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Meta unveils business hub for Indian SMBs

In addition, Meta also launched ‘Grow Your Business Playbook’ at the event that is geared to inspire and equip early-stage businesses to start their journeys on our apps….reports Asian Lite News

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, on Tuesday announced the launch of a business hub and ‘Grow Your Business’ playbook to empower small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India.

The ‘Grow Your Business Hub’ is a one-stop destination for the micro, small and medium businesses to find relevant information, tools, and resources curated to cater to business goals based on their growth journey.

In addition, Meta also launched ‘Grow Your Business Playbook’ at the event that is geared to inspire and equip early-stage businesses to start their journeys on our apps.

The ‘Playbook’ is Facebook India’s first published book on everything small businesses need to know from starting a business page, creating content on the page, to the first steps they need to take to start advertising, the company said in a statement.

The first edition is aimed at helping businesses set up offline to online journeys and accelerating online sales for small businesses during the Covid-19 era and beyond.

“Small businesses are the engines of growth for India’s economy, and the role of Meta is more important than ever in unlocking growth opportunities for them as many of them move online and use digital to grow,” said Archana Vohra, Director, Small and Medium Businesses, Facebook India.

“From curated and customised business skilling programmes to launching initiatives that enable working capital for small businesses, we have been building for the growth of India’s SMBs with a localised, India-first approach,” she added.

Every month, millions of small businesses — 15 million just on WhatsApp in India — use the Meta apps to start their online journeys and grow their business.

On Instagram, over the past three months, people in India have created more than 1.2 million posts and comments to show their support for small businesses and buying local.

More than half-a-million small businesses on Instagram in India have also listed either a WhatsApp number, or a phone number, or an email in their bio, or are encouraging potential customers to contact them directly via direct messaging. This goes to show that increasingly small businesses are leveraging the Meta apps to go direct-to-consumer, the company informed.

The Meta event focused on the growth agenda of the country’s SMBs and saw participation from emerging and small businesses from distinct verticals in the country.

The participants also shared stories of how they transformed their business using digital technologies and Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

ALSO READ: Sharjah Publishing City facilitates 38 publishing companies

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Facebook changes its name to Meta as it focuses on the virtual world

Don’t forget that when Phillip Morris changed it’s name to Altria it was still selling cigarettes that caused cancer,” tweeted Democratic lawyer Marc Elias…reports Asian Lite News.

Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta on Thursday, moving aggressively to distance itself from a social-media business embroiled in crisis and rebrand itself as a forward-looking creator of a new digital world known as the “metaverse.”

In 75-minute online presentation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged users to adjust their thinking about the company, which he said had outgrown its ubiquitous and problematic social media app – a platform that will continue to be known as Facebook. Instead, he said, the company plans to focus on what Zuckerberg described as the next wave of computing: a virtual universe where people will roam freely as avatars, attending virtual business meetings, shopping in virtual stores and socializing at virtual get-togethers.

“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said at Connect, the company’s annual event focused on virtual and augmented reality. “Facebook is one of the most used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”

The move comes as Facebook is mired in controversy over allegations that it has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content. After a whistleblower this month turned over tens of thousands of internal company documents to Congress and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, lawmakers and critics have called for urgent action to rein in the tech giant.

The revelations by whistleblower Frances Haugen represent arguably the most profound challenge yet to Zuckerberg and his company, which ranks as the largest social-media platform in the world. Critics swiftly criticized the move, comparing it to the crisis strategy employed by tobacco company Phillip Morris when it became clear that the company had long known that cigarettes damaged to human health.

“Don’t forget that when Phillip Morris changed it’s name to Altria it was still selling cigarettes that caused cancer,” tweeted Democratic lawyer Marc Elias.

Zuckerberg said the rebrand would heed the “lessons” of the past, noting in a blog post that privacy and safety would be built into the new generation of products “from day one” – a clear nod to Facebook’s record of eroding trust. In his keynote address, he also nodded to Facebook’s problems, saying, “The last few years have been humbling for me and my company in a lot of ways.”

But Facebook’s trust deficit is real. The crisis brought on by the Facebook Papers, which were provided to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission in response to a whistleblower lawsuit, follows other scandals in recent years, such as Russian disinformation around the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica crisis that highlighted the improper sharing of personal data.

The current crisis is more existential for the company, because the harm comes from within rather than from an outsider abusing the service. The Facebook Papers also touch every aspect of the service, exposing fundamental flaws in the architecture of its algorithms, the design of the platform, and its policies, while the harms exposed around mental health and polarization hit close to home for many Americans.

The Facebook Papers were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post. Facebook has called them a “coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.”

One of the major allegations of the Facebook Papers is that the company built and deployed social media technology without having a grasp on its harmful effects. Critics fear the same problems would plague the metaverse – only the stakes could be higher, as Zuckerberg pitched that people would essentially live part of their lives in his virtual world.

He sought to offset potential criticism by saying in his presentation that the next generation of Internet services would be built with greater “humility and openness,” and take the “lessons” of the past into account. But critics and some former insiders questioned that commitment.

“I was thinking during the keynote, who will be the cops in the metaverse?” said Katie Harbath, founder and CEO of consultancy Anchor Change and former Facebook public policy director. “The first few years may seem great because not that many people are on the service, but the more that come on, the more bad actors. And then the company plays catch up.”

ALSO READ-Zuckerberg issues apology after Facebook outage

READ MORE-‘Fake news’ flourished on Facebook during US presidential poll

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Facebook grilled by lawmakers making online safety rules

Davis said Facebook is largely supportive of the U.K.’s safety legislation and is interested in regulation that gives publicly elected officials the ability to hold the company accountable…reports Asian Lite News

British lawmakers grilled Facebook on Thursday over how it handles online safety as European countries move to rein in the power of social media companies.

Facebook’s head of safety said the tech giant supports regulation and has no business interest in providing people with an “unsafe experience.”

Representatives from Google, Twitter and TikTok also answered questions from a parliamentary committee scrutinizing the British government’s draft legislation to crack down on harmful online content. It comes days after the companies testified before American lawmakers and provided little firm commitment for U.S. legislation bolstering protection of children from online harm, ranging from eating disorders, sexually explicit content and material promoting addictive drugs.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic want tougher rules for protecting social media users, especially younger ones, but the United Kingdom’s efforts are much further along. U.K. lawmakers are questioning researchers, journalists, tech executives and other experts for a report to the government on how to improve the final version of the online safety bill. The European Union also is working on digital rules.

Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety who addressed the British lawmakers via video conference, defended the company’s handling of internal research on how its Instagram photo-sharing platform can harm teens, including encouraging eating disorders or even suicide.

“Where does the buck stop?” asked Damian Collins, the lawmaker who chairs the committee.

“It’s a company filled with experts, and we all are working together to make these decisions,” Davis said. She added that “we have no business interest, no business interest at all, in providing people with a negative or unsafe experience.”

Davis said Facebook is largely supportive of the U.K.’s safety legislation and is interested in regulation that gives publicly elected officials the ability to hold the company accountable.

She said she doesn’t agree with critics that Facebook is amplifying hate, largely blaming societal issues and arguing that the company uses artificial intelligence to remove content that is divisive or polarizing.

“Did you say that Facebook doesn’t amplify hate?” Collins asked.

“Correct,” Davis said, adding, “I cannot say that we’ve never recommended something that you might consider hate. What I can say is that we have AI that’s designed to identify hate speech.”

She declined to say how much dangerous content those AI systems are able to detect.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told the U.K. committee this week that the company’s systems make online hate worse and that it has little incentive to fix the problem. She said time is running out to regulate social media companies that use artificial intelligence systems to determine what content people see.

Haugen was a Facebook data scientist who copied internal research documents and turned them over to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. They also were provided to a group of media outlets, including The Associated Press, which reported numerous stories about how Facebook prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public.

In one of several pointed exchanges Thursday before the parliamentary committee, Scottish lawmaker John Nicolson told Davis that “all this rather suggests that Facebook is an abuse facilitator that only reacts when you’re under threat, either from terrible publicity or from companies, like Apple, who threaten you financially.”

Lawmakers pressed Facebook to provide its data to independent researchers who can look at how its products could be harmful. Facebook has said it has privacy concerns about how such data would be shared.

“It’s not for Facebook to set parameters around the research,” said Collins, the committee chairman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2MQ4E1j_-I

The U.K.’s online safety bill calls for a regulator to ensure tech companies comply with rules requiring them to remove dangerous or harmful content or face penalties worth up to 10% of annual global revenue.

British lawmakers are still grappling with thorny issues such as ensuring privacy and free speech and defining legal but harmful content, including online bullying and advocacy of self-harm. They’re also trying to get a handle on misinformation that flourishes on social media.

Representatives from Google and its YouTube video service who spoke to U.K. lawmakers Thursday urged changes to what they described as an overly broad definition of online harms. They also appeared virtually, and the tenor of lawmakers’ questions wasn’t as harsh as what Facebook faced.

ALSO READ-How Facebook outage wreaked havoc on the global ad empire

READ MORE-How Facebook becomes an ‘atom bomb’? Nobel laurate opens up

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News World

Sisi Rules Out Extension of Emergency

Sisi Rules Out Extension of Emergency

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi announced that he has cancelled the extension of the years-long state of emergency throughout the country…reports Asian Lite News

“I am glad that we share together the moment that we have long sought with struggle and hard work. Egypt has become, thanks to its great people and loyal men, an oasis of security and stability in the region,” Sisi posted on his official Facebook page.

He added that the Egyptians are “the real makers” of this decision through their sincere participation in all development and construction efforts, reports Xinhua news agency.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

“As I announce this decision, I remember with all honor and appreciation our heroic martyrs, without whom we would not have reached security and stability,” Sisi said.

Egypt imposed the state of emergency in 2017 after two church bombings killed at least 45 people.

It has been constantly renewed in accordance with the constitution.

Since the military ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, Egypt has been suffering terrorist attacks, which killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers in North Sinai Province and later spread to big cities including Cairo and Alexandria.

ALSO READ: Muslim Council of Elders visits Egypt pavilion at Expo 2020

Most of the attacks were claimed responsible by the Wilayat Sinai, a Sinai-based group affiliated with the extremist Islamic State (IS) group.

Since Egypt launched a comprehensive operation to uproot terrorism in February 2018, at least 1,000 militants have been killed.

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Whistleblower Haugen tears apart FB’s transparency claim

Pic credits IANS

Haugen simplified the math pointing to how “what they (Facebook) can find” is the trick phrase…reports Nikhila Natarajan

Whistleblower Frances Haugen began her 158-minute testimony before British parliamentarians on Monday stating that the Facebook transparency report inflates, multiple times over, hate speech it actually takes down.

The chair began by drawing Haugen, former product manager and Harvard Business School alum, into the behemoth’s transparency claim that 97 per cent of hate speech they can find is taken down.

Haugen simplified the math pointing to how “what they (Facebook) can find” is the trick phrase here.

The actual hate speech brought down as a percentage of total hate speech on the platform is 3-5 per cent, she said.

“The (97 per cent) stuff they (Facebook) talk about is (hate) stuff that robots got divided by the stuff that robots got plus the stuff that humans reported! That’s not the number we want. The fraction we expect to hear is total hate speech caught divided by total hate speech.”

Though most of Haugen’s testimony repeated what she said before US lawmakers earlier, the British are all ears because they are toying with the idea of an online regulator who can splice through the chaff and ask these kinds of ‘right’ questions.

A global barrage of scrutiny, basis some 10,000 pieces of internal documentation, is being called, The Facebook Project. A collective of 17 competing media platforms have been creeding in sync.

This on the day Facebook’s Q3 is expected at the end of market hours.

“Facebook is expected to report earnings on 10/25/2021 after market close. The report will be for the fiscal Quarter ending Sep 2021. According to Zacks Investment Research, based on 13 analysts’ forecasts, the consensus EPS forecast for the quarter is $3.2. The reported EPS for the same quarter last year was $2.71,” a Nasdaq notice said.

As analysts wait for the investor call, the trickiest bits may not be about financials, but the whistleblower who warned that Facebook, despite having thousands of decent folks on its staff, will fuel more episodes of violent unrest around the world because of the way its algorithms are designed to promote divisive content.

The former product manager on the civic misinformation team claimed that the social network saw safety as a cost centre, lionised a start-up culture where cutting corners was a good thing, and was “unquestionably” making hatred.

“The events we’re seeing around the world, things like Myanmar and Ethiopia, those are the opening chapters because engagement-based ranking does two things: one, it prioritizes and amplifies divisive and polarizing extreme content and two it concentrates it,” Haugen said.

Haugen argued that the algorithms pushed users towards the extreme. “So someone center left, they’ll be pushed to radical left, someone centre right will be pushed to radical right.”

Likewise, children being pushed into the pit via accounts that authority figures can’t find out.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has contested such accusations earlier this month. “The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical,” Zuckerberg – ranked 7th in the Forbes real time list of billionaires at $116 billion as of Monday – had said.

Documents cited indicate that Facebook had known that it hadn’t hired enough workers who possessed both the language skills and knowledge of local events needed to identify objectionable posts from users in a number of developing countries.

The Facebook Papers project is a unique collaboration among 17 American news organizations, including The Associated Press and Reuters.

A separate consortium of European news outlets had access to the same set of documents, and members of both groups began publishing content at 7 a.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 25.

That date and time was set by the partner news organizations to give everyone in the consortium an opportunity to fully analyze the documents, report out relevant details, and to give Facebook’s public relations staff time to respond to questions and inquiries raised by that reporting.

ALSO READ: How Facebook becomes an ‘atom bomb’? Nobel laurate opens up

ALSO READ: How Facebook outage wreaked havoc on the global ad empire

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How Facebook outage wreaked havoc on the global ad empire

It is a reminder to advertisers to have proactive mitigation plans in place to avoid the scramble of trying to figure out what to do in the moment, writes Nishant Arora

Facebook reported a 47 per cent (year-over-year) increase in ad revenue amounting to $28 billion in the second quarter (Q2) this year. The massive outage that left the entire family of Facebook apps down for several hours on a busy Monday produced a cascading effect on the global ad empire that is dependent upon the social networking giant to reach billions of consumers.

The global outage brought millions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger users to Twitter, which saw tremendous traffic (and did not suffer another downtime), leaving advertisers on Facebook and its family of apps flummoxed.

According to global market research firm Forrester, Facebook’s core app continues to rank as the top-used social media platform weekly among global audiences except China, including 76 per cent in ‘Metro India’, 66 per cent in the US, and 64 per cent in five European countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain).

Other apps within the Facebook ecosystem (Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp) also dominate globally over non-Facebook social media platforms.

According to Forrester VP, Research Director, Mike Proulx, although many brands had a “real-time marketing” moment on Twitter, this outage has widespread implications to the advertising ecosystem “given the fact that ads weren’t being served for over six hours across Facebook and Instagram, which command the lion’s share of social media ad revenue”.

When the next outage occurs, brands should position themselves to pivot quickly to lessen the blow to their demand generation efforts.

“This not only affects Facebook’s revenue (and stock price) but also brands’ bottom lines,” he said in a statement.

The October 4 Facebook outage occurred on the heels of a whistleblower — data scientist Frances Haugen — condemning the social media giant for its business practices.

Facebook later explained why the outage occurred.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Facebook said in a statement.

The social network said it has no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” the company said.

Over the past two years, Facebook has consolidated its disparate app ecosystem onto one back-end infrastructure.

According to Forrester senior analyst Jessica Liu, it is a move that creates some operational efficiencies for the company and insulation from a potential breakup by regulators.

“But it also exposes Facebook to concentration risk: A single risk event that produces a cascading effect — like old school Christmas lights where one goes out, they all go out. This strategy comes at the expense of redundancy and impairs the company’s resilience. It also irritates consumers who don’t want a unified social media profile across Facebook’s family of apps,” Liu stressed.

This Facebook outage wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

It is a reminder to advertisers to have proactive mitigation plans in place to avoid the scramble of trying to figure out what to do in the moment.

The brands need to diversify media spend within and outside of social media.

“Brands should use this incident to (re)assess how much of their ad spend is concentrated in a single media platform and determine a go-forward diversification strategy that still reaches their target audiences while reducing concentration risk,” said principal analyst Jeff Pollard.

When the next outage occurs, brands should position themselves to pivot quickly to lessen the blow to their demand generation efforts.

This involves creating “what if” scenarios with specific actions to take as risk triggers occur.

“Marketers would be wise to pressure Facebook to quickly adjust for the outage to normalise brands’ siloed Facebook ad performance dashboards,” added senior analyst Alla Valente.

ALSO READ: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram hit by global outage

ALSO READ: Zuckerberg issues apology after Facebook outage

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Zuckerberg issues apology after Facebook outage

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users, including in India, on Monday evening, as they were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms, reports Asian Lite News

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday apologised to the millions of users who faced hours’ worth of disruption in accessing the Facebook family of apps – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – from Monday night. Expressing his regret for the inconvenience, Zuckerberg took to Facebook following the disruption to let users know that the social media platforms are gradually coming back online now and that people should be able to access it after the nearly six-hour disruption that had the social media users in a standstill.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now,” said Mark Zuckerberg from his personal account on Facebook. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp came back online only in the early hours of Tuesday, after nearly six hours of an outage that partially paralysed the giant social media network on the internet. The Facebook family of apps went dark on Monday evening (around noon Eastern Time), in what the website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure the platform had ever seen.

Internet entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, media magnate, philanthropist, and the co-founder of Facebook, is having a rough time with his media empire – especially in view of the high-profile lawsuits that his company is involved in as well as the recent technical snag. This outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks. Facebook, which is the second-largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenues per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

In April, Facebook and Instagram went down for millions of users for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant.

People took to DownDetector as they were welcomed with “sorry something went wrong” error message from Facebook and Instagram.

The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, famed developer Jane Wong noted in a tweet.

Facebook shares tank

Meanwhile, shares of Facebook fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, and according to ad measurement firm Standard Media Index, Facebook was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage. Some of Facebook’s internal applications, including the company’s own email system, were also hit. Bloomberg reported that Twitter and Reddit users also said that employees at the company’s Menlo Park, California, campus were unable to access offices and conference rooms that required a security badge.

Internal routing mistake

Several Facebook employees, who declined to be named, as saying that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain. The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work added to the issue, they said. According to several security experts, the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram disruption could be the result of an internal mistake and added that sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. “Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, told Wired that the cause of the issue is “probably a bad configuration or code push to the network management system,” “This isn’t supposed to happen,” Stamos added. “Facebook’s outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that’s a just symptom of the problem,” Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets, told Wired. The fundamental issue, Mursch says—and other experts agree—is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers.

Several internet infrastructure experts told Wired that the likeliest answer was a misconfiguration on Facebook’s part. “It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet,” John Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, said.

ALSO READ-Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram hit by global outage

READ MORE-‘Fake news’ flourished on Facebook during US presidential poll

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Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram hit by global outage

social media

Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again….reports Asian Lite News

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.

 Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users, including in India, on Monday evening, as they were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms.

“We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Andy Stone, Facebook communications executive said in a tweet.

According to DownDetector, a website that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 per cent users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22 per cent had problems with the web version.

People took to Twitter to report the problems they were facing with Facebook family apps, including posting memes and GIFs.

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.

“All of us coming to Twitter to see if Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are really down,” a user tweeted.

“Everyone rushing to Twitter to see if WhatsApp is actually down,” another tweeted.

“Instagram down, Facebook down, WhatsApp down. You know who’s in-charge now?” another user posted.

Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again.

In April, Facebook and Instagram went down for millions of users for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant.

People took to DownDetector as they were welcomed with “sorry something went wrong” error message from Facebook and Instagram.

The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, famed developer Jane Wong noted in a tweet.

ALSO READ: US lawmakers blast FB over Instagram hurting teens

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-Top News USA

US lawmakers blast FB over Instagram hurting teens

Shock and anger across party lines marked the hearing on Thursday as the Facebook spin room struggles to hold out against its biggest scandal after the Cambridge Analytica firestorm in 2016. …reports Nikhila Natarajan

Lawmakers blasted Facebook for three hours over the tech giant’s handling of internal research that showed how its Instagram photo sharing platform was wrecking teens and weaponising “children’s vulnerability”.

Bombshell revelations in September first reported by The Wall Street Journal have set off alarm bells yet again around Facebook’s hold over young audiences. The newspaper reported that for the last three years, Facebook has been studying how its photo-sharing app affects millions of young people on its platform, especially teenage girls.

Facebook witness Antigone Davis, head of global safety at the company, had a hard time playing defence. Davis insisted that the research on Instagram’s impact on young people “is not a bombshell” because it does not prove causality.

Shock and anger across party lines marked the hearing on Thursday as the Facebook spin room struggles to hold out against its biggest scandal after the Cambridge Analytica firestorm in 2016.

Few days ago, Facebook put on hold its kids’ version of Instagram – targeted initially at tweens. A Facebook whistleblower will be sitting down for a CBS’ “60 Minutes” show on Sunday. This crisis is not going away for Facebook anytime soon.

The gloves are off, the reactions Thursday were deeply personal. Five moments of fierce bipartisan pushback capture the battle-ready mood in US Congress – where it concerns protections for young people navigating digital platforms.

Senator Richard Blumenthal: “This research is a bombshell. It is powerful, gripping, riveting evidence that Facebook knows of the harmful effects of its site on children, and that it has concealed those facts and findings. I don’t understand how you can deny that Instagram is exploiting young users for its own profit.”

Senator Ed Markey: “Instagram is that first childhood cigarette meant to get teens hooked early. Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product they know is harmful to the health of young people.

“Well let me just say this we’re talking about 12 year olds. We’re talking about nine year olds. If you need to do more research on this, you should fire all the people who you’ve paid to do your research up until now because this is pretty obvious and it’s pretty obvious every mother and father, in our country because all recent scientific studies by child development experts found that not getting enough likes on social media significantly reduces adolescent’s feelings of self self worth.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn: “You’ve lost the trust, and we do not trust you with influencing our children. They (parents) also don’t want Facebook collecting data on their children because – call them whatever you want, tweens, teens, young adults -A the bottom line is these are children. Their children, and you and Mr. Zuckerberg, both of you being parents should understand that Facebook has both a legal and a moral obligation to forgo collecting and using children’s data.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar: “You guys published your quarterly revenues. We have them on different countries right – how much money you make, we got that information. And so I’m trying to figure out if it includes Instagram, I’m trying to figure out if it includes kids which I assume it does, and I will keep pursuing it another way, when you estimate the lifetime value of a user, you must do that because I know your profit model and how it works now after years of taking on this monopoly dominant platform issue. What do you estimate the lifetime value of a user is for kids who start using Facebook products before age 13?”

ALSO READ: Biden signs last-minute bill averting shutdown

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FB paid billions to spare Zuck in Cambridge Analytica probe

Mark Zuckerberg

The complaints, which cite internal discussions among Facebook’s board members, were filed in Delaware Court of Chancery last month…reports Asian Lite News

Facebook conditioned its $5 billion payment to the US Federal Trade Commission to resolve the Cambridge Analytica data leak probe on the agency dropping plans to sue Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, shareholders allege in a lawsuit, Politico reported.

In suits made public Tuesday, two groups of shareholders claimed that members of Facebook’s board allowed the company to overpay on its fine in order to protect Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and largest shareholder. The complaints, which cite internal discussions among Facebook’s board members, were filed in Delaware Court of Chancery last month.

Facebook. (File Photo: IANS)

“Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other Facebook directors agreed to authorize a multi-billion settlement with the FTC as an express quid pro quo to protect Zuckerberg from being named in the FTC’s complaint, made subject to personal liability, or even required to sit for a deposition,”one of the suits alleged, as per the report.

The lawsuits show that Facebook has still yet to move beyond the Cambridge Analytica scandal, even as antitrust, alleged privacy failures and other problems plague the company. The Senate Commerce Committee said last week that it was opening a probe into how the company downplayed its own research on how Facebook’s photo-sharing app Instagram worsens mental health and body image issues for teens, the report said.

ALSO READ: ‘Fake news’ flourished on Facebook during US presidential poll

In February 2019, the FTC sent Facebook’s lawyers a draft complaint that named both the company and Zuckerberg personally as a defendant, the shareholders said. The FTC also said in court that Facebook’s fine would have been closer to $106 million, but the company agreed to the $5billion penalty to avoid having Zuckerberg or Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg deposed and any liability for the CEO, the suit alleged.

“The Board has never provided a serious check on Zuckerberg’s unfettered authority,” one set of shareholders said. “Instead, it has enabled him, defended him, and paid billions of dollars from Facebook’s corporate coffers to make his problems go away.”

They also alleged that Zuckerberg and Sandberg both declined to be interviewed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm hired to audit Facebook’s privacy compliance as part of a 2012 settlement with the FTC, allowed other managers to provide untrue statements about the company’s practices and never provided the board with copies of PwC’s audits, the report added.