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An unknown number of “targeted cuts” are coming to staffers who support the 22-member board that polices the world’s largest social media network. Launched in 2019, Meta has contributed $280 million to keep the board operational through 2025... which is a lot for a company that just emerged from its “year of efficiency.”

According to Financial Times, regulators are concerned that Meta isn’t doing enough to stifle disinformation being seeded by countries like Russia in order to undermine EU elections.

Officials reportedly also believe Meta’s process for flagging illegal content isn’t “user-friendly enough to comply with the EU Digital Services Act.” The probe would apparently begin today.

Alex Garland isn’t the only filmmaker thinking about the current state the US’ political system. During a recent appearance on The Ringer’s The Town podcast, Aaron Sorkin shared that he’s in the early stages of writing a new The Social Network-esque movie about January 6th and Facebook’s role in galvanizing the attempted coup.

A series of bot-filled communities on Facebook keep popping up to praise AI-generated images of Jesus Christ. The Dead Internet Theory explains why the internet might feel lonely even when there are many voices crying out “Amen 🙏.”
Well... if you can’t beat ‘em, #scarlettjohansson

404 Media reports that a parent soliciting advice in a Facebook group got something unexpected when Meta’s AI chatbot chimed in with some thoughts. The reply starts with “I have a child who is also 2e,” which refers to a child who is both academically advanced and has a disability. Let me stop you right there, AI chatbot.

That’s the question being raised by its Oversight Board, which today announced two new cases looking into how Meta handled explicit fakes of female public figures posted to Facebook and Instagram. One of which could concern the fake Taylor Swift images that circulated online earlier this year.

The board’s investigation will take a few weeks before reaching a final non-binding decision.

A bunch of places covered AI-generated images of an unholy Jesus/shrimp hybrid going viral on Facebook earlier this year, but the attention didn’t cause Zuck to take any action to slow the situation down. Here’s JC Noods laying back on a Lambo, a post which has 36,000 likes on Facebook right now. The AI internet is going great, y’all.

Facebook's “In App Panel” program ran from 2016 to 2019 using Onavo’s technology as a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt secured Snapchat traffic. Court documents unsealed as part of an ongoing class-action antitrust lawsuit show how the program came together.

A June 2016 email included in the documents from Mark Zuckerberg says:

Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . .

Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.

Is it 2004 all over again? There’s been a 13x spike in poking over the last month, Facebook announced on Threads. And the culprits behind The Great Poke Surge of 2024 may surprise you. Half of them come from the 18-29 year old demographic, the company told TechCrunch.

The social network attributes the spike to a few design changes, including adding the ability to poke in search results, as you can see below.

Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump explained, again, why he no longer supports the push to ban TikTok. “...without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”

And as for his own unsuccessful push to ban the ByteDance-owned app, he now claims “I had it banned just about, I could have gotten it done. But I said, ‘You know what, but I’ll leave it up to you.”

Reels and longer videos will be included in a new AI recommendation model that Facebook plans to build by 2026, Facebook head Tom Alison tells CNBC. Eventually, Facebook’s core feed may be included in the model as well.

“If you see something that you’re into in Reels, and then you go back to the Feed, we can kind of show you more similar content,” says Allison.

41 attorneys general sent a letter to Meta’s chief legal officer Tuesday demanding the company invest more in stopping scam account takeovers that threaten users’ privacy and “drain” AG resources.

The problem has gotten significantly worse over the past few years, the AGs said. In New York, Meta account takeover complaints spiked from 73 in 2019 to 783 by the end of 2023.

US District Judge Kevin Castel approved (PDF) a class action lawsuit by advertisers alleging that the company holds a monopoly in the ad market, Reuters reported yesterday.

Judge Castel dismissed some of the claims, though, including one that alleged that Google and Facebook conspired to give Facebook access to “enhanced proprietary data.”

Google is also preparing another advertising antitrust trial from the US DOJ.

Eight consumer rights groups from across the bloc filed GDPR complaints on Thursday, arguing that the ad-free subscriptions introduced for Facebook and Instagram in response to EU privacy regulations are a “consent masquerade that does not actually give consumers a free choice.”

Ursula Pachl, deputy director general of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), said in a statement:

“Meta’s offer to consumers is smoke and mirrors to cover up what is, at its core, the same old hoovering up of all kinds of sensitive information about people’s lives which it then monetises through its invasive advertising model.”

For a few years now, Meta’s Oversight Board has had the power to (very slowly, it seems) issue decisions determining how Facebook and Instagram should be moderated, and soon, the body will also be responsible for overseeing Threads.

Meta is only rolling out the test to its Facebook iOS app, and not in the EU, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. Threads posts already show up on Facebook, provided you don’t opt out.

TechCrunch writes that when user whimchic tried the feature in the Facebook iOS app, the post went to both platforms, but without any indication on Threads that it was a cross-post.

“It’s not you, it’s us! And it’s an unfortunate technical error that we’re in the process of fixing,” writes Meta’s Andy Stone.

In the meanwhile, here’s a stopgap:

If you toggle link history to be on, Meta will be able to show you a list of links you’ve tapped and viewed in the in-app browser over the past 30 days.

Meta already tracks things you do in its in-app browsers — this feature seems more like a way to surface a list of links that you can refer back to later. (Meta also says that if you flip on link history, it may use that information for ad targeting.)

Gizmodo reported on the link history feature earlier today.

The Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel hack and takeover showed what an attacker could do after stealing session tokens with a fake sponsorship offer, but this report details how a podcast invite and Facebook Live connection is another angle.

The “podcast host” manipulated the hobbyist “guest” into exposing a unique “datasets” URL for their page. Once the scammer had it, they could invite themselves in as a new admin and lock the rightful owners out.