Page 20 - Facebook

Under attack from courts, Meta tightens monitoring of teens online usage

As part of the announcement, Meta said that they are bringing parental supervision to Messenger, so that parents can see how teens spend their time and who they interact with

Documents underscore Meta's 'historical reluctance' to protect children

Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico's lawsuit against Meta underscore the company's historical reluctance to keep children safe on its platforms, the complaint says. New Mexico's Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them. In the passages freshly unredacted from the lawsuit Wednesday, internal employee messages and presentations from 2020 and 2021 show Meta was aware of issues such as adult strangers being able to contact children on Instagram, the sexualization of minors on that platform, and the dangers of its people you may know feature that recommends connections between adults and children. But Meta dragged its feet when it came to addressing the issues, the passages show. Instagram, for instance, began restricting adults' ability to message minors in 2021. One internal document ...

Meta to restrict more content targeting teens on Instagram, Facebook

The move will make it more difficult for teens to come across potentially sensitive content or accounts when they use features such as Search and Explore on Instagram

Meta enables 'Link history' on Facebook: What it is and how-to disable it

While adding to convenience since the link history feature stores users' browsing history for 30 days, it raises concerns over Meta's disclosure that it may use the information to improve ads

Zuckerberg sells nearly $500 million of Meta stock in 2 months: Report

Marc Benioff, Zuckerberg's peer in the tech world, also sold shares nearly every day in the second half of 2023

Social media firms gain $11 bn in ads from under-18 users in 2022: Report

Social media giants like Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and Snapchat collectively gained nearly USD 11 billion in advertising revenue in 2022 from users younger than 18 years, according to a new US-based study. Researchers said that approximately 30-40 per cent of the advertising revenue generated by Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube was attributable to young people. They found that while among users aged 12 and under, YouTube derived the greatest ad revenue of about USD 1 billion in 2022, among those aged 13-17 years, Instagram generated the highest revenue of about USD 4 billion. The team led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, also found that from users aged 13-17 years, TikTok derived USD 2 billion and YouTube USD 1.2 billion in 2022, suggesting that these platforms have "overwhelming financial incentives" in continuing to delay meaningful steps to protect children against the harms of using social media. The researchers said that while these socia

PM Modi's YouTube channel reaches 20M subscribers, most among world leaders

Compared to PM Modi, US President Joe Biden has 794,000 subscribers on YouTube. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, has 589,000 subscribers on the video-sharing platform

Big tech firms nearly pause recruitment in India amid global slowdown

These companies have registered a 90% decline in active job postings in India in 2023 when compared to the last year, according to a report

Wearables: Do you want Mark Zuckerberg snooping around in your closet?

Now companies like Google and Meta have an opportunity to watch our real-world lives through wearables, which could make today's online surveillance business look like something out of the Stone Age

Delhi Police tracks down 4 suspects in deepfake case of Rashmika Mandanna

Four suspects involved in uploading a deepfake video of actor Rashmika Mandana online have been tracked and the hunt is on to nab the main conspirator, police said on Wednesday

Meta's decision to remove videos of Israel-Hamas war reversed by board

A quasi-independent review board has ruled that Facebook parent company Meta should overturn two decisions it made this fall to remove posts informing the world about human suffering on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war. In both cases, Meta ended up reinstating the posts one showing Palestinian casualties and the other, an Israeli hostage on its own, although it added warning screens to both due to violent content. This means the company isn't obligated to do anything about the board's decision. That said, the board also said it disagrees with Meta's decision to bar the posts in question from being recommended by Facebook and Instagram, even in cases where it had determined posts intended to raise awareness. And it said Meta's use of automated tools to remove potentially harmful content increased the likelihood of taking down valuable posts that not only raise awareness about the conflict but may contain evidence of human rights violations. It urged the company to preserve such ..

ONDC, Meta partner to empower small biz, upskill 500k MSMEs in next 2 yrs

The Meta Small Business Academy offers entrepreneurs and marketers a certification in digital marketing skills to grow on the Meta apps

Parliament security breach: Police seek details of deleted Facebook page

Delhi Police has written to Meta to access social media accounts of the six accused arrested in the Parliament security breach case and details of the now-deleted Facebook page 'Bhagat Singh Fan Club', where they met each other, according to sources. Police have also collected bank account details of all the accused to see if they received money from someone for executing the December 13 incident, police sources said on Monday. Various Delhi Police teams approached family members of the accused on Sunday and collected details of their bank accounts. Bank pass books of Neelam Devi and Sagar Sharma were seized from their residences in Haryana's Jind and Uttar Pradesh's Lucknow, respectively, the sources said. Delhi Police Counter Intelligence unit has written to Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to access social media accounts of the accused persons and sought details of Facebook page 'Bhagat Singh Fan Page' like the number of members, etc. The page was created by th

Now you can post videos with text captions on Instagram Notes: How it works

Meta has also introduced additional ways to reply to Instagram Notes. Reply to a note can now include photos, videos, audio messages, stickers and GIFs

Meta brings AI visual identification feature to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses

When AI is prompted with queries about the surrounding visuals, the glasses clicks and sends a picture to Meta's cloud to be processed with AI

Meta's Threads brings 'Tags' for organising posts by topics: Know details

Topics do not appear with a hashtag on a published post, instead, they appear in blue text, resembling a hyperlink

Meta makes end-to-end encryption default on Facebook, Messenger platforms

Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for calls and messages across its Facebook and Messenger platforms, the company announced Thursday. Such encryption means that no one other than the sender and the recipient not even Meta can decipher people's messages. Encrypted chats, first introduced as an optional feature in Messenger in 2016, will now be the standard for all users going forward, according to Messenger head Loredana Crisan. This has taken years to deliver because we've taken our time to get this right, Crisan wrote in a blog post. Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product managers have worked tirelessly to rebuild Messenger features from the ground up. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised, back in 2019, to bring end-to-end encryption to its platforms after the social media company suffered a string of high profile scandals, notably when Cambridge Analytica accessed user data on Facebook. Privacy advocates again shined a spotlight on Meta after

Meta brings end-to-end encryption on Messenger, adds more functionality

Along with an extra layer of security, Meta is adding a suite of new features, including the ability to edit messages, read receipts control and disappear messages

Meta sued by New Mexico alleging it failed to shield underage users

Facebook and Instagram fail to protect underage users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and let adults solicit pornographic imagery from them, New Mexico's attorney general alleges in a lawsuit that follows an undercover online investigation. Our investigation into Meta's social media platforms demonstrates that they are not safe spaces for children but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex, Attorney General Raul Torrez said in a (prepared statement Wednesday. The civil suit filed late Tuesday against Meta Platforms Inc in state court also names its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, as a defendant. In addition, the suit claims Meta harms children and teenagers through the addictive design of its platform, degrading users' mental health, their sense of self-worth, and their physical safety, Torrez' office said in a statement. Those claims echo a lawsuit filed in late October by the attorneys general of 33 states including Californi

Meta bets on new AI features across social media apps to boost appeal

Meta's core social platforms are advertising behemoths, but users on Facebook and Instagram have largely plateaued at 2 billion and 3 billion people per month, respectively