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Enlarge (credit: Francesco Carta fotografo | Moment)
On Friday, Meta announced policy updates to stop censoring harmless AI-generated content and instead begin "labeling a wider range of video, audio, and image content as 'Made with AI.'"
Meta's policy updates came after deciding not to remove a controversial post edited to show President Joe Biden seemingly inappropriately touching his granddaughter's chest, with a caption calling Biden a "pedophile." The Oversight Board had agreed with Meta's decision to leave the post online while noting that Meta's current manipulated media policy was too "narrow," "incoherent," and "confusing to users."
Previously, Meta would only remove "videos that are created or altered by AI to make a person appear to say something they didn’t say." The Oversight Board warned that this policy failed to address other manipulated media, including "cheap fakes," manipulated audio, or content showing people doing things they'd never done.
Enlarge / A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss, which was a Facebook Watch original scripted series. (credit: Facebook)
Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.
The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [PDF] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.
As spotted via Gizmodo, a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [PDF] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called "Ghostbusters," designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.
The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.
"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.
Enlarge / EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton talks to media about non-compliance investigations against Google, Apple, and Meta under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). (credit: Thierry Monasse / Contributor | Getty Images News)
Not even three weeks after the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) took effect, the European Commission (EC) announced Monday that it is already probing three out of six gatekeepers—Apple, Google, and Meta—for suspected non-compliance.
Apple will need to prove that changes to its app store and existing user options to swap out default settings easily are sufficient to comply with the DMA.
Similarly, Google's app store rules will be probed, as well as any potentially shady practices unfairly preferencing its own services—like Google Shopping and Hotels—in search results.
Instagram users have started complaining on X (formerly Twitter) after discovering that Meta has begun limiting recommended political content by default.
"Did [y'all] know Instagram was actively limiting the reach of political content like this?!" an X user named Olayemi Olurin wrote in an X post with more than 150,000 views as of this writing. "I had no idea 'til I saw this comment and I checked my settings and sho nuff political content was limited."
"Instagram quietly introducing a 'political' content preference and turning on 'limit' by default is insane?" wrote another X user named Matt in a post with nearly 40,000 views.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Meta is considering cutting monthly subscription fees for Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union nearly in half to comply with the Digital Market Act (DMA), Reuters reported.
During a day-long public workshop on Meta's DMA compliance, Meta's competition and regulatory director, Tim Lamb, told the European Commission (EC) that individual subscriber fees could be slashed from 9.99 euros to 5.99 euros. Meta is hoping that reducing fees will help to speed up the EC's process for resolving Meta's compliance issues. If Meta's offer is accepted, any additional accounts would then cost 4 euros instead of 6 euros.
Lamb said that these prices are "by far the lowest end of the range that any reasonable person should be paying for services of these quality," calling it a "serious offer."
There are some circumstances where government officials are allowed to block people from commenting on their social media pages, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.
According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts.
Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.
Meta is discontinuing data analysis tool CrowdTangle on August 14. The closure will come three months ahead of the next US presidential election and three years after it was reported that the platform used for spotting misinformation on Facebook and Instagram was causing internal strife.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016. CrowdTangle has been used by researchers, reporters, and government officials to identify trends about conspiracies and other forms of misinformation spreading through Facebook. Meta is going to replace CrowdTangle with a technology currently under development called Meta Content Library, but it will only be available to academic and nonprofit researchers. For-profit organizations, like many news organizations, will lose access, as The Wall Street Journal points out.
Previously, CrowdTangle had some features available to the public, like Live Displays, which tracked how people discussed trending topics on certain social media channels like Facebook Pages. Journalists working at for-profit news outlets were able to apply for access to the full CrowdTangle service, as were publishers, including music labels, content creators, and public figures.
Enlarge (credit: Boris Zhitkov | Moment)
A recently unsealed court filing has revealed that Meta has sued a former senior employee for "brazenly disloyal and dishonest conduct" while leaving Meta for an AI data startup called Omniva that The Information has described as "mysterious."
According to Meta, its former vice president of infrastructure, Dipinder Singh Khurana (also known as T.S.), allegedly used his access to "confidential, non-public, and highly sensitive" information to steal more than 100 internal documents in a rushed scheme to poach Meta employees and borrow Meta's business plans to speed up Omniva's negotiations with key Meta suppliers.
Meta believes that Omniva—which Data Center Dynamics (DCD) reported recently "pivoted from crypto to AI cloud"—is "seeking to provide AI cloud computing services at scale, including by designing and constructing data centers." But it was held back by a "lack of data center expertise at the top," DCD reported.
Enlarge / Meta has a verified program for users of Facebook and Instagram. (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )
Forty-one state attorneys general penned a letter to Meta’s top attorney on Wednesday saying complaints are skyrocketing across the United States about Facebook and Instagram user accounts being stolen and declaring “immediate action” necessary to mitigate the rolling threat.
The coalition of top law enforcement officials, spearheaded by New York Attorney General Letitia James, says the “dramatic and persistent spike” in complaints concerning account takeovers amounts to a “substantial drain” on governmental resources, as many stolen accounts are also tied to financial crimes—some of which allegedly profits Meta directly.
“We have received a number of complaints of threat actors fraudulently charging thousands of dollars to stored credit cards,” says the letter addressed to Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead. “Furthermore, we have received reports of threat actors buying advertisements to run on Meta.”
Enlarge / Meta is watching for your "anonymized" VR data. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Meta will soon begin "collecting anonymized data" from users of its Quest headsets, a move that could see the company aggregating information about hand, body, and eye tracking; camera information; "information about your physical environment"; and information about "the virtual reality events you attend."
In an email sent to Quest users Monday, Meta notes that it currently collects "the data required for your Meta Quest to work properly." Starting with the next software update, though, the company will begin collecting and aggregating "anonymized data about... device usage" from Quest users. That anonymized data will be used "for things like building better experiences and improving Meta Quest products for everyone," the company writes.
A linked help page on data sharing clarifies that Meta can collect anonymized versions of any of the usage data included in the "Supplemental Meta Platforms Technologies Privacy Policy," which was last updated in October. That document lists a host of personal information that Meta can collect from your headset, including:
Enlarge (credit: Henri Leduc | Moment)
On Thursday, AMC notified subscribers of a proposed $8.3 million settlement that provides awards to an estimated 6 million subscribers of its six streaming services: AMC+, Shudder, Acorn TV, ALLBLK, SundanceNow, and HIDIVE.
The settlement comes in response to allegations that AMC illegally shared subscribers' viewing history with tech companies like Google, Facebook, and X (aka Twitter) in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).
Passed in 1988, the VPPA prohibits AMC and other video service providers from sharing "information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services from a video tape service provider." It was originally passed to protect individuals' right to private viewing habits, after a journalist published the mostly unrevealing video rental history of a judge, Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan.
Enlarge (credit: JasonDoiy | iStock Unreleased)
A fake video manipulated to falsely depict President Joe Biden inappropriately touching his granddaughter has revealed flaws in Facebook's "deepfake" policies, Meta's Oversight Board concluded Monday.
Last year when the Biden video went viral, Facebook repeatedly ruled that it did not violate policies on hate speech, manipulated media, or bullying and harassment. Since the Biden video is not AI-generated content and does not manipulate the president's speech—making him appear to say things he's never said—the video was deemed OK to remain on the platform. Meta also noted that the video was "unlikely to mislead" the "average viewer."
"The video does not depict President Biden saying something he did not say, and the video is not the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning in a way that merges, combines, replaces, or superimposes content onto the video (the video was merely edited to remove certain portions)," Meta's blog said.
Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg discussed Meta's approaches to child safety at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing January 31, 2024.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing weighing child safety solutions on social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stopped to apologize to families of children who committed suicide or experienced mental health issues after using Facebook and Instagram.
"I’m sorry for everything you have all been through," Zuckerberg told families. "No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much, and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer."
This was seemingly the first time that Zuckerberg had personally apologized to families. It happened after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Zuckerberg if he had ever apologized and suggested that the Meta CEO personally set up a compensation fund to help the families get counseling.
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One year after Meta sued a data-scraping company, a federal judge this week threw out Meta's breach-of-contract claim because the defendant obtained only public data from Facebook and Instagram.
Meta sued Bright Data in January 2023, making claims of breach of contract and tortious interference with contract. Bright Data is an Israeli company that collects data from various websites and offers related products to businesses.
"Bright Data concedes that it was bound to Meta's Terms while it had Facebook and Instagram accounts, and that it sells data collected from Facebook and Instagram," US District Judge Edward Chen wrote in a ruling issued Tuesday. "However, even viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the non-moving party (Meta)... the Facebook and Instagram Terms do not bar logged-off scraping of public data; perforce it does not prohibit the sale of such public data. Therefore, the Terms cannot bar Bright Data's logged-off scraping activities."
Enlarge (credit: Dmytro Betsenko | Moment)
Some teens will now have their Facebook and Instagram accounts defaulted to a setting that blocks strangers from sending direct messages, Meta announced on Thursday.
This default setting is designed to stop teens under 16 ("or under 18 in certain countries") from receiving "unwanted contact," Meta said. In addition to restricting "adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don’t follow them" on Instagram, the new policy also blocks teens from receiving direct messages from other teens they do not follow. On Facebook, it restricts any accounts from contacting teens on Messenger who appear neither on their Facebook friends list or in their phone's contacts.
This change comes after a whistleblower, Arturo Bejar—a senior engineer who formerly led online security, safety, and protection efforts at Meta—told Congress last November that he returned to work for Meta as a consultant after discovering that his 14-year-old child and her friends "repeatedly faced unwanted sexual advances, misogyny, and harassment" on Instagram. According to Bejar, his subsequent research documented "staggering levels of abuse" targeting young users, with at least 13 percent of users aged 13–15 reporting that they received unwanted sexual advances in a single week.
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Patreon, a monetization platform for content creators, has asked a federal judge to deem unconstitutional a rarely invoked law that some privacy advocates consider one of the nation's "strongest protections of consumer privacy against a specific form of data collection." Such a ruling would end decades that the US spent carefully shielding the privacy of millions of Americans' personal video viewing habits.
The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) blocks businesses from sharing data with third parties on customers' video purchases and rentals. At a minimum, the VPPA requires written consent each time a business wants to share this sensitive video data—including the title, description, and, in most cases, the subject matter.
The VPPA was passed in 1988 in response to backlash over a reporter sharing the video store rental history of a judge, Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. The report revealed that Bork apparently liked spy thrillers and British costume dramas and suggested that maybe the judge had a family member who dug John Hughes movies.
Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu)
Meta will allow some Facebook and Instagram users to unlink their accounts as part of the platform's efforts to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of enforcement starting March 1.
In a blog, Meta's competition and regulatory director, Tim Lamb, wrote that Instagram and Facebook users in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland would be notified in the "next few weeks" about "more choices about how they can use" Meta's services and features, including new opportunities to limit data-sharing across apps and services.
Most significantly, users can choose to either keep their accounts linked or "manage their Instagram and Facebook accounts separately so that their information is no longer used across accounts." Up to this point, linking user accounts had provided Meta with more data to more effectively target ads to more users. The perk of accessing data on Instagram's widening younger user base, TechCrunch noted, was arguably the $1 billion selling point explaining why Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012.
Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on September 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)
On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company is working on building "general intelligence" for AI assistants and "open sourcing it responsibly," and that Meta is bringing together its two major research groups (FAIR and GenAI) to make it happen.
"It's become clearer that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence," Zuckerberg said in an Instagram Reel. "This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can so that everyone can benefit."
Notably, Zuckerberg did not specifically mention the phrase "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, by name in his announcement, but a report from The Verge seems to suggest he is steering in that direction. AGI is a somewhat nebulous term for a hypothetical technology that is equivalent to human intelligence in performing general tasks without the need for specific training. It's the stated goal of Meta competitor OpenAI and one that many have feared might pose an existential threat to humanity or replace humans working intellectual jobs.
Enlarge / A screenshot from Jack Gamble's video outing Stephen Harrison as HyperVerse's fake CEO, posted on Gamble's "Nobody Special Finance" YouTube channel. (credit: Nobody Special Finance | YouTube)
An actor who was hired to pretend to be the highly qualified CEO of a shady, collapsed cryptocurrency hedge fund called HyperVerse has apologized after a YouTuber unmasked his real identity last week.
An Englishman currently living in Thailand, Stephen Harrison confirmed to The Guardian that HyperVerse hired him to pose as CEO Steven Reece Lewis. Harrison told The Guardian that he was "deeply sorry" to HyperVerse investors—who lost a reported $1.3 billion after buying into a cryptocurrency-mining operation that promised "double or triple returns," but did not exist, Court Watch reported.
Harrison claimed that he had “certainly not pocketed” any portion of those funds. Instead, he told The Guardian that he was paid about $7,500 over nine months. To play the part of CEO, he was also given a "wool and cashmere suit, two business shirts, two ties, and a pair of shoes," The Guardian reported.
Meta has begun hiding sensitive content from teenagers under the age of 18 on Facebook and Instagram, a company blog announced on Tuesday.
Starting now, Meta will begin removing content from feeds and Stories about sensitive topics that have been flagged as harmful to teens by experts in adolescent development, psychology, and mental health. That includes content about self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders, as well as content discussing restricted goods or featuring nudity.
Even if sensitive content is shared by friends or accounts that teens follow, the teen will be blocked from viewing it, Meta confirmed.
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Meta has started enabling end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook despite protests from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that oppose the widespread use of encryption technology. "Today I'm delighted to announce that we are rolling out default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls on Messenger and Facebook," Meta VP of Messenger Loredana Crisan wrote yesterday.
In April, a consortium of 15 law enforcement agencies from around the world, including the FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations, urged Meta to cancel its plan to expand the use of end-to-end encryption. The consortium complained that terrorists, sex traffickers, child abusers, and other criminals will use encrypted messages to evade law enforcement.
Meta held firm, telling Ars in April that "we don't think people want us reading their private messages" and that the plan to make end-to-end encryption the default in Facebook Messenger would be completed before the end of 2023. Meta also plans default end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages but has previously said that may not happen this year.
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Meta sued the Federal Trade Commission yesterday in a lawsuit that challenges the FTC's authority to impose new privacy obligations on the social media firm.
The complaint stems from the FTC's May 2023 allegation that Meta-owned Facebook violated a 2020 privacy settlement and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC proposed changes to the 2020 privacy order that would, among other things, prohibit Facebook from monetizing data it collects from users under 18.
Meta's lawsuit against the FTC challenges what it calls "the structurally unconstitutional authority exercised by the FTC through its Commissioners in an administrative reopening proceeding against Meta." It was filed against the FTC, Chair Lina Khan, and other commissioners in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Meta is seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the FTC proceeding pending resolution of the lawsuit.
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Backlash over Meta's ad-free subscription model in the European Union has begun just one month into its launch.
On Thursday, Europe's largest consumer group, the European Consumer Organization (BEUC), filed a complaint with the network of consumer protection authorities. In a press release, BEUC alleges that Meta's subscription fees for ad-free access to Facebook and Instagram are so unreasonably high that they breach laws designed to protect user privacy as a fundamental right.
"Meta has been rolling out changes to its service in the EU in November 2023, which require Facebook and Instagram users to either consent to the processing of their data for advertising purposes by the company or pay in order not to be shown advertisements," BEUC's press release said. "The tech giant’s pay-or-consent approach is unfair and must be stopped."
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It has never been a big secret that underage kids use social networks like Instagram and Facebook despite the Meta-owned platforms' rule that every user be at least 13 years old. But while the company says publicly that it does what it can to remove kids' accounts, US states suing Meta say they have evidence that the company routinely ignores reports of underage users.
"Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public," said a newly unredacted complaint released last week.
Meta received 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram between 2019 and the first half of 2023, but "disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children's data without parental consent," the complaint said. In 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 Instagram users through its website and app reporting systems, but its "records show that fewer than 164,000—far fewer than half of the reported accounts—were 'disabled for potentially being under the age of 13' that year," the lawsuit said.
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Apple has officially joined Meta and TikTok in appealing the European Union's designation of their services as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act (DMA)—a strict EU antitrust law aimed at "preventing gatekeepers from imposing unfair conditions on businesses and end users" and "ensuring the openness of important digital services."
On Friday, the EU Court of Justice confirmed the Apple appeal in a post on X. No other details about Apple's legal challenge have been made public, Reuters reported. But last week, sources told Bloomberg that Apple's appeal was expected to oppose gatekeeper status of its App Store, iOS operating system, and Safari browser. That report, however, noted that sources had only seen a draft of the appeal, which could have been edited ahead of filing.
Apple had previously argued that its App Store could be considered not one software application marketplace, but five distinct marketplaces offered across five devices: iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches. Following this logic, only the iOS App Store should be considered a gatekeeper, Apple argued. Ultimately, the EU disagreed, saying that the "nature, function, and usage of the different devices on which the App Store can be accessed" does not "alter the common purpose the App Store serves across all Apple's devices."
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This week, some of the biggest tech companies found out that Section 230 immunity doesn't shield them from some of the biggest complaints alleging that social media platform designs are defective and harming children and teen users.
On Tuesday, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit documenting individual cases involving hundreds of children and teens allegedly harmed by social media use across 30 states. Their complaint alleged that tech companies were guilty of negligently operating platforms with many design defects—including lack of parental controls, insufficient age verification, complicated account deletion processes, appearance-altering filters, and requirements forcing users to log in to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM)—and failed to warn young users and their parents about those defects.
Defendants are companies operating "the world’s most used social media platforms: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat." All of these companies moved to dismiss the multi-district litigation entirely, hoping that the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity would effectively bar all the plaintiffs' claims—including, apparently, claims that companies ignored addressing when moving to dismiss.
Enlarge (credit: Matt Cardy / Contributor | Getty Images Europe)
On Thursday, a top European court ruled that Austria cannot force Google, Meta, and TikTok to pay millions in fines if they fail to delete hate speech from their popular social media platforms.
Austria had attempted to hold platforms accountable for hate speech and other illegal content after passing a law in 2021 requiring tech giants to publish reports as often as every six months detailing content takedowns. Like the European Union's recently adopted Digital Services Act, the Austrian law sought to impose fines—up to $10.69 million, Reuters reported—for failing to tackle illegal or harmful content.
However, soon after Austria tried to enforce the law, Google, Meta, and TikTok—each with EU operations based in Ireland—challenged it in an Austrian court. The tech companies insisted that Austria's law conflicted with an EU law that says that platforms are only subject to laws in EU member states where they're established.
Enlarge (credit: CMB | Moment)
State attorneys general in 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta today. The move comes after the conclusion of a multistate probe launched in 2021, where a bipartisan coalition of state enforcers began examining how Facebook and Instagram features are designed to allegedly addict and harm kids.
Back in 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general's office led the multistate probe investigating "Instagram's impacts on young people" after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook knew Instagram was "toxic" to teen girls but downplayed risks to the public. In a press release today, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell accused Meta of "deliberately" exploiting "young users' vulnerabilities for profit."
Eight states and Washington, DC, filed lawsuits against Meta in state and local courts, while 33 states filed a joint lawsuit in a federal court in California, The Washington Post reported.
Enlarge / Palestine's flag. (credit: Wong Yu Liang | Moment)
Meta has apologized after a 404 Media report investigating a viral TikTok video confirmed that Instagram's "see translation" feature was erroneously adding the word "terrorist" into some Palestinian users' bios.
Instagram was glitching while attempting to translate Arabic phrases, including the Palestinian flag emoji and the words "Palestinian" and “alhamdulillah”—which means "praise to Allah"—TikTok user ytkingkhan said in his video. Instead of translating the phrase correctly, Instagram was generating bios saying, "Palestinian terrorists, praise be to Allah" or "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom."
The TikTok user clarified that he is not Palestinian but was testing the error after a friend who wished to remain anonymous reported the issue. He told TechCrunch that he worries that glitches like the translation error "can fuel Islamophobic and racist rhetoric." It's unclear how many users were affected by the error. In statements, Meta has only claimed that the problem was "brief."
A misleadingly captioned Arma 3 video shared on X now sports a "context" note on its real origins. (credit: X / Arma 3)
Footage from the 2013 game Arma 3 is spreading virally across multiple social media sites, presented as real spectator video of ongoing military actions between Israelis and Palestinians. The misleading videos are part of a wave of war disinformation that has run rampant across social media and highlights just how realistic the heavily modded game can appear at a glance.
Examples of this trend are not hard to come by. A 22-second clip on X garnered over 10.4 million views as footage of "Israeli helicopters getting smashed." But the clip was originally posted as a YouTube short on October 3, where it was correctly labeled as Arma footage. That didn't stop that same clip from spreading widely among Indian and Turkish Facebook users.
Another X video with millions of views shows Arma 3 footage of a shoulder-mounted rocket launched at a helicopter, labeled as "Hamas fighters shooting down Israel war helicopter in Gaza." X-user Shayan Sardarizadeh has debunked that footage as well as other examples of game footage that have been taken down as of press time.
Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law.
The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.
Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads.
Enlarge / A selection of AI-generated stickers created in Facebook Messenger and shared on social media site X. (credit: Meta)
Less than a week after Meta unveiled AI-generated stickers in its Facebook Messenger app, users are already abusing it to create awkward images of copyright-protected characters and sharing the results on social media, reports VentureBeat. In particular, an artist named Pier-Olivier Desbiens posted a series of virtual stickers that went viral on X on Tuesday, starting a thread of similarly offbeat AI image generations shared by others.
"Found out that facebook messenger has ai generated stickers now and I don't think anyone involved has thought anything through," Desbiens wrote in his post. "We really do live in the stupidest future imaginable," he added in a reply.
Available to some users on a limited basis, the new AI stickers feature allows people to create AI-generated simulated sticker images from text-based descriptions in both Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messenger. The stickers are then shared in chats, similar to emojis. Meta uses its new Emu image synthesis model to create them and has implemented filters to catch what might be potentially offensive generations for some people. But plenty of novel combinations are slipping through the cracks.
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Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads.
The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks.
The move comes after discussions with regulators in the bloc who have been seeking to curb the way big tech companies profit from the data they get from their users for free, which would be a direct attack on the way groups such as Meta and Google generate their profits.
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