Source: Facebook, Instagram to charge EU users for ad-free service

WASHINGTON, United States - Meta is proposing to offer European users a subscription-based version of Instagram and Facebook if they would rather not be tracked for ads, a source said on Tuesday.

The idea, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes as the social media giant seeks to comply with a growing list of EU regulations designed to curb the power of US big tech.

The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg makes its billions of dollars in profit by offering advertisers highly individualized data on users, but new European regulations and EU court decisions have made that harder.

The proposal has been put to EU regulators and is another example of big tech companies having to adapt long-held practices to meet oncoming EU rules.

The source close to the matter said subscribers in Europe could pay 10 euros ($10.50) a month for a desktop version of Instagram or Facebook, or 13 euros a month for Instagram on their phones.

Social media platforms have increasingly floated the idea of charging users for access to their sites, whether to comply with data privacy regulations or better guarantee the identity of users.

But the practice would be a major shift for the social media industry that grew exponentially over the past decade on an advertising model that made the site free for users in return for being tracked and ads seen highly personalized.

The proposal could help meet several regulations including the Digital Markets Act that imposes a list of do's and don'ts on big tech companies in Europe, including a ban on tracking users when they surf other sites if their consent hasn't been clearly granted.

It also follows the recommendation of the EU's highest court, which in a July decision said that Meta platform users who declined to be tracked should be offered an ad free alternative "for an appropriate fee."

That ruling echoed many previous rulings against Meta and other big tech firms in which the court ruled that the US company must ask for permission to collect large amounts of personal data, striking down various workarounds that Meta had offered.

Meta declined to comment directly on the Wall Street Journal report, but said in a statement that it still "believes in the value of free services which are supported by personalized ads."

"However, we continue to explore options to ensure we comply with evolving regulatory requirements."

Meta reported second-quarter revenues of $32 billion, of which $31.5 billion came from advertising. Some $7.2bn of that came from Europe.

Agence France-Presse

Musk threatens lawsuit as Twitter rival Threads takes off

WASHINGTON — Twitter threatened to sue Meta just hours after the Instagram parent company launched Threads, an app it hopes will beat out the struggling site owned by Elon Musk.

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, published by online news outlet Semafor on Thursday, Musk lawyer Alex Spiro accused the company of "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information."

Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of the world's biggest social media platforms, despite its struggles.

Zuckerberg's latest move against Musk further heightened the rivalry between the two multibillionaires who have even agreed to meet for hand to hand combat in a cage match.

Threads went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday (7 a.m. Thursday in Manila), and early feedback noted its close, but scaled back, resemblance to Twitter.

Within a few hours, more than 30 million people had downloaded Threads, Zuckerberg said Thursday.

"Feels like the beginning of something special, but we've got a lot of work ahead to build the app," Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account.

Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey and Hugh Jackman, as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.

Zuckerberg wrote: "It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it."

"Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will."

Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.

Musk meanwhile retweeted an image that said the Threads logo resembled a tapeworm. "Metaphorically too," he added.

In another post referencing Twitter's potential legal action against Meta, Musk noted that "competition is fine, cheating is not."

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said on Threads: "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee -- that's just not a thing."

'BE KIND' 

Threads was introduced as a spin-off of Instagram, giving it a built-in audience of more than two billion users and sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build "an open and friendly platform for conversations."

"The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind," he said.

Zuckerberg is taking advantage of Musk's chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to platform for celebrities, companies and politicians.

Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users "to make it as big as Twitter."

"Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening," she added.

Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.

He also fired more than half of Twitter's staff, some of whom presumably went to other tech companies, including Meta.

EU 'MANY MONTHS' AWAY 

Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in the major market of Europe, which could slow the growth of Threads.

The company has been criticized for its handling of personal data, the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits.

Mosseri said he regretted that the launch was delayed in the European Union, but had Meta waited for regulatory clarity from Brussels, Threads would have been "many, many, many, months away."

According to a source close to the matter, Meta was wary of a new law called the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that sets strict rules for the world's "gatekeeper" internet companies.

One rule restricts platforms from moving user data between products, as would potentially be the case between Threads and Instagram.

Globally, the Threads hashtag on Twitter has garnered three million tweets, with many users jokingly suggesting people will return to Musk's platform.

Others expressed privacy concerns.

"Meta loves to collect private information and I don't trust the way it treats private information," a Japanese user tweeted.

"I also have the impression that this is a company hated by EU, so I'm reluctant."

But some said they would permanently move to Threads.

One Threads user wrote: "Now I truly can say goodbye to Twitter forever."

Agence France-Presse 

Facebook owner Meta to lay off 11,000 staff

PARIS - Facebook owner Meta will lay off more than 11,000 of its staff in "the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history", boss Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.

He said the cuts represented 13 percent of the social media titan's workforce and would affect its research lab focusing on the metaverse as well as its apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.

The tech industry is in a serious slump and several major firms have announced mass layoffs -- Twitter's new owner Elon Musk fired half its staff last week.

"I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here," Zuckerberg said in a note to staff.

"I know this is tough for everyone, and I'm especially sorry to those impacted."

Ad-supported platforms such as Facebook and Google are suffering with advertisers looking to cut costs as they struggle with inflation and rising interest rates.

Zuckerberg told staff he had expected the boost in e-commerce and online activity during the Covid pandemic to continue, but added: "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."

METAVERSE WOES

The downturn has affected companies across the sector, with Apple and Amazon also recently announcing results that disappointed investors.

But Meta also faces some unique problems of its own.

Investors have been worried about Zuckerberg's decision to devote billions of dollars to developing the metaverse, an immersive version of the web accessed via virtual reality headsets.

Zuckerberg renamed the company to Meta a year ago to reflect the commitment to the project, but the division working on metaverse technology has since made losses of more than $3.5 billion.

He has hinted several times this year that belt-tightening measures were just around the corner and said in his letter on Wednesday that staff layoffs were a "last resort".

Meta would also keep a hiring freeze going into next year, he said, and other spending cuts were envisaged.

"Fundamentally, we're making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we're operating efficiently," he wrote.

Last month, Meta announced profits of $4.4 billion in the third quarter, a 52 percent decrease year-on-year, causing its stock price to fall 25 percent.

The slump in profits comes despite its platforms dominating the world in terms of users -- Facebook alone claims to have around two billion people who log on daily. 

Agence France-Presse

Facebook agrees to settle Cambridge Analytica privacy suit

Facebook has reached a preliminary agreement in a long-running lawsuit seeking damages from the social network for allowing third parties, including the company Cambridge Analytica, to access users' private data. 

According to a document filed Friday in a San Francisco court, Facebook says it is submitting a draft "agreement in principle" and has requested a stay of proceedings for 60 days to finalize it. 

The social network did not indicate the amount or terms of the agreement in the class action. 

When asked by AFP, Facebook's parent company Meta did not respond on Saturday. 

The deal comes as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who announced her resignation in June, were due to testify in court in September as part of the scandal. 

In a lawsuit initiated in 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties including the firm Cambridge Analytica, which was linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. 

Cambridge Analytica, which has since shut down, had collected and exploited, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to which the platform had given it access. 

This information was allegedly used to develop software steering US voters in favor of Trump. 

In 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion for misleading its users and imposed independent oversight of its personal data management. 

Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has removed access to its data from thousands of apps suspected of abusing it, restricted the amount of information available to developers in general, and made it easier for users to calibrate restrictions on personal data sharing.

Agence France-Presse

Zuckerberg loses $29 billion in a day, as Meta shares crash

Mark Zuckerberg lost $29 billion in net worth on Thursday as Meta Platforms Inc's stock marked a record one-day plunge following a disappointing earnings forecast that shook the global tech landscape.

Meta's stock fell 26%, erasing more than $200 billion in the biggest ever single-day market value wipeout for a US company. That pulled down founder and chief executive officer Zuckerberg's net worth to $85 billion, according to Forbes.

Zuckerberg owns about 12.8% of the tech behemoth formerly known as Facebook.

His one-day wealth decline is among the biggest ever and comes after Tesla Inc. top boss Elon Musk's $35 billion single-day paper loss in November. Musk, the world's richest person, had then polled Twitter users if he should sell 10% of his stake in the electric carmaker. Tesla shares have yet to recover from the resulting selloff.

At least 21 brokerages cut price targets on Meta after the company posted a weaker-than-expected forecast on Wednesday, blaming Apple Inc.'s privacy changes and increased competition for users from rivals, including TikTok and YouTube.

Following the $29 billion wipeout, Zuckerberg is in 12th spot on Forbes' list of real-time billionaires, below Indian business moguls Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.

To be sure, trading in technology stocks remains volatile as investors struggle to price in the impact of high inflation and an expected rise in interest rates. Meta shares could very well recover sooner rather than later, with the hit to Zuckerberg's wealth staying on paper.

Zuckerberg sold $4.47 billion worth of Meta shares last year, before 2021's tech rout. The stock sales were carried out as part of a pre-set 10b5-1 trading plan, which executives use to allay concerns about insider trading.

(Reporting by Eva Mathews, Akash Sriram and Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

-reuters-

Facebook announces changing parent company name to ‘Meta’

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to keep names under rebranding

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company's name is being changed to "Meta" to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network.

The new handle comes as the social media giant tries to fend off one its worst crises yet and pivot to its ambitions for the "metaverse" virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will keep their names under the rebranding.

"We've learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we've learned and help build the next chapter," Zuckerberg said during an annual developers conference.

"I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same, still about bringing people together, our apps and their brands, they're not changing," he added.

Facebook critics pounced last week on a report that leaked the rebranding plans, arguing the company was aiming to distract from recent scandals and controversy.

An activist group calling itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board has warned that major industries like oil and tobacco had rebranded to "deflect attention" from their problems.

"Facebook thinks that a rebrand can help them change the subject," the group said last week, adding the "real issue" was the need for oversight and regulation.

Facebook has just announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the "metaverse," with Zuckerberg emerging as a leading promoter of the concept.

- Crisis mode -

The social media giant has been battling a fresh crisis since former employee Frances Haugen leaked reams of internal studies showing executives knew of their sites' potential for harm, prompting a renewed US push for regulation.

Facebook has been hit by major crises previously, but the current view behind the curtain of the insular company has fueled a frenzy of scathing reports and scrutiny from US regulators.

"Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company," Zuckerberg said in an earnings call on Monday.

The Washington Post last month suggested that Facebook's interest in the metaverse is "part of a broader push to rehabilitate the company's reputation with policymakers and reposition Facebook to shape the regulation of next-wave Internet technologies."

Google rebranded itself as Alphabet in a corporate reconfiguration in 2015, but the online search and ad powerhouse remains its defining unit despite other operations such as Waymo self-driving cars and Verily life sciences.

Agence France-Presse

Facebook plans to change its name - The Verge

Social media giant Facebook Inc is planning to rebrand itself with a new name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, the Verge reported on Tuesday, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about the name change at the company's annual Connect conference on Oct. 28, but it could be unveiled sooner, the Verge reported.

A metaverse refers to shared virtual world environments, which people can access via the internet. The term can refer to digital spaces, which are made more lifelike by the use of virtual reality or augmented reality.

The rebranding would likely position Facebook's social media app as one of many products under a parent company, which will oversee groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and more, the report added.

Facebook said it does not comment on rumor or speculation. (Reporting by Shivam Patel in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Anil D'Silva)

-reuters-

Zuckerberg urged to nix kids' version of Instagram

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Advocates for children from around the world urged Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday to ditch plans for a version of Instagram geared toward pre-teens.

Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood and the Electronic Privacy Information Center were among nearly 100 groups and individuals from North America, Europe, Africa and Australia to make the plea in a letter to Zuckerberg.

Instagram "exploits young people's fear of missing out and desire for peer approval," the letter contended.

"The platform's relentless focus on appearance, self-presentation and branding presents challenges to adolescents' privacy and well-being," it argued, building on concerns about predators, bullies and inappropriate content.

Instagram is exploring the launch of a version of the image-centric social network for children under 13, with parental controls.

Facebook-owned Instagram, like its parent company, allows only those older than 13 to join but verifying age on the internet makes it challenging to catch all rule breakers.

"The reality is that kids are online," Facebook spokeswoman Stephanie Otway said in response to an AFP inquiry.

"They want to connect with their family and friends, have fun and learn, and we want to help them do that in a way that is safe and age-appropriate."

Facebook is working with child development and mental health experts to prioritize safety and privacy, according to Otway.

Instagram, which has more than a billion users, recently unveiled technology aimed at preventing underage children from creating accounts and blocking adults from contacting young users they don't know.

The platform is also looking at ways to make it more difficult for adults who have been exhibiting "potentially suspicious behavior" to interact with teens.

The children's advocates were dubious about the proposed youth version.

"Facebook's long track record of exploiting young people and putting them at risk makes the company particularly unsuitable as the custodian of a photo sharing and social messaging site for children," their letter said.

"In short, an Instagram site for kids will subject young children to a number of serious risks and will offer few benefits for families."

Agence France-Presse

Mogul vs Mogul: Australia’s tech law pits Murdoch against Zuckerberg

SYDNEY — Australia’s push to regulate tech giants has become a power struggle between two of the world’s most powerful men, with Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg locked in a generational battle for media dominance.

Efforts in Australia to make Google and Facebook pay for news has garnered worldwide attention, creating what some call a defining moment for the web and for journalism, and even a litmus test for democracy.

But beyond the high-sounding rhetoric lies a more base struggle, with the barons of traditional media fighting back against their digital heirs.

Sydney tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes went as far as calling the Australian push to force payments for content a “shakedown.”

The landmark legislation may carry the seal of government, but media and political insiders see the fingerprints of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp all over it.

“This has been a passionate cause for our company for well over a decade,” said News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, hailing his boss’ “fervent, unstinting support” for the cause.

“For many years, we were accused of tilting at tech windmills, but what was a solitary campaign, a quixotic quest, has become a movement, and both journalism and society will be enhanced.”

For decades, the Melbourne-born billionaire behind Fox News, The Sun and Sky News Australia has bestraddled politics in the United States, Britain and Down Under.

Today, he controls roughly two-thirds of daily newspaper circulation in Australia’s major cities, with complete monopolies in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin.

That has prompted critics to paint the 89-year-old in almost cartoonish terms — as an all-powerful political puppetmaster.

While he still wields political power, the rise of Facebook and Google has seriously challenged Murdoch’s preeminence — gouging ad revenues that kept many of his publications in the black.

‘Frightened of Murdoch’

At the turn of the millennium, newspapers had 96 percent of Australia’s classified revenues. Now, that is down to around 12 percent.

For every $100 spent by Australian advertisers today, $49 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook, according to the country’s competition watchdog, which proposed the law in direct response to this duopoly.

“Let’s not kid around, this was very deliberately designed to put money in the pockets of a very few specific companies — News Corp and others,” Lucie Krahulcova of advocacy group Digital Rights Watch told AFP.

An initial draft of the law even cut out public broadcaster ABC — which Murdoch’s outlets and Australia’s conservative government have long attacked — from receiving Google and Facebook payments.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, an outspoken Murdoch critic, told lawmakers in Canberra on Friday that the proposed laws solved the digital dominance problem “by enhancing the power of the existing monopoly -– that’s Murdoch.”

“Everyone is frightened of Murdoch,” he maintained.

Everyone, it seems, except Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who made a worldwide splash last week by refusing demands to pay Murdoch’s News Corp and other Australian media.

Rather than follow Google and reach agreements to pay for content, Zuckerberg went nuclear, removing news from Australia on the platform and sparking a global backlash.

Enormous political power

The two men were born more than three decades part and come from staggeringly different eras, but both wield enormous political power.

Where Murdoch could hobble governments or torpedo campaigns with a rapier front-page splash, Zuckerberg’s platform can change the tenor of a US election campaign.

Like Murdoch, Zuckerberg has come under fierce scrutiny for his influence over society.

It is also not the first time they have tussled.

Murdoch’s bid for social media dominance failed spectacularly when MySpace was left in the dust of Zuckerberg’s rapidly growing Facebook.

According to reports by tech magazine and website Wired, the pair had a testy exchange in Sun Valley, Idaho in 2016, with Zuckerberg allegedly warned to offer publishers a better deal or expect New Corp to lobby regulators around the world.

Those lobbying efforts are now bearing fruit in Australia, with Google agreeing to pay the company for news in a three-year deal.

The amounts were not disclosed, but similar Google deals with other Australian media groups were said to be worth around US$23 million a year.

Supporters have cheered that as a victory for journalism — a struggling industry long in decline — although questions remain about whether the money will be ploughed back into reporting.

With legislation in the works in Canada, Europe and perhaps even the United States, Murdoch’s “quixotic quest” against the tech giants is unlikely to stop in Australia.

-reuters-

Facebook rolls out news feeds with less politics

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Facebook said Wednesday it began rolling out news feeds with less political subject matter in line with a plan outlined by chief Mark Zuckerberg to reduce inflammatory content.

The leading social network said it would begin testing the change "for a small percentage of people" in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the United States in the coming weeks. 

"During these initial tests we'll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people's feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we'll use going forward," product management director Aastha Gupta said.

The change won't affect information about the Covid-19 pandemic and content from global health organizations or from official government agencies.

"As Mark Zuckerberg mentioned on our recent earnings call, one common piece of feedback we hear is that people don't want political content to take over their News Feed," Gupta said.

"Over the next few months, we'll work to better understand peoples' varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights."

and manipulation, notably during election periods.

Zuckerberg said last month Facebook is seeking to "turn down the temperature" on its sprawling platform by reducing the kind of divisive and inflammatory political talk it has long hosted.

He said the social media giant will no longer recommend politics-themed groups to users and was working on ways to reduce the amount of political content served up in users' news feeds by its automated systems.

"We're still going to enable people to engage in political groups and discussions if they want to," Zuckerberg said last month.

Agence France-Presse

US antitrust regulator may question Facebook chief: report

SAN FRANCISCO - US regulators may question Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and his right-hand executive to determine if the social network has broken monopoly laws, according to a Wall Street Journal report Friday.

The Journal cited unnamed people close to the matter as saying the Federal Trade Commission is considering taking sworn testimony from Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg as part of a yearlong probe into whether the leading social network has abused its dominance in the market.

The FTC declined to discuss the report.

"We look forward to sharing our views about the competitive landscape, along with other technology leaders, during this month's Congressional hearing, while also demonstrating for enforcement agencies that our innovation provides more choices for consumers," a Facebook spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.

Leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are to testify during an antitrust investigation hearing at the US House Committee on the Judiciary on July 27.

The hearing comes against a backdrop of growing complaints about tech platforms that have dominated key economic sectors, and calls by some activists and politicians to break up the Silicon Valley giants.

Chief executives Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Zuckerberg can appear virtually if they wish, according to a joint statement released by Judiciary committee chairman Jerrold Nadler and Antitrust subcommittee chairman David Cicilline.

"Since last June, the subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement," Nadler and Cicilline said.

"Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming."

Google and Facebook, which account for the bulk of digital global advertising revenue, provide free services that have become dominant in their sectors -- such as Google's search engine or its subsidiary, video-sharing platform YouTube.

Users' interactions with these products allow the companies to collect data profiles and sell targeted advertising space on a massive scale.

At Apple and Amazon, it is their sales platforms -- the App Store on iPhones and iPads, or Amazon's e-commerce site -- that are in the sights of regulators, since the two companies are both hosts and merchants.

Earlier this year, the US Justice Department said it was reviewing potential anti-competitive actions by major tech platforms, and attorneys general from the majority of US states have launched antitrust investigations of Google and Facebook.

Agence France-Presse

Facebook decisions 'setbacks for civil rights,' audit finds

SAN FRANCISCO — Auditors hand-picked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Donald Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”

The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: that it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.

Now Facebook has to decide whether its approach to hateful speech and noxious content — which was to leave it alone in the name of free expression — remains tenable. And that decision puts pressure on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who has repeatedly said that his company was not an arbiter of truth and that it would not police politicians’ posts.

“Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression,” wrote the auditors, Laura Murphy and Megan Cacace, who are civil rights experts and lawyers.

The audit, which was the culmination of 2 years of examination of the social network, was another signal of how power by the largest tech companies is increasingly under scrutiny. Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are all facing questions over how they are wielding their influence and what effects it has had. Later this month, the chief executives of all four companies are set to testify in front of Congress.

But the report was especially devastating for Facebook because its executives had pointed to it as a sign that the company was seriously grappling with the content of its site.

In the audit, Facebook was repeatedly faulted for prioritizing free expression on its platform over nondiscrimination and for not having a robust infrastructure to handle civil rights. The report homed in on three posts by Trump in May, which the audit said contained hateful and violent speech or which harmed voters. Facebook left those posts untouched, over objections by the auditors, the report said.

In doing so, the social network set a “terrible precedent” that others could copy and that could affect the November election, the report said. The move cheated the billions of other people who use Facebook out of equal treatment, giving powerful political leaders a special exemption to make false and divisive statements, it said.

“Facebook has made policy and enforcement choices that leave our election exposed to interference by the President and others who seek to use misinformation to sow confusion and suppress voting,” Murphy and Cacace wrote.

They added that they “would have liked to see the company go further to address civil rights concerns in a host of areas.”

In a post Wednesday about the audit, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the report was “the beginning of the journey, not the end.” She added, “What has become increasingly clear is that we have a long way to go. As hard as it has been to have our shortcomings exposed by experts, it has undoubtedly been a really important process for our company.”

Sandberg said Facebook was already taking steps to address its shortcomings, including banning ads with fear-mongering statements and prohibiting the spread of disinformation around the 2020 census. The company said it would also hire more civil rights experts, create a role for a senior vice president of civil rights leadership and direct voters to a “voting information center” that has accurate information.

Facebook’s difficulties have been compounded by civil rights groups organizing a campaign, “Stop Hate for Profit,” to urge its advertisers to boycott the platform. More than 300 advertisers, including Coca-Cola and North Face, have agreed to pause their spending on the site.

On Tuesday, civil rights leaders met with Zuckerberg and Sandberg with 10 demands, including appointing a civil rights executive. But attendees said the Facebook executives did not agree to many of their requests and instead spouted “spin.” Zuckerberg said that while the company would make some changes to its processes, it would not do so because of external pressure or threat of financial loss, said one person who attended the meeting.

“I don’t know if Mark appreciates that hateful speech has harmful results and that Facebook groups have real-world consequences,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League and one of the leaders of the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign.

Civil rights groups including Free Press and Color of Change also met Wednesday with nearly 300 ad agency and brand marketing leaders about Facebook. In the session, they said the new audit report exposed holes in the company’s content policies and enforcement practices, according to attendees.

The audit “has laid bare what we already know: Facebook is a platform plagued by civil rights shortcomings,” said Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Facebook has an enormous impact on our civil rights — by facilitating hate speech and violence, voter and census disinformation, and algorithmic bias, and by shortchanging diversity and inclusion.”

In the report, the auditors credited Facebook for making progress on some issues over the past 2 years, including increasing the hiring of some in-house civil rights experts and creating an ad system that would no longer allow advertisers running housing, employment and credit ads in the United States to target users based on gender, age or ZIP code. Zuckerberg had also personally committed to building products that “advance racial justice,” the report said.

But Facebook had been too willing to let politicians out of abiding by its rules, allowing them to spread misinformation, harmful rhetoric and even calls to violence, the report said.

The auditors said their concerns had increased over the past 9 months because of decisions made by Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, Facebook’s global head of policy and communications.

Last fall, Zuckerberg delivered a speech at Georgetown University about his commitment to protecting free speech at all costs. Since then, the report noted, Facebook had refused to take down inflammatory posts from Trump and had permitted untruthful political ads to be circulated.

“Elevating free expression is a good thing, but it should apply to everyone,” the auditors wrote. “When it means that powerful politicians do not have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does, a hierarchy of speech is created that privileges certain voices over less powerful voices.”

-The New York Times Company-

Facebook pledges more action on 'toxic content'

WASHINGTON - Facebook on Tuesday pledged to take further steps to remove toxic and hateful content from the leading social network as its top executives were set to meet with organizers of a mushrooming ad boycott.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were to speak with leaders of the #StopHateForProfit campaign which has garnered more than 900 advertisers pausing their campaigns on Facebook.

Sandberg said she and Zuckerberg would hold a virtual meeting with the boycott organizers led by the NAACP, Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League, which have been pressuring Facebook to do more to remove content that promotes racism and violence.

The two executives also planned to consult later Tuesday with other civil rights leaders including the head of its own civil rights audit.

The meetings come "in the context of what may be the largest social movement in US history, and our nation's best and latest chance to act against the racism that has pervaded our country," Sandberg said on her Facebook page.

She added that the Silicon Valley giant will be announcing policy updates as a result of discussions with civil rights activists and its own audit of civil rights practices.

"We are making changes -- not for financial reasons or advertiser pressure, but because it is the right thing to do," Sandberg wrote.

"We have worked for years to try to minimize the presence of hate on our platform. That's why we agreed to undertake the civil rights audit two years ago."

Sandberg said the final report of audit would be published Wednesday following a two-year review, and that this would be used to guide Facebook policy changes.

"While the audit was planned and most of it carried out long before recent events, its release couldn't come at a more important time," she said.

"It has helped us learn a lot about what we could do better, and we have put many recommendations from the auditors and the wider civil rights community into practice. 

"While we won't be making every change they call for, we will put more of their proposals into practice soon."

The boycott organizers are seeking a top-level executive to evaluate "products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate," as well as independent audits of "identity-based hate and misinformation."

Agence France-Presse

Facebook's Zuckerberg promises review of content policies after backlash

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said he would consider changes to the policy that led the company to leave up controversial posts by President Donald Trump during recent demonstrations protesting the death of an unarmed black man while in police custody, a partial concession to critics.

Zuckerberg did not promise specific policy changes in a Facebook post, days after staff members walked off the job, some claiming he kept finding new excuses not to challenge Trump.

"I know many of you think we should have labeled the President's posts in some way last week," Zuckerberg wrote, referring to his decision not to remove Trump's message containing the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

"We're going to review our policies allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt," he wrote. "We're going to review potential options for handling violating or partially-violating content aside from the binary leave-it-up or take-it-down decisions."

Zuckerberg said Facebook would be more transparent about its decision-making on whether to take down posts, review policies on posts that could cause voter suppression and would look to build software to advance racial justice, led by important lieutenants.

At a staff meeting earlier this week, employees questioned Zuckerberg's stance on Trump's post.

Zuckerberg, who holds a controlling stake in Facebook, has maintained that while he found Trump's comments "deeply offensive," they did not violate company policy against incitements to violence.

Facebook's policy is either to take down a post or leave it up, without any other options. Now, Zuckerberg said, other possibilities would be considered.

However, he added, "I worry that this approach has a risk of leading us to editorialize on content we don't like even if it doesn't violate our policies." 

-reuters-

Zuckerberg defends no action on Trump posts after Facebook walkout

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Tuesday that he stood by his decision not to challenge inflammatory posts by US President Donald Trump, refusing to give ground a day after staff members staged a rare public protest.

A group of Facebook employees - nearly all of them working at home due to the coronavirus pandemic - walked off the job on Monday. They complained the company should have acted against Trump's posts containing the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Zuckerberg told employees on a video chat that Facebook had conducted a thorough review and was right to leave the posts unchallenged, a company spokeswoman said.

She said Zuckerberg also acknowledged the decision had upset many employees and said the company was looking into "non-binary" options beyond either leaving up such posts or taking them down.

One Facebook employee, who tweeted criticism on Monday, posted again on Twitter during the all-hands meeting to express disappointment.

"It's crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with us," Facebook employee Brandon Dail wrote on Twitter. Dail's LinkedIn profile describes him as a user interface engineer at Facebook in Seattle.

On Friday, Twitter Inc affixed a warning label to a Trump tweet about widespread protests over the death of a black man in Minnesota that included the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Twitter said the post violated its rules against glorifying violence but was left up as a public interest exception, with reduced options for interactions and distribution.

Facebook declined to act on the same message, and Zuckerberg sought to distance his company from the fight between the president and Twitter. He maintained that while he found Trump's remarks "deeply offensive," they did not violate company policy against incitements to violence.

Twitter last week also put a fact-checking label on two Trump tweets containing misleading claims about mail-in ballots. Facebook, which exempts politicians' posts from its program with third-party fact-checkers, took no action on that post.

Timothy Aveni, a junior software engineer on Facebook's team dedicated to fighting misinformation, announced his resignation in protest over that decision.

"Mark always told us that he would draw the line at speech that calls for violence. He showed us on Friday that this was a lie. Facebook will keep moving the goalposts every time Trump escalates, finding excuse after excuse not to act," he wrote in a Facebook post.

Civil rights leaders who attended an hour-long video call on Monday night with Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives called the CEO's defense of the hands-off approach to Trump's "incomprehensible."

"He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump's call for violence against protesters," said a joint statement from leaders of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Color of Change.

Some critics posted calls on Twitter for Facebook's independent oversight board to weigh in. But the board will not review any cases until early fall, and users initially will only be able to appeal to the board about removed content, not content that Facebook has decided to leave untouched. The board, which can overrule Zuckerberg, will only review a small slice of content decisions.

Zuckerberg spoke with Trump on Friday, as first reported by news website Axios. 

-reuters-

Facebook's Zuckerberg faces employee blowback over ruling on Trump comments

Facebook employees critical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to remove an inflammatory comment from US President Donald Trump took their dissent public over the weekend on Twitter, praising the rival social media firm for taking action and rebuking their own employer.

Many tech workers at companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon have become active on social justice issues in recent years and urged their employers take action and change policies.

Still, the criticism of Zuckerberg marked a rare case of high-level employees publicly taking their own CEO to task, with at least three of the seven critical posts seen by Reuters coming from people who identified themselves as senior managers.

“Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind," wrote Ryan Freitas, whose Twitter account identifies him as director of product design for Facebook’s News Feed. He added he had mobilized "50+ likeminded folks" to lobby for internal change.

Jason Toff, identified as director of product management, wrote: "I work at Facebook and I am not proud of how we’re showing up. The majority of coworkers I’ve spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard."

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the employee dissent.

Twitter on Friday hid a tweet from Trump that included the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" behind a warning label. It explained the tweet violated Twitter's rules against "glorifying violence" but was being left up as a "public service exception."

Facebook declined to take action on the same message, with Zuckerberg saying in a Facebook post on Friday that while he found the remarks "deeply offensive," the company decided they did not violate its policy against "incitements to violence."

Some of the dissenting employees directly praised Twitter's response.

"Respect to @Twitter’s integrity team for making the enforcement call," wrote David Gillis, identified as a director of product design. In a long Twitter thread he said he understood the logic of Facebook's decision, but said: "I think it would have been right for us to make a 'spirit of the policy' exception that took more context into account."

Toff was one of several Facebook employees who were organizing fundraisers for non-profit groups assisting protesters in Minnesota. Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post early Monday that the company would contribute an additional $10 million to social justice causes.

"Giving a platform to incite violence and spread disinformation is unacceptable, regardless who you are or if it’s newsworthy," wrote another Facebook manager, Andrew Crow, head of design for the Portal product. "I disagree with Mark’s position and will work to make change happen." (Reporting by Fanny Potkin in Singapore. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Chizu Nomiyama)

-reuters-

Bezos, Zuckerberg join White House phone calls on reopening U.S. economy

Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com Inc, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc's CEO, on Wednesday participated in White House conference calls about how to reopen the U.S. economy in light of the coronavirus pandemic, company representatives said.

The phone calls followed an announcement Tuesday by President Donald Trump about the formation of advisory groups on how to open up the country, which include other top U.S. executives such as Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook and JPMorgan Chase & Co chief Jamie Dimon.

Business leaders told Trump the country needs much more coronavirus testing before the public would be confident enough to participate in reopening the economy, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The president, on Twitter, called the calls "very productive", adding that corporate leaders were "all-in on getting America back to work, and soon."

Some 94 percent of Americans have been under government stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which causes the potentially lethal respiratory illness COVID-19. The orders, including mandatory business closures, have battered the U.S. economy and left millions of Americans unemployed.

Trump has turned to Corporate America to help plot a course forward. He has often sought business leaders' assistance, as with a previously announced drive-through testing program with prominent retailers including Walmart Inc.

However, relations between the White House and Amazon - the world's largest online retailer - have at times appeared strained. Trump, for instance, has described the Bezos-owned Washington Post as Amazon’s “chief lobbyist.” The top editor of the newspaper, which has published articles critical of the president, has said Bezos has no involvement in its news coverage. (Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin and Katie Paul in San Francisco Editing by Chris Reese and Jonathan Oatis)

-reuters-

Treat us like something between a telco, newspaper: Facebook's Zuckerberg

MUNICH - Online content should be regulated with a system somewhere between the existing rules used for the telecoms and media industries, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told global leaders and security chiefs on Saturday.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Zuckerberg said Facebook had improved its work countering online election interference, and expanded on his previous calls for regulation of social media firms.

"I do think that there should be regulation on harmful content ... there's a question about which framework you use for this," Zuckerberg said during a question and answer session.

"Right now there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries - there's like newspapers and existing media, and then there's the telco-type model, which is 'the data just flows through you', but you're not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line."

"I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between," he said.

Facebook and social media giants including Twitter and Alphabet's Google have come under increasing pressure to better combat governments and political groups using their platforms to spread false and misleading information.

Zuckerberg said he now employed 35,000 people to review online content and implement security measures.

Those teams and Facebook's automated technology currently suspend more than 1 million fake accounts each day, he said, adding that "the vast majority are detected within minutes of signing up."

"Our budget is bigger today than the whole revenue of the company when we went public in 2012, when we had a billion users," he said.

"I'm proud of the results but we will definitely have to stay vigilant."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Google tightens political ads policy to thwart abuse

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google on Wednesday updated how it handles political ads as online platforms remain under pressure to avoid being used to spread misleading information intended to influence voters.

The internet company said its rules already ban any advertiser, including those with political messages, from lying in ads. But it is making its policy more clear and adding examples of how that prohibits content such as doctored or manipulated images or video.

"It's against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim -- whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died," Google ads product management vice president Scott Spencer said in an online post.

Examples of banned ad material included ads or links to information making demonstrably false claims that could undermine voter trust or participation in elections.

"Of course, we recognize that robust political dialogue is an important part of democracy, and no one can sensibly adjudicate every political claim, counterclaim, and insinuation," Spencer said.

"So we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be very limited - but we will continue to do so for clear violations."

Google's main formats for political advertising are ads posted along with search query results, those shown at video viewing service YouTube, and display ads that appear on websites.

Google will also limit targeting of political ads to general categories such as age, gender, or postal code level location.

"Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy," Spencer said.

"This will align our approach to election ads with long-established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print, and result in election ads being more widely seen and available for public discussion."

Google will begin enforcing the changes in Britain within a week and throughout the EU by the end of the year, then in the rest of the world starting January 6, according to Spencer.

SPEECH VS TRUTH

Snap this week confirmed that it checks political ads at Snapchat to make sure they are not deceptive or misleading and thus enforce its ban on such material.

The strategy seems to be a middle ground between Facebook's controversial tolerance of proven lies in political ads and Twitter's decision to ban them all together.

Snap policies prohibit political ads that are deceptive or misleading, with an in-house team reviewing such paid messages to make sure they don't break the rules.

Twitter last week said its ban on political ads will exempt "cause-based" messages on topics related to social or environmental issues.

The San Francisco-based messaging platform plans to bar all paid political messages starting Friday, while addressing concerns expressed by activists for social causes.

"Ads that educate, raise awareness, and/or call for people to take action in connection with civic engagement, economic growth, environmental stewardship, or social equity causes are allowed," Twitter said in its new policy.

"However, they may not reference prohibited political advertisers or political content."

Twitter said the move was aimed at countering the spread of misinformation by politicians.

The political ban has drawn mixed reactions: some argue it puts pressure on Facebook to follow suit or take other steps to curb the spread of misinformation from politicians; others say a ban will be difficult to enforce.

Social media platforms have been challenged by President Donald Trump's campaign and its use of ads that contain claims which critics say have been debunked by independent fact-checkers.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said political advertising is not a major source of revenue but adds that he believes it is important to allow everyone a "voice," and that banning political ads would favor incumbents.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Google, Facebook business models threat to human rights: Amnesty

SAN FRANCISCO -- The data-collection business model fueling Facebook and Google represents a threat to human rights around the world, Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday.

The organization argued that offering people free online services and then using information about them to target money-making ads imperils a gamut of rights including freedom of opinion and expression.

"Despite the real value of the services they provide, Google and Facebook's platforms come at a systemic cost," Amnesty said in its report, "Surveillance Giants."

"The companies' surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse."

With ubiquitous surveillance, the two online giants are able to collect massive amounts of data which may be used against their customers, according to the London-based human rights group.

The business model is "inherently incompatible with the right to privacy," Amnesty contended.

The report maintained that the two Silicon Valley firms have established "near-total dominance over the primary channels through which people connect and engage with the online world," giving them unprecedented power over people's lives.

"Google and Facebook dominate our modern lives -- amassing unparalleled power over the digital world by harvesting and monetizing the personal data of billions of people," said Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty International's secretary general.

"Their insidious control of our digital lives undermines the very essence of privacy and is one of the defining human rights challenges of our era."

The report called for governments to implement policies that ensure access to online services while protecting user privacy.

"Governments have an obligation to protect people from human rights abuses by corporations," Amnesty maintained.

"But for the past two decades, technology companies have been largely left to self-regulate."

DISPUTE ON FINDINGS

Facebook pushed back against what it contended were inaccuracies in the report, saying it strongly disagreed with its business model being characterized as surveillance-based.

"Our business model is what allows us to offer an important service where people can exercise foundational human rights -- to have a voice (freedom of expression) and be able to connect (freedom of association and assembly)," said a letter from Facebook privacy and public policy director Steve Satterfield in an annex to the Amnesty report.

"Facebook's business model is not, as your summary suggests, driven by the collection of data about people."

Facebook spotlighted its measures implemented which limit data information used for ad targeting; controls provided to users regarding their data; and steps taken to restrict abuses by apps on the social network.

"As you correctly note, we do not sell data; we sell ads," Facebook said.

Facebook chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has called for governments to implement uniform rules regarding data-handling instead of leaving private companies to make crucial social decisions such as the limits of free speech.

Google did not offer a specific written response.

But the Amnesty report noted that Google announced this month it would limit data that it shares with advertisers through its ad auction platform, following the launch of an inquiry by the Irish data protection authority and had launched a new feature allowing users to delete location data.

source: news.abs-cbn.com