Mark Zuckerberg, in a blog post: Today I'm sharing some of the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history. I've decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1. I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I'm especially sorry to those impacted.

At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We've shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas -- like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We've cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We're restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won't bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I've also made the hard decision to let people go.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to supportUkraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine's president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda. The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence. The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future. It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead ofTuesday's midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration's extensive military assistance to Ukraine.

"It's clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine," said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company. The campaign -- using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka -- have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today. It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort. The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content. The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran.

These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said. "The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks," said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. "But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims." Some characteristics of an inauthentic user to look out for include: no profile picture, no identifying biographical details, and posts exclusively on political issues that often include false or misleading posts and little engagement. They may also link to obscure websites like electiontruth.net, which Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit -- known only by its satellite tag number 234684 -- has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights. From a report: The five-month-old bird set off from Alaska on 13 October and satellite data appeared to show it did not stop during its marathon flight which took 11 days and one hour. Tagged in Alaska, the bar-tailed godwit, Limosa lapponica, flew at least 13,560km (8,435 miles) before touching down at Ansons Bay in north-east Tasmania.

The previous record was held by an adult male of the same species -- 4BBRW -- that flew 13,000km (8,100 miles) last year, beating his own previous record of 12,000km the year before. According to a Facebook post from the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre in New Zealand, 4BBRW's record had been "blown out of the water by this young upstart." Scientists track the bird using a 5G satellite tag attached to its lower back. According to data from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology's bird tracking project, the migratory bird took a route to the west of Hawaii, continuing over open ocean and flying over the Pacific island nation of Kiribati on 19 October.

Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week, WSJ reported over the weekend, citing people familiar with the matter, in what could be the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry's rapid growth during the pandemic. From the report: The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said.

The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company's 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company's staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment.

In 2004 NBC's news show "Dateline" began airing "To Catch a Predator" segments, in which a vigilante group posed online as minors to lure sex predators into in-person meetings — where they were then arrested by police.

The New Yorker looks at its cultural impact: Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it's "this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with," Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of "Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State," said. "It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven't fully grappled with." The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. "On the show, it's not the family, it's not priests or rabbis or other authority figures who pose a threat to children, it's this devious stranger," Renfro said. The show's influence helped spur the passage of the Adam Walsh Act, in 2006, which created publicly searchable databases of people convicted of certain sex crimes. (There's little evidence that sex-offender registries have been effective at reducing sexual offenses.)
But today, "amateur predator hunting has come back into style," the article notes, citing the proliferation of online groups. "Recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year."

And then the New Yorker interviewed a woman named Cam, who with her husband and her brother-in-law decided to form "the Permian Basin Predator Patrol" — broadcasting their sting operations and humiliations of potential perpetrators on YouTube: [S]oon after the channel started drawing attention, they were called to a meeting at the Odessa Police Department. According to Cam, officers made it clear that they disapproved of their activities. "We were told we can't be involved with them, and that we can't send them anything directly," she said. "One, we're endangering ourselves, and, two, we're giving them more work — that's what it seemed like they were saying."

"We are very mindful of not trying to entrap a suspect," Lieutenant Brad Cline, who works in the Odessa Police Department's Crimes Against Persons Unit, said. "Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well."
The article points out that "To Catch a Predator" was cancelled when Texas man Bill Conradt decided not to follow-up on his online messages — but "When a SWAT team burst into his house, trailed by a camera crew, Conradt shot himself."

So what did Cam's group do when the Odessa Police Department declined their help? The Permian Basin Predator Patrol continued to make videos. If she couldn't contribute to an arrest, Cam thought, at least she could get the word out to the public. She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with, even when they used fake names.... Sometimes she'd find a man's family on Facebook and send his mother screenshots of the obscene messages he'd sent, or call his employer. "I believe three of them have been let go from their jobs," she said.

A sting by the Predator Catchers Indianapolis led to a man's conviction for child solicitation.... Although YouTube's predator hunters tend to portray themselves as the unequivocal good guys (Cam is an exception — most are men), their track record is more mixed.... The Ohio-based group Dads Against Predators has reportedly been banned from local grocery stores for causing disturbances. In 2018, a twenty-year-old in Connecticut hanged himself after a confrontation with a predator-hunter group. One video by the Permian Basin Predator Patrol ends with a man weeping, then running into traffic. (Cam said that she asked police to perform a welfare check on him, but she's not sure if it occurred.)

By Tuesday morning Mastodon had gained 123,562 new users since October 27 (the site told TechCrunch) and had 528,607 active users. But by Saturday the number of new users had nearly doubled, to 230,000, reports CNN — with 655,000 active users.

In fact, for every 363 active users on Twitter, there's now one on Mastodon, CNN's figures suggest (since Twitter has nearly "238 million daily active monetizable users"). Exploring the recent spike, they note that Mastodon "has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook." Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It's operated by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding... "It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been," said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon)....

A lot of Mastodon's features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there's a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users' posts, and so on.... There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users' accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find.
CNN also notes the problem with signing up for a Mastodon server: "some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it's not accepting more users."

Meta's Instagram will soon allow artists to create and sell their own NFTs both right on the social media platform and off it. Axios reports: IG's feature will roll out to a small group of select creators in the U.S. to start, according to Meta. The first creators tapped to test the feature include photographer Isaac âoeDriftâ Wright, known as DrifterShoots, and artist Amber Vittoria. Meta won't charge fees for posting or sharing an NFT on IG, though, app store fees still apply. Separately, there will be a "professional mode" for Facebook profiles for creators to build a social media presence separate from their personal one. Artist royalties appear to be a part of the plan.

Minting or the creating of NFTs on IG will start on Polygon, a boon for the layer-2 blockchain (a separate blockchain built on top of Ethereum) given the potential onboarding of IG's billion active users. The price of Polygon's token MATIC jumped 17% from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning, boosted by IG news but also, because JPMorgan conducted its first live DeFi trade using that blockchain. The platform is adding support for Solana blockchain and Phantom wallet with the latest feature update, adding them to the list of already-supported wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Dapper Wallet, Rainbow and Trust Wallet. Ethereum and Flow blockchains are already supported. Info for selected collections with OpenSea metadata, like collection name and description, will show up on IG.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reason Magazine: The Babylon Bee this week joined The Onion in urging the Supreme Court to defend the First Amendment against an Ohio law that makes parody a felony. The case, which the Institute for Justice is asking the Court to take up, involves Parma resident Anthony Novak, who in 2016 was prosecuted for violating a state law against using a computer to "disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of any police, fire, educational, commercial, or governmental operations." Novak supposedly did that by creating a parody of the Parma Police Department's Facebook page. [...]

For obvious reasons, the right-leaning Bee, like the left-leaning Onion, is alarmed by the implication that people have no recourse against cops who arrest them for making fun of government agencies. "The Bee is serving a brutal life sentence in Twitter jail as we speak," says its amicus brief (PDF) in Novak v. City of Parma. "Its writers would very much like to avoid a consecutive sentence in a government-run facility." The premise of Novak's prosecution was that he had disrupted police operations by prompting calls about his parody to the department's nonemergency line. "Left in the hands of the Sixth Circuit and the Parma PD (and other like-minded law enforcement), the speech-stifling Ohio statute used to go after Mr. Novak empowers state officials to search, arrest, jail, and prosecute parodists without fear of ever being held accountable," the Bee says. "The upshot for The Bee is that, in Ohio at least, its writers could be jailed for many, if not most, of the articles The Bee publishes, provided that someone contacted law enforcement -- or another entity 'protected' by [Ohio's law] -- to tell them that the articles exist."

Consider the March 3 Bee story headlined "Donut Sales Surge as Police Departments Re-Funded." If someone "had called the Parma Police Department to let them know that The Bee had published the article," the brief suggests, the publication "could have been charged with a felony, its offices searched, and its writers arrested and jailed for days, all without consequence for the parties doing the charging, arresting, jailing, and searching." Likewise if an officer's "passive-aggressive brother-in-law had forwarded the article" to the cop's official email address, thereby "interrupt[ing]" his work. Given the broad wording of Ohio's law, which refers to "governmental operations" generally, Bee articles about federal agencies, such as its August 12 report on the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago, also could be treated as grounds for arrest. "Had a caller contacted the FBI field office in Cleveland or Cincinnati" to "express outrage over the suspicious timing of the FBI's raid on Melania Trump's Mar-a-Lago closet and Attorney General Garland's acquisition of a haute couture wardrobe," the Bee notes, that could be the basis for a felony charge in Ohio. On the First Amendment issues raised by this case, both The Onion and The Babylon Bee see eye to eye.

"The Onion may be staffed by socialist wackos, but in their brief defending parody to this Court, they hit it out of the park," the Bee says. "Parody has a unique capacity to speak truth to power and to cut its subjects down to size. Its continued protection under the First Amendment is crucial to preserving the right of citizens to effectively criticize the government."

The macro story unfolding today is all the layoffs taking place in the tech industry. "Tech giants including Meta and Amazon have been slowing down their hiring for months, while smaller tech companies such as Robinhood and Coinbase have announced layoffs," reports the New York Times. "But rarely have so many job cuts and hiring freezes in the industry been disclosed on the same day." From the report: The technology industry's slowdown came into even sharper relief on Thursday as Amazon publicly said it had paused hiring for its corporate work force and several other technology companies announced job cuts. [...] At the same time, Lyft said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. [...] Tech companies have led the way for the U.S. economy over the past decade, lifting the stock market during the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic. But in recent weeks, many of the largest firms reported financial results that suggested they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters, soaring inflation and rising interest rates.

Social media companies in particular have been grappling with a pullback in digital advertising over the last few months. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last week that its head count would remain "roughly flat" through the end of next year. The company plans to shrink some teams and hire only for high-priority areas. Snap, Snapchat's parent company, laid off 20 percent of its employees in August, blaming challenging macroeconomic conditions. Last week, Microsoft told investors that new hires in this quarter "should be minimal." Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also said that in this quarter it would hire fewer than half the number of people it added in the third quarter.

More layoffs at tech companies are in the works. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, has ordered cuts across the company, which employs about 7,500 people. Workers at Twitter have started circulating a "Layoff Guide" with tips on how to handle being laid off. On Thursday, Lyft said it had decided on layoffs in the face of "a probable recession sometime in the next year." All teams will be affected, said Logan Green and John Zimmer, the company's founders, in an email to employees. Over the summer, Lyft cut 2 percent of its employees, mostly as a result of shutting down its car rental business, and froze hiring. But the company still has "to become leaner," its founders said. It is "not immune to the realities of inflation and a slowing economy," which have led to increasing ride-share insurance costs. Lyft also said it planned to sell its first-party vehicle service business and expected employees on that team to be offered jobs at the acquiring company.

Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music. Ars Technica reports: Meta debuted the technology on October 25 in a paper titled "High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression," authored by Meta AI researchers Alexandre Defossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. Meta also summarized the research on its blog devoted to EnCodec.

Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate "latent space" representation. The "quantizer" then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. (This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk.) Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.

Meta's use of discriminators proves key to creating a method for compressing the audio as much as possible without losing key elements of a signal that make it distinctive and recognizable: "The key to lossy compression is to identify changes that will not be perceivable by humans, as perfect reconstruction is impossible at low bit rates. To do so, we use discriminators to improve the perceptual quality of the generated samples. This creates a cat-and-mouse game where the discriminator's job is to differentiate between real samples and reconstructed samples. The compression model attempts to generate samples to fool the discriminators by pushing the reconstructed samples to be more perceptually similar to the original samples."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents -- obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents -- illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new "Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate -- the war on terror -- has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. [...] There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the "content request system" at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. These are the key takeaways from the report: - Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
- DHS plans to target inaccurate information on 'the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."
- Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.
- The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure.
- DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly meetings as recently as August.
- DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that undermines trust in financial systems and courts.
- The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions.

Today ProPublica published "the largest-ever analysis of Google's ad practices on non-English-language websites," saying their report shows Google "is funneling revenue to some of the web's most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa," and "reveals how the tech giant makes disinformation profitable...." The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google's sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.... The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn't faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public. Google's publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

ProPublica's examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails. A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets....
The former Google leader suggests Google focuses on English-language problems partly because they're sensitive to bad PR and the posibility of regulatory scrutiny (and because English-language markets have the biggest impact).

Google is spending more money to patrol non-English content, a spokesperson told ProPublica, touting the company's "extensive measures to tackle misinformation... In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world."

But in some cases Google's ads appeared on false online article published years ago, the article points out, "suggesting that the company's failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem... [T]he investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable."

Shares of Meta plunged 24% Thursday morning as investors and analysts digested the company's third-quarter earnings miss and a weak fourth-quarter outlook. Shares were trading under $100 at market open, the lowest price since 2016. From a report: The parent company of Facebook reported quarterly revenue of $27.7 billion Wednesday, a decline of more than 4% year over year and its second straight quarterly decline. Its profit plummeted 52% to $4.4 billion. Meta warned the fourth quarter would be more of the same, issuing a weaker-than-expected outlook. It's expecting revenue for the fourth quarter to be $30 billion to $32.5 billion. Analysts were expecting sales of $32.2 billion. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated his commitment to spending billions of dollars developing the metaverse. Meta's Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality and related augmented reality technology that underpins its plans for the metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far this year. Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock Thursday, citing higher spending. Analyst Brian Nowak slashed his price target to $105 from $205. He expects the company's issues to persist as Meta continues to increase spending to build out its AI capabilities. Further reading: Facebook's worth less than Home Depot.

The social networking company, which is trying to shift into the so-called metaverse, posted falling sales and said it was "making significant changes" to operate more efficiently. The New York Times reports: This year, Meta's earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. Its stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year. On Wednesday, Meta continued that trajectory and indicated that the decline would not end anytime soon. It said it would be "making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently," including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.

The company reported a 4 percent drop in revenue for its third quarter -- to $27.7 billion, down from $29 billion a year earlier. Net income was $4.4 billion, down 52 percent from a year earlier. Spending soared by 19 percent from a year earlier. The company's metaverse investments remained troubled. Meta said its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the virtual reality and augmented reality efforts that are central to the metaverse, had lost $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. It said operating losses for the division would grow "significantly" next year. For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue of between $30 billion and $32.5 billion, which would be down from a year ago. The company's shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, acknowledged "near-term challenges on revenue." But he added that "the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth" and that he was "approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency."

Palmer Luckey is not a fan of what Mark Zuckerberg has so far produced for the metaverse, although he does think it could eventually succeed. Insider reports: The Oculus founder, speaking Monday during The Wall Street Journal conference Tech Live, said of Horizon Worlds, Facebook's core metaverse product: "I don't think it's a good product." "It's not good, it's not fun," Luckey said of Horizon. "Most people on the team would agree it's not a good product." "Mark Zuckerberg is the number one virtual reality fan in the world," Luckey said. "He's put in more money and time to it than anyone ever in history."

He said the amount of money Zuckerberg is putting behind the project alone means there's a chance Horizon Worlds will get better and the metaverse will be a success. "It is terrible today, but it could be amazing in the future," he said. "Zuckerberg will put the money in to do it. They're in the best position of anyone to win in the long run." It will take time and involve mistakes, he added, comparing it to a "project car," a fancy automobile that the owner spends a lot of money on as a hobby. "You hack at it and maybe no one else sees the value," Luckey said. "Will they stumble? Yeah sure. Will they waste money? Will they add things to their project car that they later hack off? Yes." The report notes that Facebook lost $10 billion last year on its metaverse projects, and is expected by to lose more than $10 billion again this year.

The Federal Trade Commission plans to take the rare step of bringing individual sanctions against the CEO of alcohol delivery company Drizly for data privacy abuses, following allegations that the company's security failures under his watch exposed the personal information of about 2.5 million customers. From a report: The proposed order will follow Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas to future businesses, requiring him to implement a security program at any companies he runs that collect information from more than 25,000 people. The order will also apply to the company itself, which is now a subsidiary of the ride-hailing service Uber. Under the terms of the FTC action, Rellas and Drizly will have to destroy unnecessary data, implement new data controls and train employees about cybersecurity.

In singling out Rellas, the FTC signaled it could use a wider range of tools to address data privacy abuses under the leadership of chair Lina Khan, who was widely expected to bring tougher oversight of the tech industry. The inclusion of Rellas follows a push from Democrats to more aggressively penalize individual executives involved in major data privacy breaches. Democrats on the commission previously criticized the agency's record-setting settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal because it did not name Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Altimeter Capital Chair and CEO Brad Gerstner said in an open letter to the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday that Meta has too many employees and is moving too slowly to retain the confidence of investors. From a report: The Meta investor recommends a plan to get the company's "mojo back" including reducing headcount expenses by 20% and limiting the company's pricey investments in "metaverse" technology to no more than $5 billion per year. "Meta needs to re-build confidence with investors, employees and the tech community in order to attract, inspire, and retain the best people in the world," Gerstner wrote in the letter. "In short, Meta needs to get fit and focused." The letter is the latest sign that Meta investors are starting to express reservations about the company's recent performance. Meta stock is down over 61% in 2022 so far.

At the end of the second quarter this year, Altimeter Capital held over 2 million shares of Meta. It's also a vote of less confidence about the company's ambitions in the world of virtual and augmented reality. Meta changed its company name from Facebook to better focus on its VR hardware and software, and is spending $10 billion per year on the technology. On Oct. 11, Meta announced a new high-end VR headset, the Quest Pro. However, there are few signs that VR or some of Meta's metaverse apps, like Horizon Worlds, are catching on with the public beyond early adopters. "In addition, people are confused by what the metaverse even means," Gerstner wrote. "If the company were investing $1-2B per year into this project, then that confusion might not even be a problem. An estimated $100B+ investment in an unknown future is super-sized and terrifying, even by Silicon Valley standards."

The Verge says Facebook "might ban news sharing in Canada if the country passes legislation forcing the company to pay news outlets for their content." They cite a post Friday from Facebook's parent company Meta, and a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. If this type of law sounds familiar, it's because Australia introduced a similar one last year, called the News Media Bargaining Code, which also requires Facebook and Google to pay for news included on the platforms. Although Australia eventually passed the law, it wasn't without significant pushback from Facebook and Google. Facebook switched off news sharing in the country in response, and Google threatened to pull its search engine from the country.

While Google later walked back on its plans after striking deals with media organizations, Facebook reversed its news ban only after Australia amended its legislation. Facebook's temporary ban not only affected news outlets but also ripped down posts from government agencies, like local fire and health departments. Earlier this year, a group of Facebook whistleblowers claimed the move was a negotiation tactic, alleging Facebook used an overly broad definition of what's considered a news publisher to cause chaos in the country. The company maintains the disorder was "inadvertent."

Now Facebook's prepared to put a block on news in Canada if the country doesn't change its legislation....

"If this draft legislation becomes law, creating globally unprecedented forms of financial liability for news links or content, we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content on Facebook in Canada as defined under the Online News Act," Meta states.

Engadget writes: After nearly three weeks of escalating rhetoric, The Wire is retracting its reporting on Meta.

On Sunday, the nonprofit publication said it had discovered "certain discrepancies" with the material that had informed its reporting on the social media giant since October 6th. "The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories," the outlet said, pointing to the fact it could not authenticate two emails that were critical to its previous coverage of Meta. One of the emails The Wire said it could not verify includes a message the outlet had attributed to Meta spokesperson Andy Stone.

"Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time," The Wire said. "We are still reviewing the entire matter, including the possibility that it was deliberately sought to misinform or deceive The Wire."
The Wire had reported Meta "had given an influential official from India's ruling party the extraordinary power to censor Instagram posts that he didn't like," according to the Washington Post. But it took a weird turn when The Wire published a video of a takedown request, according to Engadget.

"One day later, Meta said an internal investigation found the video showed a Workspace account created on October 13th, suggesting someone made the account to back up The Wire's reporting."

Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times.

"Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today." Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech....

The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.

With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.