Facebook

Meta (formerly Facebook) CTO Andrew Bosworth warned employees that creating safe virtual reality experiences was a vital part of its business plan - but also potentially impossible at a large scale.

In an internal memo  [Archive.today snapshot  |  local copy] seen by Financial Times, Andrew Bosworth apparently said he wanted Meta virtual worlds to have "almost Disney levels of safety"  [The Walt Disney Company], although spaces from third-party developers could have looser standards than directly Meta-built content. Harassment or other toxic behavior could pose an "existential threat" to the company's plans for an embodied future internet if it turned mainstream consumers off virtual reality (VR).

At the same time, Andrew Bosworth said policing user behavior "at any meaningful scale is practically impossible," Financial Times  reporter Hannah Murphy later tweeted that Bosworth was citing Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: a maxim, coined by Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, that says "content moderation at scale is impossible to do well." (Masnick's writing notes that this isn't an argument against pushing for better moderation, but large systems will "always end up frustrating very large segments of the population.")

Andrew Bosworth apparently suggests that Meta could moderate spaces like its Horizon Worlds  VR platform using a stricter version of its existing community rules, saying VR or metaverse moderation could have "a stronger bias towards enforcement along some sort of spectrum of warning, successively longer suspensions, and ultimately expulsion from multi-user spaces."

While the full memo isn't publicly available, Andrew Bosworth posted a blog entry alluding to it later in the day. The post, titled "Keeping people safe in VR and beyond," references several of Meta's existing VR moderation tools. That includes letting people block other users in VR, as well as an extensive Horizon surveillance system for monitoring and reporting bad behavior. Meta has also pledged $50 million for research into practical and ethical issues around its metaverse plans.

As Financial Times notes, Meta's older platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been castigated for serious moderation failures, including slow and inadequate responses to content that promoted hate and incited violence. The company's recent rebranding offers a potential fresh start, but as the memo notes, VR and virtual worlds will likely face an entirely new set of problems on top of existing issues.

"We often have frank conversations internally and externally about the challenges we face, the trade-offs involved, and the potential outcomes of our work," Andrew Bosworth wrote in the blog post. "There are tough societal and technical problems at play, and we grapple with them daily."

The term "metaverse" is the latest buzzword to capture the tech industry's imagination - so much so that one of the best-known internet platforms is rebranding to signal its embrace of the futuristic idea. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Thursday announcement that he's changing his company's name to Meta Platforms Inc., or Meta for short, might be the biggest thing to happen to the metaverse since science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term for his 1992 novel "Snow Crash."

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In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there's no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.

And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other purveyors of private space travel imagine a celestial paradise where we can thrive as a "multiplanet species." That's the dream of films such as Interstellar and WALL-E. Now comes news that Mark Zuckerberg has embraced the premise of The Matrix, that we can plug ourselves into a big computer and persist as flesh husks while reality decays around us. According to a report this week from The Verge, the Facebook chief may soon rebrand his company to mark its change in focus from social media to "the metaverse."

In a narrow sense, this phrase refers to . More broadly, though, it's a fantasy of power and control.

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Facebook Inc., under fire from regulators and lawmakers over its business practices, is planning to rebrand itself with a new group name that focuses on the metaverse, the Verge reported on Tuesday [2021-10-19]. The name change will be announced next week, according to technology blog The Verge, which cited a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking up the metaverse, a digital world where people can move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment, since July. The group has invested heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus  VR headsets and working on AR glasses and wristband technologies.

The move would likely position the flagship app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing brands such as Instagram and WhatsApp, according to the report. Google adopted such a structure when it reorganized into a holding company called Alphabet in 2015.

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Facebook and Climate Change Denial

Additional Reading

On 2021-12-17 the The BMJ  (British Medical Journal) issued an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, harshly criticizing Facebook's and Lead Stories' inaccurate and misleading representations of The BMJ's investigative reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Readers were directed to a "fact check" performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories. ... We find the "fact check" performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible. ... We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta's fact checking regime. ... Rather than investing a proportion of Meta's substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task. ..."

• See also: [2021-10-12] Revealed: Facebook's Secret Blacklist of "Dangerous Individuals and Organizations"

In April 2018, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. senators that the social media site was hiring dozens more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. The situation was dire. Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March 2018, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. Facebook, she said, had "turned into a beast."

Four months after Mark Zuckerberg's pledge to act, here is a sampling of posts from Myanmar that were viewable this month [2018-08] on Facebook. One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. "We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!" the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya [kalar: a Burmese term for Burmese Indians]. That post went up in December 2013. Another post showed a news article from an army-controlled publication about attacks on police stations by Rohingya militants. "These non-human kalar dogs, the Bengalis, are killing and destroying our land, our water and our ethnic people," the user wrote. "We need to destroy their race." That post went up last September, as the violence against the Rohingya peaked. A third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. "Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster," a commenter wrote. The post appeared 11 days after Zuckerberg's Senate testimony.

The remarks are among more than 1,000 examples Reuters found of posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook as of last week [2018-08]. Almost all are in the main local language, Burmese. The anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim invective analyzed for this article - which was collected by Reuters and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law - includes material that's been up on Facebook for as long as six years.

The poisonous posts call the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggest they be fed to pigs, and urge they be shot or exterminated. The material also includes crudely pornographic anti-Muslim images. The company's rules specifically prohibit attacking ethnic groups with "violent or dehumanising speech" or comparing them to animals. Facebook also has long had a strict policy against pornographic content.

The use of Facebook to spread hate speech against the Rohingya in the Buddhist-majority country has been widely reported by the United Nations and others. Now, a Reuters investigation gives an inside look at why Facebook has failed to stop the problem.

For years, Facebook - which reported net income of $15.9 billion in 2017 - devoted scant resources to combat hate speech in Myanmar, a market it dominates and in which there have been regular outbreaks of ethnic violence. In early 2015, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese reviewing problematic posts. Before that, most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.

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Facebook is falling short on its pledge to crack down on climate misinformation, according to a new analysis from a watchdog group. The platform - whose parent company last year rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. - promised last May [2021-05] that it would attach "informational labels" to certain posts about climate change in the United States and some other countries, directing readers to a "Climate Science Information Center" with reliable information and resources. (Facebook launched a similar hub for COVID-19 information in 2020-03).

But a new report released Wednesday [2022-02-23  |  local copy] from the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that the platform only labeled about half of the posts promoting articles from the world's leading publishers of climate change denial. "By failing to do even the bare minimum to address the spread of climate denial information, Meta is exacerbating the climate crisis," said Center for Countering Digital Hate Chief Executive Imran Ahmed  [local copy]. "Climate change denial - designed to fracture our resolve and impede meaningful action to mitigate climate change - flows unabated on Facebook and Instagram."

The British watchdog group [Center for Countering Digital Hate]> says that all of the articles it analyzed were published after 2021-05-19 - the date that Facebook announced it would expand its labeling feature in a number of countries. Facebook says it was still testing the system at the time. "We combat climate change misinformation by connecting people to reliable information in many languages from leading organizations through our Climate Science Center and working with a global network of independent fact checkers to review and rate content," Facebook spokesperson Kevin McAlistersaid in a statement provided to NPR. "When they rate this content as false, we add a warning label and reduce its distribution so fewer people see it. During the time frame of this report, we hadn't completely rolled out our labeling program, which very likely impacted the results."

Researchers examined posts with false information about climate change

The Center for Countering Digital Hate   published a report  [report  |  local copy] in 2021-11 finding that 10 publishers - labeled "The Toxic Ten" - were responsible for up to 69% of all interactions with climate denial content on Facebook. They include Breitbart News, the Federalist Papers  [actually: The Federalist ?]   Newsmax, and Russian state media. Researchers used the social analytics tool NewsWhip to assess 184 articles containing false information about climate change, published by "The Toxic Ten" and posted on Facebook, where they collectively accumulated more than 1 million interactions.

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook can proceed, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday [2022-01-11], delivering a major win for the FTC after its first attempt at targeting Facebook's alleged monopoly power was dismissed for lack of evidence. This time, however, the judge found that federal regulators have offered enough proof to argue that Facebook's acquisition strategy - particularly its takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp - is driven by a "buy or bury" ethos. In other words, that Facebook allegedly gobbles up competitors in order to maintain an illegal monopoly.

"Although the FTC may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the U.S. District Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery," wrote United States District Court Judge James Boasberg, noting that "the FTC has now alleged enough facts to plausibly establish that Facebook exercises monopoly power in the market for personal social networking services."

Judge narrows the scope of the FTC's lawsuit ["Interoperability"]

While it is an overall win for the FTC, James E. Boasberg did narrow the scope of the lawsuit. He said the accusation that Facebook's policies around interoperability, which is the ability to smoothly move between competing social networks, cannot move forward. Boasberg said Facebook abandoned a key policy around interoperability in 2018.

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The sister of a federal security officer who was fatally shot while guarding a courthouse during George Floyd-related protests  [George Floyd] has sued Facebook, accusing the tech giant of playing a role in radicalizing the alleged shooter. Dave Patrick Underwood, 53, was shot and killed on 2020-05-29 in Oakland, California. Authorities have charged suspected gunman Steven Carrillo with murder. Investigators say Steven Carrillo had ties to the far-right, anti-government boogaloo movement and that Steven Carrillo organized with other boogaloo supporters on Facebook.

In a suit filed on Thursday [2022-01-06] in California state court against Meta, Facebook's parent company, Angela Underwood Jacobs accused Facebook officials of being aware that the social network was being used as a recruitment tool for boogaloo adherents, yet Facebook did not take steps to stop recommending boogaloo-related pages until after Dave Patrick Underwood's death. The boogaloo movement is a collection of boogaloo extremists who claim to want to overthrow the U.S. government through a second civil war. Sometimes clad in Hawaiian T-shirts, the boogaloo movement is known to be heavily armed and is highly active online. Lawyers for Underwood Jacobs claim Facebook was negligent in designing a product "to promote and engage its users in extremist content" despite knowing that it could lead to potential violence. "Facebook, Inc. knew or could have reasonably foreseen that one or more individuals would be likely to become radicalized upon joining boogaloo-related groups on Facebook," the lawsuit states.

Federal investigators have said Steven Carrillo, an Air Force sergeant at the time of the shooting, used Facebook to communicate with other boogaloo supporters. On the same day as Dave Patrick Underwood was killed, Carrillo allegedly posted to a Facebook group that he planned to go to the George Floyd protests in Oakland to "show them the real targets. Use their anger to fuel our fire," he allegedly wrote. "We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage," according to federal prosecutors. Authorities say Carrillo wrote that the protest was "a group opportunity to target the specialty soup bois," a phrase boogaloo adherents use to refer to law enforcement officials because of the "alphabet soup" of federal law enforcement acronyms. Angela Underwood Jacobs' suit contends that if Facebook altered its algorithm so that it was not recommending and promoting boogaloo groups, Carrillo may never had connected online with others in the extremist movement. "Facebook bears responsibility for the murder of my brother," Underwood Jacobs said. Facebook did not have an immediate response to the suit.

The lawsuit is the latest attempt to hold a Big Tech company accountable for real-world harm. Social media companies largely escape legal responsibility in such cases thanks to a law known as Section 230, which prevents online platforms from being held liable for what users post. There have been rare exceptions in attempting to advance lawsuits against tech companies, like when an appeals court found that Snapchat could be sued  [Snapchat] for a feature that allegedly encouraged reckless driving.

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• Section 230 is a section of Title 47 of the United States Code enacted as part of the United States Communications Decency Act, that generally provides immunity for website platforms with respect to third-party content. At its core, Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." ...

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Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School who studies Section 230, said Facebook will likely invoke the legal shield in this case, but he said the suit faces other hurdles, as well. "There have been a number of lawsuits trying to establish that Facebook is liable for how violent groups and terrorists used their services," Goldman said. "And courts have consistently rejected those claims because services like Facebook aren't responsible for harms caused by people using the service."

The lawsuit leans heavily on the Facebook Files  [Facebook Files, Facebook Papers], a cache of internal company documents exposed in a series of stories by The Wall Street Journal. Among the allegations is that Facebook's algorithm promotes extremism, inflammatory and divisive content in order to keep users engaged and advertising dollars rolling in. Facebook researchers have estimated that the social network only catches between 3% and 5% of hate speech on Facebook.

In a statement, lawyers for Angela Underwood Jacobs said the Facebook Files revealed "Facebook's active role in shaping the content on its website as well as creating and building groups on the platform - activities that fall outside of the conduct protected by Section 230." Facebook has reportedly banned nearly 1,000 private groups focused on "militarized social movements" like the boogaloo movement. Facebook has previously acknowledged its role in militia-fueled violence. In 2020-08, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it made an "operational mistake" in failing to remove a page for a militia group that called for armed citizens to enter Kenosha, Wisconsin. Two protesters were shot and killed there during demonstrations over the police killing of Jacob Blake [Shooting of Jacob Blake]. The same month [2020-08], Facebook said it took down 2,400 pages and more than 14,000 groups on Facebook started by militia groups.

Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 Facebookposts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory between Election Day  [2020-11-03  |  2020 United States presidential election] and the 2021-01-06 siege of the U.S. Capitol  [2021 United States Capitol attack], with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.

The barrage - averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously - turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of then-President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the United States Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Joe Biden's election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action - including the use of force - to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.

• "LOOKS LIKE CIVIL WAR is BECOMING INEVITABLE !!!" read a post a month before the Capitol assault. "WE CANNOT ALLOW FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS TO STAND ! SILENT NO MORE MAJORITY MUST RISE UP NOW AND DEMAND BATTLEGROUND STATES NOT TO CERTIFY FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS NOW !"

• Another post, made 10 days after the election, bore the avatar of a smiling woman with her arms raised in apparent triumph and read, "WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!"

One post showed a American Civil War-era picture of a gallows with more than two dozen nooses and hooded figures  [Ku Klux Klan] waiting to be hanged. Other posts called for arrests and executions of specific public figures - both Democrats and Republicans - depicted as betraying the nation by denying Trump a second term.

• "BILL BARR WE WILL BE COMING FOR YOU," wrote a group member after William "Bill" Barr announced the United States Department of Justice had found little evidence to support Trump's claims of widespread vote rigging. "WE WILL HAVE CIVIL WAR IN THE STREETS BEFORE BIDEN WILL BE PRES."

Facebook executives have downplayed Facebook's role in the 2021-01-06 U.S. Capitol attack and have resisted calls - including from its own Oversight Board - for a comprehensive internal investigation. Facebook also has yet to turn over all the information requested by the congressional committee studying the 2021-01-06 attack. Facebook said it is continuing to negotiate with the committee.

The ProPublica/Post investigation, which analyzed millions of posts between Election Day [2020-11-03] and 2021-01-06 and drew on internal Facebook documents and interviews with former employees, provides the clearest evidence yet that Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of 2021-01-06. Facebook's efforts to police such content - the investigation also found - were ineffective and started too late to quell the surge of angry, hateful misinformation coursing through Facebook groups - some of it explicitly calling for violent confrontation with government officials, a theme that foreshadowed the storming of the U.S. Capitol that day amid clashes that left five people dead.

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Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are suing Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook, for $150 billion over allegations that the social media company did not take action against anti-Rohingya hate speech that contributed to violence. A U.S. class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday [2021-12-06] by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that the company's failures to police content and its platform's design contributed to real-world violence faced by the Rohingya community [Reuters.com Special Report, 2018-08-15: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar.  Inside Facebook's Myanmar operation]. In a coordinated action, British lawyers also submitted a letter of notice to Facebook's London office.

Facebook did not respond to a Reuters request for comment about the lawsuit. Facebook has said it was "too slow to prevent misinformation and hate" in Myanmar and has said it has since taken steps to crack down on platform abuses in the region, including banning the military from Facebook and Instagram after the 2021-02-01 coup. A Myanmar junta spokesman did not answer phone calls from Reuters seeking comment on the legal action against Facebook.

In 2018, United Nations human rights investigators said the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fueled the violence. A Reuters investigation that year, cited in the U.S. complaint, found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. Almost all were in the main local language, Burmese. The invective included posts calling the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggested they be fed to pigs, and urged they be shot or exterminated. The posts were tolerated in spite of Facebook rules that specifically prohibit attacking ethnic groups with "violent or dehumanising speech" or comparing them to animals.

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• In corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred or consolidated with other entities. As an aspect of strategic management, M&A can allow enterprises to grow or downsize, and change the nature of their business or competitive position.

Of the many complaints about Facebook, one comes through consistently: It's just too big. Which is why some critics and regulators want to make it smaller by forcing Mark Zuckerberg to unwind major acquisitions, like Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's response: Let's get bigger by buying more stuff. After slowing down briefly in 2018, the year the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted, Facebook has been steadily making large acquisitions - at least 21 in the last three years, per data service Pitchbook Data.

Many of the deals have been announced since December 2020, when the U.S. government first filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company, accusing it of maintaining an illegal monopoly in social networking by buying or crushing competitors. The original suit and a revised complaint are aimed at forcing Facebook to divest itself of both Instagram and WhatsApp.

In the past couple years, Facebook's appetite for deals has run the gamut from Giphy, which lets you place funny GIFs in your social media posts, to Kustomer, a business software company for Facebook's corporate clients. Most of them, though, have been concentrated in one area: gaming and virtual reality (VR). Which makes sense, since Zuckerberg has formally announced that gaming and virtual reality, bundled up in the expansive and hard-to-define rubric of "the metaverse," are the future of Facebook. Hence the company's name change to Meta  [Meta Platforms, Inc.]. But what's more important is a promise that Facebook will move thousands of its employees into the effort, and plans to lose $10 billion on it this year alone, and much more "for the next several years."

The day after Facebook announced the name change, the company illustrated how it will spend some of that money: a deal to buy Within, the company co-founded by VR pioneer Chris Milk, best known for its Supernatural workout app. People familiar with the transaction say Facebook paid more than $500 million for the company. Other Metaverse-y deals announced this year include Unit 2 Games, which makes a "collaborative game creation platform" called Crayta;   Bigbox VR, which makes a popular game for Facebook's  Oculus virtual reality goggles; and Downpour Interactive, another VR game-maker.

Those deals were already raising eyebrows before Facebook formally announced that they represented the future of the company. So what should we think of them now? That is: If you think 2021 Facebook needs to be broken up, in part to undo deals from the past like Instagram ($1 billion, 2012) and WhatsApp ($19 billion, 2014), then shouldn't you also be worried about deals Mark Zuckerberg is doing now to build the 2031 version of his company?

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Facebook's own internal research found 1 in 8 of its users reported compulsive social media use that interfered with their sleep, work, and relationships - what the social media platform calls "problematic use" but is more commonly known as "internet addiction," the Wall Street Journal reported  [refer here]. The social media platform had a team focused on user well-being, which suggested ways to curb problematic use, some of which were put into place. But the company shut down the team in 2019, according to the WSJ.

Pratiti Raychoudhury, a vice president of research for Meta Platforms, Inc., Facebook's new parent company, writes in a blog post that the WSJ misrepresented the research (a claim the company has made about some of the other articles the WSJ has produced based on Facebook's internal documents). She says the company "has been engaged and supportive throughout our multiyear effort to better understand and empower people who use our services to manage problematic use. That's why this work has taken place over multiple years, including now." Raychoudhury argues that "problematic use does not equal addiction," and that the company ships "features to help people manage their experiences on our apps and services."

The report is the latest in an ongoing series from The Wall Street Journal called the Facebook Files, based on internal documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen, which suggest Facebook is aware of the problems its platforms can cause. One set of reports, for instance, suggested Facebook knew that its Instagram platform was toxic for teenage users. Haugen testified before Congress on 2021-10-05, saying Facebook was "internally dysfunctional," and that it was unlikely to change its behaviors without action from external regulators.

Meta Platforms, Inc.  [formerly; Facebook, Inc.] announced on Tuesday [2021-11-02] it is shutting down its facial recognition system, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology. "Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," Jérôme Pesenti  [Anglicized: Jerome Pesenti  |  local copy] Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Meta, wrote in a 2021-11-02 blog post  [local copy]. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."

The removal of face recognition by the world's largest social media platform comes as the tech industry has faced a reckoning over the past few years over the ethics of using the technology. Critics say facial recognition technology - which is popular among retailers, hospitals and other businesses for security purposes - could compromise privacy, target marginalized groups and normalize intrusive surveillance. IBM has permanently ended facial recognition product sales, and Microsoft Corporation and Amazon.com, Inc. have suspended sales to police indefinitely.

The news also comes as https://www.reuters.com/technology/changing-facebooks-name-will-not-deter-lawmaker-or-regulatory-scrutiny-experts-2021-10-20 has been under intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over user safety and a wide range of abuses on its platforms. The company, which last week renamed itself Meta Platforms, Inc., said more than one-third of https://www.reuters.com/technology/changing-facebooks-name-will-not-deter-lawmaker-or-regulatory-scrutiny-experts-2021-10-20's daily active users have opted into the face recognition setting on the social media site, and the change will now delete the "facial recognition templates" of more than 1 billion people.

The removal will roll out globally and is expected to be complete by December 2021, a Facebook spokesperson said.

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Facebook has begun rolling out an update that is interfering with watchdogs monitoring the platform. The Markup has found evidence that Facebook is adding changes to its website code that foils automated data collection of news feed posts - a technique that groups like NYU's Ad Observatory, The Markup, and other researchers and journalists use to audit what's happening on the platform on a large scale.

The changes, which attach junk code to HTML features meant to improve accessibility for visually impaired users, also impact browser-based ad blocking services on the platform. The new code risks damaging the user experience for people who are visually impaired, a group that has struggled to use the platform in the past.

The updates add superfluous text to news feed posts in the form of ARIA tags, an element of HTML code that is not rendered visually by a standard web browser but is used by screen reader software to map the structure and read aloud the contents of a page. Such code is also used by organizations like NYU's Ad Observatory to identify sponsored posts on the platform and weed them out for further scrutiny. ...

Facebook has announced new efforts to combat climate crisis misinformation on its platform, including by expanding its Climate Science Center to provide more reliable information, investing in organizations that fight misinformation, and launching a video series to highlight young climate advocates on Facebook and Instagram.

But critics say the new push, announced on Thursday, falls short and will allow vast amounts of climate misinformation to slip through the cracks.

Facebook has long been criticized for allowing misinformation about the climate crisis to proliferate on its platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, admitted in a 2021 April congressional hearing that climate misinformation is "a big issue." In the past, the company has said such misinformation accounts for "a very low percentage of total misinformation on the service" but declined to share figures.

Climate change and misinformation experts have said lies on the platform can spread quickly. The climate change denial watchdog group InfluenceMap in October 2020 found dozens of climate denial ads had been viewed more than 8m times after slipping through the social network's filters.

In March 2021, 13 environmental groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace, sent Zuckerberg a letter calling on him to commit to monitoring climate disinformation and provide more transparency about the scale of the problem. "Climate change disinformation is spreading rapidly across Facebook's social media platform, threatening the ability of citizens and policymakers to fight the climate crisis," the groups wrote.

One recent study conducted by Friends of the Earth, an environmental organization, found about 99% of climate misinformation about the February 2021 power outages in Texas went unchecked. ...

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Past studies have revealed other climate crisis-denying posts and resources outpacing accurate information on the platform. In 2021 June, one of the most-viewed sites on Facebook was a subscription page for The Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper known for climate change denial.

"Facebook knows the super-spreaders of climate disinformation and should put an end to their repetitive lies," Khoo added. "We cannot solve social media disinformation by playing an endless game of Whac-a-Mole with known liars."

Facebook has been criticized recently for the outsized role of "super-spreaders" in sharing disinformation on a variety of topics. In July, Joe Biden referenced a study showing just a handful of Facebook accounts were responsible for pushing the majority of vaccine misinformation on the platform. The president accused Facebook of causing unnecessary deaths.

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The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in 2020-09, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook.

Before she was fired, Sophie Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at Facebook. But Zhang had become consumed by a task she deemed more important: finding and taking down fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally. Her memo revealed that she'd identified dozens of countries, including India, Mexico, Afghanistan, and South Korea, where this type of abuse was enabling politicians to mislead the public and gain power. It also revealed how little Facebook had done to mitigate the problem, despite Zhang's repeated efforts to bring it to the attention of leadership. "I know that I have blood on my hands by now," she wrote.

On the eve of her departure, Sophie Zhang was still debating whether to write the memo at all. It was perhaps her last chance to create enough internal pressure on leadership to start taking the problems seriously. In anticipation of writing it, she had turned down a nearly $64,000 severance package that would have involved signing a nondisparagement agreement. She wanted to retain the freedom to speak critically about Facebook.

But it was just two months before the 2020 United States elections, and Sophie Zhang was disturbed by the idea that the memo could erode the public's trust in the electoral process if prematurely released to the press. "I was terrified of somehow becoming the James Comey of 2020," she says, referring to the former FBI director who, days before the 2016 United States presidential election, told the United States Congress the agency [U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation] had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Hilliary Clinton went on to blame James Comey for her loss.

To Sophie Zhang's great relief, that didn't happen. And after the 2020 election passed, she proceeded with her original plan. In 2021-04, Zhang came forward in two Guardian   articles with her face, her name, and even more detailed documentation of the political manipulation she'd uncovered and Facebook's negligence in dealing with it.

Her account supplied concrete evidence to support what critics had long been saying on the outside: that Facebook makes election interference easy, and that unless such activity hurts Facebook's business interests, Facebook can't be bothered to fix the problem.

In a statement, Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, vehemently denied these claims. "For the countless press interviews she's done since leaving Facebook, we have fundamentally disagreed with Sophie Zhang's characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform," he said. "We aggressively go after abuse around the world and have specialized teams focused on this work. As a result, we've already taken down more than 150 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior ... Combatting coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority."

By going public and eschewing anonymity, Sophie Zhang risked legal action from Facebook, harm to her future career prospects, and perhaps even reprisals from the politicians she exposed in the process. "What she did is very brave," says Julia Carrie Wong, the The Guardian reporter who published Zhang's revelations.

After nearly a year of avoiding personal questions, Sophie Zhang is now ready to tell her story. Zhang wants the world to understand how she became so involved in trying to protect democracy worldwide and why she cared so deeply. She's also tired of being in the closet as a transgender woman, a core aspect of her identity that informed her actions at Facebook and after she left. Zhang's story reveals that it is really pure luck that we now know so much about how Facebook enables election interference globally. Zhang was not just the only person fighting this form of political manipulation; it wasn't even her job. She had discovered the problem because of a unique confluence of skills and passion, and then taken it upon herself, driven by an extraordinary sense of moral responsibility.

To regulators around the world considering how to rein in Facebook, this should be a wake-up call.

[ ... snip ... ]

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• [MIT TechnologyReview.com, 2021-12-24] Our favorite stories of 2021. ⟶ [MIT: TechnologyReview.com, 2021-07-29] She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she's telling her story.  Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it.

Sophie Zhang was a whistleblower who had exposed how fake accounts and likes on Facebook were allowing politicians to sway the public in countries outside the United States, and potentially enable election interference. The story had been told, but no one had written a profile of her before. Karen Hao  [Technology Review page] showed readers that "for Zhang, the explanation of why she cared so much is tied up in her [gender] identity". Telling that story was an expert piece of profile-writing that required sensitivity and compassion.

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