Facebook

BREAKING NEWSGoldman Sachs said its credit-card unit is under investigation, including how it handles customer refunds and billing disputes  » Read More

The logo of Meta Platforms is seen in Davos, Switzerland, May 22, 2022. Picture taken May 22, 2022. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann//File PhotoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comAug 4 (Reuters) - Facebook-parent Meta Platforms (META.O) said on Thursday it would make its first-ever bond offering, at a time when the social media company is making massive investments to fund its virtual reality projects.Meta did not disclose the size of the offering but said it would use the proceeds for capital expenditures, share repurchases, acquisitions or investments.The company received an 'A1' rating from Moody's and an 'AA- rating' and a 'stable' outlook from S&P. Meta is selling four tranches of bonds with maturities ranging from five years to 40 years.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comAmong big technology companies, Meta is the only one that does not have any debt on its books. Tapping the market now would give it more financial room as it tries to fund some expensive overhauls, including a bet on augmented and virtual reality technology,  » Read More

Huge, advertising-based, general-purpose social networks aren’t the high-growth cash cows they once were, as Facebook’s recent “growth” numbers would suggest. Many consumers, it turns out, would rather spend their time watching short-form videos than sharing memes and hitting “like” buttons. And new restrictions on user tracking have made it harder for mass-market social networks to target ads.The founders of a new social network called Niche believe the next generation of social networks might cater to online communities formed around more specific interests, such as hobbies or creator businesses.“I think the first run of social networks was to connect everyone en masse—it’s your high school friends, your family; it’s a very large swath of connection and very little in common,” says Niche CEO Christopher Gulczynski, one of its cofounders, who is credited with inventing Tinder’s “swipe” feature when he worked at the dating app company. “But I think the trend in social networking right now is to get smaller, to get more intimate around that relational status of everyone in the group.”So,  » Read More

Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Facebook’s parent company, is partly relocating to London as he joins senior colleagues in moving to the UK capital.The former Liberal Democrat leader will divide his time between California, where he lives currently, and London. Clegg’s new executive role at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will require more travelling and it is understood that Clegg sees London as a suitable base for visiting Europe and Asia.The Financial Times, which first reported the move, said Clegg wanted to spend more time in the UK and continental Europe for personal reasons, including wanting to be closer to his elderly parents.Clegg joined Meta in 2018 and moved with his family to California, but had been clear that he wanted to return to Europe at some point, telling the FT last year that his “heart belongs massively 5,000 miles away”.Clegg’s wife, Miriam González Durántez, a senior international trade lawyer, has also referred to missing Europe in her Instagram posts, stating last year that she felt like “kissing the ground” after returning to her native Spain for the first time in 18 months.  » Read More

In a Massachusetts town’s virtual yard sale group, a Facebook user warned of a man with gray hair and glasses and driving a truck tried to abduct an 8-year-old.The post, however, was a scam, Franklin Police Department is warning.“No incident similar to this was reported to the FPD,” the police said on Facebook. “The poster, Nobuhle Magutshwa, posted the same post on various Facebook groups all around the country.”The police department also stated that “other activity on her Facebook page is consistent with other social media scams.”The police department also stated that “other activity on her Facebook page is consistent with other social media scams.”Facebook also warns that her page has “false information.”“The same information was checked in another post by independent fact-checkers,” a warning states on one of the Facebook posts that claims “dangerous mentally ill man on the loose in Franklin.”Facebook also warns of "false information" in similar Facebook posts.  » Read More

A Facebook post by the City of Ames went viral over the weekend as the organizers of Rummage RAMPage — and hundreds of social media users — tried to reunite a beloved quilt with its owner.Dawn Taylor was in the middle of moving from Ames to Austin, Texas, when she learned that her quilt, adorned with tulip designs and lovingly created by her grandmother, had accidentally been dropped off at the community garage sale, which started Saturday and continues through this Saturday.She’d left behind a box of bedding that was going to be shipped to her in Austin because there was no room in the moving truck or in her car.“We had a box of stuff that was going to Rummage RAMPage and a box of bedding that was going to my sister’s, and somehow it all ended up with Rummage RAMPage,” Taylor said.On Saturday, the City of Ames posted a photo of the quilt on Facebook.“If you purchased the quilt in the photo,  » Read More

Amazon shoppers rely on reviews of a product by previous customers to help guide their buying choices. Crafty sellers have found a way to exploit this by using Facebook groups to mobilize fake positive product reviews. Amazon doesn't like this one bit and have taken legal steps to stop it. Here are the details... Amazon Sues Facebook Group Admins Amazon has sued the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups for allegedly using their groups to mobilize people to write fake or misleading product reviews in exchange for cash or free products. According to an Amazon press release: These groups are set up to recruit individuals willing to post incentivized and misleading reviews on Amazon’s stores in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan. According to the company, the fake reviews affect hundreds of products across the site. One of the groups targeted by the lawsuit filed in Seattle's King County Superior Court is the Amazon Product Review group, which had more than 43,000 members before Meta deleted it in early 2022.  » Read More

Jimarielle Bowie at her alma mater, Angelo Rodriguez High School, in Fairfield, Calif. A lawyer, she credits some of her success to the friendships she made in high school. Marissa Leshnov for The New York Times Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults. But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty. For poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the new research found. The study, published Monday in Nature, analyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, amounting to 84 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 44. Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others at removing barriers to climbing the income ladder,  » Read More

Aging tech products often suffer from what's known as feature creep: excessive complexity caused by the accretion of bells and whistles over the years. Log into Facebook (launched in 2004) or Instagram (launched in 2010) these days and every available pixel seems to offer up a different feature, function, tool or interface, many of them cloned from newer, buzzier competitors. This everything-to-everyone approach might leave one with the impression that Meta Platforms — the recently rebranded umbrella company that oversees Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — lacks a clear vision for its flagship apps. But on an earnings call with investors Wednesday afternoon, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg outlined a straightforward mission statement for Facebook and Instagram: They're both TikTok now. Not that he said so outright. But the trajectory he mapped out for both apps, toward an experience dominated by algorithm-suggested video content, is one that will bring them more in line with the ByteDance-owned video app that has rapidly become their fiercest competitor — even if their users would explicitly prefer otherwise.  » Read More

Facebook placed a 'fact-checking' label on a post written by a top economist stating that the United States is now in a recession - a move he termed 'Orwellian'.Two consecutive quarters of negative growth is the standard definition of a recession, and Phillip Magness, the research and education director at the American Institute for Economic Research, posted on Facebook a commentary about the country now being in a recession.The post - which is no longer visible - was marked by Facebook's fact checkers as being misleading.'We live in an Orwellian hell-scape,' he tweeted.'Facebook is now 'fact checking' anyone who questions the White House's word-games about the definition of a recession.' Biden on Thursday (pictured) insisted that the country was not in a recession, despite new data showing a second consecutive quarter with negative growth Phillip Magness, an economic historian, believes the U.S. is in recession - but the White House disagreesMagness then tweeted, as the row continued: 'Recession. n.  » Read More