The European Union and U.S. moved a step closer to securing the privacy of transatlantic data flows as President Joe Biden moved to end years of uncertainty and allow thousands of companies to legally move customer data across the Atlantic. From a report: Biden signed an executive order Friday that'll create an independent court system in the US for EU citizens who think their data was unlawfully accessed or used by intelligence agencies. Decisions by the Data Protection Review Court will be binding and force the likes of the CIA to limit data collection to the "pursuit of defined national security objectives," according to a White House fact sheet.

The EU Court of Justice in 2020 toppled the so-called Privacy Shield over concerns that user data wasn't safe from prying eyes once on US soil. The ruling meant thousands of businesses that ship commercial data to the U.S. had to figure out an alternative and EU-U.S. negotiators were forced back to the drawing table. The prospect of no accord led Meta Platforms to say it would may have no choice but to pull its Facebook and Instagram services from the EU. The order is designed to address concerns about the ability of American spies to access EU data, which led to two previous data transfer accords being struck down by the bloc's top court. The EU and US have been working on a new deal for months and in March reached a breakthrough with an agreement in principle. The order gives the European Commission a tool to "restore an important, accessible, and affordable" data transfer mechanism while also providing greater legal certainty for companies shipping data across the Atlantic, the White House said.

A year after Meta announced its metaverse push, it has yet to demonstrate that its $10bn a year bet on an immersive virtual world will be a success. From a report: According to memos and conversations with 10 current and former employees, his 3bn user-strong social media empire is experiencing disruption and challenges as part of the pivot to Meta, and has already been forced to delay future launches and adjust expectations. In a September memo seen by the Financial Times, Vishal Shah, the vice-president of Meta's metaverse arm, warned that users and creators had complained that Horizon Worlds -- its social virtual reality experience and the closest thing it has to a metaverse so far -- was low quality and full of bugs.

He ordered a "quality lockdown" for the rest of the year, telling staff that they need to improve fundamentals before any aggressive expansion. Staffers working on the product had to "reprioritise or slow some things we had planned," said Shah, adding that he was lowering its user numbers target for the second half of the year. Some employees warned morale was suffering as teams got restructured to accommodate Zuckerberg's new vision, which many have not yet bought into. "There are a lot of people internally who have never put on a [virtual reality] headset," said one metaverse employee.

Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook leaders have given many hints that a reorganization is coming. Now, a specific number of workers are to be deemed "needs support," Insider has learned. From the report: The company is already telling some to find other jobs, leaving workers to call it "quiet layoffs." It told staff last week in a weekly Q&A with CEO Mark Zuckerberg that it was extending a hiring freeze that's been in place since May. Just before this meeting, executives told directors across the company that they should select at least 15% of their teams to be labeled as "needs support" in an internal review process, one of the people who spoke with Insider said.

All the workers asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. This was also discussed last week in a post from a Meta worker on Blind, an app popular with tech workers that requires a valid company email address to use anonymously. "These 15% will likely be put on PIP and be let go," the person wrote. The post prompted hundreds of comments from many other Meta workers who debated how many people would be let go. In Facebook's employee-review process, someone deemed in need of support is ostensibly dipping below performance goals. It is broadly seen by workers as a "performance-improvement plan," or PIP, and a precursor to losing your job. In July, Maher Saba, Meta's head of engineering, told managers they needed to identify everyone on their teams who fell into the "needs-support" category but did not specify a percentage of people who should be labeled that way.

Following another quarter that saw marketers pull back on their ad spending, Meta today announced it's increasing its ad load on Instagram with the launch of two new ad slots. TechCrunch reports: Amid a slew of product updates for advertisers, including a music catalog for advertisers and a new ad format for Facebook Reels, the company said it will now allow advertisers to run ads on the Explore home page and in profile feeds. Meanwhile, though Instagram Reels began rolling out 30-second ads globally last year, followed by Reels ads on Facebook earlier in 2022, the new format now being tested will involve shorter ads on Facebook Reels, specifically.

Called "post-loop" ads, these 4- to 10-second skippable ads and standalone video ads will play after a Reel has ended. When the ad finishes playing, the Reel will then resume and loop again. Like TikTok, many Reels are designed to be watched more than once -- but stuffing an ad at the end could see users instead choosing to scroll to a new video instead of watching the same one again. This is a risky move, as people will also likely consider this a poor user experience.

Meta also said it will test "image carousel" ads in Facebook Reels starting today. These are horizontally scrollable ads that can include anywhere from two to 10 image ads and are shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content. In addition, the company is introducing new Instagram ad placements as a way to increase the surface for ads as it struggles to monetize its TikTok competitor, Reels. This is being done through the addition of ads on the Explore home page and in the profile feed. [...] Historically, Instagram had only placed ads on Explore within the Explore feed -- that is, when a person taps on a post and scrolls. But now, it's expanding to the Explore home page itself, as it says it sees users spending meaningful time there, Instagram told TechCrunch. This is already rolling out globally.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday. "Americans can be put in jail for poking fun at the government?" the brief asked. "This was a surprise to America's Finest News Source and an uncomfortable learning experience for its editorial team." The source is, of course, The Onion. Or, as the satirical website described itselfin the brief (PDF),"the single most powerful and influential organization in human history."

The Parma, Ohio, area man in question, Anthony Novak, spent four days in jail over a Facebook page he created in 2016 that mocked his local police department. He was charged with using a computer to disrupt police functions, but a jury found him not guilty. Mr. Novak says his civil rights were violated, and he is trying to sue the city for damages. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit earlier this year, saying that the police had qualified immunity, and an appeals court upheld that decision. Now the high court is reviewing his request to take up the matter. One of Mr. Novak's lawyers, Patrick Jaicomo, said in an interview Monday that last month he contacted Jordan LaFlure, the managing editor of The Onion, which is based in Chicago, to make him aware of the case and see if he would be interested in helping raise attention. "They heard the story, and they were like, 'Oh my god, this is something that could really put all of our people in the crosshairs if we rub someone the wrong way with one of our stories,'" Mr. Jaicomo said. [...]

On Tuesday, a lawyer representing Parma, Richard Rezie, said that the courts had dismissed Mr. Novak's lawsuit as groundless and agreed that his rights had not been violated. The judges "did not base their opinions on parody, freedom of speech, or the need for a disclaimer," Mr. Rezie said, adding that Mr. Novak "went beyond mimicry" when he reproduced a police warning about his fake page, but claimed that the Parma site was the fake and his was the "official" page. "Falsely copying an official warning along with a claim to be the authentic Facebook page is not parody," Mr. Rezie said, adding that Mr. Novak also deleted comments from readers who realized his page was fake. In Mr. Jaicomo's view, The Onion's brief used parody itself to make the point that parody is important and protected speech. "The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion's writers' paychecks," the brief said. It pointed to The Onion's history of blatantly ridiculous headlines: "Fall Canceled After 3 Billion Seasons." "Children, Creepy Middle-Aged Weirdos Swept Up in Harry Potter Craze." "Kitten Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day." A footnote reads "See Mar-a-Lago Assistant Manager Wondering if Anyone Coming to Collect Nuclear Briefcase from Lost and Found, The Onion, Mar. 27, 2017."

The brief also said that the case posed a threat to The Onion's business model. "This was only the latest occasion on which the absurdity of actual events managed to eclipse what The Onion's staff could make up," it said. "Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times."

A quarter of a century after it began collecting web pages, the Internet Archive is adapting to new challenges. From a report: Within the walls of a beautiful former church in San Francisco's Richmond district, racks of computer servers hum and blink with activity. They contain the internet. Well, a very large amount of it. The Internet Archive, a non-profit, has been collecting web pages since 1996 for its famed and beloved Wayback Machine. In 1997, the collection amounted to 2 terabytes of data. Colossal back then, you could fit it on a $50 thumb drive now.

Today, the archive's founder Brewster Kahle tells me, the project is on the brink of surpassing 100 petabytes -- approximately 50,000 times larger than in 1997. It contains more than 700bn web pages. The work isn't getting any easier. Websites today are highly dynamic, changing with every refresh. Walled gardens like Facebook are a source of great frustration to Kahle, who worries that much of the political activity that has taken place on the platform could be lost to history if not properly captured. In the name of privacy and security, Facebook (and others) make scraping difficult.

The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear two cases seeking to hold social media companies financially responsible for terrorist attacks. From a report: Relatives of people killed in terrorist attacks in France and Turkey had sued Google, Twitter, and Facebook. They accused the companies of helping terrorists spread their message and radicalize new recruits. The court will hear the cases this term, which began Monday, with a decision expected before the court recesses for the summer, usually in late June. The court did not say when it would hear arguments, but the court has already filled its argument calendar for October and November.

One of the cases the justices will hear involves Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen studying in Paris. The Cal State Long Beach student was one of 130 people killed in Islamic State group attacks in November 2015. The attackers struck cafes, outside the French national stadium and inside the Bataclan theater. Gonzalez died in an attack at La Belle Equipe bistro. Gonzalez's relatives sued Google, which owns YouTube, saying the platform had helped the Islamic State group by allowing it to post hundreds of videos that helped incite violence and recruit potential supporters. Gonzalez's relatives said that the company's computer algorithms recommended those videos to viewers most likely to be interested in them.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was found by a federal jury in Austin, Texas, to have infringed on two patents held by Voxer, a walkie talkie messaging app founded by a former Army Green Beret. The social media giant was ordered to pay nearly $175 million in damages. Military Times reports: Voxer launched the app in 2011, which was named Best Overall App in the First Annual Silicon Valley Business App Awards in 2013. In 2012, Facebook approached Voxer about a potential collaboration that led to Voxer sharing its patents and proprietary information with the company. "When early meetings did not result in an agreement, Facebook identified Voxer as a competitor although Facebook had no live video or voice product at the time," court filings read. "Facebook revoked Voxer's access to key components of the Facebook platform and launched Facebook Live in 2015 followed by Instagram Live in 2016. Both products incorporate Voxer's technologies and infringe its patents."

The Texas jury found that Facebook Live and Instagram Live incorporated two pieces of Voxer's technologies that involve streaming media over networks. Meta countered in court filings that "Facebook has prioritized live video messaging since the launch of Facebook Live and Instagram Live, with one report identifying Facebook Live as Facebook's 'top priority.'" In a statement to TechCrunch, Meta said the social media company will continue to press the issue through the courts. "We believe the evidence at trial demonstrated that Meta did not infringe Voxer's patents," Meta's spokesperson said in the statement. "We intend to seek further relief, including filing an appeal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg would like you to please stop asking Tumblr to bring back porn because it isn't going to happen. After widespread and inaccurate speculation that Tumblr would lift its ban on adult content, Mullenweg posted a long explanation yesterday of why Tumblr will never go back to the old days. Or, in his words: "the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible." That doesn't mean Tumblr's policies will stay the same. Mullenweg has said before that Automattic (which bought Tumblr in 2019) wants to loosen the rules its old owner Verizon implemented in 2018, and he reiterated that here, echoing comments he made earlier this week. Verizon's ban "took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists," Mullenweg wrote in his post. "This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense." Tumblr is supposed to implement those policies soon, putting the site more in line with Automattic's WordPress.com blogging platform.

"That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007," Mullenweg wrote, quoting Tumblr's old liberal policy slogan. (If you're wondering, it was "go nuts, show nuts.") "I agree with 'go nuts, show nuts' in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible." On Tumblr, that era helped produce a lot of unique, often queer, blogs with sexual content. The 2018 ban changed the tenor of the site for good -- and this week, many users were enthusiastically but prematurely celebrating its end. Why is returning to that era impossible? For now, it's largely because of intermediaries that play a massive role in how people access the web. Payment processors have long been leery of adult content, and they've stepped up enforcement in recent years, in part because of concerns about child abuse and nonconsensual pornography. Apple's iOS App Store has been staunchly opposed to it since launch. And without those two pieces of infrastructure, running a for-profit site is incredibly difficult. "If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we'd probably have to shut the service down," Mullenweg noted. Some nonprofit sites that do allow things like explicit artwork -- primarily the Archive of Our Own fanworks site -- have remained persistently web-only despite years of requests for apps. [...]

If you reached this article through Twitter or Reddit, you might have a fairly obvious question right now, and Mullenweg raises it: why can both those platforms, fairly unusually for modern social networks, allow a lot of porn? "Ask Apple, because I don't know," says Mullenweg. He speculates that Tumblr and Reddit are both too big to ban -- although Apple has forced moderation changes even for giant services like Facebook. The overall upshot, to Mullenweg, is this: "If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you'd need to be web-only on iOS and side-load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don't go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don't dox your users, and make a ton of money. I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don't know about it. They'll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that's a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don't attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist."

AI text-to-image generators have been making headlines in recent months, but researchers are already moving on to the next frontier: AI text-to-video generators. From a report: A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook's parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant development in the field of AI content generation.

"Generative AI research is pushing creative expression forward by giving people tools to quickly and easily create new content," said Meta in a blog post announcing the work. "With just a few words or lines of text, Make-A-Video can bring imagination to life and create one-of-a-kind videos full of vivid colors and landscapes." In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the work as "amazing progress," adding: "It's much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they'll change over time."

Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it will freeze hiring and restructure some teams in an effort to cut costs and shift priorities. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the social networking company's freeze during a weekly Q&A session with employees, according to a person in attendance. He added that the company would reduce budgets across most teams, even teams that are growing, and that individual teams will sort out how to handle headcount changes -- whether that means not filling roles that employees depart, shifting people to other teams, or working to "manage out people who aren't succeeding," according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively," Zuckerberg said.

A third-party Instagram app, called "The OG App," which promised an ad-free feed more like the original Instagram experience, has been pulled from Apple's App Store just one day after it officially launched. It's not clear if Apple pulled the app at the request of Meta, but the social network confirmed it had taken "enforcement actions" against the service. From a report: "This app violates our policies and we're taking all appropriate enforcement actions," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those actions were, or if it had been in contact with Apple, but pointed to a blog post outlining Meta's policies barring clone sites. "A clone site is a third-party site that duplicates, in whole or in part, the content of an existing site," Meta explains. On Twitter, the developers of The OG App said their entire team had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram as a result of their ties to the service.

The head of WhatsApp has warned UK ministers that moves to undermine encryption in a relaunched online safety bill would threaten the security of the government's own communications and embolden authoritarian regimes. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Will Cathcart, who runs the Meta-owned messaging app, insisted that alternative techniques were available to protect children using WhatsApp, without having to abandon the underlying security technology that safeguards its more than 2bn users. The UK's bill, which the government argues will make the internet safer, has become a focus of global debate over whether companies such as Google, Meta and Twitter should be forced to proactively scan and remove harmful content on their networks.

Tech companies claim it is not technically possible for encrypted messaging apps to scan for material such as child pornography without undermining the security of the entire network, which prevents anyone -- including platform operators -- from reading users' messages. Cathcart said the UK's ultimate position on the issue would have a global impact. "If the UK decides that it is OK for a government to get rid of encryption, there are governments all around the world that will do exactly the same thing, where liberal democracy is not as strong, where there are different concerns that really implicate deep-seated human rights," he said, citing Hong Kong as a potential example.

Apple has removed the iOS apps belonging to VK, the technology conglomerate behind Russia's version of Facebook called VKontakte, from its App Store globally. From a report: In a translated statement on its website, VK said that its apps "are blocked by Apple" but that it will "continue to develop and support iOS applications." In response to an inquiry by The Verge, Apple spokesperson Adam Dema confirmed that VK's apps have been removed and its developer accounts shut down.

"These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government," Dema said in a statement. "In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location. Users who have already downloaded these apps may continue to use them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Beast: Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn't wait to test out his colleague's newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university's campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and different types of phobias. But a couple of minutes after he put on the headset, he could tell something was wrong. "I started feeling bad," Garrido told The Daily Beast. He was experiencing an unsettling bout of dizziness and nausea. He tried to push through but ultimately had to abort the simulation almost as soon as he started. "Honestly, I don't think I lasted five minutes trying out the application," he said.

Garrido had contracted cybersickness, a form of motion sickness that can affect users of VR technology. It was so severe that he worried about his ability to drive home, and it took hours for him to recover from the five-minute simulation. Though motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, cybersickness is a much newer condition. While this means that many of its causes and symptoms are understood, other basic questions -- like how common cybersickness is, and whether there are ways to fully prevent it -- are only just starting to be studied. After Garrido's experience, a colleague told him that only around 2 percent of people feel cybersickness. But at a presentation for prospective students, Garrido watched as volunteers from the audience walked to the front of an auditorium to demo a VR headset -- only to return shakily to their seats. "I could see from afar that they were getting sweaty and kind of uncomfortable," he recalled. "I said to myself, 'Maybe I'm not the only one.'"

As companies like Meta (nee Facebook) make big bets that augmented reality and virtual reality technology will go mainstream, the tech industry is still trying to figure out how to better recruit users to the metaverse, and get them to stay once there. But experts worry that cybersickness could derail these plans for good unless developers find some remedies soon. "The issue is actually something of a catch-22: In order to make VR more accessible and affordable, companies are making devices smaller and running them on less powerful processors," adds the report. "But these changes introduce dizzying graphics -- which inevitably causes more people to experience cybersickness."

"At the same time, a growing body of research suggests cybersickness is vastly more pervasive than previously thought -- perhaps afflicting more than half of all potential users." When Garrido conducted his own study of 92 people, the results indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness -- a sharp contrast to the 2 percent estimate Garrido had been told.

He says that these results should be concerning for developers. "If people have this type of bad experience with something, they're not going to try it again," Garrido said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta was sued for allegedly building a secret work-around to safeguards that Apple launched last year to protect iPhone users from having their internet activity tracked. In a proposed class-action complaint filed Wednesday in San Francisco federal court, two Facebook users accused the company of skirting Apple's 2021 privacy rules and violating state and federal laws limiting the unauthorized collection of personal data. A similar complaint was filed in the same court last week. The suits are based on a report by data privacy researcher Felix Krause, who said that Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps for Apple's iOS inject JavaScript code onto websites visited by users. Krause said the code allowed the apps to track "anything you do on any website," including typing passwords.

According to the suits, Meta's collection of user data from the Facebook app helps it circumvent rules instituted by Apple in 2021 requiring all third-party apps to obtain consent from users before tracking their activities, online or off. Meta has said it expected to miss out on $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022 because of Apple's changes. The Facebook app gets around Apple privacy rules by opening web links in an in-app browser, rather than the user's default browser, according to Wednesday's complaint. "This allows Meta to intercept, monitor and record its users' interactions and communications with third parties, providing data to Meta that it aggregates, analyzes, and uses to boost its advertising revenue," according to the suit. A Meta spokesperson said the allegations are "without merit" and the company will defend itself. "We have designed our in-app browser to respect users' privacy choices, including how data may be used for ads," the company said in an emailed statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Chess's top-ranked player, Magnus Carlsen, has finally spoken about the ongoing alleged cheating scandal that has rocked the chess world for the last several weeks and was reignited when Carlsen resigned in protest after making one move against Hans Niemann. Niemann, of course, was accused of cheating against Carlsen earlier this month, but no one has been able to prove this, nor has a mechanism for the supposed cheating been proven.

"I think the whole world is wondering, what is the reason you withdrew [against Niemann]?" a newscaster with Chess24 asked. "Unfortunately I cannot particularly speak on that," Carlsen said. "But, you know, people can draw their own conclusion and they certainly have. I have to say I'm very impressed by Niemann's play, and I think his mentor Maxine Dlugy must be doing a great job." "I will not comment on that," he added when asked if he was accusing Niemann of cheating. He was then asked if he was accusing Dlugy, who is a chess grandmaster, of helping Niemann cheat: "No, I will not say more about that subject ... I hope to say a little bit more after the tournament." Carlsen was then asked if he thought cheating was a problem in chess. "I think individual people will answer the question differently depending on their own experiences. Regardless of whether it's a massive problem or not, it's, I think, fairly easy to cheat. On a general basis, cheaters in the future, it should not be taken lightly neither online nor over the board."

Chess watchers believe that by namedropping Maxine Dlugy, Carlsen is putting down more breadcrumbs. Dlugy is is a Russian-born, American chess grandmaster who currently operates the Chess Max Academy in Manhattan. In July, Dlugy posted a photo with "my student Hans Niemann," congratulating him on "becoming a top 50 player in the world! Go Hans!" After Niemann beat Carlsen earlier this month, Dlugy posted a congratulatory message: "Just 16 months ago or so, I recommended to Hans to really focus on endings. He devoted a lot of time to this pivotal part of the game and today I am proud to say that his endgame play is sufficient to beat the reigning World Champion from a better position. That's powerful! Hans Niemann -- Chess speaks for itself!"

Redditors were quick to point out, however, that Dlugy has his own controversy. Dlugy has been removed twice from a weekly Chess.com tournament called Titled Tuesday, in 2017 and 2020. Benjamin Bok, a chess grandmaster and Twitch streamer, for example, made a whole segment delving into some of Dlugy's old Chess.com matches and pointing out that Dlugy was suddenly removed from Chess.com with no explanation: "Generally that only means one thing," Bok said, not elaborating on what it means, but heavily implying that it means he was caught cheating. "Draw your own conclusions. Draw your own conclusions. That's all I'm going to say." "Question becomes: Is perhaps Dlugy Hans' accomplice, in case Hans is cheating? We'll have to wait and see," Bok says. "But the fact that Magnus makes that statement and drops his name, it means that he knows something we don't know. You can't just drop someone's name in there without really knowing stuff. I feel like he knows something really big."

Former President Donald Trump could be allowed back on Facebook once a suspension of his account expires in 2023, Nick Clegg of parent company Meta Platforms, said Thursday at an exclusive Semafor Exchange event in Washington, DC. From the report: As the company makes its decision, it will talk to experts, weigh the risk of real world harm and act proportionally, he said. It's the first time Clegg, who, as president of global affairs is charged with deciding whether to lift the limit, has publicly discussed his thinking. Trump was prohibited from posting on several online platforms after the January 2021 riots at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., with Facebook, sister app Instagram, Twitter and Google's YouTube citing his role in inciting the violence. "When you make a decision that affects the public realm, you need to act with great caution," Clegg told Semafor editor-at-large Steve Clemons. "You shouldn't throw your weight about."

Facebook and Instagram's speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites' parent company Meta. From a report: "Meta's actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred," says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication. Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company's censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring.

Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military airstrikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain. Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta's delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the "first quarter" of the year. While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames "a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur."

In response to stalling growth and intense competition, Meta Platforms executives have spoken of cost cuts, hiring freezes and "ruthless prioritization." One word the company hasn't used: layoffs. From a report: But Meta has begun quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers by reorganizing departments and giving affected employees a limited window to apply for other roles within the company, according to current and former managers familiar with the matter, in a move that achieves staffing cuts while forestalling the mass issuance of pink slips. The reductions are expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts, with Meta looking to trim its costs by at least 10% within the next few months, according to people informed of the company's plans. While some savings will come from cuts to overhead and consulting budgets, the people said, much of it is expected to come from reduced employment. In response to questions, Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton referred to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's July statement that the company would need to reallocate resources toward corporate priorities as pressures mount on the business.