According to a joint investigation from The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Instagram's algorithms are actively promoting networks of pedophiles who commission and sell child sexual abuse content on the app. The Verge reports: Accounts found by the researchers are advertised using blatant and explicit hashtags like #pedowhore, #preteensex, and #pedobait. They offer "menus" of content for users to buy or commission, including videos and imagery of self-harm and bestiality. When researchers set up a test account and viewed content shared by these networks, they were immediately recommended more accounts to follow. As the WSJ reports: "Following just a handful of these recommendations was enough to flood a test account with content that sexualizes children."

In addition to problems with Instagram's recommendation algorithms, the investigation also found that the site's moderation practices frequently ignored or rejected reports of child abuse material. The WSJ recounts incidents where users reported posts and accounts containing suspect content (including one account that advertised underage abuse material with the caption "this teen is ready for you pervs") only for the content to be cleared by Instagram's review team or told in an automated message [...]. The report also looked at other platforms but found them less amenable to growing such networks. According to the WSJ, the Stanford investigators found "128 accounts offering to sell child-sex-abuse material on Twitter, less than a third the number they found on Instagram" despite Twitter having far fewer users, and that such content "does not appear to proliferate" on TikTok. The report noted that Snapchat did not actively promote such networks as it's mainly used for direct messaging.

In response to the report, Meta said it was setting up an internal task force to address the issues raised by the investigation. "Child exploitation is a horrific crime," the company said. "We're continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behavior." Meta noted that in January alone it took down 490,000 accounts that violated its child safety policies and over the last two years has removed 27 pedophile networks. The company, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, said it's also blocked thousands of hashtags associated with the sexualization of children and restricted these terms from user searches.

schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: When whistleblower Frances Haugen pulled back the curtain on Facebook in the fall of 2021, thousands of pages of internal documents showed troubling signs that the social media giant knew its platforms could be negatively impacting youth, and were doing little to effectively change it. With around 21 million American adolescents on social media, parents took note. Now, families are suing social media. Since we first reported this story last December, the number of families pursuing lawsuits has grown to over 2,000. More than 350 lawsuits are expected to move forward this year against TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Roblox and Meta -- the parent company to Instagram and Facebook.

Kathleen Spence: They're holding our children hostage and they're seeking and preying on them. Sharyn Alfonsi: Preying on them? Kathleen Spence: Yes. The Spence family is suing social media giant Meta. Kathleen and Jeff Spence say Instagram led their daughter Alexis into depression and to an eating disorder at the age of 12. [...] Attorney Matt Bergman represents the Spence family. He started the Social Media Victims Law Center after reading the Facebook papers and is now working with more than 1,800 families who are pursuing lawsuits against social media companies like Meta. Matt Bergman: Time and time again, when they have an opportunity to choose between safety of our kids and profits, they always choose profits.

This summer, Bergman and his team plan on starting the discovery process for the federal case against Meta and other social media companies, a multi-million dollar suit that he says is more about changing policy than financial compensation. This summer, Bergman and his team plan on starting the discovery process for the federal case against Meta and other social media companies, a multi-million dollar suit that he says is more about changing policy than financial compensation. Matt Bergman: They have intentionally designed a product that is addictive. They understand that if children stay online, they make more money. It doesn't matter how harmful the material is.

Security guru Bruce Schneier and CS professor Jim Waldo think big tech has underestimated the impact of open source principles on AI research: In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn't just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it to do things no one else anticipated. And their results have been immediate, innovative, and an indication of how the future of this technology is going to play out. Training speeds have hugely increased, and the size of the models themselves has shrunk to the point that you can create and run them on a laptop. The world of A.I. research has dramatically changed.

This development hasn't made the same splash as other corporate announcements, but its effects will be much greater. It will wrest power from the large tech corporations, resulting in both much more innovation and a much more challenging regulatory landscape. The large corporations that had controlled these models warn that this free-for-all will lead to potentially dangerous developments, and problematic uses of the open technology have already been documented. But those who are working on the open models counter that a more democratic research environment is better than having this powerful technology controlled by a small number of corporations...

[B]uilding on public models like Meta's LLaMa, the open-source community has innovated in ways that allow results nearly as good as the huge models — but run on home machines with common data sets. What was once the reserve of the resource-rich has become a playground for anyone with curiosity, coding skills, and a good laptop.

Bigger may be better, but the open-source community is showing that smaller is often good enough. This opens the door to more efficient, accessible, and resource-friendly LLMs.
Low-cost customization will foster rapid innovation, the article argues, and "takes control away from large companies like Google and OpenAI." Although this may have one unforeseen consequence...

"Now that the open-source community is remixing LLMs, it's no longer possible to regulate the technology by dictating what research and development can be done; there are simply too many researchers doing too many different things in too many different countries."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for submitting the article

New submitter Peppercopia writes: CTV News is reporting that Meta will begin testing the blocking of news sites in Canada. If the argument is that the social media giants are unfairly benefitting from content from Canadian news organizations, this move should be moot as the 'stealing' would now be stopping. Unfortunately the opposite is likely the case, and the news organizations will find out how important the free traffic and promotion they are getting from social media giants really is. It feels a bit like killing the golden goose to get the eggs. The move is designed to "work out the kinks" before permanently blocking news on its platforms when the Canadian government passes the Online News Act. According to CTV News, the test "will affect up to five percent of its 24 million Canadian users."

"The company says the randomly selected users won't be able to see some content including news links as well as reels, which are short-form videos, and stories, which are photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours." Media organizations will be chosen at random.

Meta announced that it would remove news content from its platform in California if the state government passes legislation requiring tech companies to pay publishers. Reuters reports: The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act would require "online platforms" to pay a "journalism usage fee" to news providers whose work appears on their services, aimed at reversing a decline in the local news sector. In a tweeted statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the payment structure a "slush fund" and said the bill would primarily benefit "big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers."

The statement was Meta's first on the California bill specifically, although the company has been waging similar battles over compensation for news publishers at the federal level and in countries outside the United States.

Britain's competition watchdog on Friday said social media giant Meta had offered to limit its use of other businesses' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace service to address the regulator's competition concerns. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to accept the commitments, which include advertisers being able to opt out of allowing their data to be used to improve the Facebook Marketplace classified ads platform. CMA executive director of enforcement Michael Grenfell said: "Reducing the risk of Meta unfairly exploiting the data of businesses who advertise on its platform for its own competitive advantage could help many UK businesses who advertise there. We are now consulting on these commitments which we believe, at this stage, will address our concerns."

Meta employees received news Wednesday of the final round of previously announced job cuts, which affected thousands of workers in the company's business departments. Now, remaining staff are hoping an uncomfortable limbo at the company can end. From a report: The layoffs complete the bulk of the restructuring Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced in March to eliminate 10,000 positions. Initial reductions affected the company's recruiting and human resources departments, and in late April jobs in Meta's tech groups were slashed. Zuckerberg has said further cuts will come in only a "small number of cases" for the rest of the year, giving those people left a cold sense of relief.

The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said the layoffs were necessary to improve efficiency, after over-hiring during the pandemic. Meta promised faster product development and decision-making that sent its shares up more than 100% so far this year. But employees said some important work and planning has been at a standstill. Notably, Meta is still deciding on its product roadmap for the rest of the year, while it sorts out resources following cuts in the tech group, a person familiar with the matter said. During the limbo, employees have been unsure who to collaborate with, how to shift responsibilities on their teams or who would be cut next, according to current and recently let-go employees, who asked not to be named discussing internal issues.

Facebook's parent company Meta is reportedly in discussions with augmented reality start-up Magic Leap to establish a multiyear agreement for intellectual property licensing and contract manufacturing in North America. While the partnership is not expected to result in a joint headset, Magic Leap's technology could play a crucial role in Meta's ambitious metaverse project as it seeks to compete with Apple's upcoming mixed reality device. The Financial Times reports: Magic Leap produces custom components, including high-tech lenses and associated software, which are key technologies that may be required to build a metaverse. Two former employees said Magic Leap's "biggest asset" is the sophistication of its "waveguides" -- technology that allows thin glass in front of the user's eyes to conjure up realistic images at different depths.

Meta sells nearly 80 per cent of all VR/AR headsets, thanks to its VR Quest models. But the market itself is small -- fewer than 9mn units sold last year, according to IDC -- a tenuous lead given Apple's expected entry into the market during its developer conference next month. The company told the Financial Times: "Given the complexities of developing true augmented reality technologies and the intricacies involved with manufacturing these optics, as well as the issues many companies experience with overseas supply chain dependencies, we have entered into several non-exclusive IP licensing and manufacturing partnerships with companies looking to enter the AR market or expand their current position."

Facebook owner Meta was hit by a record $1.3 billion European Union privacy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users' data to the US after regulators said it failed to protect personal information from the prying eyes of American security services. Bloomberg News: The social network giant's continued data transfers to the US didn't address "the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms" of people whose data was being transfered across the Atlantic, according to a decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission announced on Monday. On top of the fine, which eclipses a $806 million EU privacy penalty previously doled out to Amazon, Meta was given five months to "suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US" and six months to stop "the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US" of transferred personal EU data. A data-transfers ban for Meta was widely expected and once prompted the US firm to threaten a total withdrawal from the EU. But its impact has now been muted by the transition phase given in the decision and the prospect of a new EU-US data flows agreement that could already be operational by the middle of this year.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.

Meta's new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its "in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads," Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post... But the MTIA chip is seemingly a long ways away: it's not set to come out until 2025, TechCrunch reports.
Meta has been working on "a massive project to upgrade its AI infrastructure in the past year," Reuters reports, "after executives realized it lacked the hardware and software to support demand from product teams building AI-powered features."

As a result, the company scrapped plans for a large-scale rollout of an in-house inference chip and started work on a more ambitious chip capable of performing training and inference, Reuters reported...

Meta said it has an AI-powered system to help its engineers create computer code, similar to tools offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
TechCrunch calls these announcements "an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft."

Meta's VP of Infrastructure told TechCrunch "This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale." Over the past decade or so, Meta has spent billions of dollars recruiting top data scientists and building new kinds of AI, including AI that now powers the discovery engines, moderation filters and ad recommenders found throughout its apps and services. But the company has struggled to turn many of its more ambitious AI research innovations into products, particularly on the generative AI front. Until 2022, Meta largely ran its AI workloads using a combination of CPUs — which tend to be less efficient for those sorts of tasks than GPUs — and a custom chip designed for accelerating AI algorithms...

The MTIA is an ASIC, a kind of chip that combines different circuits on one board, allowing it to be programmed to carry out one or many tasks in parallel... Custom AI chips are increasingly the name of the game among the Big Tech players. Google created a processor, the TPU (short for "tensor processing unit"), to train large generative AI systems like PaLM-2 and Imagen. Amazon offers proprietary chips to AWS customers both for training (Trainium) and inferencing (Inferentia). And Microsoft, reportedly, is working with AMD to develop an in-house AI chip called Athena.

Meta says that it created the first generation of the MTIA — MTIA v1 — in 2020, built on a 7-nanometer process. It can scale beyond its internal 128 MB of memory to up to 128 GB, and in a Meta-designed benchmark test — which, of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt — Meta claims that the MTIA handled "low-complexity" and "medium-complexity" AI models more efficiently than a GPU. Work remains to be done in the memory and networking areas of the chip, Meta says, which present bottlenecks as the size of AI models grow, requiring workloads to be split up across several chips. (Not coincidentally, Meta recently acquired an Oslo-based team building AI networking tech at British chip unicorn Graphcore.) And for now, the MTIA's focus is strictly on inference — not training — for "recommendation workloads" across Meta's app family...

If there's a common thread in today's hardware announcements, it's that Meta's attempting desperately to pick up the pace where it concerns AI, specifically generative AI... In part, Meta's feeling increasing pressure from investors concerned that the company's not moving fast enough to capture the (potentially large) market for generative AI. It has no answer — yet — to chatbots like Bard, Bing Chat or ChatGPT. Nor has it made much progress on image generation, another key segment that's seen explosive growth.

If the predictions are right, the total addressable market for generative AI software could be $150 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts that it'll raise GDP by 7%. Even a small slice of that could erase the billions Meta's lost in investments in "metaverse" technologies like augmented reality headsets, meetings software and VR playgrounds like Horizon Worlds.

The Supreme Court on Thursday sidestepped a case against Google that might have allowed more lawsuits against social media companies. From a report: The justices' decision returns to a lower court the case of a family of an American college student who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris. The family wants to sue Google for YouTube videos they said helped attract IS recruits and radicalize them. Google claims immunity from the lawsuit under a 1996 law that generally shields social media company for content posted by others. Lower courts agreed with Google. The justices had agreed to consider whether the legal shield is too broad. But in arguments in February, several sounded reluctant to weigh in now. In an unsigned opinion Thursday, the court wrote that it was declining to address the law at issue.

Big tech companies accounting for more than 5% of a telecoms provider's peak average internet traffic should help fund the rollout of 5G and broadband across Europe, according to a draft proposal by the telecoms industry. From a report: The proposal is part of feedback to the European Commission which launched a consultation into the issue in February. The deadline for responses is Friday. Alphabet's Google, Apple, Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon, Netflix and TikTok would most likely be hit with fees, according to industry estimates. Google, Apple, Meta, Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft together account for more than half of data internet traffic.

The document, which was reviewed by Reuters and has not been published, was compiled by telecoms lobbying groups GSMA and ETNO. They represent 160 operators in Europe, including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Telecom Italia. Telecom operators have lobbied for years for leading technology companies to help foot the bill for 5G and broadband roll-out, saying that they create a huge part of the region's internet traffic. This is the first time they have tried to define a threshold for who should pay.

Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy, "punctuating a yearslong descent from a new-media darling to a cautionary tale of the problems facing the digital publishing industry," writes Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin via the New York Times. The media company was once valued at $5.7 billion back in 2017. From the report: The bankruptcy will not interrupt daily operations for Vice's businesses, which in addition to its flagship website include the ad agency Virtue, the Pulse Films division and Refinery29, a women-focused site acquired by Vice in 2019. A group of Vice's lenders, including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, is in the leading position to acquire the company out of bankruptcy. The group has submitted a bid of $225 million, which would be covered by its existing loans to the company. It would also take over "significant liabilities" from Vice after any deal closes. A sale process follows next. The lenders have secured a $20 million loan to continue operating Vice and then, if a better bid does not emerge, the group that includes Fortress and Soros will acquire Vice.

Investments from media titans like Disney and shrewd financial investors like TPG, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars, will be rendered worthless by the bankruptcy, cementing Vice's status among the most notable bad bets in the media industry. Like some of its peers in the digital-media industry, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, Vice and its investors bet big on the rising power of social media networks like Facebook and Instagram, anticipating they would deliver a tide of young, upwardly mobile readers that advertisers craved. Though readers came by the millions, new media companies had trouble wringing profits from them, and the bulk of digital ad dollars went to the major tech platforms.

Trend Micro researchers at Black Hat Asia are warning that millions of Android devices worldwide come pre-infected with malicious firmware before the devices leave their factories. "This hardware is mainly cheapo Android mobile devices, though smartwatches, TVs, and other things are caught up in it," reports The Register. From the report: This insertion of malware began as the price of mobile phone firmware dropped, we're told. Competition between firmware distributors became so furious that eventually the providers could not charge money for their product. "But of course there's no free stuff," said [Trend Micro researcher Fyodor Yarochkin], who explained that, as a result of this cut-throat situation, firmware started to come with an undesirable feature -- silent plugins. The team analyzed dozens of firmware images looking for malicious software. They found over 80 different plugins, although many of those were not widely distributed. The plugins that were the most impactful were those that had a business model built around them, were sold on the underground, and marketed in the open on places like Facebook, blogs, and YouTube.

The objective of the malware is to steal info or make money from information collected or delivered. The malware turns the devices into proxies which are used to steal and sell SMS messages, take over social media and online messaging accounts, and used as monetization opportunities via adverts and click fraud. One type of plugin, proxy plugins, allow the criminal to rent out devices for up to around five minutes at a time. For example, those renting the control of the device could acquire data on keystrokes, geographical location, IP address and more. "The user of the proxy will be able to use someone else's phone for a period of 1200 seconds as an exit node," said Yarochkin. He also said the team found a Facebook cookie plugin that was used to harvest activity from the Facebook app.

Through telemetry data, the researchers estimated that at least millions of infected devices exist globally, but are centralized in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. A statistic self-reported by the criminals themselves, said the researchers, was around 8.9 million. As for where the threats are coming from, the duo wouldn't say specifically, although the word "China" showed up multiple times in the presentation, including in an origin story related to the development of the dodgy firmware. Yarochkin said the audience should consider where most of the world's OEMs are located and make their own deductions.

The team confirmed the malware was found in the phones of at least 10 vendors, but that there was possibly around 40 more affected. For those seeking to avoid infected mobile phones, they could go some way of protecting themselves by going high end. That is to say, you'll find this sort of bad firmware in the cheaper end of the Android ecosystem, and sticking to bigger brands is a good idea though not necessarily a guarantee of safety. "Big brands like Samsung, like Google took care of their supply chain security relatively well, but for threat actors, this is still a very lucrative market," said Yarochkin.

A study commissioned by Meta has found that the metaverse could contribute around 2.4% to U.S. annual GDP by 2035, equating to as much as $760 billion. Reuters reports: The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or overlay information digitally on images of the real world, according to the report by consulting firm Deloitte. Economic gains may come from the use of the technologies in the defense, medical and manufacturing sectors, plus entertainment use cases such as video games and communication, the report said.

Social media giant Meta, which pivoted its focus on building metaverse technologies in 2021, has forecast the tech would eventually replace mobile as the main computing platform. In a separate report, Meta said the European Union may see an increased economic opportunity of up to 489 billion euros ($538.29 billion) in annual GDP by 2035 or about 1.3%-2.4% of its total GDP. The metaverse could contribute between C$45.3 billion ($33.88 billion) and C$85.5 billion to Canada's annual GDP by 2035, Deloitte said. Last year, a Meta-funded report estimated that metaverse adoption would contribute $3.01 trillion by 2031.

LinkedIn, the networking platform used by millions of employees and companies, said on Monday it will pare down its operations in China, capping a multiyear pullback that exemplified the challenges of running a foreign business in China. From a report: The company, owned by Microsoft, said it will lay off 716 employees worldwide, including teams dedicated to engineering and marketing in China, because of slumping demand. It did not say how many of those layoffs will be in China. LinkedIn will also shut its China job posting app, a bare-bones version of its international service, by August. Users of the app, called InCareer, could only search for jobs and not post or share articles the way they can on LinkedIn.

When LinkedIn started a Chinese-language version of its website in 2014, it charted a path that its peers, including Facebook and Google, had shied away from. It partnered with local firms and began censoring the content of millions of Chinese customers in accordance with Beijing's strict laws. Several U.S. journalists and activists said their profiles had been blocked because of "prohibited content." The company said at the time that while it opposed government censorship, its absence in the country could deprive Chinese professionals of the chance to make professional connections.

Meta has announced a new open-source AI model that links together multiple streams of data, including text, audio, visual data, temperature, and movement readings. From a report: The model is only a research project at this point, with no immediate consumer or practical applications, but it points to a future of generative AI systems that can create immersive, multisensory experiences and shows that Meta continues to share AI research at a time when rivals like OpenAI and Google have become increasingly secretive. The core concept of the research is linking together multiple types of data into a single multidimensional index (or "embedding space," to use AI parlance). This idea may seem a little abstract, but it's this same concept that underpins the recent boom in generative AI.

Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. [...] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old in Kansas City, says he's done all kinds of work over the years. He's made fast-food sandwiches. He's been a custodian and a junk-hauler. And he's done technical sound work for live theater.

These days, though, his work is less hands-on: He's an artificial intelligence trainer.

Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next.

The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits... He credits the AI gig work — along with a previous job at the sandwich chain Jimmy John's — with helping to pull him out of homelessness.
"Their feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data," the article explains: "A lot of the discourse around AI is very congratulatory," said Sonam Jindal, the program lead for AI, labor and the economy at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that promotes research and education around artificial intelligence. "But we're missing a big part of the story: that this is still hugely reliant on a large human workforce," she said...

A spike in demand has arrived, and some AI contract workers are asking for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who've worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT voted Monday to form a union, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work, Time magazine reported... Time magazine reported in January that OpenAI relied on low-wage Kenyan laborers to label text that included hate speech or sexually abusive language so that its apps could do better at recognizing toxic content on their own. OpenAI has hired about 1,000 remote contractors in places such as Eastern Europe and Latin America to label data or train company software on computer engineering tasks, the online news outlet Semafor reported in January...

A spokesperson for OpenAI said no one was available to answer questions about its use of AI contractors.

The FTC is proposing to prevent Meta from monetizing children's data due to alleged violations of a 2020 privacy order. CNBC reports: According to the FTC, an independent assessor found "several gaps and weaknesses in Facebook's privacy program" that posed "substantial risks to the public." The company had agreed to independent assessments of its updated privacy program as part of the 2020 settlement, under which Facebook paid a $5 billion civil penalty following an FTC investigation around the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The FTC alleges Facebook also violated an earlier 2012 order by continuing to allow app developers access to private user information. Facebook allowed third-party apps to access user data until mid-2020 in some cases, the FTC alleges. The FTC is also accusing Meta of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule by misrepresenting parental controls on its Messenger Kids app. The COPPA Rule requires parental consent for websites to collect personal information from kids under 13. The FTC alleged that while the company marketed that the app would only allow kids to talk with contacts their parents approved, children were able to communicate with additional contacts in group chats or group video calls in some circumstances.

As a result, the FTC is proposing to strengthen the terms of the 2020 agreement to put additional restrictions on the company, which would apply to all of Meta's services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. The proposed terms include a blanket ban on monetizing data from users under 18. That means any data collected from these users could only be used for security reasons and any data collected while users are under age could not be later monetized once they turn 18. The FTC also seeks to impose a pause on the company's ability to launch new or modified products or services until the independent assessor confirms in writing that Meta's privacy program is in full compliance with the terms of the agreement. Compliance with the 2020 order would also extend to any companies Meta acquires or merges with. The proposal would also require Meta to get affirmative consent from users for future use of facial recognition technology. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone called the FTC's move a "political stunt." He said in a statement: "Despite three years of continual engagement with the FTC around our agreement, they provided no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory. We have spent vast resources building and implementing an industry-leading privacy program under the terms of our FTC agreement. We will vigorously fight this action and expect to prevail."