“Facebook and Big Tech are facing a Big Tobacco moment,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said this week when a whistle-blower testified about how the social media company’s products harmed teenagers.
The disclosures by whistleblower Frances Haugen about Facebook — first to the Wall Street Journal and then to “60 Minutes” and Congress — ought to be the stuff of shareholders’ nightmares: When she left Facebook, she took with her documents showing, for example, that the corporation knew Instagram was making girls’ body-image issues worse, that internal investigators knew a Mexican drug cartel was using the platform to recruit hit men and that the company misled its own Oversight Board about having a separate content appeals process for a large number of influential users.
A former Facebook employee has told US lawmakers that the company’s sites and apps “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy”.
A trove of leaked documents, published by The Wall Street Journal, hints at a company whose best days are behind it.
As Apple and Google enact privacy changes, businesses are grappling with the fallout, Madison Avenue is fighting back and Facebook has cried foul.
The High Court of Australia has dismissed an appeal by some of the country’s biggest media outlets including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, finding they are the publishers of third-party comments on their Facebook pages.
WhatsApp has been fined €225m by Ireland’s data watchdog for breaching privacy regulations.
Microsoft, Facebook and other tech companies claim a virtual reality universe is the future of the Internet.
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all banned harmful covid-related misinformation as the pandemic took hold throughout the world. But the false claims are still proliferating.
President Biden on Friday unleashed a forceful new attack against social media companies for allowing the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines, explicitly blaming them for the deaths of many Americans of covid-19.