Helle Thorning-Schmidt, from Meta’s oversight board, told the BBC she welcomed aspects of the shake-up, which will see users decide about the accuracy of posts via X-style “community notes”.

However speaking on Today, on BBC Radio Four, she added there were “huge problems” with what had been announced, including the potential impact on the LGBTQ+ community, as well as gender and trans rights.

“We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm, so we will be watching that space very carefully,” she said.

In a video posted alongside a blog post by the company on Tuesday, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the decision was motivated by “getting back to our roots around free expression”.

He said third-party fact checkers currently used by the firm were “too politically biased”, meaning too many users were being “censored”.

The decision has prompted questions about the survival of the board – which Meta funds – and was created by then president of global affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, who announced he was leaving the company less than a week ago.

Ms Thorning-Schmidt – a former Prime Minister of Denmark – insisted the changes to fact checking meant it was needed more than ever.

“That’s why it is good we have an oversight board that can discuss this in a transparent way with Meta”, she said.

She did welcome some of Meta’s announcement on moderation, including its aim to find a new way to fact-check after there had been instances of “over-enforcement”, with people ending up in “Facebook jail”. ‘Kiss up to Trump’

While Meta says the move – which is being introduced in the US initially – is about free speech, others have suggested it is an attempt to get closer to the incoming Trump administration, and catch up with the access and influence enjoyed by another tech titan, Elon Musk.

The tech journalist and author Kara Swisher told the BBC it was “the most cynical move” she had seen Mr Zuckerberg make in the “many years” she had been reporting on him.

“Facebook does whatever is in its self-interest”, she told Today.

“He wants to kiss up to Donald Trump, and catch up with Elon Musk in that act.”

However while campaigners against hate speech online reacted with dismay to the change some advocates of free speech have welcomed the news.

The US free speech group Fire said: “Meta’s announcement shows the marketplace of ideas in action. Its users want a social media platform that doesn’t suppress political content or use top-down fact-checkers.

“These changes will hopefully result in less arbitrary moderation decisions and freer speech on Meta’s platforms.”

Speaking after the changes were announced, Trump told a news conference he was impressed by Mr Zuckerberg’s decision and that Meta had “come a long way”.

Asked whether Mr Zuckerberg was “directly responding” to threats Trump had made to him in the past, the incoming US president responded: “Probably”.

Advertiser exodus

Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged on Tuesday there was some risk for the company in the change of strategy.

“It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” he said in his video message.

X’s move to a more hands-off approach to moderating content has contributed to a major fall-out with advertisers.

Jasmine Enberg, analyst at Insider Intelligence, said that was a risk for Meta too.

“Meta’s massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulate it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus”, she told the BBC.

“But brand safety remains a key factor in determining where advertisers spend their budgets – any major drop in engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business, given the intense competition for users and ad dollars.”

By BBC News

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The tech giant’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November, having sought to repair his and his firm’s relationship with Trump following the election.

Trump has previously been highly critical of Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook – calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017.

Meta is not believed to have made similar donations to President Joe Biden’s inaugural fund in 2020 or to Trump’s previous inaugural fund in 2016.

The company confirmed its million-dollar donation to the inaugural fund to several outlets on Wednesday.

Inauguration funds are used to pay for events and activities when a new president takes office – some consider them an attempt to curry favour with a new administration.

The donation was confirmed by CBS, the BBC’s US media partner, on Wednesday, and was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The BBC has approached Meta for comment.

Trump will be sworn in as the 47th US president on 20 January.

Trump & Mark Zuckerberg’s history

Relations between Trump and Mr Zuckerberg have historically been far less cordial.

They particularly soured when Facebook and Instagram suspended the former president’s accounts in 2021, after they said he praised those engaged in violence at the Capitol on 6 January.

Since then, Trump has waged a war of words against Meta – calling Facebook an “enemy of the people” in March.

He said a law that would see TikTok banned in the US unless sold off by its parent company ByteDance would unfairly benefit Facebook.

In August, Mr Zuckerberg told Republican lawmakers in a letter that he regretted bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to “censor” some Facebook and Instagram content during the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump wrote in a book published in September that Mr Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he tried to intervene in the 2024 election.

But the president-elect appears to have since softened his position.

He told a podcast in October it was “nice” Mr Zuckerberg was “staying out of the election”, and thanked him for a personal phone call after he faced an assassination attempt.

Still, Mr Zuckerberg remains far less close to Trump than fellow tech titan Elon Musk.

The Tesla and X owner has been dubbed Trump’s “First Buddy” because of his extensive donations to his election campaign.

That has led to Mr Musk being placed in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

There has been no such rapprochement between Mr Musk and Mr Zuckerberg – although the cage fight between them that was once mooted now appears to be off.

By BBC News

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The long-awaited decision sets out a successor to a world-first law that Australia passed in 2021, which was designed to make giants like Meta and Google pay for hosting news on their platforms.

Earlier this year Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – announced it would not renew payment deals it had in place with Australian news organisations, setting up a standoff with lawmakers.

The new rules, announced on Thursday, will require firms that earn more than A$250m ($160m; £125m) in annual revenue to enter into commercial deals with media organisations, or risk being hit with higher taxes.

The design of the scheme is yet to be finalised but it will apply to sites such as Facebook, Google and TikTok.

In a statement, Meta said it was concerned that the government was “charging one industry to subsidise another”.

Unlike the previous model, the new framework – called the News Bargaining Incentive – will require tech firms to pay even if they do not enter deals with publishers.

“Digital platforms receive huge financial benefits from Australia and they have a social and economic responsibility to contribute to Australians’ access to quality journalism,” Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said on Thursday.

The previous News Media Bargaining Code saw news organisations negotiate commercial deals with tech giants, while also committing firms like Facebook and Google to invest millions of dollars in local digital content.

That code aimed to address what the government called a power imbalance between publishers and tech companies, while offsetting some of the losses traditional media outlets have faced due to the rise of digital platforms.

As deals brokered under that arrangement neared expiry, Meta said that it would not be renewing them, leading to a roughly A$200m loss in revenue for Australian publishers.

Instead, Meta said it would phase out its dedicated news tab – which spotlights articles – on Facebook in Australia, and reinvest the money elsewhere.

“We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content… news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed,” it said in a statement in February.

The announcement prompted a strong response from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, which described the move as “a fundamental dereliction” of Meta’s “responsibility to its Australian users”.

“The risk is that misinformation will fill any vacuum created by news no longer being on the platform,” Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said at the time.

The new taxation model begins in January 2025 and will be cemented into law once parliament returns in February.

The government says it will be designed to make tech companies fund Australian journalism in exchange for tax offsets, not to raise revenue.

By BBC News

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The Competition Commission of India (CCI) launched a probe in March 2021 into WhatsApp’s privacy policy, which allowed data sharing with Facebook and its units, sparking global backlash.

“Sharing of user data collected on WhatsApp with other Meta companies… for purposes other than for providing WhatsApp service shall not be made a condition for users to access WhatsApp Service in India,” the CCI said.

Tech giants, including Apple, Google and Meta face new regulatory challenges with India’s proposed EU-like antitrust law.

The Indian government is currently examining a February report from a panel established by the corporate affairs ministry. The report proposed a new “Digital Competition Bill” to complement existing antitrust laws.

The U.S.-India Business Council, a key U.S. lobby group has already opposed the move, fearing its business impact.

The post India Fines Meta Sh3 Billion Over WhatsApp Data Sharing appeared first on KahawaTungu.

“The European Commission has fined Meta for violating EU antitrust rules by linking its Facebook Marketplace with its social networking platform and imposing unfair conditions on competitors in the online classified ads market,” said the EU’s executive branch in a statement.

Meta has announced plans to appeal the decision but says it will comply with EU regulations in the meantime. The company is preparing a solution to address the EU’s concerns.

The case follows a two-year investigation by the European Commission, which began probing Facebook’s conduct in June 2021. By December 2022, the EU raised concerns about Meta’s bundling of Facebook Marketplace with its main social network. According to the EU, this practice constitutes an illegal “tie” that forces Marketplace onto Facebook users.

Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace expanded into several European countries the following year. Meta argues that users have the freedom to engage with Marketplace or ignore it entirely, and that the EU’s findings overlook this choice. Additionally, Meta contends that the EU could not demonstrate harm to other online marketplaces.

Under EU antitrust laws, companies can face fines of up to 10% of their global revenue for such violations.

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The Firefly Video Model, as the technology is called, will compete with OpenAI’s Sora, which was introduced earlier this year, while TikTok owner ByteDance and Meta Platforms have also announced their video tools in recent months.

Facing much larger rivals, Adobe has staked its future on building models trained on data that it has rights to use, ensuring the output can be legally used in commercial work.

San Jose, California-based Adobe will start opening up the tool to people who have signed up for its waiting list but did not give a general release date. While Adobe has not yet announced any customers using its video tools, it said on Monday that PepsiCo-owned Gatorade will use its image generation model for a site where customers can order custom-made bottles, and Mattel has been using Adobe tools to help design packaging for its Barbie line of dolls.

For its video tools, Adobe has aimed at making them practical for everyday use by video creators and editors, with a special focus on making the footage blend in with conventional footage, said Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s chief technology officer for digital media.

“We really focus on fine-grain control, teaching the model the concepts that video editors and videographers use – things like camera position, camera angle, camera motion,” Greenfield said.

By Agencies

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In a letter sent to a US House committee chair, he said some material – including humour and satire – was taken down in 2021 under pressure from senior officials.

The White House has defended its actions, saying it encouraged “responsible actions to protect public health and safety”.

Mr Zuckerberg also said his firm briefly “demoted” content relating to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 election, after the FBI warned of “a potential Russian disinformation” operation.

It later became clear that this content was not part of such an operation, Mr Zuckerberg said, and it should not have been temporarily taken down.

Mr Zuckerberg did not give further detail about the actions he regretted during the pandemic. At that time, his business removed posts for a variety of reasons.

Mr Zuckerberg said the decisions made were the decisions of his business, but that the “government pressure was wrong”.

He continued: “We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Mr Zuckerberg said he and Meta would be ready to “push back” if something similar happened in the future.

His letter was addressed to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House judiciary committee, which has been investigating content moderation on online platforms. Republicans said the letter was a “big win for free speech”.

In a statement issued to the website Politico, the White House stood by its actions.

It said: “Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”

Hunter Biden controversy

Mr Zuckerberg’s comments on Hunter Biden refer to the story of a laptop that was abandoned by the president’s son at a repair shop in Delaware – as first reported by the New York Post.

The newspaper claimed emails found on the computer suggested his business abroad had influenced US foreign policy while his father was vice-president.

The president and his family have denied any wrongdoing.

The story became a notable right-wing talking point in the US, and a point of contention as some social media platforms censored the content.

Mr Zuckerberg said the story was temporarily demoted on his platforms while going through a fact-check – after a warning from the FBI of a potential Russian disinformation operation, and “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote.

“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Mr Zuckerberg also said he did not plan to make any more contributions to supporting electoral infrastructure.

In 2020, he donated $400m (£302m) via his philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which was intended to help government offices conduct the election during the pandemic.

However, misinformation spread rapidly on social media accusing Mr Zuckerberg of effectively using a loophole to skirt maximum donation limits in a bid to get Mr Biden elected.

Mr Zuckerberg said his donations “were designed to be non-partisan”.

“Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.

“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role on way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role – so I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”

By BBC News

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Meta provided revenue guidance for the third quarter of $38.5 billion to $41 billion, or $39.75 billion at the middle of the range. Analysts were expecting a forecast of of $39.1 billion.

The Facebook parent reported second-quarter revenue growth of 22% from $32 billion a year earlier, marking a fourth straight quarter of growth in excess of 20%. Net income jumped 73% to $13.47 billion from $7.79 billion, or $2.98 a share, a year earlier.

Meta’s results point to continued share gains in the digital ad market, the company’s core business. Advertising revenue, which comes largely from the Facebook and Instagram apps, rose 22% from a year earlier. Last week, top rival Alphabet reported an 11% increase in Google ad sales, with YouTube missing estimates.

Meta said expenses in the second quarter were $24.2 billion, which included the charge from its recent agreement to settle a facial recognition data lawsuit by the state of Texas for $1.4 billion.

The company reported capital expenditures of $8.47 billion for the second quarter, below the $9.51 billion that analysts estimated.

Meta said its expense outlook for the year remains unchanged at $96 billion to $99 billion. The company narrowed the range for capital expenditures. It’s now $37 billion to $40 billion; the low number was previously $35 billion.

For user metrics, Meta reported that it had 3.27 billion daily active people (DAP) in the quarter, matching Street Account estimates. In the past, Meta reported daily and monthly active user numbers for its Facebook and Messenger apps. The DAP figure is the number of people accessing any one of its apps.

Meta’s financials continue to benefit from cost-cutting initiatives that started in late 2022. The company eliminated a total of about 21,000 jobs over multiple rounds of layoffs. Operating income climbed 58% from a year earlier to $14.9 billion, and Meta’s operating margin expanded to 38% from 29% during the year-earlier period.

Meta said that its headcount dropped 1% year over year to 70,799 as of June 30.

While it’s been downsizing broadly, Meta has been spending heavily on cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and the virtual reality and augmented reality tech needed to underpin the metaverse. Similar to other tech giants, Meta has been pouring money into data center infrastructure and computing resources that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said is necessary to stay ahead of the competition.

“We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We’ve released the first frontier-level open source AI model, we continue to see good traction with our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, and we’re driving good growth across our apps.”

Meta said Wednesday that while the company is continuing “to refine our plans for next year, we currently expect significant capital expenditures growth in 2025 as we invest to support our artificial intelligence research and product development efforts.”

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s computing infrastructure will include 350,000 Nvidia H100 graphics cards, the expensive computer chips used to train so-called large language models and related AI software, by the end of 2024. Additionally, Zuckerberg said at the time that Meta’s computing infrastructure would contain “almost 600k H100 equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs,” which equates to billions of dollars.

As part of Meta’s AI push, the company debuted last week the latest version of its Llama AI model, which consists of three different variants that developers can access and use for free via open source. One version of the Llama 3.1 technology contains a whopping 405 billion parameters, which are metrics that indicate the size and capabilities of the AI model, underscoring Meta’s efforts to ensure that its technology is on par with rivals like OpenAI and Google.

Meta shares were up 34% for the year as of Wednesday’s close, double the gains for the Nasdaq. The stock rose 6.9% to $507.45 after hours.

By CNBC

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The ex-US president and convicted felon’s accounts were suspended in 2021 after he praised supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January.

Trump’s accounts, which combined have over 60 million followers, were re-instated in 2023 but subject to additional monitoring, which has now been removed, the social media giant said in a blog post.

Meta said it had a responsibility to allow political expression and that Americans should be able to hear from presidential nominees on an equal basis.

It added that US presidential candidates “remain subject to the same Community Standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, including those policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence.”

Since returning to Meta’s platforms, Trump’s accounts have mostly posted campaign details and memes including attacks on his presidential race rival Joe Biden.

Prior to his 2021 ban, Trump’s Facebook posts were often some of the most popular in the US, according to data at the time from CrowdTangle.

Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a crime and was also banned from Twitter and YouTube.

Restrictions on these accounts were also lifted last year, but despite this Trump communicates now on Truth Social, a social media platform he owns, before reposting to other networks.

Trump returned to Twitter – now called X – after the company’s CEO Elon Musk held a poll that asked users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Trump’s account should be reinstated. “Yes” won, apparently with 51.8% of the vote.

The big tech companies acted after the Capitol Hill riots which killed five people and injured more than 100 police officers. Trump was accused of inciting violence and repeatedly spreading disinformation.

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The charge announced on Monday follows the tech giant’s launch of the no-ads subscription service for Facebook and Instagram in Europe last November. The move is the European Union executive’s latest against Big Tech since the DMA came into force earlier this year.

Meta offers users a choice between being targeted by ads based on their personal data or paying to avoid them. The system was rolled out after the EU ruled that Meta must get consent before showing ads to users – a decision that threatened its business model of tailoring ads based on individual users’ online interests and digital activity.

However, the EC said that this binary choice does not give users the option to “freely consent” to the combination of their personal data from various Meta-operated sites.

It also found in a preliminary investigation that Meta fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of the social networks.

“We want to empower citizens to be able to take control over their own data and choose a less personalised ads experience,” EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

DMA violations could result in a fine of as much as 10 percent of a company’s global annual turnover.

“Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and complies with the DMA,” Meta said in a statement. “We look forward to further constructive dialogue with the European Commission to bring this investigation to a close.”

The Commission has until March next year to wrap up its investigation. Privacy activists and privacy watchdogs have also taken issue with Meta’s advertising model.

Series of probes

The charge against Meta is the latest in a series of EC actions targeting Big Tech, a trend that has accelerated since the DMA came into force in March.

The move against the Facebook operator comes a week after the EU watchdog issued its first DMA charge against Apple, claiming that Apple’s App Store rules breach the rules by preventing app developers from steering consumers to alternative offers.

In May, the EC launched an investigation against Meta over Facebook and Instagram child safety, alleging potential breaches of online content rules relating to child safety on its platforms.

Meta was also forced to add safety features to its misinformation tracking tool CrowdTangle for use during June’s European Parliament elections, in an attempt to allay EU concerns that triggered an investigation in April into the impact of Meta’s decision to phase out the tool.

In September 2023, the EU named 22 so-called “gatekeeper” services run by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok-owner ByteDance, giving them six months to comply with the DMA provisions.

Meta and TikTok appealed against the gatekeeper status in November. TikTok lost that bid in February.

Apple said in April that it would continue to engage with the EC to comply with the rules.

By Agencies.

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