Frances Haugen

In the fall of 2021, members of the U.S. Congress and hundreds of Western journalists obtained access to a collection of internal Facebook documents. The trove of research reports, proposals, presentations, and employee conversations would form the foundation for dozens of news stories describing Facebook’s own awareness of the real-world harms that resulted from its relentless pursuit of its users’ attention.Whistleblower Frances Haugen—a former member of the Civic Integrity team at the company now called Meta—shared the…

Photo: Peter Macdiarmid (Getty Images)Facebook jail is about to get less crowded. Under a new set of policies revealed this Thursday, parent company Meta says it’s now harder for users to wind up with their Facebook accounts suspended for lesser violations of its rules. Those changes come after years of pushback from civil society groups and Meta’s semi-independent Oversight Board, which criticized the company’s “disproportionate and opaque” policies around “strikes” that can result in otherwise benign content being…

Photo: Getty/GizmodoOn Thursday, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke to a national organization that convenes investors, telling them that Meta was an unwise place to put their money, specifically the version of Meta under the direction of Mark Zuckerberg.“It adds systemic risks to portfolios, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia,” she said. She called calling Meta’s refusal to disclose information about the problems it creates a smokescreen keeping investors from judging if the company would be a sound…

Instagram launched a new “Quiet Mode” this week to help users spend less time on the company’s totally, absolutely not addictive platform.Though any user can use the new features, Meta’s launching them partly with teens in mind in what marks the company’s latest attempt to recover from a string ofreports and leaked documents allegedly linking its product to teens harm.Users who choose to turn on Quiet Mode won’t receive notifications until they turn the setting off. Friends and other users trying to reach out to someone…

Meta’s oversight board has been analyzing the company’s cross-check system for over a year, and now has basically concluded with a 2021 report saying it gave celebrities the power to post harmful content with little chance of a full review.Photo: Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)On Tuesday, Meta’s Oversight Board dropped a more than-50 page report detailing how the company needs to overhaul its systems that have allowed major influencers and celebrities leeway to post disingenuous or harmful content that would otherwise be…

Photo: SPPFR (AP)Earlier this month, dozens of civil rights groups advised top brands and marketing agencies to pause advertising on Twitter unless CEO Elon Musk offered serious assurances that he’d protect vulnerable users from a flood of harassment and hate speech. Now, those same groups are renewing their call for companies to cut ties with the platform, saying the site’s billionaire owner has already backtracked on the promises he haddelivered in person just a couple of weeks ago.A coalition of more than 60…

Photo: Maddie Meyer (Getty Images)A trio of the nation’s premier law schools are bucking a longstanding ranking trend and opting out of the U.S. New and World Report’s top colleges list. Dean’s from the schools expressed exhaustion with the list’s incentive structures and said the company’s ranking methodology is mostly to blame.On Tuesday, officials from Yale and Harvard laws schools, widely considered among the best in country, announced they would no longer be participating in the annual ranking with the dean from the…

Photo: Krill Kudryavsev (Getty Images)Instagram’s video selfie age verification system for teens went live this week in the United Kingdom, around six months after the the company began testing the tool.The verification method, which uses AI identification tools from U.K. based technology firm Yoti, will apply to U.K. users who try to edit their date of birth from under 18 years of age to over 18 years of age. Users altering their date of birth can alternatively opt to submit a photo of a drivers license or other accepted…

Photo: Pool (Getty Images)When Meta’s shares plummeted last week in response to yet another dismal earnings report, most analysts pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse as the source of the company’s woes. And while it’s true that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse experiment to date has been underwhelming, these analysts are missing the forest for the trees. Meta has a much bigger problem in that the company is failing to assess and mitigate risk in both the short and long term. Until Meta fundamentally changes…

Gif: Surreal Entertainment/YouTubeWell, Meta sure is in a bit of a mess. The company formerly known as Facebook rang in its one-year anniversary last week but had very little reason to celebrate. Instead, an unfortunate Q3 earnings report showed that, since its inception last October, the company has lost a gargantuan amount of money in its quest to create “the metaverse”—a hypothetical new realm where it wants all of us to live. How did we end up here, exactly? It all started twelve months ago, when, in the heat of a…