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The Facebook PapersOne of the most pressing questions is whether the Securities and Exchange Commission will significantly add to the company’s woes.Credit...Illustration by Mel Haasch; Photograph by Getty ImagesOct. 26, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — In recent weeks, Facebook’s stock has fallen roughly 5 percent, shaving billions off its market value. Lawmakers have introduced laws that could weaken the company’s legal protections. Shareholders filed a resolution to dilute the power of its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.All of that has been in response to the thousands of pages of internal research and testimony provided by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager. She has said the documents show that the company chooses profits before the safety of users. Many of the documents, called the Facebook Papers, were shared with a consortium of news organizations that included The New York Times.Now one of the most pressing questions is whether the Securities and Exchange Commission — the federal agency where Ms.  » Read More

CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he believes people will start seeing Facebook as a metaverse company in the next five years. Illustration by James Martin/CNET At its annual conference Thursday, Facebook is expected to unveil more details about its vision for the future of virtual reality and augmented reality.The social media giant has been betting big on what it calls the "metaverse,"a virtual space where people can be present with friends and family like they're there in person. Work on the metaverse has already begun. Facebook has been building new versions of its VR headsets and recently partnered with Ray-Ban on its first pair of smart glasses. Get the CNET Daily News newsletter Catch up on the biggest news stories in minutes. Delivered on weekdays. "I view this work as critical to our mission because delivering a sense of presence -- like you're right there with another person -- that's the holy grail of online social experience," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday,  » Read More

The results were a continuation of the company’s strong financial performance during the coronavirus pandemic, which has pushed people indoors toward their computers and other devices.Credit...Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesOct. 25, 2021Updated 6:02 p.m. ETFacebook said on Monday that revenue rose 35 percent to $29 billion in the three months ending in September compared with the same period last year, while profits rose 17 percent to $9.2 billion, a sign of the social network’s financial strength as it faces a public relations crisis over troubling disclosures made by a former employee.Advertising revenue, which is responsible for the vast majority of Facebook’s income, rose 33 percent to $28.3 billion. “Other” revenue, which consists largely of sales of Facebook’s virtual-reality Oculus hardware, rose 195 percent to $734 million.Some 3.6 billion people now use one of Facebook’s apps every month, up 12 percent from a year earlier.“We made good progress this quarter and our community continues to grow,” said Mark Zuckerberg,  » Read More

A more complete portrait of how Facebook was vividly aware of its harmful effects came to light Monday, both at Frances Haugen’s testimony in front of the British Parliament and via a series of reports based on internal documents she leaked, deemed “The Facebook Papers.” During the 2.5 hour question-and-answer, Haugen repeatedly said that Facebook puts “growth over safety,” particularly in developing areas of the world where the company does not have language or cultural expertise to regulate content without fostering division among users. Here are the most explosive revelations from her Oct. 25 testimony and the internal documents. Facebook fails to moderate harmful content in developing countries The documents, confirmed by multiple news outlets, reveal that problems with hate speech and disinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world, where content moderation is often weaker. In India, Facebook reportedly did not have enough resources or expertise in the country’s 22 officially recognized languages, leaving the company unable to grapple with a rise in anti-Muslim posts and fake accounts tied to the country’s ruling party and opposition figures.  » Read More

Congressman Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6 select committee, said that the House January 6 select committee has issued subpoenas for social media companies, including Facebook, that may be relevant to the investigation.  » Read More

the media equationIn a time of mega-leaks, journalists’ sources have become power players. Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who shared company documents, led a meticulous media rollout.Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, testifying to a Senate panel earlier this month.Credit...Pool photo by Matt McclainOct. 24, 2021Updated 10:14 p.m. ETFrances Haugen first met Jeff Horwitz, a tech-industry reporter for The Wall Street Journal, early last December on a hiking trail near the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif.She liked that he seemed thoughtful, and she liked that he’d written about Facebook’s role in transmitting violent Hindu nationalism in India, a particular interest of hers. She also got the impression that he would support her as a person, rather than as a mere source who could supply him with the inside information she had picked up during her nearly two years as a product manager at Facebook.“I auditioned Jeff for a while,” Ms. Haugen told me in a phone interview from her home in Puerto Rico,  » Read More

The Facebook whistleblower whose revelations have tipped the social media giant into crisis has launched a stinging new criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, saying he has not shown any readiness to protect the public from the harm his company is causing.Frances Haugen told the Observer that Facebook’s founder and chief executive had not displayed a desire to run the company in a way that shields the public from the consequences of harmful content.Her intervention came as pressure mounted on the near-$1tn (£730m) business following a fresh wave of revelations based on documents leaked by Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The New York Times reported that workers had repeatedly warned that Facebook was being flooded with false claims about the 2020 presidential election result being fraudulent and believed the company should have done more to tackle it.Haugen, who appears before MPs and peers in Westminster on Monday, said Zuckerberg, who controls the business via a majority of its voting shares, has not shown any willingness to protect the public.  » Read More

Is it reputation damage control after the recent leaks or does Facebook have bigger plans for the future?Published: 23 Oct 2021, 6:50 PM ISTiAfter facing one of the biggest scandals in years over shocking internal documents, social media giant Facebook is changing its name. The name change, first reported by The Verge on 19 October, will be announce in the company’s upcoming annual Connect conference on 28 October.Valued at nearly a trillion dollars, Facebook along with the social media platform of the same name, also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and a host of other technology products like Oculus.Speaking to The Verge earlier this year in July, Facebook chairman and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said that in the next few years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”But what’s in a name? Is it reputation damage control after the recent whistleblower leak or does the company have bigger plans in the future?  » Read More

“It was like we could take a victory lap,” said a former employee, one of many who spoke for this story on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. “There was a lot of the feeling of high-fiving in the office.”Many who had worked on the election, exhausted from months of unrelenting toil, took leaves of absence or moved on to other jobs. Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of election-season measures that it had used to suppress hateful, deceptive content. A ban the company had imposed on the original Stop the Steal group stopped short of addressing dozens of look-alikes that popped up in what an internal Facebook after-action report called “coordinated” and “meteoric” growth. Meanwhile, the company’s Civic Integrity team was largely disbanded by a management that had grown weary of the team’s criticisms of the company, according to former employees.Story continues below advertisementBut the high fives, it soon became clear, were premature.On Jan. 6, Facebook staffers expressed their horror in internal messages as they watched thousands of Trump supporters shouting “stop the steal” and bearing the symbols of QAnon — a violent ideology that had spread widely on Facebook before an eventual crackdown — thronged…

A protester unleashes a smoke grenade in front of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images A protester unleashes a smoke grenade in front of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images Hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, angry Donald Trump supporters on Facebook coalesced around a rallying cry now synonymous with the siege on the U.S. Capitol: "Stop the Steal." Inside Facebook, employees were watching with concern. The presidential election may have passed without major incident, but in its wake, "angry vitriol and a slew of conspiracy theories" were fomenting, Facebook staff wrote in an internal report on the Stop the Steal movement earlier this year. Supporters perpetuated the lie that the election had been stolen from then-President Donald Trump — a lie that Trump himself had been stoking for months. By the time Facebook banned the first Stop the Steal group on Nov.  » Read More