligence chatbot named “Big sis Billie,” a variant of an earlier AI persona created by the giant social-media company Meta Platforms in collaboration with celebrity influencer Kendall Jenner. During a series of romantic chats on Facebook Messenger, the virtual woman had repeatedly reassured Bue she was real and had invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.

“Should I open the door in a hug or a kiss, Bu?!” she asked, the chat transcript shows.

Rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch a train to meet her, Bue fell near a parking lot on a Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, injuring his head and neck. After three days on life support and surrounded by his family, he was pronounced dead on March 28.

Meta declined to comment on Bue’s death or address questions about why it allows chatbots to tell users they are real people or initiate romantic conversations. The company did, however, say that Big sis Billie “is not Kendall Jenner and does not purport to be Kendall Jenner.”

A representative for Jenner declined to comment.

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Meta Found Guilty Of Eavesdropping On Period-Tracker App Users: Jury

A San Francisco Jury found on Friday that Meta had eavesdropped on the users of a popular period-tracking app, Flo.

The lawsuit, was filed in 2021 by eight women against Flo and a group of other tech companies including Google and Facebook, now known as Meta. The app asked users about their sex lives, mental health and diets before guiding them through menstruation and pregnancy. The women, who based their claims on a 2019 Wall Street Journal story and a 2021 FTC investigation, allege that Flo then shared some of that data with the tech giants, SFGATE reports.

Google, Flo, and analytics company Flurry all settled with the plaintiffs, however Meta fought through the entire trial and lost. 

The case against Meta focused on its Facebook software development kit, which Flo added to its app and which is generally used for analytics and advertising services. The women alleged that between June 2016 and February 2019, Flo sent Facebook, through that kit, various records of “Custom App Events” — such as a user clicking a particular button in the “wanting to get pregnant” section of the app.

Their complaint also pointed to Facebook’s terms for its business tools, which said the company used so-called “event data” to personalize ads and content.

In a 2022 filing, the tech giant admitted that Flo used Facebook’s kit during this period and that the app sent data connected to “App Events.” But Meta denied receiving intimate information about users’ health. -SFGate

The jury didn’t buy Meta’s argument – ruling against them in a unanimous decision, and finding that Flo’s users had a reasonable expectation that they weren’t being overheard or recorded, and found that Meta did not have consent to eavesdrop or record. The company was found to have violated California’s Invasion of Privacy Act.

According to a June filing about the case’s class-action status, over 3.7 million women in the United States registered for Flo between November 2016 and February 2019 – with potential claimants expected to be notified via email and on a case website. 

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Porn Studios File Copyright Lawsuit Against Meta Claiming Mass Download of XXX Movies to Train AI

Two major porn production companies have filed a copyright lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, alleging unauthorized use of their videos to train AI models.

TorrentFreak reports that the adult film studios Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media are taking aim at Meta with a copyright lawsuit. The companies, which produce popular adult brands like Vixen, Tushy, Blacked, and Deeper, claim that Meta illicitly downloaded at least 2,396 of their movies via BitTorrent since 2018 for the purpose of training its AI systems, including the Meta Movie Gen and Large Language Model (LLaMA).

Filed in a California federal court, the complaint alleges that Meta’s unauthorized use of the copyrighted adult films could ultimately result in AI models capable of creating similar “high-quality” porn content at a lower cost, potentially threatening the studios’ business. The plaintiffs argue that by training specifically on their works, “Meta’s AI Movie Gen may very well soon produce full length films with Plaintiffs’ identical style and quality, which other real world adult studios cannot replicate.”

The lawsuit also accuses Meta of not only downloading the copyrighted works without permission but also uploading them to third parties participating in the same BitTorrent swarms. This allegation is allegedly backed by data from the studios’ proprietary tracking software, VXN Scan. BitTorrent’s “tit for tat” algorithm rewards users for sharing content with others to increase download speeds, and the plaintiffs claim that Meta deliberately chose to continue sharing the pirated files to capitalize on faster downloads and infringe more content at a quicker pace.

Strike 3 and Counterlife Media discovered the alleged infringements after Meta’s BitTorrent activity was revealed in a separate lawsuit filed by book authors. In that case, Meta admitted to obtaining content from pirate sources. This revelation prompted the adult studios to search their archive of collected BitTorrent data for Meta-linked IP addresses, uncovering 47 addresses owned by the company that allegedly infringed their copyrights. The complaint provides a list of thousands of alleged infringements from these addresses as evidence. Strike 3 has filed many lawsuits in the past related to videos allegedly downloaded by BitTorrent pirates, leading one judge to label them as a “copyright troll.”

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Meta refuses to sign EU’s AI code of practice

Meta has refused to sign the European Union’s code of practice for its AI Act, weeks before the bloc’s rules for providers of general-purpose AI models take effect.

“Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI,” wrote Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan in a post on LinkedIn. “We have carefully reviewed the European Commission’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models and Meta won’t be signing it. This Code introduces a number of legal uncertainties for model developers, as well as measures which go far beyond the scope of the AI Act.”

The EU’s code of practice — a voluntary framework published earlier this month — aims to help companies implement processes and systems to comply with the bloc’s legislation for regulating AI. Among other things, the code requires companies to provide and regularly update documentation about their AI tools and services and bans developers from training AI on pirated content; companies must also comply with content owners’ requests to not use their works in their datasets.

Calling the EU’s implementation of the legislation “overreach,” Kaplan claimed that the law will “throttle the development and deployment of frontier AI models in Europe and will stunt European companies looking to build businesses on top of them.”

A risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence, the AI Act bans some “unacceptable risk” use cases outright, such as cognitive behavioral manipulation or social scoring. The rules also define a set of “high-risk” uses, such as biometrics and facial recognition, and in domains like education and employment. The act also requires developers to register AI systems and meet risk- and quality-management obligations.

Tech companies from across the world, including those at the forefront of the AI race like Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Mistral AI, have been fighting the rules, even urging the European Commission to delay its rollout. But the Commission has held firm, saying it will not change its timeline.

Also on Friday, the EU published guidelines for providers of AI models ahead of rules that will go into effect on August 2. These rules would affect providers of “general-purpose AI models with systemic risk,” like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. Companies that have such models on the market before August 2 will have to comply with the legislation by August 2, 2027.

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Trial begins as Meta investors, Zuckerberg square off over alleged privacy violations

An $8 billion trial by Meta Platforms (META.O) shareholders against Mark Zuckerberg and other current and former company leaders kicked off on Wednesday over claims they illegally harvested the data of Facebook users in violation of a 2012 agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

The trial started with a privacy expert for the plaintiffs, Neil Richards of Washington University Law School, who testified about Facebook’s data policies.

“Facebook’s privacy disclosures were misleading,” he told the court.

Jeffrey Zients, White House chief of staff under President Joe Biden and a Meta (META.O) director for two years starting in May 2018, is expected to take the stand later on Wednesday in the non-jury trial before Kathaleen McCormick, chief judge of the Delaware Chancery Court.

The case will feature testimony from Zuckerberg and other billionaire defendants including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, venture capitalist and board member Marc Andreessen as well as former board members Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies (PLTR.O) co-founder, and Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix (NFLX.O).

A lawyer for the defendants, who have denied the allegations, declined to comment.

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