Facebook is killing a buzzy version of its personal assistant “M,” which was powered by artificial intelligence and real-life humans. The service, which helped people set up appointments and buy things, was available through a Messenger bot—but only to about 2,000 in California people throughout its two-year lifespan.
Facebook shareholders are pressing the company to establish more oversight by creating a separate risk committee that would address issues ranging from fake news to social media addiction.
When the US banned Ramzan Kadyrov, the Instagram-loving Chechen strongman, from entering the country under a sanctions law in December 2017, Facebook also blocked him from its platforms. The company said it did so to comply “legal obligations” imposed by the US government. But Facebook has not booted other people who were put on sanctions lists by the US under various laws, including at least one person, Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, sanctioned under a version of the same law as Kadyrov, also in late December.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his self-improvement project for 2018, and it’s not becoming his own butcher or learning Mandarin. He wants to fix his own company.
Facebook is getting rid of its red flags on articles that signal that they are fake news. As it turns out, the company said in a blog post, putting red flags on fake news actually encourages people to click on them.
Trump administration officials love talking about how the US is in the throes of a dangerous, deadly crime wave that bodes terribly for the future of the country. Yet as 2017 comes to an end, experts confirm what they predicted earlier this year: Crime in the US is falling, directly contradicting the scaremongering.
The European Commission is set to trigger a “nuclear option” against Poland, a member state whose right-wing, populist government has pushed through judicial reforms that are seen, both abroad and within the country, as a threat to the country’s democracy.
Every year, Facebook gets tens of thousands of requests for data from governments worldwide, including search warrants, subpoenas, or calls to restrict certain kinds of content. According to a new report released by the company on Dec. 18, these requests are increasing.
Continuing its effort to clean up News Feed, Facebook says it will start punishing pages and individual users that ask for likes, shares, comments, votes, and tags—which the company calls “engagement bait.”
While Facebook assures western powers, from Germany to the United States, that it will do everything it can to help them defend their democratic processes from malicious actors, it continues to aid, in one way or another, oppressive regimes across the world.
While Facebook is trying to lure a younger audience to its platform, the French government is pushing in the other direction. A draft bill proposes that children under 16 would need their parents’ permission to sign up for an account, the justice minister told reporters on Wednesday (Dec. 13)
After a thinly-veiled criticism of the company for “ripping apart the social fabric” by a former executive went viral, Facebook has decided to weigh in.
While Facebook’s business is booming and the company continues to expand its tentacles to every corner of the internet, its early employees and investors are growing more and more vocal about the damage it has wrought among its users.
In a rare move for the corporate world, Facebook published its internal anti-sexual harassment policies on Friday, Dec. 8. The company says it wants to be transparent, and to share its best practices in order to help others improve their own. In some ways, the relatively robust approach mirrors what experts have been recommending for college campuses, which have been grappling with these issues long before Silicon Valley.
Student-journalists in southern California have decided to stop broadcasting morning news after their school asked them to self-censor. In particular, they say, Coronado Middle School objected to student reporting on the wave of sexual harassment allegations that dominate US headlines.
If you thought that sleep-with-the-fishes-style Italian-American mafia antics are a thing of the past or just a pop-culture trope, the US Justice Department will gladly prove you wrong.
At a holiday party in New York on Tuesday (Dec. 5), Facebook unveiled its 2017 year in review, an annual roundup of what the world used the platform to talk about the most. In the past several years, Facebook’s list has been a simple Top 10 ranking, revealing some interesting insights about humanity—or at least about its 2 billion-strong user base. But this year, the list reveals something else: In 2017, a bad, bad year for Facebook, the company really wants you to know how great it is.
Australia’s governmental competition watchdog is stepping into the debate about the future of news media by launching a probe to determine whether Facebook and Google have disrupted the industry.
Technically, children under the age of 13 aren’t allowed on Facebook. But many kids manage to sign up for Facebook and Instagram quite easily, making them vulnerable to all of the internet’s dangers.
Data on criminal justice in the United States is notoriously spotty, making it a source of anguish for many criminologists, policymakers, reformers, and journalists.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will drop fees to nonprofit fundraisers, but the company will keep them for individuals trying to raise money on the platform.
In order to promote the “new Snapchat,” a massive redesign of the struggling app, the company’s CEO also penned an op-ed for Axios that tore into Facebook. Without ever naming the company’s arch-rival, Evan Spiegel blames it for the spread of fake news, for destroying human relationships, and weakening the media.
Facebook is rolling out AI technology to detect posts that hint at suicidal intentions. The tool, which the company has been testing for months, will be used for all types of Facebook content, and is meant to significantly speed up the process of reporting concerning behavior to first responders.
Everyone who has anything to sell is preparing for the Black Friday shopping weekend. Google has added new features to its shopping platform, and is lowering prices to push its smart home hardware. Amazon is discounting Whole Foods turkeys for Prime members and chipping away at the Thanksgiving spirit.
