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Get ahead of new stories that are impacting the T&S industry.
Adults or Sexually Abused Minors? Getting It Right Vexes Facebook
NY times | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: Facebook
Facebook is a leader among tech companies in detecting child sexual abuse content, which has exploded on social media and across the internet in recent years. But concerns about mistakenly accusing people of posting illegal imagery have resulted in a policy that could allow photos and videos of abuse to go unreported.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, has instructed content moderators for its platforms to “err on the side of an adult” when they are uncertain about the age of a person in a photo or video, according to a corporate training document.
TikTok and Twitter capture Ukraine war in frighteningly real time
Latimes | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: TikTok
A snowy sidewalk strewn with bloodied bodies. A beleaguered president roaming the streets of a country under attack. Missiles streaming. Sirens wailing. Teens making homemade bombs. And dead soldiers, so many of them, lying crumpled in fields and slumped in smoldering tanks.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spawned a constant stream of online content, a deluge of audio-visuals that has countered Moscow’s disinformation campaign, spurred global leaders to action and helped, as they have in other recent conflicts in Syria and Ethiopia, change the way we see and understand war.
First lawsuit filed against ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law in Florida
Washingtonblade | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: Social Media
Mere days after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the first lawsuit against the measure has emerged, asserting the statute “would deny to an entire generation that LGBTQ people exist and have equal dignity.”
Among the lawyers who signed the complaint — filed Thursday before the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Florida — was Roberta Kaplan, who rose to fame for successfully arguing against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, as partner at the New York-based law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP.
How social media handles censorship and graphic content
Winknews | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: Social Media, TikTok
A video on social media that showed a 14-year-old falling from an Orlando ride is still up. But how can that be if politicians get in trouble for social media posts?
Right now, there is no law or regulation prohibiting people from posting that video on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, sometimes there will be a label saying that the video is graphic but displaying those is up to the platform.
As for the teen’s father, he found out about his son’s death on social media before law enforcement informed him.
That video of a 14-year-old falling more than 400 feet to his death is not something that WINK News would ever show, but social media has a different story. It has been plastered across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Facebook News Feed Bug Mistakenly Elevates Misinformation, Russian State Media
Mydroll | April 1, 2022
Company Listed: Facebook
A group of Facebook engineers identified a “massive ranking failure” that exposed as much as half of all News Feed views to “integrity risks” over the past six months, according to an internal report on the incident obtained by The Verge.
The engineers first noticed the issue last October, when a sudden surge of misinformation began flowing through the News Feed, notes the report, which was shared inside the company last week. Instead of suppressing dubious posts reviewed by the company’s network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30 percent globally. Unable to find the root cause, the engineers watched the surge subside a few weeks later and then flare up repeatedly until the ranking issue was fixed on March 11th.
Instagram Reels have a TikTok aggregation problem
Protocol | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: TikTok, Instagram
Meta’s big bet on Instagram Reels seems to be panning out so far. The short-form video tool is where Instagram users are getting the most likes, comments and shares, and Reels accounted for more than half of Facebook’s most-viewed posts in the last quarter of 2021. But there’s a catch: Some of the most popular Reels were on TikTok first. There's also no way to put this politely, but some of the other highly viewed Reels just aren’t that good.
About three-fourths of the most viewed Reels from last quarter were posted by anonymous accounts, and more than 80% came from accounts that just aggregate other people’s content, according to an analysis by the Integrity Institute that was originally provided to Recode. That includes reposts from TikTok, showing how even the viral content Meta craves to attract young people is still being created on the platform of one of its biggest competitors.
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Ex-Facebook Executive Calls for Regulating the Social-Media Site
Thestreet | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: Facebook
Facebook parent Meta Platforms (FB) - Get Meta Platforms Inc. Class A Report continues to struggle.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has made a number of strategic moves, including last year's dramatic rebranding to establishing an oversight board in 2018 to ensure accountability of its enforcement systems.
But critics say its content-moderation policies remain weaker than they should be and the social-media giant still hasn't fully explained how it will deal with problematic content.
Whistleblowers have leveled allegations about Facebook's work culture and that of related divisions, including photo- and video-sharing app Instagram.
Attorneys general call for TikTok, Snapchat to give parents more control over apps
Q13fox | Mar 31, 2022
Company Listed: TikTok
A group of attorneys general is pushing for TikTok and Snapchat to make their platforms safer for children by giving parents more control to protect them from harmful content.
The National Association of Attorneys General sent a letter Tuesday to Snapchat and TikTok calling for th