An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Janus Rose: During a tech demo in 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described VR as "the next major computing platform" -- a space where all our social interactions will play out with new levels of physical presence thanks to headsets and motion-controllers. As I wrote at the time, this could only mean one thing: Zuckerberg wants to build virtual environments where all human behavior can be recorded, predicted, and monetized. At the time, the company told me it had "no current plans" to use physical motion data like head and eye movements as a means of predicting behavior and serving ads. Since then, it has made logging into Facebook a mandatory requirement for users of its Oculus headset -- a requirement it was recently pressured to remove. And earlier this year, the company announced its inevitable entry into VR-based advertising, inspiring enough backlash to cause one Oculus developer to abandon its plans for VR ads altogether.

While the bait-and-switch is a familiar and unsurprising move for The Company Formerly Known As Facebook, the announcement of Meta proves that there is no stopping Zuckerberg's plans to mine every human interaction in the world for data that can then be monetized. The brand shift notably comes at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny for its role in spreading disinformation and violence around the world, reinvigorated by revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugin. With Meta, it's safe to assume the predictive algorithms at work will be functionally the same as its predecessor. Data is collected about human behavior, which is then used to build profiles on users and automatically prioritize content they are more likely to interact with. Facebook itself proved the effectiveness of this manipulation with an "emotional contagion" experiment it secretly conducted on users in 2012, which showed that changing a user's feed to show positive or negative content altered the types of content they were likely to post.

This type of algorithmic manipulation forms the core business model of Facebook and countless other apps and social platforms. [...] Researchers have found that this algorithmic "nudging" is possible in embodied virtual spaces too, where the collection of intimate data about physical body movements provides new ways to influence human behavior on a large scale. Companies like RealEyes and Affectiva have marketed AI that they say can predict human emotions by analyzing body language and facial expressions -- a claim that is fiercely contested by AI experts but being widely deployed anyway. In one notable study, researchers determined that AI-controlled digital avatars can be used in virtual spaces to push people into accepting certain political views. In other words, Meta represents a massive investment into the very kind of algorithmic manipulation for which Facebook has been repeatedly maligned.

Facebook plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users and effectively eliminating a feature that has fueled privacy concerns, government investigations, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes. From a report: Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook's newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." He added that the company still saw the software as a powerful tool, but "every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance." The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could save time.

The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users "tag" them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facial-recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests. Some cities and states have banned or limited the technology to prevent potential abuse.

If you're worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel. From a report: The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse -- a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds. The first offering, a version of Microsoft's Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world. "This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction," Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said. Microsoft also has plans for gaming and entertainment. "You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an interview with Bloomberg. "If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they're 2D today, and the question is can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so."

Apple's long-rumored AR-VR headset may be arriving next year. According to a new report from notable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone-maker is aiming to put Wi-Fi 6 and 6E support into the device, which could arrive at some point towards the end of 2022. From a report: In a note to investors, spotted by MacRumors, Kuo writes that Meta (formerly Facebook), Sony and Apple will all have new virtual reality or augmented reality headsets of some kind next year, which will support the latest Wi-Fi standards. He expects that Meta's product will launch in the second half of the year, Apple's in the fourth quarter of 2022 and Sony's sometime in the second quarter. Last week during its Facebook Connect event Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a new, higher-end headset dubbed Project Cambria that the company says will arrive next year. Sony, meanwhile, has been teasing a successor to its PlayStation VR headset that is designed for the PlayStation 5. It too is aiming to launch its VR product in 2022. Kuo writes that using Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E will be a "basic requirement for head-mounted displays to improve the wireless experience," adding that "Wi-Fi 6 is significantly better than Wi-Fi 5 in transmission speed and power consumption."

"Internal documents show that Facebook has been actively hiring employees to build products that target children as young as 6 to expand its user base," reports NBC News — apparently within just the last six months.

"Our company is making a major investment..." begins an internal Facebook blog post seen by NBC. The blog post announces that the company was dedicating a team "to make safer, more private, experiences for youth..." It goes on to point out this marked a new direction for Facebook, since "For many of our products, we historically haven't designed for under 13."

Further down the post adds that "Our work prioritizes the best interests of the child..." Diagrams illustrate proposed new target age groups, ranging from kids 6 to 9 years old and tweens 10 to 12 years old — along with existing targets of early teens from 13 to 15 years old, late teens from 16 to 17 years old, and adults... Critics of the company say these documents are part of a long-standing pattern of Facebook attempting to attract younger users as early as possible.

"Facebook and Instagram have repeatedly shown that they simply can't be trusted when it comes to the well-being of children and teens," said James Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that researches the relationship between children and the digital world. "They need to focus on cleaning up their existing platforms instead of trying to hook more children to their addictive platforms at younger and younger ages...."

The post came just one week before a coalition of 35 organizations and 64 individual experts, coordinated by Fairplay, formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a Boston-based nonprofit, raised concerns about privacy, screen time, mental health, self-esteem and commercial pressure in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"These documents make clear that instead of working to make its existing platforms less harmful to teens, Facebook's priority was to ensnare younger children and create a pipeline of lifetime users of Facebook products," Fairplay's executive director Josh Golin told NBC News. "Despite Facebook's claims that their motivation for Instagram for Kids is to create a safer experience for preteens, it's clear the real reason is Facebook is fixated on kids to drive growth. Facebook products aren't safe for younger children, and a company that consistently puts profits ahead of young people's well-being has no business building platforms for kids."

"In a world of inequality, we are well accustomed to rich, powerful, connected people getting preferential treatment..." argues an opinion piece in the Washington Post.

"The notable exception is Wikipedia." There, VIPs have been shouting "Do you have any idea who you are dealing with?!" for years, only to be told either, not really, or, don't care, and then instructed...to take their objections to a Talk page where the community can weigh in...

One reason the project is different from other digital platforms for VIPs is the absence of a mechanism for "escalating the case to leadership," as one internal Facebook memo, recently published by the Wall Street Journal, euphemistically described the process of Facebook's giving special treatment... The closest approximation to a Wikipedia power player would be Jimmy Wales, the chairman emeritus of the foundation that supports Wikipedias in more than 250 languages and the face of the project for its 20 years of existence. But Wales is not actually in control of anything. When he gets personally involved in helping a petitioner, a crowd of editors track his movements to ensure that he not hold special influence. This tradition began way back in Wikipedia's history, when Wales insisted that the birth date on his own article, and his birth certificate, was wrong. The editors did not take his word for it...

With no bigwig to enlist, people who object to what appears on their article page try to navigate Wikipedia on their own, an often-treacherous experience. In the early days of Wikipedia, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins edited the article about him to correct an error. He confirmed in an email to an editor, Alienus, that "yes, the person who purported to be me is indeed me! But thank you very much for checking. I am bowled over by how good Wikipedia generally is." That same editor followed up, however, by questioning a change Dawkins had made to his article to reduce the number of journals he edits from four to two and to remove any mention of one, Episteme Journal. "Do you have any citations to support this change?" Dawkins was flabbergasted: "It is unreasonable to ask for a positive citation to demonstrate that I did NOT found a journal called Episteme. I am telling you that I never founded a journal called Episteme. I didn't even know that a journal called Episteme existed." Turned out an editor had made an error; the sentence was removed permanently.
The article — by Wikipedia editor Noam Cohen — opens with the story of John C. Eastman, a lawyer advising president Trump, and his argument with Wikipedia editors over his biography (an argument still archived on the biography's "Talk" page).

Eastman complains that their supporting references — which included the New York Times — were biased against him, and yet rather than allowing him to delete them "I had to ask permission from some unknown twentysomething."

A Microsoft software engineer working on open-source technologies recently wrote that "you can find an open-source implementation for (almost) anything.

"But the mobile landscape is a notable exception." While there are some open-source success stories, Android being a massive one, only a handful of major companies rule hardware and software innovation for the devices we carry in our pockets. Together, Apple and Samsung hold over 50 percent of the world's market share for mobile devices, a figure that underscores just how few dominant players exist in the space. Numbers like these might leave you feeling somber about the overall viability of mobile open source. But a growing demand for better security and privacy, among other factors, may be turning the tides, and a host of inspectable, open-source solutions with transparent life cycle processes are emerging as promising alternatives....

Along with the open-source messaging app Telegram, Signal has garnered attention as a more privacy-focused alternative to apps like Facebook Messenger. The browser Chromium and the mobile game 2048 are other noteworthy examples, as well as proof that although open-source apps aren't the norm, they can be widely adopted and popular. For example, over 65 percent of mobile traffic flows through Chromium-based browsers...

Despite the many open-source technologies available to help build mobile apps, there's plenty of room to grow in the user-facing space — especially as more people recognize the value of having open-source and open-governance applications that can better safeguard their personal information. That growth isn't likely to extend to the hardware space, where the cost of building open-source implementations isn't as rewarding for developers or users — though we may start to see more devices that allow people to choose individual hardware modules from a variety of providers.
The article does cite the open source mobile hardware company Purism. And there's plenty of interesting open source software for mobile app developers, including frameworks like Apache Cordova (which lets developers use CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript) and a whole ecosystem of open source libraries. But it all does raise the question...

Why aren't there more open source solutions for mobile devices?

"Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels," reports the New York Times. "The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies.

"But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced," they write — and sometimes, YouTube does end up making mistakes. (Alternate URL here...) The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe claim that YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation... Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally in different languages. "It's impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content," said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook."

In its email on Tuesday morning, YouTube said Novara Media [a left-leaning London news group] was guilty of "repeated violations" of YouTube's community guidelines, without elaborating. Novara's staff was left guessing what had caused the problem. YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before... Novara's last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy, which hardly seemed worthy of YouTube's attention. One of the organization's few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers...

Staff members worried it had been a coordinated campaign by critics of their coverage to file complaints with YouTube, triggering its software to block their channel, a tactic sometimes used by right-wing groups to go after opponents.... An editor, Gary McQuiggin, filled out YouTube's online appeal form. He then tried using YouTube's online chat bot, speaking with a woman named "Rose," who said, "I know this is important," before the conversation crashed. Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. "We call on YouTube to immediately reinstate our account," it said. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament.

Within a few hours, Novara's channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail.
"We work quickly to review all flagged content," YouTube said in a statement, "but with millions of hours of video uploaded on YouTube every day, on occasion we make the wrong call "

But Ed Procter, chief executive of the Independent Monitor for the Press, told the Times that it was at least the fifth time that a news outlet had material deleted by YouTube, Facebook or Twitter without warning.

The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower "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."

And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg's "unique degree of control" over Facebook, he's ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as "a litany of societal harms caused by the company's relentless pursuit of growth." Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook...

For all Facebook's troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the "Rest of World," including India, France and Italy...

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits.

Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization... Starting in 2017, Facebook's algorithm gave emoji reactions like "angry" five times the weight as "likes," boosting these posts in its users' feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business. The company's data scientists eventually confirmed that "angry" reaction, along with "wow" and "haha," occurred more frequently on "toxic" content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less "disturbing" content and less "graphic violence," company data scientists found.
The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg "makes decisions that cause harm" and then also dismissed the findings as being "based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context..."

Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, "We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible."

She added that the company is "constantly making difficult decisions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse. "I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player -- one company -- winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said. The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be "a honeypot trap for 'architecture astronauts.'" Those are the programmers and designers who "want to only look at things from the very highest levels," he said, while skipping the "nuts and bolts details" of how these things actually work.

These so-called architecture astronauts, Carmack said, "want to talk in high abstract terms about how we'll have generic objects that can contain other objects that can have references to these and entitlements to that, and we can pass control from one to the other." That kind of high-level hand-waving makes Carmack "just want to tear [his] hair out... because that's just so not the things that are actually important when you're building something." "But here we are," Carmack continued. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is developing a smartwatch with a front-facing camera and rounded screen, according to an image of the device found inside one of the tech giant's iPhone apps. The photo shows a watch with a screen and casing that's slightly curved at the edges. The front-facing camera -- similar to what you'd see on a smartphone -- appears at the bottom of the display, and there's a control button for the watch on the right side. The image was found inside of the company's app for controlling its new smart glasses launched in partnership with Ray-Ban. The picture was located by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News.

The watch has a detachable wrist strap and what appears to be a button at the top of the watch case. Its large display mimics the style of Apple's watch -- rather than the more basic fitness trackers sold by Google's Fitbit and Garmin. The camera suggests the product will likely be used for videoconferencing, a feature that would make Meta's device stand out. Apple's smartwatch doesn't have a camera, nor do rival products from companies such as Samsung. Facebook has been planning to launch its first watch as early as 2022, but a final decision on timing hasn't been made yet and the debut could be later, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on three generations of the product aimed at different release time frames, the person said. The device in the image could ultimately represent a version that is never released, but it's the first evidence of the company's work on the project. Not only does the code inside the software of the watch indicate it'll work with iOS and Android devices, but it may also be used as an input device or accessory for the company's VR and AR headsets.

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced it's changing Facebook's name to Meta. While he said Facebook's existing brands wouldn't be changing, we have learned that's not entirely true. "In a lengthy Facebook post, CTO-in-waiting Andrew Bosworth detailed about 15 minutes later following the completion of the keynote that as part of the new rebrand, they will be killing off the Oculus brand," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oculus phrasing was conspicuously absent from the presentations today and features like the Oculus Store were consistently referred to as the Quest Store. In his post, Bosworth details that starting early next year the process to rename the Oculus app to the Meta app and the Oculus Quest to the Meta Quest will begin. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we're retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today," Bosworth wrote. Facebook bought Oculus VR back in 2014 for $2 billion.

At the time, Zuckerberg said the Oculus Rift VR headset was the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures."

Facebook said Thursday it's changing its name to Meta. "From now on, we''ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Oculus Connect event. "Over time you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services."

Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a "metaverse" that will bring physically distant people closer together. From a report: Facebook has said this is its next major push, but it comes as the company is under intense scrutiny for how it is managing the impact of its existing services. The company is using its annual Facebook Connect conference to outline a series of new features and products, as well as some investments to spur adoption of the technologies. Among them:

Horizon Home: Facebook is making the home screen on Oculus Quest more social, allowing friends to gather, watch videos together and dive into games and apps.
Messenger calling in VR: This will start with being able to call from VR and eventually that will be a launch point for hanging out in virtual reality.
Bringing more 2D apps to VR: More than 20 apps are coming to Horizon Home, with the ability to be placed on a virtual screen. Apps include productivity titles like Slack and Dropbox as well as Facebook's own services, including Instagram. Developers will also be able to offer their own progressive web apps for use in VR.
Horizon Marketplace: The company plans to operate its own marketplace where creators and developers can sell their own virtual goods.
On the augmented reality front, Facebook is adding hand and body tracking to its Spark AR developer tools as well as Polar, a new app that allows people to create augmented reality filters without needing to code.

Apple's privacy rules are "negatively affecting" Facebook, and its business, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed during its most recent earnings call. MacRumors reports: As a quick refresher, starting with iOS 14.5 and all newer versions of iOS and iPadOS, Apple requires that apps ask for users' permission to track them across other apps and websites. Under the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, the latest change gives users a choice on whether they wish to be tracked for ads or other purposes. [...] Continuing on its anti-Apple's privacy rules campaign, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to blame Apple for his company's lower than expected growth in the third quarter of the year. Kicking off the earnings call, Zuckerberg said Apple is "negatively affecting" Facebook but that he believes the company will be able to "navigate" the challenges Apple is presenting thanks to its long-term investments.

"As expected, we did experience revenue headwinds this quarter, including from Apple's changes that are not only negatively affecting our business, but millions of small businesses in what is already a difficult time for them in the economy. Sheryl and Dave will talk about this more later, but the bottom line is we expect we'll be able to navigate these headwinds over time with investments that we're already making today." While Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team hold Apple's changes accountable for this quarter's performance, it may also be an asset. Zuckerberg has in the past stated that ATT could ultimately help Facebook, and it's a sentiment he again repeated during the earning's call. Apple's changes, according to Zuckerberg, are making "e-commerce and customer acquisition less effective on the web." Still, Facebook could benefit from the lessened effectiveness as "solutions that allow businesses to set up shop right inside our apps will become increasingly attractive," Zuckerberg added.

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, also criticized Apple and its privacy rules, going as far as to claim that the new rules are negatively impacting Facebook while benefiting Apple's own advertising business: "We've been open about the fact that there were headwinds coming -- and we've experienced that in Q3. The biggest is the impact of Apple's iOS14 changes, which have created headwinds for others in the industry as well, major challenges for small businesses, and advantaged Apple's own advertising business." Despite Facebook facing an avalanche of pressure amid leaked internal documents and scrutiny, Sandberg pointed the finger at Apple for Facebook's lackluster performance this quarter. "Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth," Sandberg said.

During the company's first appearance at a U.S. congressional hearing, TikTok executive Michael Beckerman said it does not give information to the Chinese government and has sought to safeguard U.S. data. Reuters reports: Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy for the Americas, became the company's first executive to appear before Congress, testifying to a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee. Republicans in particular pressed Beckerman on worries regarding TikTok's stewardship of data on the app's users. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the panel's top Republican, said she is concerned about TikTok's data collection, including audio and a user's location, and the potential for the Chinese government to gain access to the information. Blackburn questioned Beckerman on whether TikTok could resist giving data to China's government if material were to be demanded. "We do not share information with the Chinese government," Beckerman responded.

Under questioning by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Beckerman said that TikTok has "no affiliation" with Beijing ByteDance Technology, a ByteDance entity at which the Chinese government took a stake and a board seat this year. Beckerman also testified that TikTok's U.S. user data is stored in the United States, with backups in Singapore. "We have a world-renowned U.S. based security team that handles access," Beckerman said. Republican Senator John Thune said TikTok is perhaps more driven by content algorithms than even Facebook, as the app is famous for quickly learning what users find interesting and offering them those types of videos. Beckerman said TikTok would be willing to provide the app's algorithm moderation policies in order for the Senate panel to have it reviewed by independent experts.

TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat will appear before Congress Tuesday with a key priority: distinguishing their practices from Facebook's. From a report: Facebook is under attack, and its tech peers don't want to get caught in the crossfire as lawmakers mull legislation to rein in the company. At the hearing before the Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee, representatives from TikTok, YouTube and Snap will focus on ways their services differ from Facebook and Instagram and measures they've already put in place to protect children.

TikTok's Michael Beckerman, vice president and head of public policy, will highlight proactive safety moves the company has made, including disabling direct messages for users under 16. Snap's Jennifer Stout, vice president of global public policy, will note that the company was designed to avoid some of the toxicity of social media platforms and uses human moderation for creator posts that will reach more than 25 users. YouTube's Leslie Miller, vice president of government affairs and public policy, will point out that the company already has designed different services and products for younger users, including YouTube Kids, Made for Kids and Supervised Experiences.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he's redirected teams within his company to "make serving young adults their north star." The comment, made on a call with investors this afternoon, speaks to Facebooks' concerns about declining usage among teens and young adults. From a report: "So much of our services have gotten dialed to be the best for the most people who use them, rather than specifically for young adults," Zuckerberg said. He suggested the change will be more than just lip service. Facebook usage among older users will grow slower than it otherwise would have because of the changes, Zuckerberg said. Even with those tradeoffs, he said, "I think it's the right approach." Zuckerberg expects the changes to take years. One of the more immediate shifts could be to Instagram, which he says will see "significant changes" to lean further into video and make Reels "a more central part of the experience."

Last week, Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union to help build "the metaverse," a futuristic notion for connecting online that uses augmented and virtual reality. We now know how much the company plans to spend on this venture, as revealed in the company's third-quarter earnings release. According to The Verge, "Facebook plans to spend at least $10 billion this year on Facebook Reality Labs, its metaverse division tasked with creating AR and VR hardware, software, and content." From the report: "We are committed to bringing this long-term vision to life and we expect to increase our investments for the next several years," the company writes in its third-quarter earnings release this afternoon. Facebook sees AR and VR as being core to "the next generation of online social experiences." The division, which already makes the Oculus Quest headset and Portal lineup of calling devices, is clearly being positioned as the next big thing inside of Facebook. For one, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about the metaverse nonstop for the past several months. And today, Facebook said it's going to begin reporting earnings specifically for its Reality Labs segment, while Facebook's main ads business -- a staggering $28 billion this last quarter alone -- will be reported under another bucket. It's a sign to investors that the Reality Labs business matters and should be judged separately from how they value Facebook today.

It's also a move to, perhaps, distract from what else is going on in Facebook's earnings today. The company missed revenue expectations by around $1 billion (this is not a lot, exactly, at Facebook's scale), which speaks to some of the company's struggles right now. Facebook blames a number of factors for this: COVID-19, the economy, and Apple's recent ad-tracking changes -- something we saw last week when Snap reported earnings, too.

Tesla's market valuation hit and then surpassed the $1 trillion mark Monday, a milestone reached by the company 11 years after it became a publicly traded company. It also puts Tesla in select company with Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, all of which have market caps above $1 trillion. From a report: Tesla shares hit $998.22 midday Monday. Shares are now trading above $1,004, up about 10.5% from this morning's open. This is the first time the company's share price reached $1,000 a share. Shares pushed higher Monday on several news stories related to Tesla, including that rental giant Hertz, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, had agreed to buy 100,000 EVs from the automaker.