Meta Platforms, grappling with its first-ever quarterly sales slump, now has another problem: Jobs in the metaverse are disappearing. From a report: New monthly job postings across all industries with "metaverse" in the title declined 81% between April and June, according to workplace researcher Revelio Labs, after surging in the months following Facebook's rebranding last fall. The dropoff coincides with a broader slowdown across the tech sector, which has prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, leaving workers from the Bay Area to Bangalore increasingly rattled. Job postings in tech hubs like San Francisco and Austin, Texas, dropped 8.4% in the past four weeks, according to job site Indeed.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's big bet on virtual reality and other nascent, immersive technologies encouraged companies of all stripes to look for experts in those fields, which may have created "short-lived hype from the demand side," Revelio Labs economist Jin Yan said. Now, as employers recalibrate their hiring needs and labor budgets amid growing concerns of a recession, that hype has come face to face with a sobering, and fully non-virtual, reality.

Kenya's national cohesion watchdog threatened to suspend Facebook from the country Friday if it doesn't mitigate hate speech ahead of the country's general elections next month. From a report: The regulator has given the company one week to remediate the problem, which included Facebook's approval of ads advocating for ethnic cleansing. Human rights organizations and the Facebook whistleblower are calling on Facebook to immediately suspend all advertising in Kenya and take other emergency steps. The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a Kenyan agency founded to mitigate ethnic violence and promote national healing in the wake of the 2007-08 post-election crisis, told reporters on Friday that Facebook was "in violation of the laws of our country."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Instagram will walk back some recent changes to the product following a week of mounting criticism, the company said today. A test version of the app that opened to full-screen photos and videos will be phased out over the next one to two weeks, and Instagram will also reduce the number of recommended posts in the app as it works to improve its algorithms. "I'm glad we took a risk -- if we're not failing every once in a while, we're not thinking big enough or bold enough," Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in an interview. "But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. [When] we've learned a lot, then we come back with some sort of new idea or iteration. So we're going to work through that."

The changes come amid growing user frustration over a series of changes to Instagram designed to help it better compete with TikTok and navigate the broader shift in user behavior away from posting static photos toward watching more video. Redesigns often incur the wrath of users who are hostile to change, but in this case the high-profile dissatisfaction was backed up by Instagram's own internal data, Mosseri said. The trend toward users watching more video is real, and pre-dated the rise of TikTok, he said. But it's clear that people actually do dislike Instagram's design changes. "For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn't great," he said. "So there I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup, and figure out how we want to move forward."

The company also plans to show users fewer recommendations. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said [on an earnings call (PDF)] that recommended posts and accounts in feeds currently account for about 15 percent of what you see when you browse Facebook, and an even higher percentage on Instagram. By the end of 2023, that figure will be around 30 percent, Zuckerberg said. But Instagram will temporarily reduce the amount of recommended posts and accounts as it works to improve its personalization tools. (Mosseri wouldn't say by how much, exactly.) "When you discover something in your field that you didn't follow before, there should be a high bar -- it should just be great," Mosseri said. "You should be delighted to see it. And I don't think that's happening enough right now. So I think we need to take a step back, in terms of the percentage of feed that are recommendations, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then -- if and when we do -- we can start to grow again." ("I'm confident we will," he added.) Mosseri made clear that the retreat Instagram announced today is not permanent.

Instagram's head defended the app against a user backlash, after the social network launched a series of changes intended to make it more like its arch-rival TikTok. The Guardian reports: The changes, which include an extremely algorithmic main feed, a push for the service's TikTok-style "reels" videos, and heavy promotion of the TikTok-style "remix" feature, have resulted in users struggling to find content from friends and family, once the bread and butter of the social network. "We're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you," Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter. "I'm hearing a lot of concerns about photos, and how we're shifting to video. We're going to continue to support photos, but I need to be honest: more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We're going to have to lean in to that shift while continuing to support photos."

The Instagram boss also defended the platform's new "recommendations" feature, which puts content from people users do not follow on to their feed. "The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not even know exist," he said. "You can snooze all recommendations for up to a month, but we're going to try and get better at recommendations because we think it's one of the best ways to help creators reach a new audience and grow their following. He added: "We're going to need to evolve, because the world is changing quickly and we're going to need to change with it."

Instagram's makeover is widely seen as a response to TikTok's continued growth, in particular among younger American users. [...] By boosting algorithmic recommendations, allowing users to "remix" posts (akin to TikTok's "Duet" feature), and promoting full-screen vertical video above photos, Instagram is attempting to turn its main app experience into something similar to that of the Chinese-owned upstart. In a widely shared story, Kardashian clan member and social media star, Kylie Jenner, called on the service to "make Instagram Instagram again." She added: "Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see cute photos of my friends."

UPDATE: Instagram Is Walking Back Its Changes For Now

Facebook parent company Meta has just reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2022, and it was another quarter of shrinking profits. Engadget reports: Total revenue of $28.8 billion was only down one percent compared to Q2 one year ago, but net income dropped 36 percent to $6.7 billion. Making almost $7 billion in profit is not a bad quarter for anyone, but the size of the decline compared to a year ago is pretty significant. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, this is the first-ever drop in revenue for Meta / Facebook -- so even though we're only talking one percent, it's still noteworthy.

Revenue from advertising and Meta's "family of apps" was essentially flat year-over-year, and Reality Labs (home to hardware like the Meta Quest and other metaverse-related initiatives) actually grew 48 percent year-over-year to $452 million. But Reality Labs accounted for a $2.8 billion loss this quarter, a 15 percent larger loss than Q2 one year ago. At this rate, it seems likely that Reality Labs will lose Meta more than the $10 billion it cost the company in 2021. Indeed, the company said it expects Reality Labs revenue to be lower in the third quarter. [...] In June, Meta said that it had 2.88 billion daily active users in its family of apps (which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) and 3.65 billion monthly active users, both of which are up four percent compared to a year ago. Facebook-specific growth was smaller, though -- average daily and monthly users only increased three percent and one percent, respectively. Further reading: FTC Files To Block Meta's Virtual Reality Deal

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, limiting the company's push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals. From a report: The antitrust lawsuit is the first to be filed under Lina Khan, the commission's chair and a leading progressive critic of corporate concentration, against one of the tech giants. Ms. Khan has argued that regulators must stop violations of competition and consumer protection laws when it comes to the bleeding edge of technology, including virtual and augmented reality, and not just in areas of business where companies have already become behemoths. "Meta could have chosen to try to compete," the F.T.C. said in its lawsuit. "Instead, it chose to buy" a top company in what the government called a 'vitally important' category.

Mark Zuckerberg believes that Apple and his company are in a "very deep, philosophical competition" to build the metaverse, suggesting the two tech giants are ready to butt heads in selling hardware for augmented and virtual reality. The Verge reports: The Meta CEO told employees earlier this month that they were competing with Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of his comments during an internal all-hands meeting obtained by The Verge. He said that Meta would position itself as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple, which is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year. "This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said of the brooding rivalry. "And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist."

Since rebranding Facebook's company name to Meta, Zuckerberg has been pushing for the concept of interoperability for the metaverse, or what he sees as the next major chapter of computing after mobile phones. Meta recently helped stand up the Metaverse Open Standards Group with Microsoft, Epic Games, and others. The idea is to spur the creation of open protocols that will let people easily move through future immersive, 3D worlds with their virtual goods. Apple is absent from the group, which Zuckerberg called out as not surprising in his comments to employees. He explained how Apple's approach of building hardware and software it tightly controls had worked well with the iPhone, but that for the metaverse, "it's not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better."

[...] If VR and AR do take off like Zuckerberg hopes, it seems he wants to position Meta as the Android to Apple's iOS. There is a parallel to draw already: Meta's Quest headset already allows the side loading of apps that are not approved by Meta's VR app store, similar to how Google's Android allows for sideloading. And even though it just increased the price of the Quest by $100, Meta's hardware is still mostly sold at a loss or breakeven. [...] Zuckerberg's remarks suggest that even as he tries to invent his way out of being under Apple's thumb on mobile, the two tech giants are going to be battling for years to come.

An ongoing cybercriminal operation is targeting digital marketing and human resources professionals in an effort to hijack Facebook Business accounts using a newly discovered data-stealing malware. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at WithSecure, the enterprise spin-off of security giant F-Secure, discovered the ongoing campaign they dubbed Ducktail and found evidence to suggest that a Vietnamese threat actor has been developing and distributing the malware since the latter half of 2021. The firm added that the operations' motives appear to be purely financially driven. The threat actor first scouts targets via LinkedIn where it selects employees likely to have high-level access to Facebook Business accounts, particularly those with the highest level of access. The threat actor then uses social engineering to convince the target to download a file hosted on a legitimate cloud host, like Dropbox or iCloud. While the file features keywords related to brands, products, and project planning in an attempt to appear legitimate, it contains data-stealing malware that WithSecure says is the first malware that they have seen specifically designed to hijack Facebook Business accounts.

Once installed on a victim's system, the Ducktail malware steals browser cookies and hijacks authenticated Facebook sessions to steal information from the victim's Facebook account, including account information, location data, and two-factor authentication codes. The malware also allows the threat actor to hijack any Facebook Business account that the victim has sufficient access to simply by adding their email address to the compromised account, which prompts Facebook to to send a link, via email, to the same email address. The recipient -- in this case, the threat actor -- then interacts with the emailed link to gain access to that Facebook Business. The threat actors then leverage their new privileges to replace the account's set financial details in order to direct payments to their accounts or to run Facebook Ad campaigns using money from the victimized firms.

Facebook parent Meta has raised the price of its Quest 2 virtual reality headset by $100, as the company reckons with inflationary pressures. From a report: Starting Aug. 1, the 128 GB version of the Quest 2 will cost $399, while the 256 GB model will cost $499, Meta said. The company said it hiked the price of the VR headset "in order to continue investing in moving the VR industry forward for the long term." Meta added in a corporate blog post that "the costs to make and ship our products have been on the rise. By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow our investment in groundbreaking research and new product development that pushes the VR industry to new heights."

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur. From a report: Since 1972, the world's timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities like adding data to a database.

The temporal tweak causes more problems -- like internet outages -- than benefits, they say. And dealing with leap seconds ultimately is futile, the group argues, since the Earth's rotational speed hasn't actually changed much historically. "We are predicting that if we just stick to the TAI without leap second observation, we should be good for at least 2,000 years," research scientist Ahmad Byagowi of Facebook parent company Meta said via email. "Perhaps at that point we might need to consider a correction."

Tuned, Meta's social app for couples, is winding down a little over two years after it launched. TechCrunch: Users, including this reporter, began receiving a notification about the impending shutdown last week, advising them to download their data before September 19 when the app will cease to work. Tuned was a project under Meta's New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team, which was originally formed to build consumer-facing apps that would allow Meta to test out new features and gauge people's reactions. Launched in the early months of the pandemic, Tuned was positioned as a way for couples to stay in touch and engaged, with messaging features and quizzes designed to let them share how they're feeling, what they're up to and milestones they're anticipating. Tuned allowed users to exchange notes, photos and videos, challenges, voice messages, notes and lists, and music via a Spotify integration. They could set their respective moods, and -- for more intimate content -- choose a password or a blur filter. A "check-in" feature nudged couples to suss out their feelings about the relationship in any given moment, with prompts to add context.

A worldwide shortage of fibre optic cable has driven up prices and lengthened lead times, endangering companies' ambitious plans to roll out state of the art telecommunications infrastructure. From a report: Europe, India and China are among the regions most affected by the crunch, with prices for fibre rising by up to 70 per cent from record lows in March 2021, from $3.70 to $6.30 per fibre km, according to Cru Group, a market intelligence firm. Although the pandemic prompted some of the biggest tech and telecoms groups to slash their capex, there has been a surge in demand for internet and data services, leading to a shortfall in availability of the crucial but often overlooked material.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta are expanding their data centre empires to meet soaring demand, including laying vast international fibre networks under the ocean. Meanwhile, governments have set ambitious targets for the rollout of superfast broadband and 5G, both of which require vast quantities of fibre optic cable to be laid under the ground. Total cable consumption increased by 8.1 per cent in the first half of the year compared with the same time last year, according to Cru estimates. China accounted for 46 per cent of the total, with North America representing the fastest growing region, at 15 per cent year on year.

Tech companies should move ahead with controversial technology that scans for child abuse imagery on users' phones, the technical heads of GCHQ and the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre have said. From a report: So-called "client-side scanning" would involve service providers such as Facebook or Apple building software that monitors communications for suspicious activity without needing to share the contents of messages with a centralised server. Ian Levy, the NCSC's technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis -- codebreaking -- at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time.

"We've found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter," they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was "not government policy." They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning -- most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company's image-sharing service -- rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice. They suggested, for instance, requiring the involvement of multiple child protection NGOs, to guard against any individual government using the scanning apparatus to spy on civilians; and using encryption to ensure that the platform never sees any images that are passed to humans for moderation, instead involving only those same NGOs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A video started circulating on Twitter Thursday of a Boston Dynamics-style robot dog firing a submachine gun into targets amid a snowy backdrop. This type of robot dog (it doesn't seem like the robot in the video is a Boston Dynamics Spot, just looks a lot like it) is famous for dancing, but now appears to have fulfilled every warning given by journalists and analysts. It's got a gun and it's ready to kill. A lot of questions remain. First, the robot dog doesn't seem to be able to handle the recoil of the gun well. As it fires its rounds, the barrel trails up and the dog has to take a minute to get its balance back. We also don't know if the dog is firing on its own or if, and this is more likely, someone is off-camera pulling the trigger remotely.

The robot's feet, various ports, and its front are completely different from Boston Dynamics' Spot. There's dozens of knockoffs of the Boston Dynamics dog selling on the international market. The one in the video appears to be a UnitreeYusu "technology dog" selling on AliExpress for about $3,000. The feet, port placement, and joint coverings are all the same. The robot also has strips of Velcro on either of its flanks. The left flank bears a Russian flag and the other appears with a wolf's head. In another video on the channel, a man wears a similar patch on his arm. It appears to be a wolf's head insignia commonly associated with Russian Special Operations Forces or Spetsnaz. That doesn't mean that Spetsnaz is using armed robot dogs, as pretty much anyone can buy a similar patch online in various places.

The gun is also Russian. It appears to be a PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun based on the AK-74 design. As the dog wanders around and fires, it sometimes moves in front of an armored personnel carrier with a unique triangular door. That's a BDRM-2, a Russian armored car that's been spotted recently in Ukraine. Finally, there's the account the video originally appeared on. Before making its way to Twitter, the video of the dog was posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22, 2022. Atamov is listed on his LinkedIn profile as the founder of "HOVERSURF" and his Facebook page lists him as living in Moscow. He posted a picture of the robot dog on March 21. According to Facebook's translation of his post, he called the dog "Skynet."

Facebook parent Meta Platforms is changing the way it shows users posts and videos on its flagship social network, part of an effort to get people to watch content from accounts they don't already follow and better compete with the video app TikTok. From a report: The main feed on Facebook will now be called "Home," and will be a place for people to "discover new content" that Facebook thinks that they'll like, according to a company blog post. That includes photos and videos selected by software algorithms, which will surface content based on users' interests, from both accounts they follow and those they don't.

The changes will start Thursday, but the majority of the content will still come from accounts users follow, a Meta spokeswoman said. The company plans to increase the new content it shows over time as it improves the recommendation algorithm. A new tab, called "Feeds," will exclusively show posts from friends, family, pages and groups that a person has chosen to follow, with the most recent content at the top. "Your Home tab is uniquely personalized to you," the company explained in its blog. "This system takes into account thousands of signals to help cut through the clutter and rank content in the order we think you will find most valuable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg will have to provide testimony to a federal court to discuss their alleged involvement in the company's notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, over half a decade since it first captured the world's attention. [...] Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that used Facebook user data to target and lobby potential voters ahead of the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. The ensuing scandal helped trigger an investigation from the Federal Trade Commission that resulted in Facebook agreeing to a record-setting $5 billion settlement over its privacy practices.

A new filing (PDF) in the Northern District of California Tuesday shows Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed to be deposed for six and five hours respectively in September of this year. This comes as part of a class action lawsuit filed against Meta, claiming the company violated consumer privacy laws when it shared user data with Cambridge Analytica back in 2015. [...] In addition to Zuckerberg and Sandberg, the court's also seeking to depose Meta's newly named CTO Javier Olivan -- who previously served as the company's Chief Growth Officer -- as well as a handful of other "key witnesses." Olivan's deposition is expected to last three hours. According to Tuesday's filing Meta will also hand over 1,200 documents "previously withheld as privileged." Plaintiffs in the case previously accused Meta and the law firm representing it of "stonewalling," during the court's discovery phase.

An installation-art company called META (or Meta.is) announced Tuesday that it will be suing Meta (or Facebook) for trademark violation, alleging that Zuckerberg's name change violated the smaller company's established brand. The Verge reports: "On October 28, 2021, Facebook seized our META mark and name, which we put our blood, sweat, and tears into building for over twelve years," reads a post on the smaller company's site. "Today, after eight months of trying to negotiate with Facebook in good faith to no avail, we were left with no choice but to file a lawsuit against them."

Much of the case hinges on Facebook's many privacy scandals, which Meta.is argues has made it impossible to share the name. "Meta can no longer provide goods and services under the META mark," the complaint argues, "because consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Meta's goods and services emanate from Facebook and that Meta is associated with the toxicity that is inextricably linked with Facebook."

Meta.is holds a valid trademark for the name but may still be facing an uphill battle in court, given the broad range of trademark applications Facebook has made since the name change became official -- including separate marks for messaging, social networks, and financial services. There are also a number of trademarks claiming the Meta name for non-tech products, including a hard seltzer and manufacturer of prosthetic limbs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon filed a lawsuit Monday against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that coordinate cash or goods for buyers willing to post bogus product reviews. The global groups served to recruit would-be fake reviewers and operated in Amazon's online storefronts in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy. If 10,000 Facebook groups sounds like a lot, it's apparently the sum total of groups Amazon has reported to Facebook since 2020. The company notes that past legal action it's taken has been effective and "shut down multiple major review brokers," and yet here we are. They've been suing people for this stuff since all the way back in 2015.

The company named one group, "Amazon Product Review," which boasted more than 40,000 members until Facebook removed it earlier in 2022. That one evaded detection through the time-honored, AI-eluding strategy of swapping a few letters around in phrases that would get it busted. Amazon says that it will leverage the discovery process to "identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven't already been detected by Amazon's advanced technology, expert investigators and continuous monitoring." The monitoring might be continuous but it's clear that thousands and thousands of illegitimate reviews push products across the online retailer's massive digital storefront every day, all around the world. And regulators are taking notice -- something that's bound to light a little fire under everyone's favorite online shopping monolith.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Exactly 10 years ago today, Microsoft completed its $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer, an enterprise-focused social networking platform. Despite a big Yammer overhaul in 2019, Microsoft has been increasingly focused on Teams and its new Viva platform as the hubs of communication in workplaces. Microsoft is now launching Viva Engage today, a new Facebook-like app inside Teams that encourages social networking at work.

Viva Engage builds on some of the strengths of Yammer, promoting digital communities, conversations, and self-expression in the workplace. While Yammer often feels like an extension of SharePoint and Office, Viva Engage looks like a Facebook replica. It includes a storylines section, which is effectively your Facebook news feed, featuring conversational posts, videos, images, and more. It looks and feels just like Facebook, and it's clearly designed to feel similar so employees will use it to share news or even personal interests.

Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms's Facebook have submitted to Indonesian regulations that grant Jakarta sweeping powers to shut down content it deems undesirable and tax digital sales. From a report: The US giants were among the last of several internet media platforms that submitted official business registrations in Indonesia, effectively endorsing the new rules. Netflix, Spotify Technology, Meta Platforms' Instagram and ByteDance-owned TikTok have also registered, according to Indonesia's information ministry. Social media operators are facing increasing scrutiny from governments around the world as their market dominance grows. The Indonesia regulations allow the government to block services that fail to remove within 24 hours content that could potentially "incite unrest" or "disturb public order," such as those that promote child pornography or support terrorism. They also allow the government to levy a value-added tax on the sale of digital goods, from content to virtual items.