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Facebook owner Meta is expected to lay off “a large number” of its contract workers in the Republic in the coming weeks, after cutting 30-35 jobs in Dublin recently due to the shutting down of its cryptocurrency project, Novi, earlier this month, the Sunday Times reports.The newspaper highlighted that a significant portion of its 6,000 staff in the State are on contract. Meta is also said to be laying off junior recruiters, having indicated in July its intention to slow down hiring globally. It also emerged over the summer that Meta had paused the fit-out of parts of its headquarters in Ballsbridge as it re-evaluates its international real-estate requirement.Carbon tax rise set to go ahead despite uneaseThe Sunday Times also reports that the Government is set to proceed with a planned increase in carbon taxes on October 12th in spite of unease among Coalition partners about the matter amid soaring living costs.The report noted that Opposition politicians and some within Fine Gael had called for a delay in the planned increase,  » Read More

Roy Scheider’s final film, Beautiful Blue Eyes, - a title which the late Jaws actor suggested to the producers - has been banned from being promoted on Facebook. It's nothing to do with the quality of the film, which is currently being screened in over 400 Regal Cinemas across the US, but - according to the social media giant – it’s because the title breaches Facebook’s policy against content that ‘includes direct or indirect assertions or implications about a person’s race.’ Clearly the filmmakers would have rather let Polly do the algorithms rather than those at Facebook HQ as the title of the thriller relates to the eye colour of a child who died at the hands of the Nazis and is related to a key scene in the Roy Scheider’s film swansong. The film is set in Germany with flashbacks to Nazi-occupied Poland. It follows the story of Joseph (Scheider), a retired NYPD cop who visits his estranged son Ronnie and is convinced that his neighbour is the SS Commander, who slaughtered his entire family in 1941.  » Read More

This is why your uncle has carrot emojis in his Twitter handle. No amount of carrots will ever bring eyesight to the blind. Credit: Sergnester via Getty To avoid censorship for the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, anti-vax groups on Facebook have begun coding their messages with the carrot emoji, according to a report from the BBC. The emoji is used in place of the word "vaccine" to avoid the wrath of Facebook's automated moderator algorithms.The BBC reports that these groups often share unverified claims of people being killed or injured by the COVID-19 vaccine. One group with over 200,000 members states in its rules that members must "use code words for everything" and that posters cannot "use the c word, v word or b word ever" (covid, vaccine, booster). According to the BBC, the algorithm the Meta-owned platform uses for moderation tends to focus on words, not images. This is unsurprising news. Back in July 2021, a Bloomberg report detailed how social media algorithms perform poorly in detecting abuse through emojis.  » Read More

More evidence of Facebook colliding with the Biden administration to target political opposition has emerged. In the latest expose, it has been learned that Facebook spied on its conservative American users and reported those to the FBI who had expressed doubt about the controversial 2020 presidential elections. According to sources in the Department of Justice, Facebook spied on private messages sent using its messenger service, and red-flagged those containing messages against the Biden administration, or those that questioned the election. Facebook continued with the illegal spying for the past 19 months, and then transmitted them to the domestic terrorism operational unit at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, in a redacted form. Facebook intercepted the private messages and sent them to the FBI without any subpoena, which is required in such interventions. “It was done outside the legal process and without probable cause,” a source in the department told the media. The source further said, “Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena.” These illegally obtained messages were used by the FBI as ‘leads’ to obtain subpoenas from the judicial offices for further probe against the targeted people,  » Read More

Yara Shahidi will kick it with celebrity peers in a new show premiering on Facebook Watch later this month. The actor, model, activist and self-proclaimed “music nerd” — best known for starring on “Black-ish” and “Grown-ish” — stars in and executive produces Facebook Watch original series “Yara Shahidi’s Day Off.” In each episode, Shahidi will participate in a range of activities with her celeb guests that reflect “their authentic interests outside of their fame,” spanning horseback riding, gymnastics, golfing, soccer and game night. “Yara Shahidi’s Day Off” premieres Thursday, Sept. 29, at 9 a.m. PT, on Facebook Watch, Shahidi’s Facebook page (2.2 million followers) and her Instagram page (7.6 million followers). The premiere episode will feature massively popular TikTok creator Khaby Lame, in one of his first American sit-down interviews. Additional guests on the show will include Liza Koshy, Chloe Kim, Swae Lee, Elsa Majimbo, Amanda Seales, Alton Mason and Nas. Shahidi also will have intimate chats with her guests, asking them to divulge the one question nobody never asks that they wish people would.  » Read More

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up… The scandal-hit company formerly known as Facebook has fought for over four years to keep a lid on the gory details of a third party app audit that its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally pledged would be carried out, back in 2018, as he sought to buy time to purge the spreading reputational stain after revelations about data misuse went viral at the peak of the Cambridge Analytica privacy crisis. But some details are emerging nonetheless — extracted like blood from a stone via a tortuous, multi-year process of litigation-triggered legal discovery. A couple of documents filed by plaintiffs in privacy user profiling litigation in California, which were unsealed yesterday, offer details on a handful of apps Facebook audited and internal reports on what it found. The revelations provide a glimpse into the privacy-free zone Facebook was presiding over when a “sketchy” data company helped itself to millions of users’ data, the vast majority of whom did not know their info had been harvested for voter-targeting experiments.  » Read More

Billions of people across the globe use Facebook to connect, interact, and share their opinion with other users. Facebook has billions of active monthly and daily users, which makes it a great place to share visual content, such as videos and images. There are now millions of videos on Facebook that are watched by 500 million people daily. These 500 million people watch a total of 8 billion videos daily. Initially developed to be a social media platform, Facebook has become one of the largest libraries of videos on the internet. People watch videos on Facebook using their smartphones, PCs, and even smart TVs. In addition, Facebook allows users to watch various kinds of videos, including skits, stand-up comedy sessions, documentaries, game highlights, live streams, and educational videos. With all these videos available on Facebook, some users want to save their favorite videos for offline usage. However, many people don’t know if downloading videos from Facebook and keeping them offline on their devices is possible. The good news is that Facebook video download is possible but can be a little tricky for users.  » Read More

AUBURN, MI — An Auburn man has been charged with breaking into a local convenience store to steal scratch-off lottery tickets, one of which he allegedly tried to redeem when it proved to be a $100 winner.About 1:35 a.m. on Sept. 9, Michigan State Police troopers responded to a burglary alarm at JoJo’s Refresh Shop, 401 W. Midland Road in Auburn. They arrived to find no sign of forced entry, with the business owner showing them surveillance camera footage of the intrusion.The footage showed a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt, mask, gloves, and gray pants enter the store, walk behind the register, and steal scratch-off lottery tickets, two packs of Camel Crush cigarettes, and $50 in cash, court records show.In all, the value of stolen lottery tickets amounted to $1,930, court records show.An employee who closed JoJo’s the night of Sept. 8 told troopers a regular customer had come in and stayed longer than usual, making her uncomfortable. This patron asked the employee what would happen if she sold him a lottery ticket without first scanning it and it wound up a winner,  » Read More

Phishers are looking to trick owners of Facebook pages with fake notices from the social network (i.e., Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), in an attempt to get them to part with sensitive information. The method they are using to harvest information is quite clever: they create a lead generation form via the Meta Ads Manager and include the link to it in the phishing email. Such a link makes it less likely that email security solutions will flag the email as potentially malicious, and can also give a false sense of security to the potential targets, as the email ostensibly came from Facebook and contains a link to a page hosted on Facebook. “Our researchers have been consistently tracking phishing emails that come from legitimate sources,” says Jeremy Fuchs, a cybersecurity researcher at Avanan. Hackers often leverage sites that appear on email security services’ Allow lists – and Facebook is one of those. “So a link from Facebook would appear to be legitimate and not scanned for further malicious content,” he explained.  » Read More

Skip to main content / Court dismissed claims that the ‘Jedi Blue’ program illegally monopolized ad-tech, but it let the larger case proceed Sep 13, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC|A Google G logo. The VergeA federal judge has allowed crucial elements of an antitrust case against Google to proceed, including allegations that Google illegally monopolized the ad-tech market. However, Judge P. Kevin Castel dismissed claims of collusion between Google and Facebook (now Meta) in the “Jedi Blue” program. Castel’s ruling (spotted by Bloomberg reporter Leah Nylen) says states have plausibly alleged Google has a monopoly in ad servers and ad exchanges and that its actions have had anticompetitive effects. It also says Google may have unfairly competed with operations like Project Bernanke, a secret program that allegedly edged out competitors by using Google’s access to data.The suit, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is one of several legal attacks on Google’s power in the tech world.  » Read More