2025-01-16
I don't have a normative point here and folks are obviously free to criticize a massively powerful and profitable company whenever they want. I also have my own feelings about the announced changes (largely not a fan). …
Wired
Four current Meta employees, citing internal discussions, say the actual number of full-time staff who will have to relocate from California to Texas is limited
Mark Zuckerberg said content moderation teams in California will relocate to Texas to help reduce bias.
Seeing a lot of outrage about Meta's recently announced changes from a ton of ppl who never made any effort to explain why the previous policies were good/worthwhile/industry leading, and, in a lot of cases, relentlessly attacked them as bad/windowdressing/insufficient/ ineffective etc. (tbc plenty of other folks who've provided a lot of nuanced and contextualized analysis all along) (1/2)
Wired
Four current Meta employees, citing internal discussions, say the actual number of full-time staff who will have to relocate from California to Texas is limited
Mark Zuckerberg said content moderation teams in California will relocate to Texas to help reduce bias.
2024-12-11
Have a ton of thoughts, most of which I'll keep to myself, but mostly this is really a shame for the incredible number of smart, talented folks who've done really great work there since the company's inception. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
GM says Cruise will exit the robotaxi business, combining Cruise's and GM's technical teams to focus on autonomous and driver safety tech for upcoming GM cars
Cruise and GM's technical teams will be combined into a single effort focused on developing autonomous technology to offer …
2024-09-25
People with more expertise should chime in, but I've certainly had a lot of proximity to T&S and my read of this is that there's zero automated enforcement and probably not even any classifiers being used to queue content for review...which is genuinely pretty hard to fathom on a platform of any scale.
Wired
X releases its first transparency report since Elon Musk took over; X took action on 2,361 accounts over hateful content in H1 2024, down from 1M in H2 2021
In the first half of 2024, the report says, X received nearly 67 million reports of hateful conduct, and took action on more than 2,000 accounts.
2024-07-19
Loved my time at Meta and mostly defend the company on here, but I feel like this should have happened years ago. When I was there (and I'd imagine even more-so after the subsequent series of layoffs) it was bewildering how immune RL often felt from any kind of normal accountability/success measures. https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
The Information
An ex-Reality Labs manager says Meta asked the unit to cut spending by ~20% from 2024 to 2026; Meta plans two Quest 4 versions in 2026 and a Quest Pro 2 in 2027
2024-03-16
It's peripherally relevant to consider the many times Meta apps have been temporarily or permanently banned by foreign countries—very occasionally for vaguely legitimate beefs but overwhelmingly for terrible reasons. …
New York Times
The TikTok divestment bill's progress slows down in the Senate, as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not decided whether to bring the bill to the floor
Legislation to force TikTok's Chinese owner to sell the app or have it banned in the United States sailed through the House, but the Senate has no plans to move hastily.
It's peripherally relevant to consider the many times Meta apps have been temporarily or permanently banned by foreign countries—very occasionally for vaguely legitimate beefs but overwhelmingly for terrible reasons. …
Gizmodo
Lawyers warn that the bill to ban TikTok unless it's sold gives POTUS unchecked power to ban any app or website the President deems a “national security threat”
2022-10-19
I found this statement from The Wire rather confusing, but pulling the stories down in the interim is an incredibly modest worthwhile first step. https://thewire.in/... https://twitter.com/...
Newslaundry
The Wire suspends its stories on Meta's controversial XCheck program until it carries out a “thorough review”; cited cybersecurity experts deny being consulted
2022-10-17
There seems to be a lot of ‘The Wire and Meta continue pointing fingers’ kind of commentary/reporting but the facts at this point seem pretty straightforward:
Meta
Meta says it found an externally-created Meta Workplace account that was used to spoof an internal Instagram system used as “evidence” for The Wire's reporting
This is an ongoing investigation and we will update as it unfolds. At this time, we can confirm that the video shared …
2022-10-11
Want to be measured here, but will just say that some of the claims in this story make zero sense and I'd view the entire thing with a TON of skepticism. https://twitter.com/...
The Wire
Source: Instagram removed 705 posts without oversight in India in September, after being flagged by Amit Malviya, the head of BJP's IT Cell, as part of XCheck
Want to be measured here, but will just say that some of the claims in this story make zero sense and I'd view the entire thing with a TON of skepticism. https://twitter.com/...
@andymstone
Meta says documentation in The Wire's article alleging Instagram removed posts flagged by a BJP member in India without oversight “appears to be fabricated”
@JeffHorwitz Where to even begin with this story?! X-check has nothing to do with the ability to report posts. The posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, ...
2022-09-21
Great reporting. xcheck was deeply flawed in the past and this sounds quite bad in its own right, but it's actually important that platforms *don't* treat all accounts identically when it comes to enforcement resources/robustness which needs to be talked about more 🧵 https://twitter.com/...
Forbes
Internal meetings: TikTok employed a two-tiered moderation system with “more lenient” treatment for influencers, celebrities, and other VIPs with 5M+ followers
2022-09-01
It's not immediately clear to me why Cloudflare's announcement isn't viewed in the same vein as Meta or Youtube announcing they were wrong to ban the most virulent terrorist or white supremacist orgs and wouldn't be doing it anymore.
VICE
After an outcry over serving anti-trans stalking forum Kiwi Farms, Cloudflare says denying security services due to “despicable” content is the wrong policy
2022-07-26
FB already doubled down on literally this exact type of content *years* ago and mostly just got told they were a shitty lame world-destroying app only olds like by the entire media ecosystem. Genuinely weird for me to see those same folks hand-wringing over product changes now https://twitter.com/...
TechCrunch
Instagram's new TikTok-inspired UI, which has rolled out to some users, lifts some dark patterns from TikTok, like no longer letting users quickly mute videos
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch :
FB already doubled down on literally this exact type of content *years* ago and mostly just got told they were a shitty lame world-destroying app only olds like by the entire media ecosystem. Genuinely weird for me to see those same folks hand-wringing over product changes now https://twitter.com/...
Insider
Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian post Stories sharing a petition to “Make Instagram Instagram Again” and “stop trying to be TikTok” that has 100K+ signatures
- Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian called on Instagram to “stop trying to be TikTok” on Monday.
2022-07-12
Many smarter ppl than me have said this but it's worth repeating that ‘bot’ is a term w functionally no meaning for platforms. You get all kinds of signals and then draw an educated line where you've decided behavior is authentic enough to allow. It's an artificial binary.
Wired
Twitter employees say it's a “shit show internally”, exasperated by weak leadership and lack of support amid targeted harassment from outside the company
Days after the deal to buy Twitter fell apart, fed-up employees say they are being kept in the dark.
Loved my time at Meta & vast majority of the ppl there are super talented. But I hope increased performance scrutiny makes its way up to the VP level as well. In my experience the small # of low performers aren't exclusively clustered around ICs https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
The Information
In an internal post, Meta Vice President of Remote Presence and Engineering Maher Saba instructed managers to identify and “move to exit” poor performers
Meta Platforms' Vice President of Remote Presence and Engineering Maher Saba has instructed managers to identify and …
Many smarter ppl than me have said this but it's worth repeating that ‘bot’ is a term w functionally no meaning for platforms. You get all kinds of signals and then draw an educated line where you've decided behavior is authentic enough to allow. It's an artificial binary.
Bloomberg
A look at Twitter's options as Musk tries to back out, such as suing for “expectation damages”, which may be capped at $1B, or suing for “specific performance”
Musk pays Twitter $5 billion or $10 billion or whatever to walk away — then that seems better to me than having a disgruntled Musk buy Twitter at a lower price,” Levine writes. Do ...
2022-05-06
an endlessly frustrating part of working at Meta was that the company was treated as a pariah that should be disbanded/destroyed *except* when it was more convenient to say we were an irreplaceable force for public good denying the citizenry access to critical info https://twitter.com/...
Wall Street Journal
Whistleblowers: Meta deliberately took down Pages for hospitals and other Australian institutions in 2021 as a negotiating tactic over the news bargaining law
When Facebook blocked news pages last year to pre-empt Australian legislation that would force it to pay for content …
2021-10-23
can confirm https://twitter.com/...
New York Times
Internal docs show the extent of Facebook's knowledge of extremist Groups on its site but don't offer a complete picture of its decision-making in response
Company documents show that the social network's employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies …