facebook - CybAI news

17 Jan

Mark Zuckerberg Turns His Back on the Media

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, donald trump, elon musk, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, meta, plaintext, social media, X

There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t regard mainstream media as the enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years-long embed into Facebook to write a book. For the past two years, Zuckerberg’s company had been roundly criticized for its failure to rein in disinformation and hate speech. Now the young founder had a plan to address this.Part of the solution, he told me, was more content moderation. He was going to hire…

15 Jan

Not Many Meta Employees Will Have to Move to Texas After All

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, meta, social media, Texas

Whether shifting teams to Texas will be anything more than symbolic is unclear. Common sense suggests if a person in California exhibits some sort of political preference, moving them to Texas isn’t likely to reshape their viewpoints immediately.In the same town hall call, company leadership described the Texas relocation as an attempt to address the perception problem with California. That reasoning frustrated employees, who believe Meta is harming its workforce to appease Trump, the three staffers told WIRED. Meta and Trump remain in litigation in a northern California federal court over the temporary suspension of his account following the January…

14 Jan

Mark Zuckerberg plans to lay off an additional five percent of Meta’s workforce

stp2y0 CommentsNewsfacebook, layoffs, Mark Zuckerberg, meta, news, tomorrow

Meta is preparing for even more layoffs, . CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a company memo that he plans on cutting about five percent of its "low-performers."“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”All told, this could result in 10 percent fewer staff at Meta, once attrition is accounted for. Bloomberg suggested that the forthcoming pink slips will focus on people…

11 Jan

Latin American Fact-Checkers Brace for Meta’s Next Moves

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsdisinformation, facebook, instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, meta

This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump's imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X's Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation or not.In the statement where Zuckerberg announced that he will dismantle the program, he said that fact-checkers succumbed to political bias, destroying more trust than they'd created in the US. However, for Laura Zommer, former director of Chequeado (one of the most important Spanish-speaking verifier…

08 Jan

The X-ification of Meta

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, meta, social media, twitter, X

“Meta has perennially been a home for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation,” claims Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, Meta apparently has decided to open the floodgates completely."Again, fact-checking isn’t perfect; Croviz says that NewsGuard has tracked several “false narratives” on Meta’s platforms already. And the community notes model with which Meta will replace its fact-checking battalions can still be somewhat effective. But research from Mahavedan and others has shown that crowdsourced solutions miss vast swaths of misinformation. And unless Meta commits to maximal transparency in how…

08 Jan

AI Social Media Users Are Not Always a Totally Dumb Idea

stp2y0 CommentsAIai lab, algorithms, artificial intelligence, facebook, social media

Meta caused a stir last week when it let slip that it intends to populate its platform with a significant number of entirely artificial users in the not too distant future.“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta, told The Financial Times. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform ... that’s where we see all of this going.”The fact that Meta seems happy to…

07 Jan

Meta’s Fact-Checking Partners Say They Were ‘Blindsided’ by Decision to Axe Them

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, X

Meta’s fact-checking partners claim they were “blindsided” by the company’s decision to abandon third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in favor of a Community Notes model, and some say they are now scrambling to figure out if they can survive the hole this leaves in their funding.“We heard the news just like everyone else,” says Alan Duke, cofounder and editor in chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories, which started working with Meta in 2019. “No advance notice.”The news that Meta was no longer planning on using their services was announced in a blog post by chief global affairs officer…

07 Jan

Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have ‘Mental Illness’

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, Gender, Immigration, instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, meta

Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including that it’s “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Meta’s newly-appointed chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote in a blog post outlining the changes.In an accompanying video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s current rules in these areas as “just out of touch with mainstream…

07 Jan

Meta Ditches Fact-Checkers Ahead of Trump’s Second Term

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, elon musk, facebook, instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, politics, social media, X

Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an emailed statement. “Newsrooms get grants from Facebook to provide fact-checks. That money allows them to do other journalism. Zuckerberg’s announcement is a full bending of the knee to Trump and an attempt to catch up to Musk in his race to the bottom. Fact-checking was not a panacea to disinformation on Facebook but it was an important part of moderation.”In what…

03 Jan

Meta sends its AI-generated profiles to hell where they belong

stp2y0 CommentsNewsartificial intelligence, facebook, gear, instagram, meta, news

Meta has nuked a bunch of its AI-generated profiles from Facebook Instagram, the company confirmed, after the AI characters prompted widespread outrage and ridicule from users on social media.The AI-generated profiles, which were labeled as “AI managed by Meta,” launched in , rolling out alongside the company’s celebrity-branded AI chatbots (). Meta doesn’t seem to have updated any of these profiles for several months, and the pages seem to have been largely unnoticed until this week, following an interview published by the Financial Times with Meta’s VP of Generative AI, Connor Hayes.In the interview, Hayes spoke about the company’s goal…