Meta has begun warning users it suspects are under 16 that their accounts will begin to be deactivated under the teen social media ban, as it investigates why Instagram already won’t let some users create accounts. On Thursday, Meta was the first tech company to announce its plans for complying with the government’s social media minimum age… Read more »
Right now, more than 311,000 Australian Facebook users can apply for a slice of a A$50 million compensation fund from tech giant Meta – the largest ever payment for a breach of Australians’ privacy. But the clock is ticking. Even if you’re eligible, you only have until December 31 2025 to make your claim. Similar… Read more »
Twenty-one years after Facebook’s launch, Australia’s top 25 news outlets now have a combined 27.6 million followers on the platform. They rely on Facebook’s reach more than ever, posting far more stories there than in the past. With access to Meta’s Content Library (Meta is the owner of Facebook), our big data study analysed more… Read more »
When Sue Keay’s Facebook account was hacked, Meta didn’t warn her of the obvious problem, it preferred to go nuclear and deleted all her accounts. It’s a reminder that digital sovereignty matters. There used to be a lot of different ways that people could connect with me but please know that you are no longer… Read more »
Facebook’s Australian arm saw revenue grow by $110 million to $1.46 billion in 2024, but its greedy parent company gobbled up all of that additional revenue in service charges according to regulatory filings. The 20-year-old social media is barely profitable in Australia, just getting by on margins similar to the restaurant industry, at 3.2%, according… Read more »
Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted. The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen,… Read more »
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been ordered by a US court to provide details on how scammers use the social media platform to create scams ads as part of legal action by Dr Andrew Forrest. The WA mining billionaire has been doing battle with Facebook both here and in California for the last three years… Read more »
Social media giant Meta is attempting to lessen the impact of a tell-all memoir by its former director of global public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled Careless People, which the company alleges is “defamatory”. Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling in the United States on Wednesday, where an absent Wynn-Williams was ordered to temporarily stop personally promoting… Read more »
Apple says it plans to introduce age assurance technologies which can tell social media platforms if a user is underage, before Australia implements a ban of under-16s from such platforms in late 2025. The tech giant’s announcement pushes back against companies such as Snap and Meta, which have called for device manufacturers like Apple and… Read more »
Meta has announced it will abandon its fact-checking program, starting in the United States. It was aimed at preventing the spread of online lies among more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads. In a video, the company’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said fact checking had led to… Read more »
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has struck a $50 million deal with the Australian Information Commissioner to settle a Federal Court case over privacy breach involving the Cambridge Analytica political scandal. While it’s the second largest settlement struck by Meta over the matter, its a fraction of the US$725 million (A$1.14bn) the tech giant paid to… Read more »
Big tech companies would have to either do deals with news organisations to help fund journalism or pay a charge to the Australian government, under a new plan announced by the Albanese government on Thursday. The new plan follows the Morrison government-era system introduced in 2021 known as the news media bargaining code, which saw… Read more »
Scam ads are lucrative for scammers, but the money they steal from vulnerable people is also delivering plenty of cash to Mark Zuckerberg and his social media company Meta. The business behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has been named one of five “winners” in consumer group CHOICE’s annual Shonky Awards for trash products. The CHOICE… Read more »
For almost a decade, researchers have been gathering evidence that the social media platform Facebook disproportionately amplifies low-quality content and misinformation. So it was something of a surprise when in 2023 the journal Science published a study that found Facebook’s algorithms were not major drivers of misinformation during the 2020 United States election. This study… Read more »
Facebook acknowledged in a Senate inquiry yesterday that it is scraping the public photos of Australian users to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Facebook’s parent company Meta claims this excludes data from users who have marked their posts as “private”, as well as photos or data from users under the age of 18. Since… Read more »
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.
