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The social network wrongly bowed to government demands to take down content in the countries, employees said, in more signs of internal dissent.Migrant workers waited for trains to leave Mumbai in April. The government ordered social media companies to remove posts about its handling of the pandemic.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York TimesJune 3, 2021Updated 12:16 p.m. ETSAN FRANCISCO — When India’s government ordered Facebook and other tech companies to take down posts critical of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic in April, the social network complied on some posts.But once it did, its employees flocked to online chat rooms to ask why Facebook had helped Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India stifle dissent. In one internal post, which was reviewed by The New York Times, an employee with family in India accused Facebook of “being afraid” that Mr. Modi would ban the company from doing business in the country. “We can’t act or make decisions out of fear,” he wrote.  » Read More

by Martin Brinkmann on June 03, 2021 in Facebook - Last Update: June 03, 2021 - 4 comments WhatsApp users who don't accept the new privacy policies of the service won't have their accounts deleted or functionality limited, after all.Facebook introduced updated terms of service and a new privacy policy for its popular messaging service some time ago. The company extended the deadline once but stuck to May 15, 2021 despite far reaching user protests and media coverage on the situation.Users of WhatsApp who would not accept the new terms and the privacy policy would have their functionality limited up until recently. The staged reduction of functionality would remove the ability to initiate chats or calls before options to respond to chats or calls would be removed as well, and eventually the termination of the account.A published FAQ page about the changes and consequences of not accepting the terms and new policy on the WhatsApp website was updated recently,  » Read More

Attendees walk past a Facebook logo during Facebook's F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, April 30, 2019.Stephen Lam | ReutersFacebook on Wednesday announced a number of new developer tools, including several messaging features for businesses, at its virtual F8 software developer conference.The event marked Facebook's first software developer conference since 2019, as the Covid pandemic forced the company to cancel last year's event.This year, Facebook placed a focus on new features to help businesses communicate with consumers directly via its messaging services. This is a key focus for Facebook, which is seeking to enable more e-commerce transactions directly on its services and enable businesses to handle more of their customer support via Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.Here are some key announcements:Messenger API for Instagram: Facebook announced that all businesses will now have access to the application program interface, or API, for messaging on Instagram. This will make it easier for businesses to automate and manage direct message communication with users.  » Read More

At today’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced new capabilities for Spark AR, its flagship AR creation software. Since Spark AR was announced at F8 2017, more than 600,000 creators from 190 countries have published over 2 million AR effects on Facebook and Instagram, making it the largest mobile AR platform, according to Facebook. If you’ve ever posted a selfie on your Instagram story with an effect that gave you green hair, or let you control a dog’s facial expression by moving your own face, then you’ve used Spark AR.  Soon, these AR effects will be available for video calling on Messenger, Instagram, and Portal with the introduction of a Multipeer API. Creators can develop effects that bring call participants together by using a shared AR effect. As an example, Spark AR shared a promo video of a birthday party held over a video call, in which an AR party hat appears on each of the participants’ heads.  Creators can also develop games for users to play during their video calls.  » Read More

Staff reports  |  Observer-Dispatch5 p.m.: – Media, TV, Cable, and Internet Committee – The committee will meet regarding the creation of a council Facebook page.6 p.m. – Pre-Meeting Conference/Committee of the Whole. Legislation to be reviewed in conference:Resolution to amend appendix A to section 2-2-86 of the Utica City Code: This legislation, if passed, will add the Harbor Point Land Development Corporation to the list of required to submit Financial Disclosures.Resolution to set the dates of the July and August meetings of the City of Utica Common Council. The council meets once in July and once in August during each calendar year.Resolution to create and govern a City of Utica Common Council Facebook page.Introductory Local Law to Establish Juneteenth as a public holiday in the City of Utica, NY.7 p.m. – Main Meeting, Common Council Floor: The council may introduce and/or act on any legislation discussed, reviewed, or offered in the pre-meeting conference, as well as legislation in committee.  » Read More

by: Jennifer Bullock Posted: Jun 1, 2021 / 04:27 PM EDT / Updated: Jun 1, 2021 / 04:28 PM EDT A man holds a smart phone with the icons for the social networking apps Facebook, Instagram and Twitter seen on the screen in Moscow on March 23, 2018. (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo credit should read KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images) COLUMBUS (WCMH) — Facebook announced in April that the personal information of more than 500 million users appeared on a website used by hackers. Cybersecurity expert Mike Moran, with Affiliated Resource Group, said this isn’t a new problem for social media sites. “Unfortunately, they all get hacked,” said Moran. “And Facebook has people that get hacked every day.” In this case, Facebook appears to have a wide-reaching problem involving hacked accounts, where the rightful owners, including many of who called Better Call 4, are unable to get them back, even after reaching out to the social media giant directly.  » Read More

Should dining in be allowed to resume with one diner per table? I think the main problem is that people tend to linger and talk without masks. Even with one person sitting per table, at such close proximity in our hawker centres and food courts, there is still a risk of transmission. Wong Kin Mun Frankly, two per table with no mingling is okay, so that businesses are still sustainable. But it must be very strictly adhered to. Micheka Lee Suet Fong Get the unlinked cases sorted, then we will all go out and eat to our heart's content. Yvonne Choy Sook Yee Why not install sneeze guard shields on all tables, this way it can be safe to dine-in. Only that the shields need to be disinfected after each use. Emdy MK Economically speaking, allowing one diner per table would not be good for F&B, because when that happens, then there could be no support (which they are hardly getting right now) from the Government and overheads alone would kill most restaurants.  » Read More

MENLO PARK (California) • Facebook said last Wednesday it would take "stronger" action against people who repeatedly share misinformation on the platform. Facebook will reduce the distribution of all posts in its news feed from a user account if it frequently shares content that has been flagged as false by one of the company's fact-checking partners, the social media giant said in a blog post. The company already does this for Pages and Groups that post misinformation, but it had not previously extended the same policy to individual users. Facebook declined to specify how many times a user's posts have to be flagged before the new punishment kicks in. The California-based company will also start showing users a pop-up message if they click to "like" a page that routinely shares misinformation, alerting them that fact-checkers have previously flagged that page's posts. "This will help people make an informed decision about whether they want to follow the Page," the company said. False claims and conspiracies have proliferated on social media platforms,  » Read More

By Gerald Krueger  |  American News columnistWe wonder just how many folks get hooked on the wide world of the internet and all of the associated perks. Sometimes we get a little embarrassed at how much we are slaves to things that bring good feelings and satisfaction.An example is the SiriusXM Satellite Radio. We have three subscriptions and would never give them up. This old guy even has SiriusXM in my tractor and would never give that up.We are die-hard fans of country music, relaxing music, humor or stand-up comedy and oldies but goodies. So, our first choice on SiriusXM is channel 59, Willie's Roadhouse and Dallas Wayne and all his pals that serve as DJs. Recently we discovered channel 104 and it takes us back to yesteryear with the old comedians like Jack Benny, Red Skeleton and Richard Pryor to name a few.Of course we subscribe to OnStar, and that becomes a bit of an ordeal because sometimes the folks you visit with are hard to understand,  » Read More

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/dynaboard-moving-beyond-accuracy-to-holistic-model-evaluation-in-nlp Last year, Facebook AI released Dynabench, a platform that radically rethinks benchmarking in AI, starting with natural language processing (NLP) models. Going forward, they have now announced a new evaluation-as-a-service platform for comprehensive, standardized evaluations of NLP models called Dynaboard. Dynaboard can perform apples-to-apples comparisons dynamically without common issues from bugs in evaluation code, inconsistencies in filtering test data, backward compatibility, accessibility, and several other reproducibility issues. Dynaboard enables AI researchers to customize a new Dynascore metric based on multiple axes of evaluation, including compute, accuracy, robustness, memory, and fairness. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/dynaboard-moving-beyond-accuracy-to-holistic-model-evaluation-in-nlp Dynascore allows AI researchers to dynamically adjust the default score by placing more or less weight on particular metrics to evaluate performance comprehensively. This capability is an essential feature of Dynascore since every person who uses leaderboards has different preferences and goals. Since launching Dynabench, Facebook AI has collected over 400,000 examples and has released two new, challenging data sets. Facebook AI believes that as the AI community continues to build on its open platform,  » Read More