Regulators in the U.K. on Tuesday said they have directed Facebook parent company Meta to sell Giphy after finding "the takeover could reduce competition between social media platforms and increase Facebook's already significant market power." From a report: Facebook agreed to buy Giphy in May of last year for an estimated price of $400 million. The deal almost immediately invited antitrust scrutiny, given the increased attention to Facebook's growing market power.

In a statement, the U.K.'s competition and markets authority concluded that the deal would be anticompetitive because Facebook could theoretically increase market power by "denying or limiting other platforms' access to Giphy GIFs," or "changing the terms of access," to its GIFs for competitive sites. Regulators also determined that the deal was uncompetitive because it shut down Giphy's advertising business, therefore eliminating Giphy's competition to Facebook's ad business. As a result, regulators said Facebook "will also be required to reinstate the innovative advertising services that Giphy offered before the merger."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants -- presumably including Netflix and other big US companies -- to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem." The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive.

Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model -- which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation -- can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants, but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory topics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face with services by big tech."

The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta's $315m acquisition of online gif platform Giphy in the coming days in an escalation of the watchdog's assault on Big Tech. Financial Times: The Competition and Markets Authority is set to reverse the deal according to individuals close to the matter, in what would be the first time the CMA has unwound a Big Tech deal. The watchdog began investigating Meta's acquisition of New-York based Giphy -- the biggest provider of animated images known as gifs to social networks -- in June last year. A decision to block the deal would set an eye-catching precedent from the UK regulator, which has never sought to reverse a completed tech deal. In August the CMA provisionally ruled Meta, formerly known as Facebook, should be forced to sell Giphy due to competition concerns. It has until December 1 to make a final call. At that time the CMA argued Meta could cut off its rivals' access to gifs, and demand platforms like TikTok or Snapchat hand over more of their data in order to access gifs, consolidating power in Meta's hands. The watchdog also said the deal could remove a competitor to Meta in the display advertising market in the UK, despite Giphy's lack of presence in that sector.

The New York Times tells the remarkable story of Uber's need for more intelligence gathering back in 2016: Uber was expanding aggressively into foreign markets. The pushback was swift and sometimes violent. Taxi drivers staged widespread protests, and in Nairobi, Kenya, several Uber cars were lit on fire and drivers were beaten. Competitors in China and India used sophisticated methods to collect Uber's data and undercut its prices. To fight back, Uber began to recruit a team of former C.I.A. officers like [Nick] Gicinto, law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts. The team would gather intelligence about threats against Uber drivers and executives, and investigate competing companies and potential acquisitions. "They didn't know what was going on, on the ground," Mr. Gicinto said. "They recognized that they needed somebody who understood the human aspect of these things and understood foreign environments...."

In addition to Uber's recruitment from the C.I.A., Google, Facebook and Amazon poached hackers from the National Security Agency to fend off cyberattacks, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agents to staff teams responsible for fielding law enforcement requests and former Pentagon officials to advise on defense contracts.
A history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle tells the Times it's not at all unusual for tech companies to hire from the intelligence community, a long-standing practice to protect intellectual secrets.

So for example, Uber's team "outsourced some of the projects to intelligence firms, which sent contractors to infiltrate driver protests... the team filmed Waymo's vehicles and scraped competitors' apps to collect pricing information." The men who gathered intelligence for Uber were supposed to be ghosts. For years, they were un-Googleable sentries, quietly informing executives about the actions of competitors, opponents and disgruntled employees. But the secrecy of the tightknit team ended abruptly in 2017 when one of its members turned on the others, accusing them of stealing trade secrets, wiretapping and destroying evidence. They flouted the law while carrying out Uber's dirtiest missions, their former co-worker, Richard Jacobs, claimed in an April 2017 email sent to top Uber executives. His lawyer followed up with a letter that said the team went so far as to hack foreign governments and wiretap Uber's own employees.

But Mr. Jacobs's most damning allegations of illegal activity were not true. In June, nearly four years after his claims drew wide attention, he retracted them. In a letter to his former co-workers that he wrote as part of a legal settlement, Mr. Jacobs explained that he had never intended to suggest that they broke the law. "I am sorry," he wrote. "I regret not having clarified the statements at an earlier time and regret any distress or injury my statements may have caused." Gary Bostwick, a lawyer for Mr. Jacobs, declined to comment....

Testifying in court, Mr. Jacobs seemed to distance himself from some of the claims in the letter. He hadn't had much time to review it before his lawyer sent it, he said, and he wasn't sure if Mr. Gicinto and his other former co-workers had broken the law. "I did not believe it was patently illegal. I had questions about the ethics of it," Mr. Jacobs testified. "It felt overly aggressive and invasive and inappropriate."
The Times reports that Uber had paid $7.5 million to cooperate with an investigation into Jacobs' allegations (according to legal filings), and while the findings were never made public, the co-workers accused in the letter "said they had been told that they were cleared of any wrongdoing...

"In 2021, Mr. Jacobs settled the libel lawsuit by his former co-workers. The terms of the settlement are not public."

We're on alert overload. Stray comments and offhand requests once shouted across the office now blink and buzz at us from Microsoft Teams and Slack. Our communication has grown fragmented, spread across myriad apps we have to learn, conform to, remember to check. From a report: Meanwhile, personal texts and social-media mentions have bled into the workday after all this time at home, adding another layer of distraction to our time on the clock. Why put your phone on silent if the boss isn't hovering over you? Our culture has evolved to accommodate rapid communication, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and it can be mentally taxing. Many of us struggle to conjure up that brilliant thought that hit right before the notification burst in. "Your memory is just overflowing with information," she says.

It doesn't make for great circumstances for getting work done, but there are ways individuals, managers and organizations can contend with the onslaught. Dr. Mark's research finds people switch screens an average of 566 times a day. Half the time we're interrupted; the other half we pull ourselves away. Breaks -- even mindless ones like scrolling Facebook -- can be positive, replenishing our cognitive resources, Dr. Mark says. But when something external diverts our focus, it takes us an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to get back to our original task, she has found. (Folks often switch to different projects in between.) And it stresses us out. Research using heart monitors shows that the interval between people's heart beats becomes more regular when they're interrupted, a sign they're in fight-or-flight mode. The onus is on teams and organizations to create new norms, Dr. Mark says. If individuals just up and turn off their notifications they'll likely be penalized for missing information. Instead, managers should create quiet hours where people aren't expected to respond. "It's a matter of relearning how to work," she says.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has agreed for the first time to testify before Congress, as bipartisan anger mounts over harms to young people from the app. From a report: Mr. Mosseri is expected to appear before a Senate panel during the week of Dec. 6 as part of a series of hearings on protecting children online, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, who will lead the hearing. Mr. Mosseri's appearance follows hearings this year with Antigone Davis, the global head of safety for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, and with Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistle-blower. Ms. Haugen's revelations about the social networking company, particularly those about Facebook and Instagram's research into its effects on some teenagers and young girls, have spurred criticism, inquiries from politicians and investigations from regulators.

In September, Ms. Davis told Congress that the company disputed the premise that Instagram was harmful for teenagers and noted that the leaked research did not have causal data. But after Ms. Haugen's testimony last month, Mr. Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, suggesting that his company had "provided false or inaccurate testimony to me regarding attempts to internally conceal its research." Mr. Blumenthal asked that Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Mosseri testify in front of the consumer protection subcommittee of the Senate's Commerce Committee to set the record straight.

A patch of virtual real estate in the online world Decentraland sold for a record $2.4 million worth of cryptocurrency, the buyer crypto investor Tokens.com and Decentraland said on Tuesday. From a report: Decentraland is an online environment -- also called a "metaverse" -- where users can buy land, visit buildings, walk around and meet people as avatars. Such environments have grown in popularity this year, as the pandemic caused people to spend more time online. read more Interest surged last month when Facebook changed its name to Meta to reflect its focus on developing virtual reality products for the metaverse. Decentraland is a specific type of metaverse that uses blockchain. Land and other items in Decentraland are sold in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a kind of crypto asset. Crypto enthusiasts buy land there as a speculative investment, using Decentraland's cryptocurrency, MANA. A subsidiary of Tokens.com, called the Metaverse Group, bought a patch of real estate for 618,000 MANA on Monday, which was around $3.27 million at the time of this Slashdot post, a Decentraland spokesman and a statement by Tokens.com said.

Russia has demanded that 13 foreign and mostly U.S. technology companies be officially represented on Russian soil by the end of 2021 or face possible restrictions or outright bans. From a report: The demand, from state communications regulator Roskomnadzor late on Monday, gave few details of what exactly the companies were required to do and targeted some firms that already have Russian offices. Foreign social media giants with more than 500,000 daily usershave been obliged to open offices in Russia since a new law took effect on July 1. The list published on Monday names the companies for the first time.

It lists Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and messaging app Telegram, all of which Russia has fined this year for failing to delete content it deems illegal. Apple, which Russia has targeted for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the mobile applications market, was also on the list. None of those companies responded to requests for comment. Roskomnadzor said firms that violate the legislation could face advertising, data collection and money transfer restrictions, or outright bans.

Apple sued the NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, in federal court on Tuesday, another setback for the beleaguered firm and the unregulated spyware industry. From a report: The lawsuit is the second of its kind -- Facebook sued the NSO Group in 2019 for targeting its WhatsApp users -- and represents another consequential move by a private company to curb invasive spyware by governments and the companies that provide their spy tools. Apple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. Apple also wants to permanently prevent NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices, a move that could render the company's Pegasus spyware product worthless, given that its core business is to give NSO's government clients full access to a target's iPhone or Android smartphone.

Apple is also asking for unspecified damages for the time and cost to deal with what the company argues is NSO's abuse of its products. Apple said it would donate the proceeds from those damages to organizations that expose spyware. Since NSO's founding in 2010, its executives have said that they sell spyware to governments only for lawful interception, but a series of revelations by journalists and private researchers have shown the extent to which governments have deployed NSO's Pegasus spyware against journalists, activists and dissidents. Apple executives described the lawsuit as a warning shot to NSO and other spyware makers. "This is Apple saying: If you do this, if you weaponize our software against innocent users, researchers, dissidents, activists or journalists, Apple will give you no quarter," Ivan Krstic, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in an interview on Monday.

The lead committee in the European Parliament writing new tech rules passed measures Tuesday that could impact major U.S. and European tech companies. Lawmakers voted to approve measures in the draft Digital Markets Act that could mean: 1. A company's messaging or social media app is interoperable, to prevent users feeling forced to use one or the other because that's where their friends are
2. A ban on behavioral targeting of ads to minors
3. Fines of as much as 20% of a company's global annual sales for breaches for the law

Companies identified as "gatekeepers" and therefore set to be accountable under the DMA include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Booking.com, and could later hit online marketplaces Zalando and Alibaba.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Niantic, the augmented reality platform that's developing games like Pokemon GO, raised $300 million from Coatue, valuing the company at $9 billion. The San Fransisco-based startup, which initially spun out of Google, will use this money to build what it calls the "real-world metaverse." As early as August, Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke has referred to the metaverse -- at least, the one that renders us bound to VR headsets, like in "Ready Player One" -- as a "dystopian nightmare."

Unlike Facebook, which changed its company name to Meta to signal its investment in VR technology, Niantic wants to develop technology that brings people closer to the outside world. Earlier this month, Niantic unveiled its Lightship AR Developer Kit (ARDK), which makes tools to develop AR games publicly available for free to anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Unity game engine. "At Niantic, we believe humans are the happiest when their virtual world leads them to a physical one," Hanke said at the time. "Unlike a sci-fi metaverse, a real-world metaverse will use technology to improve our experience of the world as we've known it for thousands of years." The funding will help expand the ARDK, which has already been used by companies like Coachella, Historic Royal Palaces, Universal Pictures, SoftBank, Warner Music Group and the PGA of America to create augmented reality experiences.

Gizmodo says it will be making the "Facebook Papers" public, becoming the first media outlet to do so. These documents were leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower earlier this year and "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post. Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content." Gizmodo explains how and why they're making this move: We believe there's a strong public need in making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we've partnered with a small group of independent monitors, who are joining us to establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals' privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest. The committee includes [experts from NYU, Mass Amherst, Columbia, Marquette, and the ACLU]. While our group is itself largely American, our first decision was to require local experts when reviewing any document focused on another country. One of the committee's chief responsibilities is to vet local experts to work alongside our reviewers.

[...] Beyond privacy reasons, the documents require additional review to ensure that we aren't just handing criminals and spies a roadmap for undermining what controls Facebook does have in place to defend against propaganda that spreads lies, hate, and fear. That would undermine any benefit the world stands to reap from this act of whistleblower justice. Our work is just beginning, but we're eager to release our first batch of documents as soon as possible. To get the ball rolling, the first release will likely consist mostly of documents that warrant the least amount of inspection. To learn more, check back for updates at the top of this article in the coming days.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users' messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as "simply not acceptable." The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the "frontline of child sexual abuse online" because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content -- a process known as end-to-end encryption. The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram's parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest.

"We're taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023," Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. "As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we're determined to protect people's private communications and keep people safe online." Meta already uses end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service and had been planning to extend that to its Messenger and Instagram apps in 2022. It has already encrypted voice and video calls on Messenger. Announcing the privacy drive in 2019, Zuckerberg, said: "People expect their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they've sent them to -- not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments or even the people operating the services they're using."

WhatsApp is rewriting its privacy policy as a result of a huge data protection fine earlier this year. From a report: Following an investigation, the Irish data protection watchdog issued a $253.29m fine -- the second-largest in history over GDPR -- and ordered WhatsApp to change its policies. WhatsApp is appealing against the fine, but is amending its policy documents in Europe and the UK to comply. However, it insists that nothing about its actual service is changing. Instead, the tweaks are designed to "add additional detail around our existing practices", and will only appear in the European version of the privacy policy, which is already different from the version that applies in the rest of the world. "There are no changes to our processes or contractual agreements with users, and users will not be required to agree to anything or to take any action in order to continue using WhatsApp," the company said, announcing the change. The new policy takes effect immediately.

In January, WhatsApp users complained about an update to the company's terms that many believed would result in data being shared with parent company Facebook, which is now called Meta. Many thought refusing to agree to the new terms and conditions would result in their accounts being blocked. In reality, very little had changed. However, WhatsApp was forced to delay its changes and spend months fighting the public perception to the contrary. During the confusion, millions of users downloaded WhatsApp competitors such as Signal.

When Americans gather around the Thanksgiving table this week, the blistering rally in technology, electric vehicles and crypto-related stocks is likely to be a part of their conversations. From a report: There's a reason it will dominate the small talk: The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is now worth almost half as much as the benchmark S&P 500 -- the highest ever -- and the megacap tech stocks alone represent a third of the S&P 500. Nvidia and Roblox's sprint stood out in a year when the rest of the big tech names jogged to new highs, defying several calls to sell the sector around last year's thanksgiving due to soaring valuations.

Chipmaker Nvidia has soared 148% as booming chip demand and a foray into the metaverse made it the best performer on the Nasdaq 100. Applied Materials and Advanced Micro Devices were other winners, each rising about 80% and outperforming many of the megacap tech stocks. Tesla soared to a $1 trillion market value as the electric-carmaker's shares doubled in value, driven by a sustained pickup in sales, even as part shortages were crippling the broader auto industry. EV fever was even more evident with Rivian Automotive, which doubled in value in less than two weeks after going public. Lucid Group was the sector's other hot name. Roblox's tripling of value from its March listing to Facebook's name change to Meta Platforms showed the metaverse was the next big thing in tech. The rush to the space was evident with the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an exchange traded fund focused on the theme, surpassing $500 million in assets under management on Nov. 17, having doubled in just two weeks. From the digital world to digital money: Bitcoin briefly reclaiming $60,000 and a rally in smaller cryptocurrencies boosted a host of related stocks such as Marathon Digital Holdings, Riot Blockchain and MicroStrategy. Marathon Digital was among the top winners, with its stock jumping ten-fold.

MIT's Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), " All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites.

"In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources." [T]he sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more. In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a "determining role" in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn't done enough "to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook's algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world.

But there's a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn't just amplifying misinformation.

The company is also funding it.

An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Facebook pays them for permission to open their content within Facebook's app (where Facebook controls the advertising) rather than having users clickthrough to the publisher's own web site, reports Technology Review: Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform's design also didn't sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages — in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy — one they still use today... Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of U.S. dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary — paid to them directly by Facebook. An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019... At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said...

75% of users who were exposed to clickbait content from farms run in Macedonia and Kosovo had never followed any of the pages. Facebook's content-recommendation system had instead pushed it into their news feeds.
Technology Review notes that Facebook now pays billions of dollars to the publishers in their program. It's a long and detailed article, which ultimately concludes that the problem "is now happening on a global scale." Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook's payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale...

Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it's AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation.
Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Technology Review that they'd misunderstood the issue. And the spokesperson also said "we've invested in building new expert-driven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so."

Google's spokesperson confirmed examples in the article violated their own policies and removed the content, adding "We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information."

Facebook has written to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), demanding that it stop setting up fake profiles to conduct surveillance on users. From a report: This comes after the Guardian revealed that the US police department had been working with a tech firm, analysing user data to help solve crimes. Facebook expressly prohibits the creation and use of fake accounts. The intent, it said, was to "create a safe environment where people can trust and hold one another accountable". "Not only do LAPD instructional documents use Facebook as an explicit example in advising officers to set up fake social media accounts, but documents also indicate that LAPD policies simply allow officers to create fake accounts for 'online investigative activity'," wrote Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel for civil rights Roy Austin in a letter outlining Facebook's policies. "While the legitimacy of such policies may be up to the LAPD, officers must abide by Facebook's policies when creating accounts on our services. The Police Department should cease all activities on Facebook that involve the use of fake accounts, impersonation of others, and collection of data for surveillance purposes."

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. state attorneys general said on Thursday it has opened a probe into Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, for promoting its subsidiary Instagram to children despite potential harms. From a report: The investigation, which involves at least eight states, comes at a time when Facebook is under scrutiny over its approach to children and young adults. The attorneys general are investigating whether the company violated consumer protection laws and put young people at risk, they said in emailed statements.

Facebook advertisers promoted false and misleading claims about climate change on the platform in recent weeks, just as the COP26 conference was getting under way. From a report: Days after Facebook's vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, touted the company's efforts to combat climate misinformation in a blog as the Glasgow summit began, conservative media network Newsmax ran an ad on Facebook (FB.O) that called man-made global warming a "hoax." The ad, which had multiple versions, garnered more than 200,000 views.

In another, conservative commentator Candace Owens said, "apparently we're just supposed to trust our new authoritarian government" on climate science, while a U.S. libertarian think-tank ran an ad on how "modern doomsayers" had been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades. Newsmax, Owens and the Daily Wire, which paid for the ad from Owens's page, did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, does not have a specific policy on climate misinformation in ads or unpaid posts. Alphabet's Google said last month it would no longer allow ads that contradict scientific consensus on climate change on YouTube and its other services, though it would allow content that discusses false claims.

In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger's voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen. From a report: One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved. The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind. In Cambodia, everyone from tuk-tuk drivers to Prime Minister Hun Sen prefers to send voice notes instead of messages. Facebook's study revealed that it wasn't just Cambodians who favor voice messages -- though nowhere else was it more popular. In the study, which included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and that single Cambodian, 87% of respondents said that they used voice tools to send notes in a different language from the one set on their apps. This was true on WhatsApp -- the most popular platform among the survey respondents -- along with Messenger and Telegram.

One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard. In Cambodia's case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language's 74 characters, the most of any script in the world. It was a daunting task. Javier Sola, a Spanish-born, Phnom Penh-based computer scientist, was part of the team working on the initial KhmerOS project in 2005. "There are many, many more symbols in Khmer than in [the] Latin script," Sola, now executive director of Cambodian NGO the Open Institute, told Rest of World. On a Latin keyboard, a user could see all of the alphabet at once, making typing intuitive. But in Khmer, each key hosted two different characters, which required flipping repeatedly between two keyboard layers. Not only that, but limited fonts meant that some messages failed to appear if the recipient's computer lacked the same font as the sender's. Still, users made it work. Facebook became popular in Cambodia around 2009, just at the same time as cheap smartphones and internet access, which meant that its usage exploded. Today, it's still the country's most popular overall platform. But on a small smartphone screen, that same typing system became nearly impossible.