The world's largest social network has more than 2 billion daily users, and is expanding rapidly around the world. Led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook undergirds much of the world's communication online, both through its flagship app and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Despite huge financial success, Facebook is also confronted with questions about data privacy, hate speech on the platform, and concerns that frequent social media use can lead to unhappiness. The Verge publishes a nightly newsletter about Facebook and democracy, subscribe here.
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.
The attorneys general of 33 states sued Meta in October, but many details of what executives allegedly knew about the impacts of Facebook and Instagram on youth mental health were redacted. The New York Times reports a version with more details has been unsealed, and you can read all 233 pages here.
Between the first quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2023, Meta received over 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram via its underage reporting webform and in-app underage reporting process. These processes were only a few of many ways that Meta acquired actual knowledge of under-13 users on its Social Media Platforms. Despite this actual knowledge, Meta disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children’s data without parental consent,
In a statement, Meta says the lawsuit “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”
Over the last year, Meta has added AIM status-like features to Instagram and WhatsApp and today announced it's rolling out Notes (using the same name as Instagram’s feature) for Messenger globally.
You can’t post them from the desktop, but a support document explains how to add or remove Notes via iPhone, iPad, or Android device by clicking the thought bubble next to your profile picture. If you don’t remove them manually, the messages expire after 24 hours.
Meta’s CEO posted this picture to Instagram Friday night, saying, “Tore my ACL sparring and just got out of surgery.”
He was apparently training for his next competitive MMA match. Recovery from this type of injury takes up to a year for professional athletes, so an executive closing in on 40 could be out of action for a while. On the plus side, maybe this will keep Elon Musk from randomly threatening to show up at Zuckerberg’s house for a brawl.
Now, you can publish them without a Facebook review. Facebook won’t organically surface those games, which will be available as part of the app’s “Play Lab” tier, but the reduced friction could make it easier to get early feedback on a game that may not be ready for a full launch just yet.
[Meta for Developers]
Early this morning, Meta updated a blog post about its efforts regarding the war. The company detailed some changes it has made, including new, more limited default visibility settings for public posts made in the region, and making it easier for users to mass-delete comments on their posts.
Meta also said it had fixed several global bugs impacting the spread of information in the region.
Or nearly $17/mth to use both. That’s what Meta is reportedly pitching EU regulators who want Zuck and Co to stop using personal data to target ads at European citizens without their consent. The bloc’s users could have three options by the end of this month: pay up, use for free but agree to personalized ads, or quit, with the latter looking very tempting.
[The Wall Street Journal]
A panel of judges ruled that government officials crossed a line while pressuring social media companies to curb covid misinformation, writing that they aren’t “permitted to advance these interests to the extent that it engages in viewpoint suppression.”
The court ... vacated much of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction, with the exception of a provision concerning alleged coercion, which it narrowed.
The 5th Circuit said the narrower injunction applied to the White House, the surgeon general, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI, but would no longer apply to other federal officials covered by the lower court order.
The judges had previously lifted the injunction, and this narrower one is on hold for ten days as the administration pursues a review by the Supreme Court.