Tag: Instagram

East Tennessee Schools Sue Major Social Media Companies

Peter D'Abrosca
Kids on tablets

More than 30 school districts in East Tennessee have joined a lawsuit first filed by Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSS) against social media companies, claiming that those companies are harming children.

According to WBIR, Knox, Anderson, Blount, Claiborne, Fentress, Grainger, Greene, Hamblen, Lenoir City, Loudon, Maryville, Oak Ridge, Oneida, and Sevier counties have joined the suit, which names eta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, YouTube and WhatsApp as defendants.

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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti Sends Letter to Meta Demanding Instagram Stop Monetizing Child Exploitation

Kaitlin Housler
Kids on Phone

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has joined a coalition of 26 other state attorneys general in sending a letter to Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, demanding that Instagram stop monetizing child exploitation content.

Citing reporting from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the coalition of attorneys general expressed concern over news that Instagram has “actively promoted” to “likely pedophiles” content created by “adults seeking to profit from exploiting their own children.”

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Moms Inadvertently Expose Daughters to Predators on Instagram in Quest for Money and Fame, Investigation Reveals

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Instagram User

Mothers are inadvertently exposing their young daughters to male predators on Instagram in a quest to garner money and fame, an investigation published by The New York Times on Thursday found.

The accounts, numbering in the thousands, reveal how social media platforms are altering the definition of childhood and the increasing commodification of young girls, the NYT found. In some cases, mothers managing the accounts actively sell photographs, previously worn outfits and chat sessions with their underage daughters.

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Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti Warns Instagram Effects ‘Catastrophic’ on Teens, Cites Unredacted Complaint Against Meta

Tom Pappert
Friends Phone

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti told The Tennessee Star in a Thursday phone interview that his office’s unredacted lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shows the company is using strategies to increase Instagram user engagement which are “catastrophic” to teenage girls, and warned that other social media companies may soon land within his crosshairs.

Speaking to The Star, Skrmetti explained that his office’s unredacted complaint against Meta, which it released last week, outlines “a very sophisticated effort by a very sophisticated company to design a product that kids would have a hard time not using.” Meta’s focus on children, Skrmetti said, was motivated by a desire to keep them using the platforms into adulthood, when the company will have collected years worth of data that can be used by advertisers.

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Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti Claims Meta Knowingly Made Instagram Addictive to Children in Unredacted Lawsuit

Tom Pappert
AG Skrmetti

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) released on Wednesday the unredacted lawsuit he is leading against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which alleges Meta created Instagram using “deceptive and unfair business practices that are fomenting a mental health crisis in this state.”

Skrmetti stated in a press release that his office’s “complaint makes clear that Meta knew its platforms were hurting kids and made a very clear decision to choose money over the mental health of its young users.” The attorney general said that “Tennessee law protects kids from companies, big or small, that mislead and hurt them” and that the state “will continue to aggressively enforce that law.”

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Tennessee Official Says Anxiety, Depression on the Rise Among Children

Peter D'Abrosca

An official with the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (TDMHSAS) said in a recent interview that mental illnesses among children are on the rise in the Volunteer State, as the state’s Attorney General works to tackle some of the potential root causes of those illnesses. 

“The data from all sources point to that we see increased sadness and hopelessness among high school students,” TDMHSAS Deputy Commissioner Matthew Yancey told WKRN. “We’ve seen increases in emergency room presentations related to psychiatric emergencies, increases in suicidal ideation.”

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New Mexico Sues Facebook and Instagram for Hosting Child Sexual Abuse, Solicitation, and Trafficking Content

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New Mexico is suing Facebook and Instagram for creating “prime locations” for sexual predators to share child sexual abuse, solicitation, and trafficking content.

NM Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a civil suit filed against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, alleging that “certain child exploitative content” is ten times “more prevalent” on Facebook and Instagram than on pornography site PornHub and the adult content platform OnlyFans.

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Sen. Blackburn: Whistleblower Has ‘Irrefutable Evidence’ Facebook Serves Harmful Content to Kids, Hid Data from Congress

Tom Pappert

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said on Friday that a whistleblower formerly employed by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, provided “irrefutable evidence” the social media giant knowingly serves harmful content to children on its platforms.

Blackburn released a bipartisan statement with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Friday after speaking with whistleblower Arturo Bejar, a former employee and consultant for Meta, which was then Facebook. He alleged the company willfully ignored data proving children are regularly served to content that glorifies drug use and eating disorders, and are subjected to sexual harassment and bullying on the company’s platforms.

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Attorney General Skrmetti Leading Coalition of More than 40 States in Suing Meta over Children’s Mental Health

Peter D'Abrosca

Tennessee’s Attorney General is leading a bipartisan coalition of 42 states in suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging that Instagram causes mental health harms to its young users.

“Meta has known for years that Instagram causes psychological harm to young users,” said General Skrmetti in a Tuesday press release. “Rather than take steps to reduce or disclose the harm, Meta leaned further in to its profit-maximizing approach that hurts kids.  Targeting kids with a harmful product and lying about its safety violates the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. Meta knows every last design decision that made Instagram addictive to kids and that means it knows exactly how to fix the problem. We’re suing to make the company fix the problem.”

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Vanderbilt University Medical Center ‘WokeScientist’ Supports Palestinian Liberation ‘By Any Means Necessary’

M.D. Kittle

A microbiologist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, known as WokeScientist on her Instagram account, took to her social media page to defend Hamas for the terrorist network’s barbaric attack on Israelis.

Dr. Ayesha Khan, a VUMC resident and clinical fellow in microbiology in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology, insists on her Instagram page that “a ceasefire is not enough.”

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China Ramps Up Crackdown on American Tech

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Over the past few months, China has escalated its efforts to exert control over American technology companies by implementing new requirements, bans and restrictions.

The Chinese government is clamping down on American technology companies by throttling their already limited access to the country’s massive economy, according to new requirements, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The country has also challenged American technology dominance by developing rivals to the latest smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as announcing export limits to key metals in July.

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Meta’s Oversight Board Rules That Company Stifled Speech by Removing Posts About Abortion

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Meta’s Oversight Board ruled Wednesday that Facebook and Instagram showed “patterns of censorship” by removing posts about abortion that the social media platforms claimed constituted death threats.

The board had been weighing a series of posts that were initially taken down by Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, for potential death threats against both pro-abortion and pro-life advocates before being reinstated after appeals from the users. The board took up the case in June and announced this week that Facebook had erred by removing the posts, according to the ruling.

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Meta’s Epidemic of Chinese ‘Spamouflage’ Propaganda

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Meta recently took “what appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” off its platforms, according to the company’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released this week.’

The social media accounts that made up the covert influence operation — collectively dubbed “Spamouflage” — were active all over the world, including in America, major U.S. allies, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora.

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Florida AG Moody Calls on Zuckerberg to Respond to ‘Stunning’ Number of Human Trafficking Cases on Meta Platforms

The Center Square

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody on Monday called on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking to account for how Meta is being used to facilitate human trafficking and sex exploitation.

Moody did so while announcing what she described as the “stunning” and “disturbing” findings of a statewide investigation that found that Meta platforms are being used more than any other social media platforms by human traffickers to commit crimes.

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Lt. Governor Randy McNally ‘Grateful for the Support of My Caucus’ after Surviving State Senate Republican Caucus’ Vote of Confidence

Kaitlin Housler

Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally won a vote of confidence Monday from members of the Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus. In total, 19 members voted in support of McNally’s continued leadership as Lt. Governor while seven did not, according to a statement emailed to media following the private caucus vote.

“I have always been honored, humbled and grateful for the support of my caucus. I remain so today,” McNally said. “We have a lot of important work left to do as we complete the legislative session, including the budget. I look forward to getting to it.”

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State Rep. Todd Warner Calls on Lt. Gov. Randy McNally to Resign Immediately

Kaitlin Housler

Following Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally’s bizarre social media postings on his official government Instagram account, State Representative Todd Warner (R-Chapel Hill) called on him to resign immediately, saying the 79-year-old lieutenant governor was a “predator.”

“Not only have Tennessee Republicans now become the laughingstock of the nation, the bottom line is this: Randy McNally is a predator,” Warner began in a statement released on Thursday.

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Ohio Proposal Aims to Require Verified Parental Consent Before Kids Can Use Social Media

Hannah Poling

A new proposal spearheaded by Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted would require certain online companies to obtain verified parental consent before permitting kids ages 16 and under to use their platforms.

The executive budget for 2023–24 that Governor Mike DeWine submitted last week to the Ohio General Assembly includes the Social Media Parental Notification Act.

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Social Media Use in Children Linked to Significant Brain Changes

Susan Berry, PhD
Person on phone with Twitter open

A new study from the University of North Carolina shows children and teens who frequently check social media may become more sensitive in the long term to “social feedback” in the form of “likes” and “dislikes” at a time when the brain is experiencing significant developmental changes.

In the study, published at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, researchers Maria Maza, et al, investigated whether the frequency with which middle-school age children check their Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat social media accounts is associated with long-term changes in brain development as they mature further into adolescence.

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Meta’s ‘Unequal’ Moderation Policy Protects Elites on Facebook and Instagram: Report

Admin

Meta’s Oversight Board criticized the social media giant for unfairly favoring certain elite users of Facebook and Instagram, granting them amnesty from certain rules, and failing to publicly disclose the program’s extent.

Meta’s “cross-check” program is supposed to minimize the number of posts Facebook and Instagram incorrectly take down, by having a human review posts by certain “powerful” users when they are found to be violating the rules, according to the Oversight Board. The Board found that, in practice, cross-check protected these accounts, allowing their content to remain up even when it was in violation of the sites’ rules and helping favored accounts receive reduced punishments for infractions, all the while repeatedly failing to detail to the public and the Board which accounts and posts were subject to this policy.

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European Country Fines Instagram $400 Million

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The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Instagram  €405 million ($403 million USD) Monday over child privacy violations, according to Business Insider.

The fine for failing to protect the privacy of minors stemmed from a variety of default settings for minor-operated accounts that the data watchdog considered improper, according to Business Insider. Children were allowed to operate business accounts, receive messages from adults and had their accounts set to “public” by default, according to Business Insider.

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Big Tech Censored Dozens of Doctors, over 800 Accounts for COVID-19 ‘Misinformation,’ Study Shows

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Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).

MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Amazon and Facebook Spent More Money Than Ever Lobbying in 2021

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Amazon and Facebook parent company Meta spent more money in 2021 lobbying lawmakers and officials than any year before, according to lobbying disclosure filings.

Amazon spent $20.3 million on lobbying while Meta spent $20.1 million in 2021, according to a review of lobbying disclosure filings by MarketWatch. The figures are record totals for both tech companies, who spent $18.9 million and $19.7 million on lobbying in 2020, respectively.

Google’s lobbying spend for 2021 clocked in at $11.5 million, while Microsoft spent $10.3 million and Apple spent $6.5 million, according to MarketWatch’s review.

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Facebook Parent Company Will Make Its Office Workers Get the Vaccine Booster

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Facebook parent company Meta will require its in-person workers to receive a booster shot in addition to a COVID-19 vaccine, the company announced Monday.

By March 28, Meta employees must have received the booster to use the in-person offices of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, The Wall Street Journal reported. Meta is reportedly delaying the reopening of its offices until late March due to the requirement.

“We’re focused on making sure our employees continue to have choices about where they work given the current COVID-19 landscape,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, said in a statement, CNBC reported. “We understand that the continued uncertainty makes this a difficult time to make decisions about where to work, so we’re giving more time to choose what works best for them.”

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Most Americans Don’t Trust TikTok, Facebook to Keep Their Data Safe: Poll

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Facebook logo with smartphone showing lock in front

A majority of Americans don’t trust major social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, to keep their data safe, according to a new poll.

Over 70% of American internet users say they don’t trust Facebook to responsibly manage their personal information or data related to their internet activity, according to the results of The Washington Post/Schar School poll released Wednesday. Similarly, 63% say they don’t trust TikTok to handle their data and 60% say they don’t trust Instagram.

Amazon and Apple were deemed the most trustworthy major tech companies, with just 40% of Americans saying they distrust the tech giants, according to the poll results.

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China Cuts Checks to American Social Media Influencers to Hype Olympics, Downplay Boycotts

Admin

China’s government is paying social media influencers in the U.S. to promote the Beijing Olympics and distract from diplomatic boycotts over its human rights violations, according to disclosures filed with the Department of Justice.

The Chinese consulate is paying Vippi, a New Jersey based public relations firm, $300,000 to have influencers on Instagram, TikTok and Twitch promote the Beijing Olympics, according to the disclosures. The influencers will also be required to promote U.S.-China cooperation on issues including energy and climate change.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics have inspired diplomatic boycotts from the U.S., Australia and the U.K. due to China’s purported ethnic cleansing and torture of Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in Western China.

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Instagram Rolls Out Teen Safety Features One Day Before CEO Will Testify in Congress

Admin
Adam Mosseri

Instagram unveiled a host of child safety measures and parental controls for its app just one day before chief executive Adam Mosseri is due to testify in Congress.

“At Instagram, we’ve been working for a long time to keep young people safe on the app,” Mosseri wrote in a blog post. “As part of that work, today we’re announcing some new tools and features to keep young people even safer on Instagram.”

The new features include controls allowing parents to set time limits for their kids’ use of Instagram, providing resources on how Instagram works and options allowing kids to notify parents if they report another user. Instagram will also launch its “Take A Break” feature, which asks users to take some time away from Instagram if they’ve been scrolling for a while.

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State Attorney Generals Launch Investigation into Instagram’s Effects on Kids

Admin
Young person on Instagram

A bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general launched a probe into Instagram on Thursday to examine whether the company violated state-level consumer protection laws.

The states are investigating whether Meta (formerly known as Facebook), which owns Instagram, promoted the image-sharing platform “to children and young adults” despite being aware of its negative effects, according to statements from the attorneys general. The probe cites internal Facebook communications and research leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen and published by The Wall Street Journal showing Meta was aware that use of Instagram could contribute to body image and mental health issues among teens.

“When social media platforms treat our children as mere commodities to manipulate for longer screen time engagement and data extraction, it becomes imperative for state attorneys general to engage our investigative authority under our consumer protection laws,” Republican Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson said in a statement.

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Tennessee Sen. Blackburn Blasts YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat Execs for Allowing Dangerous Content

Bradley Vasoli

A U.S. Senate committee investigating the promotion of material harmful to young people on social media expanded beyond Facebook and Instagram Tuesday to include the video-sharing sites YouTube and TikTok as well as the Snapchat messaging application.

Therein, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) deplored the health-threatening viral challenges (e.g. binge drinking, the infamous “cinnamon challenge”), enticements toward illegal drugs, encouragements to engage in drastic dieting and presentations of child-sex abuse that she said have been purveyed to children and teens via these websites. She raised particular alarm regarding minors she said have been led into illicit sexual relationships on Snapchat.

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Tennessee Attorney General Slatery Credited with National Role in Anti-Social Media Effort

Bradley Vasoli

The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) has credited Tennessee’s top prosecutor with a major role in leading NAAG’s support for the U.S. Senate’s inquiry into social media’s impacts on mental health and safety. 

The association announced Tuesday it sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security backing that subcommittee’s efforts to probe Facebook and other companies regarding their effects on children and teens.

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Big Tech Down: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Experience Widespread Outages

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Smartphone with display of social media apps

Platforms owned by Facebook all experienced outages at the same time late Monday morning, and could not be accessed.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went down Monday morning, according to outage tracking site Downdetector. Facebook was first reported down around 11:15 a.m., with reports peaking around 12 p.m. with over 100,000 reported outages, according to the site.

When users attempted to access Instagram, a message reading “5xx Server Error” appeared. A message reading “Sorry, something went wrong” appeared when users tried to access Facebook.

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Tennessee Senator Blackburn Grills Facebook Head of Safety on Teen Health and Safety Impacts

Bradley Vasoli

Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R) and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D) led a bipartisan grilling of Facebook’s Antigone Davis Thursday about apparent troubles the company’s photo-sharing platform causes for teenagers.

Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, testified before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security, of which Blumenthal and Blackburn are respectively chair and ranking member. The meeting focused largely on the psychological hazards that Facebook has quietly acknowledged its photo-album application Instagram has posed to children and teens.

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Tennessee Sen. Blackburn Spearheading Bipartisan Probe with Connecticut Sen. Blumenthal of Facebook’s Impact on Youngsters

Bradley Vasoli

Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R) and her Connecticut colleague Richard Blumenthal (D) announced this week they’re launching an inquiry into revelations, reported that morning in The Wall Street Journal, about Facebook’s knowledge of harms its products may pose to their young users.

Blumenthal chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, through which the investigation of the social network will proceed. Blackburn serves as the subcommittee’s ranking member.

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Report: Facebook Aware Instagram Makes Teen Girls Feel Bad, Leaked Research Shows

Admin
woman with blonde hair in bed on her laptop

Facebook is aware that Instagram, an image-sharing social media platform it owns, has harmful effects on the self-esteem of teen girls, according to leaked research seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Internal research, documents and research reportedly show that Facebook has studied the harmful effects Instagram can have on its users, especially teen girls, according to the WSJ.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” one slide from an internal research report read, with another saying that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”

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Mother of Slain Marine Suspended from Facebook, Instagram After Criticizing Joe Biden

Peter D'Abrosca
Shana Chappell

The mother of a U.S. Marine who died during the ISIS-affiliated attack on Kabul’s airport has been suspended from Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram. 

“Shana Chappell, mother of Marine Kareem Nikoui who was killed in Kabul, had her FB and Instagram accounts suspended for posts she made about her son and her feelings about the President and Vice President,” Lynn Afendoulis, former Michigan State Representative, said on Facebook. “This is horrifying. Her son GAVE HIS LIFE FOR OUR COUNTRY. She can say what she wants. Her FB account is back up. For now. God be with her.”

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Facebook Threatens Legal Action Against Group Conducting Research on Algorithm Manipulations

Admin
Person looking on Facebook with trending topics

A research group that has been investigating the manipulation of algorithms by Instagram was forced to shut down its research after legal threats from Facebook, according to Breitbart.

The Germany-based group, AlgorithmWatch, was investigating how Instagram favors certain types of content over others, and thus promotes them more heavily on users’ timelines. The group had been utilizing a browser extension that specializes in collecting data from users’ Instagram feeds in order to determine certain trends.

Among other findings, AlgorithmWatch determined that Instagram, a photo-sharing website, more heavily prioritizes images that include faces rather than just text. In May, representatives from Facebook, which owns Instagram, requested a meeting with the project’s leaders; during that meeting, Facebook accused the group, without any evidence, of violating Instagram’s terms of service. They also claimed that the investigation was in violation of the European Union’s GDPR data laws, since the project was allegedly collecting user data without the consent of the users.

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Detroit Meteorologist April Moss: CBS 62 Employees Who Choose Not to Be Vaccinated Are ‘Segregated’

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Meteorologist April Moss

CBS 62 Detroit Meteorologist and Multimedia Journalist, April Moss, was officially fired from the station this week after blowing the whistle on the network’s discriminatory practices regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.

Moss decided to sit down with Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe to discuss the behind-the-scenes discrimination and bias after Fox 26 Houston reporter Ivory Hector last week used Veritas to expose how her superiors were trying to “muzzle” her reporting on  Hydroxychloroquine.

Moss told O’Keefe that, like Hector, she too was worried that the liberal slant at her station was negatively impacting the public.

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Tennessee Attorney General Urges Facebook to Cease Building an Instagram for Kids Under 13

Corinne Murdock

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III submitted a letter this week urging Facebook to stop developing an Instagram specifically for children under 13. In addition to Tennessee, 44 other attorney generals signed onto the letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg. 

The attorneys general stated that research consistently links social media to physical, emotional, and mental health issues; that children can’t handle the challenges and responsibilities of social media, such as privacy and inappropriate content; and that Facebook fails to protect the safety and privacy of children.

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