Tag: facebook

Online News Act left rural Canadians without credible information during wildfires: report

The report, first detailed by Blacklock’s Reporter, examined the consequences of Meta’s decision to block Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram following Parliament’s passage of Bill C-18.

The legislation was designed to compel large digital platforms to compensate Canadian publishers for news content. Meta responded by blocking news content from its platforms in Canada.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia said the consequences were particularly serious in rural communities, where Facebook had become a major source of local information during emergencies.

“Rural B.C. communities lost access to credible journalism at the precise moment they needed it most,” researchers wrote, citing consequences for public safety, trust and compliance with emergency instructions.

The study, “When Good Intentions Cause Harm: The Online News Act, Meta’s News Ban And Public Safety During Wildfire Emergencies,” examined wildfire coverage in several B.C. communities.

Researchers said removing journalism from Facebook did not eliminate information about the fires. Instead, personal accounts and emotionally charged material remained and were amplified on the platform, contributing to community outrage and conspiracy theories.

The report blamed the problem on a combination of declining institutional trust, social media algorithms and the disappearance of credible journalism from Facebook.

Researchers also criticized mainstream news coverage, saying the absence of local reporters with established community relationships made newsrooms increasingly dependent on governments and other “official voices.”

“Media were producing a version of wildfire events in which affected communities were compliance problems rather than people in crisis,” the report said.

The researchers noted an irony at the centre of the controversy: declining local journalism was partly caused by the advertising-market changes Bill C-18 was supposed to address, but the legislation ultimately contributed to credible journalism disappearing from one of the platforms rural Canadians relied upon most.

Blacklock’s was among the independent Canadian outlets that opposed the Online News Act, arguing it amounted to federal interference in the news marketplace. The outlet says it neither sought nor accepted payments available under the legislation.

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Court Orders Meta to Pay $567 Million Over Child Harm

A court on Thursday 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 on Thursday, CNBC reported.

KCRA reported:

A New Mexico court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial the social media giant lost in March.

In a ruling late Thursday, Judge Bryan Biedcheid said the bulk of the money — $420 million — will be used for treatment services for young people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening services and other costs over the next five years.

In the first phase, jurors had ordered $375 million in civil penalties against Meta, determining that it knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

In the second phase, prosecutors had asked the judge to impose fundamental changes at Meta aimed at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings and closer oversight.

In March, a Los Angeles, California, jury found that Meta and YouTube were liable for a teen’s mental health and awarded her $3 million in damages.

The plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman identified as KGM or “Kaley,” said she became addicted to Meta’s app Instagram and Google’s YouTube as a child.

KGM said she developed body dysmorphia and had suicidal ideations because of her addiction to the social media platforms.

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Instagram to Ban Creeps Filming Harassment Videos with Meta Smart Glasses

Instagram has announced a new policy prohibiting videos captured with Meta smart glasses that feature harassment of strangers in public spaces, targeting creeps who film pranks and pickup attempts without clear consent. Meta’s smart glasses have picked up the nickname “pervert glasses” due to their misuse.

Business Insider reports that Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed the platform’s crackdown on certain types of content filmed using Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses in a recent Instagram story response. The new policy specifically targets videos showing harassment of unsuspecting individuals in public locations, including the controversial pickup artist videos and prank content that have proliferated on social media platforms.

“If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” Mosseri stated. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”

The policy change comes after increasing concerns about the misuse of Meta’s smart glasses technology for creating questionable content. There is a growing trend of videos appearing on TikTok and Instagram Reels where content creators film themselves executing pranks on service industry workers while wearing the glasses. These pranks often cross the line into harassment territory, with examples including incidents where creators spray fart spray into candles at retail stores and then ask employees to smell them.

Following the policy announcement, Business Insider discovered that at least two major accounts belonging to pickup artists who filmed themselves approaching women while wearing Meta glasses had been deactivated. Both accounts previously boasted followings exceeding one million users. A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that these accounts were removed for violating the new policy regarding harassing content filmed with the smart glasses.

However, details about the policy’s enforcement mechanisms remain unclear. Meta has not provided specific information about what exactly constitutes a violation under the new rules or how the company plans to systematically identify and remove offending content.

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Judge Denies Immunity to Texas Cops in Meme Arrest Case

A federal judge has refused to throw out the civil rights lawsuit filed by a Texas journalist arrested over a satirical Facebook meme and declined to grant qualified immunity to the sheriff and investigator who put him in jail.

Chief US District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled on July 20 that Kolton Krottinger’s suit can move forward against Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds and former deputy James Luckie.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

O’Connor wrote that Krottinger “sufficiently alleged that Luckie and Sheriff Deeds violated his clearly established rights to be free from arrest without probable cause, malicious prosecution, and First Amendment Retaliation.”

The ruling keeps alive claims of First Amendment retaliation, unlawful arrest, malicious prosecution, and Fourth Amendment violations.

Qualified immunity shields officers from suit unless they broke rights already clearly established in law, and it ends most cases of this kind before they reach discovery. O’Connor found that Krottinger cleared that bar.

Krottinger, a 36-year-old Navy veteran, runs several Hood County news pages on Facebook and a nonprofit, Anxiety Solutions of America, that operates a 21-acre ranch for veterans and first responders. Governor Greg Abbott named him an honorary admiral of the Texas Navy in January 2025.

His arrest traces to a satire image posted to a satirical page called Hood County Sheepdogs during a Granbury school board race. The meme made it look as though Tina Brown, a regular speaker at county commissioners’ meetings, had endorsed a candidate she actually opposed. Brown reported the post on October 6, saying she had not made it.

C.J. Grisham, a First Amendment attorney representing Krottinger, said the meme was meant “to poke fun at the two people who can’t stand each other…endorsing that person. That’s the joke of it.”

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Meta worker who developed ‘digital experiences for kids’ admits to trying to sext child in undercover NYC sting

A New York City engineer who said he created “digital experiences for kids” at social media giant Meta was busted after he admitted to trying to sext a 13-year-old during an undercover sting.

Josh Felker, 44, who’s now on leave from the Facebook parent company, admitted he had been grooming and sexting someone he thought was a teen girl during a sting by Predator Poachers Long Island, a vigilante group that seeks to catch would-be pervs.

“Even though inappropriate things had already gone on, I just almost wish I could be her dad,” Felker, who is married and has a small child, shockingly told a member of the group posing as his would-be victim’s grandmother on the phone, according to video of the encounter set to be released Monday.

Felker, who listed his job on a now-deleted LinkedIn account as an Engineering Manager who built “digital experiences for kids” for Meta reached out to the group’s 13-year-old “decoy account” in May and has been messaging them regularly since, the group said. 

It didn’t take long before Felker allegedly started making a slew of sick remarks — including trying to teach the girl how to masturbate — while sending multiple photos and videos of himself doing the same and even trying to set up days to meet her in person, Mike Villani, one of the predator catchers who led the poach, told The Post. 

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Facebook Verified: Meta Now Wants a Video Selfie of Your Face

Meta is rolling out a badge on Facebook that requires users to record a video of their own face.

The feature, massively accelerating the normalization of face scanning and biometric data collection, is called Facebook Verified, and asks a user to record a short video selfie, which the company checks against the photos already on their profile to confirm a match.

The process is free and takes a few minutes.

The company, which has been aggressively lobbying for “age verification” digital ID laws, presents the badge as a way to confirm a real person is behind an account. “As AI makes it easier to generate content, profiles, and messages,” it said, it wants users “to know there is a real person on the other side of a profile.”

The badge is open to Facebook users who are 18 or older and in good standing with Meta’s Community Standards on fraud, scams, and deceptive practices, and who show “no evidence of inauthentic behavior.” It is not available for Pages or ProMode accounts, which limits it to personal profiles.

Once a user completes the one-time check, the badge appears on Marketplace, Dating, Groups, and Profile. Meta said it plans to extend it to Feed posts over time.

Facebook Verified is separate from Meta Verified, the company’s paid subscription, which bundles a badge with impersonation protection and account support. Facebook Verified charges no fee.

Meta has not said how long it keeps the selfie video, where it stores it, or when it deletes it.

The launch materials describe the match and say nothing about the video afterward.

The scan arrives the same month Google added a selfie-video sign-in that records a user’s face to recover a locked account. Age-check laws in several US states and in Britain already require a face or an ID scan to open some accounts.

Meta is now asking hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a face scan too.

Facebook Verified is rolling out in phases, starting in select markets, and Meta plans to expand it worldwide.

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Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

Meta has moved from building traditional structures for its data centers to putting up tents across the U.S. and sticking AI servers inside them. Michael Thomas, founder of market intelligence and data center tracking firm Cleanview Energy, said on X that the AI tech firm has already built or is in the process of constructing three data centers that use the strategy.

One site, located in New Albany, Ohio, already has five buildings that took approximately two to three years to complete. The company then started putting up five tents, with an area of around 125,000 square feet each, in the area. City permits seen by Cleanview Energy say that the construction started in April 2026, while recent satellite images show that the structures have already been completed.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially. It’s said that Meta is inspired by Elon Musk’s feat with xAI, which built a 100,000-strong AI data center in just 19 days in 2024 — something which usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The technique is apparently quite effective, and it’s now being applied to two other sites, including one in Tennessee.

Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called “rapid deployment structures,” is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They’re certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the “classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock” situation. Nevertheless, the company has probably weighed the pros and cons of such a setup and has decided that it was worth taking the risk to gain an advantage in the AI infrastructure race.

Another factor that allowed Meta to bring its data centers online at a much faster pace is its use of “behind-the-meter” power, in which the company installed its own turbines to produce power on-site rather than relying on grid power. This is similar to what Musk did with his Memphis Supercluster, which he initially powered with portable power generators. However, Meta’s turbines would be a permanent feature on the Ohio site, as it’s designed to run independently of the power grid.

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AI Price War Breaks Out: Meta Unveils Paid AI Model For First Time, Will Be “Among Most Affordable Options”

Shortly after a leaked Meta memo revealed the company was planning on putting an AI chip into production in September as it looks to double computing capacity to 14Gigawatts, the company also unveiled a version of its most advanced artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark 1.1, that includes a new paid tier for developers, marking the first time Meta has charged businesses for access to its models and providing a new revenue stream. It’ll be “among the most affordable options“ on the market, Zuckerberg said in a Bloomberg interview ahead of the release.

“Since this is not an open source model, this is I think the first time that we’re doing a real serious API,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the application programming interface used to access Meta’s AI. “And the pricing is going to be very aggressive and attractive” he added indicating that Meta hopes to capture market share by undercutting its competitors, offering the new model at 25% of the cost of top models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The new model’s biggest improvement is in its agentic capabilities, the Meta CEO told Bloomberg, and according to benchmarks the model does indeed appear to be in line with the competition.

He hopes to piggyback on the latest craze in AI development this year, which a month ago saw Goldman forecast that agentic AI use will lead to a massive 120 quadrillion monthly tokens being used by 2030.

Agents are the big theme of AI this year, with the label applied to systems that can complete multistep tasks on behalf of a user. Zuckerberg described Muse Spark 1.1 as having “state-of-the-art or very close to it” agentic reasoning and tool use. The model is also greatly improved when it comes to coding and Meta employees are using it internally to build products and features for various apps, he added. 

Meta will also introduce a new Meta Model API system, which will be used to collect fees from developers. Its API pricing is roughly 25% of the cost advertised by other top models from OpenAI and Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Developers will be able to use Meta’s model for free, but only up to a point; they’ll be required to pay for access after reaching a certain token threshold, Zuckerberg said. 

Which means that legacy frontier models will now have to worry about domestic cheap alternatives, especially after xAI also released an agentic and coding model yesterday which will have to grab market share, in addition to much cheaper Chinese models.

“The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins,” Zuckerberg said, underscoring that his strategy is to get Meta’s technology in front of as many people as possible. “We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost.”

Zuckerberg, 42, is spending aggressively to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Alphabet in a race to achieve what he calls superintelligence, or AI that can perform tasks better than humans. Meta has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building the infrastructure necessary to develop superintelligence, including data centers and expensive AI chips. The company announced a new $10 billion data center investment in Canada as well as a new image-generation model just this week.

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Deadly bacteria found in major US city’s wastewater system tied to Mark Zuckerberg’s $800m data center

Meta‘s massive AI data center in Wyoming is facing scrutiny after an unexpected contamination incident emerged during construction.

The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company is developing a 715,000sq ft campus in Cheyenne that is set to go online next year, but its contractor has come under fire after city officials traced wastewater containing a rare bacterium to the project.

Known as Cupriavidus gilardii, the naturally occurring bacterium is typically found in soil and water. While harmless to most healthy people, it can cause severe pneumonia, bloodstream and lung infections, and, in rare cases, death among people with weakened immune systems. 

Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities (BOPU) said the bacterium was found in wastewater discharged by Goat Systems, a contractor working on Meta’s $800 million data center. 

According to the BOPU, the bacterium was first detected during routine wastewater sampling in late February, but was only announced last Thursday.

Meta said its general contractor, Fortis, began hauling industrial wastewater offsite and that independent testing found no trace of the substance to date.

Officials stressed that it did not contaminate the city’s drinking water, but said it disrupted the municipal reclaimed water system and required months of cleanup. 

However, the city permanently revoked Meta’s authorization to discharge wastewater from its fill-and-flush operations into Cheyenne’s treatment system, where the water is recycled and later used to irrigate parks and other public spaces. 

A Meta spokesman told the Daily Mail: ‘When the board shared that it found a substance in the city’s wastewater – not public drinking water – Fortis immediately stopped discharging industrial wastewater and began hauling it offsite.

‘Fortis also began its own water testing with an independent environmental specialist, which has found no trace of the substance. 

‘Meta is committed to being a good neighbor in Cheyenne, including through the protection of local water resources, and will continue encouraging collaboration between Fortis and the board until this situation is resolved.’

It comes as AI data centers face mounting scrutiny across the US for their enormous demands on local water and power supplies. 

According to Data Center Map, there are nearly 4,500 data centers nationwide, with some facilities consuming as much as 300,000 gallons of water a day, roughly the same amount used by 1,000 households.

Goat Systems LLC is the corporate entity Meta uses for the construction of the center, dubbed Project Cosmo.

Officials said the contaminated wastewater was discharged during a fill-and-flush process used to prepare the data center’s cooling system before it goes online. 

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Zuckerberg to spend over $10B on “historic” Alberta AI data centre investment, sources say

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is behind a massive artificial intelligence data centre planned for Sturgeon County, Alberta, Juno News has confirmed.

This is according to several well-placed sources with direct knowledge of the investment, one that all sources agree will be “historic” in magnitude.

The project is expected to involve roughly $13 billion in total investment, though the final figure could still change as it is unclear if the final proposal has been approved and signed off by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s board.

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