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Facebook's oversight board says the site was wrong to delete a post protesting against the government in Iran. It's another example of the difficulties of moderating content online. The ruling came from an independent body that reviews a selection ... of decisions made by Facebook moderators. In a very loose sense, the body works a little like the Supreme Court in that it looks at specific cases but its rulings set wider precedents. In this case, a user had made a post which included the phrase "marg bar Khameni." Literally translates, that means "death to Khameni" and refers to Iran's Supreme ... (view more)

Facebook and Instagram's "Oversight Board" received more than a million complaints about content moderation in its first year. But it investigated fewer than 100 and made public rulings in just 20 cases. The board is made up of independent members ... who have industry expertise but aren't connected to Meta, the company which owns both Facebook and Instagram. It has the power to rule on content moderation decisions, with the sites having to follow its judgment. It can also make recommendations for policy changes. Of the 1.1 million appeals from users, most involved content moderation for bullying ... (view more)

The Supreme Court has blocked a Texas law that would have stopped social media companies from banning users based on political views. A 5-4 majority of judges said the law violated the First Amendment. In this case, the right to free speech in ... question is not that of individual users, but that of the social media companies. They had argued that they have the right to decide what content does and doesn't appear on their platforms. The verdict doesn't throw the law out. Instead, it means it cannot take effect until ongoing lawsuits about its measures have been resolved. Because it was an ... (view more)

A former Facebook content moderator is suing the site's operators claiming the work mentally harmed him. Daniel Motaung says the low-paid work left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Motaung is suing Facebook's owner Meta along with Sama, the ... contracting company that hired him for the work. He says he was misled by a job ad that implied content moderation was a small part of a wider customer service role. He was recruited in South Africa and relocated to work in Nairobi where he was paid the equivalent of $2.20 an hour. He says this relocation made it more difficult for himself and ... (view more)

Facebook is to ditch some tools which tracked a user's location. It seems to be more about the tools being little used than a sudden interest in boosting privacy. The tools all involved tracking a user's location in real time and using the ... information to provide some sort of service. Perhaps the best known was "Nearby Friends" which lived up to its name, telling users if anyone they knew on Facebook (or at least anyone who also had the feature switched on) was in the area, allowing for semi-spontaneous meet-ups. The tools also included localized weather alerts. In both cases, many users ... (view more)

For the first time, more than five billion people use the Internet. That means the proportion of the world who are online will soon reach two-thirds. The figures come from Data Reportal, which gathers together information from multiple sources to ... produce a global estimate. (Source: datareportal.com ) Its headline figures include five billion people using the Internet, meaning 63 percent of the world's population. It also says 5.32 billion people have a mobile phone (67 percent of the population), with around 80 percent of those handsets being smartphones. (Source: bdaily.co.uk ) The report ... (view more)

Facebook and Google have been fined a total of $237 million for the way they ask users for permission to issue cookies. French regulators said the companies breached rules that say refusing cookies must be as simple as accepting them. The fines came ... from the CNIL, France's primary data privacy regulator. It found the companies had breached France's Data Protection Act. In both cases, the companies breached rules on cookies that took effect last year with a deadline of March 31st for compliance. (Source: cnil.fr ) Unfair Choice Facebook was fined approximately $68 million USD while Google was ... (view more)

Facebook and Instagram will not strengthen the encryption on their messaging until 2023, a year later than planned. The delay has been linked to complaints that the encryption could help abusers of children. At the moment, both service messages are ... encrypted between the sender and the company's servers and then from the company's servers to the recipient. That means anyone who intercepts the message in transit can't practically read it, but the company itself can. Although the companies say they do not access the messages normally, they may do so in response to a court order, law enforcement ... (view more)

A change giving Apple users more control over their data has cost four major tech companies nearly $10 billion in lost ad revenue according to one estimate. But the drop is nowhere near as big as Facebook had warned. The change, which took effect in ... April, affects a tag called Identifier for Advertisers that links to a specific iPhone. It lets advertisers combine data from multiple sources and build up a picture of the device owner's interests, helping them better target advertising. Individual apps must now ask for permission (via an on-screen prompt) to access the tag, giving users greater ... (view more)

Internal Facebook documents suggest automated moderating will never pick up more than a small portion of the hate speech posted on the site. The figures suggest Facebook has used some creative wording when publicly arguing how well its systems are ... working. The company has a natural interest in using automated moderation, particularly with artificial intelligence that doesn't simply follow rules to spot content that breaks site rules, but develops its own methods for detecting it. That's because it's highly unlikely Facebook could every employ enough humans to manually moderate posts (before ... (view more)