An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Meta has routinely fought data scrapers, but it also participated in that practice itself -- if not necessarily for the same reasons. Bloomberg has obtained legal documents from a Meta lawsuit against a former contractor, Bright Data, indicating that the Facebook owner paid its partner to scrape other websites. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the relationship in a discussion with Bloomberg, but said his company used Bright Data to build brand profiles, spot "harmful" sites and catch phishing campaigns, not to target competitors.

Stone added that data scraping could serve "legitimate integrity and commercial purposes" so long as it was done legally and honored sites' terms of service. Meta terminated its arrangement with Bright Data after the contractor allegedly violated company terms when gathering and selling data from Facebook and Instagram. Neither Bright Data nor Meta is saying which sites they scraped. Bright Data is countersuing Meta in a bid to keep scraping Facebook and Instagram, arguing that it only collects publicly available information and respects both European Union and US regulations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Millions of Americans have used GoodRx, a drug discount app, to search for lower prices on prescriptions like antidepressants, H.I.V. medications and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases at their local drugstores. But U.S. regulators say the app's coupons and convenience came at a high cost for users: wrongful disclosure of their intimate health information. On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission accused the app's developer, GoodRx Holdings, of sharing sensitive personal data on millions of users' prescription medications and illnesses with companies like Facebook and Google without authorization. [...]

From 2017 to 2020, GoodRx uploaded the contact information of users who had bought certain medications, like birth control or erectile dysfunction pills, to Facebook so that the drug discount app could identify its users' social media profiles, the F.T.C. said in a legal complaint. GoodRx then used the personal information to target users with ads for medications on Facebook and Instagram, the complaint said, "all of which was visible to Facebook." GoodRx also targeted users who had looked up information on sexually transmitted diseases on HeyDoctor, the company's telemedicine service, with ads for HeyDoctor's S.T.D. testing services, the complaint said. Those data disclosures, regulators said, flouted public promises the company had made to "never provide advertisers any information that reveals a personal health condition."

The company's information-sharing practices, the agency said, violated a federal rule requiring health apps and fitness trackers that collect personal health details to notify consumers of data breaches. While GoodRx agreed to settle the case, it said it disagreed with the agency's allegations and admitted no wrongdoing. The F.T.C.'s case against GoodRx could upend widespread user-profiling and ad-targeting practices in the multibillion-dollar digital health industry, and it puts companies on notice that regulators intend to curb the nearly unfettered trade in consumers' health details. [...] If a judge approves the proposed federal settlement order, GoodRx will be permanently barred from sharing users' health information for advertising purposes. To settle the case, the company also agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty for violating the health breach notification rule.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back. From a report: The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps. Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends. Artifact -- the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence -- is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok's For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A bug in a new centralized system that Meta created for users to manage their logins for Facebook and Instagram could have allowed malicious hackers to switch off an account's two-factor protections just by knowing their phone number. Gtm Manoz, a security researcher from Nepal, realized that Meta did not set up a limit of attempts when a user entered the two-factor code used to log into their accounts on the new Meta Accounts Center, which helps users link all their Meta accounts, such as Facebook and Instagram.

With a victim's phone number, an attacker would go to the centralized accounts center, enter the phone number of the victim, link that number to their own Facebook account, and then brute force the two-factor SMS code. This was the key step, because there was no upper limit to the amount of attempts someone could make. Once the attacker got the code right, the victim's phone number became linked to the attacker's Facebook account. A successful attack would still result in Meta sending a message to the victim, saying their two-factor was disabled as their phone number got linked to someone else's account.

Manoz found the bug in the Meta Accounts Center last year, and reported it to the company in mid-September. Meta fixed the bug a few days later, and paid Manoz $27,200 for reporting the bug. Meta spokesperson Gabby Curtis told TechCrunch that at the time of the bug the login system was still at the stage of a small public test. Curtis also said that Meta's investigation after the bug was reported found that there was no evidence of exploitation in the wild, and that Meta saw no spike in usage of that particular feature, which would signal the fact that no one was abusing it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kanter has been one of Google's main legal foes for nearly 15 years. Last week, as the nation's top antitrust cop, he delivered a threat to break up the internet company. Mr. Kanter, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for antitrust, filed a lawsuit alleging that Google is an illegal monopolist in the market for brokering ads on the internet. Some of the complaints trace back to early 2000s, when Mr. Kanter started questioning Google's role in the digital economy on behalf of his then-legal clients, including Microsoft.

The 140-page lawsuit, which Google, a unit of Alphabet, has said includes untrue allegations and misstatements about its business, embraces charges the government once wrote off as far-fetched. In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission, which also polices threats to competition, said Google wouldn't be able to smother rivals in the digital-advertising world and declined to block its purchase of DoubleClick, an ad broker that the Justice Department now says Google should be forced to sell. The DOJ's lawsuit alleges that threats the FTC dismissed actually came to pass. The company built a moat around its business matching web publishers' supply of ad space with advertisers' demand, according to the DOJ's lawsuit. When new companies tried to compete or customers sought better deals, Google responded by blocking rivals from its platform or buying them outright and forcing them to work only with its products, the lawsuit alleges.

Mr. Kanter, 49 years old, is one of the leaders of a movement that sees big technology companies including Google, Amazon.com, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Apple as monopolists in the tradition of the 19th-century railroad and oil companies that inspired the original antitrust laws. "Today there is nobody in the world who knows more about that business and the antitrust issues surrounding it than Jonathan," said Charles "Rick" Rule, who worked with Mr. Kanter in private practice. "He has been confronting Google for 15 years." Mr. Kanter has spent most of his legal career in private practice, sometimes defending corporate clients from government investigations, but also representing companies in pressing law enforcers to go after rivals that have grown dominant. He began looking into Google during the 2000s decade on behalf of Microsoft, which the DOJ in 1998 alleged was an illegal monopolist in the personal-computer market in a lawsuit settled in 2001.

Home Depot's Canadian arm was found to be sharing details from e-receipts related to in-store purchases with Facebook owner Meta Platforms without the knowledge or consent of its customers, according to Canada's privacy regulator. From a report: An investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) found that by participating in Meta's offline conversions program Home Depot shared the e-receipts that included encoded email addresses and purchase information. The regulator added that the home goods chain stopped sharing customer information with Meta in October 2022, which was among the recommendations made by OPC, until the company is able to implement measures to ensure valid consent.

Alphabet's Google says it believes the complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice accusing the company of abusing its dominance in digital advertising is "without merit." From a report: The company also added it will "defend itself vigorously". The government on Tuesday said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12% of Google's revenue in 2021 while also playing a vital role in the search engine and cloud company's overall sales. Google, which depends on its advertising business for about 80% of its revenue, said the government was "doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow." The federal government has said its Big Tech investigations and lawsuits are aimed at leveling the playing field for smaller rivals who are up against a group of powerful companies that include Amazon, Facebook-owner Meta and Apple.

Last summer GNOME invited people to voluntarily run the tool gnome-info-collect on their systems to send back (non-sensitive/non-identifiable) data about their system configurations. 2,560 people ran the tool, and they're now releasing the data.

Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents:

Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%)
Arch: 469 (18.64%)
Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%)
Manjaro: 140 (5.56%)
EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%)
Debian: 44 (1.75%)
openSUSE: 38 (1.51%)
Pop! 38 (1.51%)
Other: 78 (3.10%)


And the breakdown of hardware manufacturers (top four):

Lenovo: 516 (23.54%)
Dell: 329 (15.01%)
ASUS: 261 (11.91%)
HP: 223 (10.17%)


The site OMG! Linux pointed out that 90% of systems had Flatpak installed — (though it's enabled by default on Fedora, which was 54.69% of all the respondents). Some other interesting stats they noticed: - Most common default browser: Firefox (73.14%), Chrome (11.64%), Brave (4.76%). [Microsoft Edge was the default browser on 37 systems (1.51%) ]

- 83% of users have at least one (non-default) GNOME extension installed
- 'App Indicator' is the most popular extension (by 43% of those using extensions)

- GSConnect, User Themes, and Dash to Panel/Dock also widely used

- Most popular desktop apps: GIMP (58.48%), VLC (53.71%), Steam (53.40%)


[...] The popularity of GNOME extensions will surprise no-one. It is a solid indicator that the existing GNOME extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system in the ways they want.
GNOME's report adds that "it's exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments."

One other interesting stat from their report: 55% of the participants were using Online Accounts, with Google the most common one added, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. But "Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems."

Thursday Instagram launched "Quiet mode" to "help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers.... Once enabled, you won't receive any notifications, your profile's activity status will change to 'In quiet mode' and we'll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs you.... and once the feature is turned off, we'll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed."

A report from the Verge notes the move "comes as Instagram faces mounting criticism over its effect on the mental health of teens, especially teenage girls." Since then, the company has been making a number of changes focused on the safety of its younger users, including tightening default content settings for teens, nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through, and introducing restrictions on the ways advertisers can target teens....

Instagram will specifically prompt teen users to toggle on Quiet Mode "when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night." However, the platform doesn't state how much time teens have to spend on the app to see the prompt and also doesn't say what timeframe it considers "late at night." Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw tells The Verge the notification will appear after "several minutes."
Quiet mode launched Thursday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand, with launches in other countries planned soon. Elsewhere the Verge reports that Meta is "putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place." The company's rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub. The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa....

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you've given each app. It doesn't seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you'll need to add them manually.
The feature launched Thursday and will roll out gradually to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in "the coming months."

The Washington Post has obtained "stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot."

Their source? The bipartisan committee investigating attacks on America's Capitol on January 6, 2021 "spent more than a year sifting through tens of thousands of documents from multiple companies, interviewing social media company executives and former staffers, and analyzing thousands of posts. They sent a flurry of subpoenas and requests for information to social media companies ranging from Facebook to fringe social networks including Gab and the chat platform Discord."

Yet in the end it was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee but not delved into in their final report. And this was partly because the committee was "concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel's sensitive deliberations." The [committee staffer's] memo detailed how the actions of roughly 15 social networks played a significant role in the attack. It described how major platforms like Facebook and Twitter, prominent video streaming sites like YouTube and Twitch and smaller fringe networks like Parler, Gab and 4chan served as megaphones for those seeking to stoke division or organize the insurrection. It detailed how some platforms bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives out of fear of reprisals, while others were reluctant to curb the "Stop the Steal" movement after the attack....

The investigators also wrote that much of the content that was shared on Twitter, Facebook and other sites came from Google-owned YouTube, which did not ban election fraud claims until Dec. 9 and did not apply its policy retroactively. The investigators found that its lax policies and enforcement made it "a repository for false claims of election fraud." Even when these videos weren't recommended by YouTube's own algorithms, they were shared across other parts of the internet. "YouTube's policies relevant to election integrity were inadequate to the moment," the staffers wrote.

The draft report also says that smaller platforms were not reactive enough to the threat posed by Trump. The report singled out Reddit for being slow to take down a pro-Trump forum called "r/The-Donald." The moderators of that forum used it to "freely advertise" TheDonald.win, which hosted violent content in the lead-up to Jan. 6.... The committee also spoke to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, whose leaked documents in 2021 showed that the country's largest social media platform largely had disbanded its election integrity efforts ahead of the Jan. 6 riot. But little of her account made it into the final document.
"The transcripts show the companies used relatively primitive technologies and amateurish techniques to watch for dangers and enforce their platforms' rules. They also show company officials quibbling among themselves over how to apply the rules to possible incitements to violence, even as the riot turned violent."

Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbed. From a report: CEO Sundar Pichai informed staff Friday at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company's news blog. The firings adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai wrote. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." He said the layoffs reflect a "rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations. The jobs being eliminated "cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions," Pichai said. In a regulatory filing late last year, the company said that it employed nearly 187,000 people. Pichai said that Google, founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, was "bound to go through difficult economic cycles."

"When people talk about crypto mining the first thing usually mentioned is the amount of electricity it uses," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "What few realize is how loud rack after rack of servers and fans for cooling running 24/7 can be. The people of Murphy, North Carolina found out, and are not happy about it." From a report: When Judy Stines first heard about cryptocurrency, "I always thought it was smoke and mirrors," she said. "But if that's what you want to invest in, you do you." But then she heard the sound of crypto, a noise that neighbor Mike Lugiewicz describes as "a small jet that never leaves" and her ambivalence turned into activism. The racket was coming from stacks and stacks of computer servers and cooling fans, mysteriously set up in a few acres of open farm field down on Harshaw Road.

Once they fired up and the noise started bouncing around their Blue Ridge Mountain homes, sound meters in the Lugiewicz yard showed readings from 55-85 decibels depending on the weather, but more disturbing than the volume is the fact that the noise never stopped. "There's a racetrack three miles out right here," Lugiewicz said, pointing away from the crypto mine next door. "You can hear the cars running. It's cool!" "But at least they stop," Stines chimed in, "And you can go to bed!"

[...] The mine in Murphy is just one of a dozen in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina owned by a San Francisco-based company called PrimeBlock, which recently announced $300 million in equity financing and plans to scale up and go public. But a year and a half after crypto came to this ruby red pocket of Republican retirees and Libertarian life-timers, anger over the mine helped flip the balance of local power and forced the Board of Commissioners to officially ask their state and federal officials to "introduce and champion legislation through the US Congress that would ban and/or regulate crypto mining operations in the United States of America."

The cases could significantly affect the power and responsibilities of social media platforms. From a report: For years, giant social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have operated under two crucial tenets. The first is that the platforms have the power to decide what content to keep online and what to take down, free from government oversight. The second is that the websites cannot be held legally responsible for most of what their users post online, shielding the companies from lawsuits over libelous speech, extremist content and real-world harm linked to their platforms. Now the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider those rules, potentially leading to the most significant reset of the doctrines governing online speech since U.S. officials and courts decided to apply few regulations to the web in the 1990s.

On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms from liability for the content posted by their users. The cases could eventually alter the hands-off legal position that the United States has largely taken toward online speech, potentially upending the businesses of TikTok, Twitter, Snap and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. "It's a moment when everything might change," said Daphne Keller, a former lawyer for Google who directs a program at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers. From a report: To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook's AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals' phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies. Researchers have been working on "seeing" people without using cameras or expensive LiDAR hardware for years. In 2013, a team of researchers at MIT found a way to use cell phone signals to see through walls; in 2018, another MIT team used WiFi to detect people in another room and translate their movements to walking stick-figures.

Discord has acquired the Gas social app, a poll-based app for friends to share compliments with each other. "The app is designed for anonymous compliments and positive affirmations or, as kids say, gassing your friends up," reports The Verge. From the report: Gas has polls that ask users to vote for things like the most beautiful person they've met or the classmate that isn't afraid to get in trouble. It has soared in popularity among high schoolers since launching in August. One of the co-creators of TBH, a very similar teenager app acquired and shut down by Facebook, created Gas, which has caught the attention of more than 1 million daily active users and 30,000 new users per hour in October.

"Gas' founders have a proven track record of creating exciting apps and experiences, and we're thrilled to work with their team to take things to the next level," says Discord in a blog post announcing the Gas acquisition. "At this time, Gas will continue as its own standalone app and the Gas team will be joining Discord to help our efforts to continue to grow across new and core audiences." Discord hasn't disclosed the terms of its Gas acquisition, but it's clearly part of a broader and continued effort to target communities and users outside of just gaming.

Meta has filed a legal complaint against a company for allegedly creating tens of thousands of fake Facebook accounts to scrape user data and provide surveillance services for clients. From a report: The firm, Voyager Labs, bills itself as "a world leader in advanced AI-based investigation solutions." What this means in practice is analyzing social media posts en masse in order to make claims about individuals. In 2021, for example, The Guardian reported how Voyager Labs sold its services to the Los Angeles Police Department, with the company claiming to predict which individuals were likely to commit crimes in the future.

Meta announced the legal action in a blog post on January 12th, claiming that Voyager Labs violated its terms of service. According to a legal filing issued on November 11th, Meta alleges that Voyager Labs created over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts and used its surveillance software to gather data from Facebook and Instagram without authorization. Voyager Labs also collected data from sites including Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram.

Speaking of Google, the company says in a court filing that a case before the Supreme Court challenging the liability shield protecting websites such as YouTube and Facebook could "upend the internet," resulting in both widespread censorship and a proliferation of offensive content. From a report: In a new brief filed with the high court, Google said that scaling back liability protections could lead internet giants to block more potentially offensive content -- including controversial political speech -- while also leading smaller websites to drop their filters to avoid liability that can arise from efforts to screen content. [...] The case was brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the 2015 Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris. The plaintiffs claim that YouTube, a unit of Google, aided ISIS by recommending the terrorist group's videos to users. The Gonzalez family contends that the liability shield -- enacted by Congress as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 -- has been stretched to cover actions and circumstances never envisioned by lawmakers. The plaintiffs say certain actions by platforms, such as recommending harmful content, shouldn't be protected.

Section 230 generally protects internet platforms such as YouTube, Meta's Facebook and Yelp from being sued for harmful content posted by third parties on their sites. It also gives them broad ability to police their sites without incurring liability. The Supreme Court agreed last year to hear the lawsuit, in which the plaintiffs have contended Section 230 shouldn't protect platforms when they recommend harmful content, such as terrorist videos, even if the shield law protects the platforms in publishing the harmful content. Google contends that Section 230 protects it from any liability for content posted by users on its site. It also argues that there is no way to draw a meaningful distinction between recommendation algorithms and the related algorithms that allow search engines and numerous other crucial ranking systems to work online, and says Section 230 should protect them all.

Downing Street has said it is considering a Tory-backed amendment to the online safety bill that would allow for the imposing of jail sentences on social media bosses who are found not to have protected children's safety. The Guardian reports: No 10 said on Thursday it was open to the proposal, which is backed by at least 36 Conservative MPs including the former home secretary Priti Patel and the former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith. The amendment would give Ofcom, the communications watchdog, the power to prosecute executives at social media companies that are found to have breached the law. If ministers include it in the bill, it will mark the third time the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has bowed to the demands of his backbenchers, after U-turns on planning and onshore windfarms.

The bill is aimed at cracking down on a range of online content that ministers believe is causing serious harm to users and was informed in part by the testimony of Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who accused the company of repeatedly putting profits ahead of user safety. The bill will force companies to remove any content promoting self-harm, depicting sexual violence or facilitating suicide. It will also require companies to impose and enforce strict age limits and to publish assessments of the risks their platforms pose to young people. As it is currently written, the bill gives Ofcom the power to levy fines on companies of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaches in the law. Ofcom will be able to prosecute executives only if they fail to cooperate with an investigation. This has upset many Conservative MPs, however, who believe the regulator should be given tougher powers.

The amendment, which has been signed by 37 MPs overall, would allow Ofcom to prosecute individual executives if they were proved to have connived with or consented to breaking the elements of the bill designed to protect children's safety. Judges would be allowed to impose prison sentences of up to two years. [...] Other changes to the bill, which has its report and third reading stage in the House of Commons next week, include altering earlier plans to tackle content seen by adults that is harmful but falls below the threshold of criminality, such as cyberbullying and sexist and racist material. Tech companies will be required to state clearly in their terms and conditions how they will moderate such content. Users will also be given the option of asking to have such content screened out when they are on social media platforms. A Downing Street spokesperson said on Thursday: "Our aim is to hold to account social media platforms for harmful content, while also ensuring the UK remains a great place to invest and grow a tech business. We are confident we can achieve both of these things. We will carefully consider all the proposed amendments to the online safety bill and set out the position when report stage continues."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Parlement Technologies, the parent company of "censorship-free" social media platform Parler, has laid off a majority of its staff and most of its chief executives over the last few weeks. The sudden purge of staff has thrown the future of Parler, one of the first conservative alternatives to mainstream platforms, into question. Parlement Technologies began laying off workers in late November, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. These layoffs continued through at least the end of December, when around 75 percent of staffers were let go in total, leaving approximately 20 employees left working at both Parler and the parent-company's cloud services venture. A majority of the company's executives, including its chief technology, operations, and marketing officers, have also been laid off, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Parler was founded in 2018 at the height of former President Donald Trump's war against social media platforms over their alleged discrimination against conservative users. The platform marketed itself as a "free speech" alternative to more mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter, offering what it billed as anti-censorship moderation policies. The app surged in popularity throughout the 2020 presidential election cycle, registering more than 7,000 new users per minute at its peak that November. But following the deadly January 6th riot at the US Capitol, Apple and Google expelled the app from their app stores after criticism that it was used to plan and coordinate the attack. These bans prevented new users from downloading the app, effectively shutting down user growth. "It's not clear how many people are currently employed to work on the Parler social media platform or where it's headed from here," adds The Verge. "At the time of publication, the company has just one open job left on its website: to manage its data center facilities in Los Angeles."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has one of the toughest jobs in tech this year. On one hand, he has to deliver on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's grand metaverse ambitions as Apple and ByteDance are entering the space. At the same time, he's also attempting a dramatic cultural reset within Reality Labs, the sprawling division responsible for those ambitions. In an internal memo I obtained that he sent to employees just before the holidays, Bosworth acknowledged a sentiment I've been hearing from current and ex-employees for a while: "We have solved too many problems by adding headcount. But adding headcount also adds overhead. And overhead makes everything slower."

"Every week I see documents with 100+ editors," he wrote to the roughly 18,000 people in Reality Labs. "A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule. Sometimes there is even a 'pre-meeting' with its own document. I believe the current situation is untenable."