Facebook

Facebook's own researchers found that around 1 in 8 of the social network's 2.9 billion users have addiction-like problems.The problems associated with using the platform are said to affect users' sleep, work, parenting or relationships.The social media platform euphemistically calls the issues 'problematic use' but in the wider world it is more commonly known as 'internet addiction.'  The usage patterns are 'perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social media platform, which all seek to keep users coming back,' according to the report as seen by the Wall Street Journal. The information was all contained in documents leaked to the press part of the Journal's Facebook Files, a trove of reporting based on internal documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen who testified before Congress last month.  A Facebook survey conducted by company researchers found the social network is harmful for 1 in 8 of its users. The platform negatively impacts users sleep, work or personal relationshipsWhatever the term,  » Read More

The rebranding of the company seems to be in line with the tech giant’s recent investment in metaverseEarlier, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger used to show the test “from Facebook” at the bottom of the screenFacebook to Meta: The new ‘Meta’ branding has begun showing up in all of (formerly) Facebook company’s apps – Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook as well as Messenger. The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company had last week announced that it was changing its name from Facebook to Meta, and now, all of these apps are now showing the Meta branding. Earlier, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger used to show the test “from Facebook” at the bottom of the screen, but now, these three apps as well as the Facebook app show the text “from Meta”. The branding has changed for the apps on both Android as well as iOS platforms.Also read | Facebook updates Subscriptions feature to help creators bypass Apple’s 30% cutThe rebranding of the company seems to be in line with the tech giant’s recent investment in metaverse,  » Read More

You don't have permission to access "http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-11-05/un-investigator-hopeful-facebook-will-hand-over-more-myanmar-information" on this server. Reference #18.55c35868.1636169872.1f949b9f  » Read More

Coming to an end: Louisiana’s weeklong early voting period for the Nov. 13 election wraps up Saturday. The only issues facing all voters statewide are four constitutional amendments. In 21 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes, those amendments are the only items on the ballot, according to the secretary of state’s office. Read more.  Addiction: Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users reports engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. Read the full story.    Holiday season: Retailers are staring down a triple whammy of challenges this season including labor shortages, supply chain woes and inflation, CNBC reports. The National Retail Federation projects sales between November and December will rise between 8.5% and 10.5% for a total of between $843.4 billion and $859 billion. Businesses large and small are hiking pay,  » Read More

Facebook is facing mounting pressure from advocacy groups to weed out climate misinformation on its platform and be more transparent about the extent of the false or misleading claims.A pair of reports released this week amid the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow found scores of accounts spreading climate misinformation and raised questions about the tech giant's efforts to combat such content.“Facebook is not solely responsible for climate misinformation existing, but it's definitely amplifying the problem and a possible bigger problem down the line and doing nothing about it,” said Sean Buchanan, author of a Stop Funding Heat report published Thursday.That report, along with another on the topic from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published earlier in the week, were unveiled as global leaders gathered at the U.N. summit to discuss new efforts to address climate change.The Stop Funding Heat report, released in partnership with the group Real Facebook Oversight Board, estimated an average range of between 818,000 and 1.36 million daily views of climate misinformation,  » Read More

Rob Pegoraro  |  Special to USA TODAYLISBON, Portugal – The tech conference that once had Facebook executives holding forth on their futuristic ambitions in headline keynotes treated the social network to an extended critique this week. And Facebook responded by streaming it in, with two executives appearing only via video.Web Summit – taking place in person after the pandemic forced 2020’s event to go virtual – opened Monday night with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen telling an arena packed with masked attendees about her decision to bear witness against her former employer."I learned things that I believed were putting lives in jeopardy,” Haugen said of her "60 Minutes" interview during a conversation with moderator Laurie Segall.► Who is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen?  Everything you need to know► Facebook Papers:  What USA TODAY found in whistleblower documentsShe said the company’s reliance on large groups and algorithmic amplification accelerates extremism: "Right now,  » Read More

Facebook has announced it is deleting about 1bn “faceprints” it used as part of a facial recognition system for photo tagging, citing concerns with the technology.Meta, the company formally known as Facebook, announced on Tuesday it would end its use of facial recognition technology in the coming weeks. A third of Facebook’s users, or about 1 billion people, had opted into the service, Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence Jerome Pesenti said.So is the company really concerned about people’s privacy, or is it just a public relations move?How was Facebook using facial recognition technology?When people opted in to allowing the use of facial recognition, Facebook scanned a “faceprint” of that user and used it to find photos and videos of them on the platform, and suggested tagging them.It was also used to identify if someone else was impersonating that user on Facebook, and helped with accessibility for people with visual impairments by telling them who was in a photo.Why is Facebook stopping it?  » Read More

Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition program and deleting more than 1 billion users' faceprints, a company official said Tuesday.The move means more than one-third of Facebook’s daily active users – about 640 million people – who have opted into the social network's facial recognition option no longer will be automatically recognized in photos and videos, said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, the newly named parent company of Facebook, in a blog post. Also affected: Facebook's automatic alt text system, which uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence to give those who are blind or visually impaired descriptions of images that let them know when they or a friend are in an image.►The Facebook Papers: 17 news orgs examined them, found struggles with sex trafficking, hate speech, more►'Never Meta worse idea': Facebook's new name gives critics fresh chance to roast companyFacebook is taking this action,  » Read More

Facebook announced that it will shut down the social service’s facial-recognition system, and as part of that will delete more than 1 billion people’s individual facial-recognition templates. For more than a decade, Facebook has used the opt-in system to automatically recognize people in photos and videos shared on the service. But the technology has drawn fire from privacy advocates and regulators for years. Last year Facebook agreed to pay $650 million to settle class-action litigation alleging the tech giant violated users’ privacy via its photo-tagging feature that uses the face-recognition system — one of the biggest ever amounts in a privacy lawsuit. “We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” Jerome Pesenti, VP of artificial intelligence at Meta (the new corporate name of Facebook), wrote in a blog post Tuesday. In the next few weeks, Facebook’s Face Recognition system will be shuttered as part of “a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products,” Pesenti added.  » Read More

Facebook will delete the “faceprints” of more than a billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the “many concerns” about using the technology.The social media network has been under political, legal and regulatory pressure over its use of the software, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos – and let’s them know if a fellow user has posted a photo or video with them in it – if they have opted in to the feature. In a statement, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said it would shut down facial recognition on the platform over the coming weeks and delete 1 billion facial recognition templates.Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, said the technology had helped visually impaired and blind users identify their friends in images and can help prevent fraud and impersonation. But Pesenti said the advantages needed to be weighed against “growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole”.“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society,  » Read More