#meta

#meta

Concord, NH - Attorney General John M. Formella and a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general are calling on Meta to better enforce its own policies about pharmaceutical and wellness ads on Instagram and Facebook and take additional measures to prevent AI-generated weight loss content in ads. These ads are likely to see an uptick during the holiday season and the new year, when conversations around weight loss and appearance tend to increase.

The unholy alliance between Big Tech and China goes far beyond TikTok, which recently reached a deal to survive in the U.S. by divesting its American operations from non-Chinese ownership. Even American-owned tech giants are deep under the covers with the Chinese, as evidenced by a new Reuters report that examines the relationship between Facebook's parent company Meta and China. The report concludes that Meta takes in billions in ad revenue from China while only loosely policing fraud and other illegal content in those ads.

Meta announced on Tuesday an update to its AI glasses that will allow you to better hear people talking when you're in a noisy environment. The feature will initially become available on Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN smartglasses in the U.S. and Canada, the company says. In addition, the glasses are getting another update that lets you use Spotify to play a song that matches what's in your current view.

Internet users have been buzzing ever since learning that the messages they choose to exchange with Meta's AI chatbot will be analyzed and used to personalize advertisements and recommendations across its apps and services. The topic and viral social media posts from tech influencers caused some users to enter a panic, worried that this is one example of AI being taken too far and potentially invading privacy.

It's clear that there are a lot of new opportunities to use new AI advances to accelerate our core business that should have strong ROI over the next few years, so I think we should invest more there [...] our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there too.

It may sound like a trip through the produce aisle, but leading AI companies have something much more important on their lists. Meta, OpenAI, and Google have all relied on food-related names for their sometimes secretive plans for future AI models. Thinking with your stomach is nothing new for Silicon Valley, just look at the assortment of desserts Android assembled over the years before Google had its fill.

[Meta was] never interested in a truly open source model approach, just an open weights model approach. To really commit to open source, [it] would have to be willing to share its training data and give up control over model governance.

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, "[Meta was] never interested in a truly open source model approach, just an open weights model approach. To really commit to open source, [it] would have to be willing to share its training data and give up control over model governance." Weights, he said, "are just the different knobs along the neural pathways that can be tweaked when training a model.

Zuckerberg, Chen said, has personally "hand-cooked" and "hand-delivered" soup to researchers he wanted to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn't a joke, the executive insisted. "It was shocking to me at the time," Chen admitted. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you must respond in kind. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his own recruits as he hopes to poach talent from Meta.

The toxicity of his products is exceeded only by his gormless demeanour (let he who is without sin, cast the first stone). Yet, even those who consider him an enemy of humanity must admit that Zuckerberg possesses a talented grasp on the fundamentals of technology trends. Despite the clinical efficiency of his businesses in spreading misery, or perhaps proof of how well the product has been engineered underneath the hood - offerings like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, it is fair to acknowledge, are tightly-built products.

One company removed from the platform is C'est La Vie, which claimed to be a longstanding jewellery retailer run by Patrick and Eileen in Birmingham but had a returns address in China. Mabel & Daisy, which used AI generated pictures of a mother and daughter and claimed to sell "timeless clothing" from a shop in Bristol, has also been removed from the platform after it was exposed for selling cheap items from a base in Hong Kong.

A significant new court filing claims Facebook and Instagram owner Meta had a 17x policy allowing sex traffickers to post content related to sexual solicitation or prostitution 16 times before their accounts were suspended on the 17th strike. The allegation is one of many in the filing claiming Meta chose profit and user engagement over the safety and well-being of children.

The research, code-named "Project Mercury," took place in 2020. Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to see what impact deactivating Facebook had on people. According to internal documents, "people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison." According to the filings, instead of pursuing more research, Meta dropped the project, claiming that participants' feedback was biased by "the result of the existing media narrative around the company."

investigate and, if appropriate, bring enforcement actions against Meta for its facilitation of and profiting from criminal investment scams, fake government benefits schemes, deepfake pornography, and other fraudulent activities.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported internal documents from late 2024 stated Meta expected to earn about 10% of its revenue that year, about $16 billion, from illicit advertising. One document noted Meta earns $3.5 billion in revenue from "higher risk" scam ads every six months. Other documents stated that Meta's anti-fraud rules didn't appear to apply to many ads that regulators and the company's own staff believed "violated the spirit" of its rules against scam advertising.

Meta allegedly gave accounts engaged in the "trafficking of humans for sex" 16 chances before suspending them, according to testimony from the company's former head of safety and wellbeing, Vaishnavi Jayakumar. The testimony - along with several other claims that Meta ignored problems if they increased engagement - surfaced in an unredacted court filing related to a social media child safety lawsuit filed by school districts across the country.

Meta's impressive, photorealistic digital replicas of real places built using its "Hyperscape" capture tech, which uses the cameras on a Quest 3 or Quest 3S VR headset to scan a room, have so far been solitary spaces. If you wanted to visit a virtual version of a room in your house (or of Gordon Ramsay's home kitchen), you could only do it on your own.