A New Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Inflaming Civil War in Ethiopia
On November 3, 2021, Meareg Amare, a professor of chemistry at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, was gunned down outside his home. Amare, who was ethnically Tigrayan, had been targeted…
Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Making Meta Look Smart
It was the first day of April 2022, and I was sitting in a law firm’s midtown Manhattan conference room at a meeting of Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body the…
The Reason for Meta’s Massive Layoffs? Ghosts in the Machine
Remember Libra, Meta’s ambitious plan to enter the cryptocurrency market? Or Lasso, Meta’s ambitious attempt to outdo TikTok? Alongside projects like Shops, Meta’s ambitious plan to turn Instagram and Facebook…
Inside Meta’s Oversight Board: 2 Years of Pushing Limits
Ultimately, the issue came up in a March 2022 meeting with Clegg, who seemed taken aback by the board members’ frustration. He promised to break the logjam, and a few…
Why Meta Is Tanking—and How Zuckerberg Can Fix It
2012: Facebook plays catch-up with mobile. Not many people realize that Facebook had an existential scare when the action in computing shifted from the desktop to our pockets. This made…
China’s WeChat Is a Hot New Venue for US Election Misinformation
When Chinese-language misinformation appears on US platforms like YouTube or Facebook, activists say it seems to get less actively moderated than English content, a pattern that has also been documented…
Meta’s VR Headset Harvests Personal Data Right Off Your Face
In November 2021, Facebook announced it would delete face recognition data extracted from images of more than 1 billion people and stop offering to automatically tag people in photos and…
Meta Quest Pro VR Headset: Price, Specs, Details
Jenga was just one of many games and experiences I tried at Meta’s Reality Labs headquarters in Burlingame, California, last week. I stretched my face in ways that would put…
Meta Says It Has Busted More Than 400 Login-Stealing Apps This Year
Both Apple and Google have struggled for years to keep malicious apps out of their official mobile app stores and away from users’ phones. Simple programs like flashlight apps, photo…
Meta Rethinks the Philosophy of the Facebook Feed
When I tell Facebook I want to see more or less of something, does that mean I’m telling it, for instance, that I don’t want to see politics? For now,…
Facebook Freeloads Off Newspapers. This Plan Might Stop It
What happened next, though, was telling: The Australian measure passed—and Google and Facebook did indeed pay up, remunerating Australian news companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. The news experiment…
A Sprawling Bot Network Used Fake Porn to Fool Facebook
In November 2021, Tord Lundström, the technical director at Swedish digital forensics nonprofit Qurium Media, noticed something strange. A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was targeting Bulatlat, an…
How to See Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter Posts Chronologically
Social media feeds are no longer set to chronological order as the default. Whether you’re doomscrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, the sequence of the posts is shuffled up by…
What Adults Don’t Get About Teens and Digital Life
On a snowy winter day, we were in the library of a charter middle school in Portland, Maine. It was the first of many school visits where we teamed up…
Meta Just Happens to Expand Messenger’s End-to-End Encryption
A Nebraska woman and her 17-year-old daughter are facing felony and misdemeanor charges related to allegedly performing an abortion after 20 weeks, which has long been illegal in the state,…
Will Europe Force a Facebook Blackout?
“My guess is that Meta is going to have to look at some form of geo-siloing if they want to continue to operate in the EU,” says Calli Schroeder, global…
We Interviewed Meta’s New AI Chatbot About … Itself
Kuki can talk about everything from music to sports to politics and religion! And beyond that as well Would you like me to call you Kuki? Yes! Call me kuki…
Kenya’s Threat to Ban Facebook Could Backfire
In June, Global Witness and Foxglove found that Meta continued to approve ads in Amharic targeting Ethiopian users that included hate speech and calls for violence. Facebook has been implicated…
Big Tech Can’t Stop Obsessing Over Apple and TikTok
Every three months, Wall Street watches with anticipation for bumper results from Big Tech companies. Over the course of a little more than a week, Snap, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Spotify,…
At Facebook, It’s Always Been All About Growth
Michael Calore: He’s the naughtiest bird. Lauren Goode: He’s the … Don’t do it Emmanuel. Don’t do it! Alex Heath: Don’t do it! Lauren Goode: I love it. Alex Heath:…
Facebook’s New Feeds Tab Is an Algorithm-Free Zone
Have you visited your Facebook News Feed lately? If not, you’d be forgiven, and also in good company. The experience is overstuffed, a cornucopia of photos from vaguely familiar acquaintances…
A Lawsuit Against Meta Shows the Emptiness of Social Enterprises
Earlier this year, Meta and its largest content moderation partner in Africa, Sama, were accused of union busting, forced labor, and human trafficking. The lawsuit claims that “misleading job ads”…