Facebook on Tuesday released data for the first time about the prevalence of bullying and harassment on the social network and its photo-service Instagram. Facebook said that from July to September, bullying and harassment content was seen between 14 and 15 times per every 10,000 views of content on the social network. On Instagram, these …
Read More »
Facebook was renamed as Meta this week, as part of a broad push to focus on the cross-device multiverse vision for social networking that Mark Zuckerberg has talked about for months. The name change, announced at the company’s developer-focused Connect virtual conference, happened in the same week that a cache of internal documents pointed to Facebook’s role in perpetuating hate speech, …
Read More »
The US Federal Trade Commission is reportedly looking into whether Facebook’s own research documents show the social network violated a 2019 settlement over privacy concerns, for which the company paid a $5 billion fine. FTC officials have begun to look into recently disclosed internal research that outline how much Facebook knew about its platforms’ harms, according to a report Wednesday from …
Read More »
Now just about anyone on Instagram can add links in Stories. The Facebook-owned company said Wednesday that it’s expanding the capability to more accounts, whereas before it was limited to verified accounts or people with a certain number of followers. “We’ve heard from the rest of our community that they also want to share things that matter with their friends and family,” …
Read More »
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was in London on Monday to provide evidence to a UK parliamentary committee analyzing the country’s incoming Online Safety Bill. The appearance came nearly a month after the former product engineer revealed herself as the person behind a leak of internal research that has brought new scrutiny upon the company — in particular regarding its safety systems. …
Read More »
Instagram said it’s rolling out new features, including a way to co-author posts and short videos, underscoring the Facebook-owned social network’s effort to double down on retaining and attracting creators. Instagram’s Collabs tool lets you invite another user to co-author a post or short video. Facebook Starting this week, Instagram is testing a tool called Collabs that will allow a …
Read More »
The Senate will hold a hearing on Oct. 26 with TikTok, YouTube and Snap’s Snapchat to examine the platforms’ impact on young users’ safety, the Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee said Tuesday. “Recent revelations about harm to kids online show that Big Tech is facing its Big Tobacco moment — a moment of reckoning,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who chairs the …
Read More »
Some Facebook, Instagram and Messenger users reported Friday that the apps weren’t working for them, days after the social media giant experienced a massive outage. Facebook then fixed the problem, which the company said arose from a “configuration change” that impacted users globally. “Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours. We …
Read More »
Facebook said late Monday that the company believes a “faulty configuration” change caused a widespread outage that lasted roughly six hours. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said in a blog post. …
Read More »
Instagram wants to make it simpler to watch videos on its platform. To see longer videos on the photo- and video-sharing social network, you used to need a separate app called IGTV. Now, the Facebook-owned company is merging the IGTV videos and the shorter videos you’d normally find in your feed into a single tab called Instagram Video. Announced via …
Read More »
