Meta

The subscription plan is a response to European Union policies and court rulings to restrict Meta’s data-collection practices.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday accused Facebook of putting profits over people’s safety during the emergencies created by Canada’s record wildfire season. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced earlier this summer it would keep its promise to block news content from Canada on its platforms because of a new law that requires tech giants to pay publishers for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online.

Meta is facing severe criticism for its policy of blocking news content in Canada while wildfires rage in British Columbia. “Right now, while wildfires are causing evacuations in the NWT and endangering lives, Meta is blocking news about them on Facebook and Instagram,” tweeted Chris Bittle, Liberal MP for St. Catharines, Ontario. “They did this in Australia, and it made dangerous situations worse. Meta’s actions to block news are reckless and irresponsible.”

Facebook is shunning the news business in the U.S. The Meta-owned company has quietly made changes in recent months that have dramatically reduced referral traffic to media outlets, more than half a dozen publishers say. The move has put considerable dents in the daily traffic publishers see, with the damage appearing to be more pronounced among those who publish more hard news-oriented content. “If you’re a major publisher, you’ve gotten nicked,” said an executive at a major media company, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Among other remarks, the organizations’ joint statement said: “Meta – a nearly trillion-dollar company – repeatedly chooses to restrict news content for its users to avoid compensating news producers for the value it gains on their vital journalism. These retaliatory tactics demonstrate Meta’s monopolistic dominance over the advertising marketplace and its ability to dictate how radio and TV broadcasters, newspapers and others can reach audiences online.”

Meta has begun the process to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada, the company said on Tuesday. The move comes in response to legislation in the country requiring internet giants to pay news publishers. Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, said the changes will roll out in the coming weeks.

The company beat Wall Street’s $30.9 billion sales estimate by a hefty margin while launching Twitter rival Threads.

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee may vote this week to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt, a committee spokesperson said Monday, a move that would further escalate House Republicans’ attack on the social media giant. Republicans on the Judiciary panel have accused the company of failing to cooperate with its probe of the tech giant’s content moderation practices. A committee spokesperson confirmed the panel is eyeing a Thursday vote.

Amazon, Google and Meta are among the companies that announced the new commitments on Friday as they race to outdo each other with versions of artificial intelligence.

Tech giant Meta’s large language model will be available for free commercial and research use, rivaling OpenAI’s GPT-4 that powers the popular ChatGPT tool, the social media company said Tuesday. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is releasing its open source Llama 2 large language model, which can power artificial intelligence tools, in partnership with Microsoft.

In a letter Wednesday to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Spiro, an attorney representing Twitter, accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app. The move ramps up the tensions between the social media giants after Threads debuted Wednesday, targeting those who are seeking out alternatives to Twitter amid unpopular changes Musk has made to the platform since buying it last year for $44 billion.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, teased a new app called Threads that is set to take on Twitter for real-time digital conversations.

After the nation’s senate passed the Online News Act yesterday, Meta confirmed it will remove news content from Facebook and Instagram for all Canadian users, but it remained unclear whether Google would follow suit for its platforms.

Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The company says it is improving internal controls.

Meta is preparing to block news for some Canadians on Facebook and Instagram in a temporary test that is expected to last the majority of the month. The Silicon Valley tech giant is following in the steps of Google, which blocked news links for about five weeks earlier this year for some of its Canadian users in response to a controversial Liberal government bill. Bill C-18, which is currently being studied in the Senate, will require tech giants to pay publishers for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online.

The District of Columbia accused the company of sharing user data in deceptive ways. A Superior Court decision said Meta had made its policies clear.

Facebook parent company Meta is threatening to remove news content on its platforms Instagram and Facebook in California if the state legislature passes a new proposal that would make tech companies pay publishers for news content. “If the Journalism Preservation Act passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” reads a statement posted to Twitter by Meta spokesperson Andy Stone.

Meta has begun its third round of layoffs as part of the company’s multibillion-dollar plan to save costs. The latest round of cuts targets members of Meta’s business groups and follows a previous round of layoffs in April that affected employees in technical roles. About 10,000 workers will lose their jobs between the April and May cuts, following the company’s first round in November that affected 11,000 employees.

The penalty fine of 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission is the biggest since the EU’s strict data privacy regime took effect five years ago, surpassing Amazon’s 746 million euro penalty in 2021 for data protection violations. The Irish watchdog is Meta’s lead privacy regulator in the 27-nation bloc because the Silicon Valley tech giant’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.

Meta Platforms violated prior privacy settlements, and as a result should be prohibited from monetizing minors’ data, including the use of it to fuel ad targeting or algorithms, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday. “Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said. “The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.”

Mina Lefevre, who was head of development and programming at Meta, is leaving Facebook’s parent company. Lefevre, who was formerly EVP and head of scripted at MTV, is exiting as part of the latest round of layoffs at the Mark Zuckerberg-run company, which has seen more than 20,000 employees leave. None of the remaining FB Watch Originals, most notably Red Table Talk, are coming back for new seasons as the company is getting out of that business, shifting its focus on creating VR experiences in Meta Horizon Worlds that can also be deployed across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

Workers at Facebook’s parent have been increasingly alarmed by job cuts and the company’s direction.

After cutting 11,000 jobs last November, Facebook’s parent Meta said today it will slash another 10,000 jobs and will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs.

Siding with Meta Platforms, a judge has dismissed claims that the social media platform violated the federal video privacy law by allegedly disclosing names of users who watched real-time streaming video. In a ruling issued late last week, U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar in the Northern District of California said the 35-year-old video privacy law applies to recorded broadcasts, not live streams.

Meta on Tuesday announced it would now include information on how it uses machine learning to deliver ads — increasing transparency since Meta and others including Google have launched independent tools to tell users why they see the ads they do.

This is the third consecutive quarter of revenue decline for the tech giant, which laid off 11,000 workers, or about 13% of its workforce, in November. CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed the layoffs on aggressive hiring during the pandemic.

The company said in a blog post Wednesday it is adding “new guardrails” to ensure there are no “repeat offenders” who violate its rules, even if they are political candidates or world leaders. “The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box,” wrote Nick Clegg, Facebook parent Meta’s vice president of global affairs.

Meta says it is expanding its partnership with the NBA and WNBA to launch more than 50 live NBA games in virtual reality on Meta Quest, including five in immersive, 180-degree VR. Those five games will feature celebrity broadcasters Meta said.

Former President Donald Trump, who recently announced plans to run again in 2024, reportedly is urging Meta Platforms to restore his account. “We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse,” a representative for Trump said in a letter to Meta, according to NBC News, which first reported on Trump’s request for his account to be reinstated.

Starting next month, Meta Platforms will no longer allow companies to send targeted ads to teens based on their gender, the company said Tuesday. Meta also said that data about teens’ engagement on Meta’s own apps — including whether teens followed Instagram or Facebook pages — won’t be used for ad targeting.

The decision is one of the most consequential issued under the E.U.’s landmark data-protection law and creates a new business headwind for the social media giant.

Meta Platforms will pay $725 million to settle class-action claims that it violated users’ privacy by sharing their information with outside developers, including the defunct political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, according to court papers filed late Thursday.