TWEAKS AND UPDATES

KnowTechie: Meta spirals from the top-10 list of most valuable companies. “Meta, previously Facebook, is no longer among the top ten most valuable global companies. That’s after a 45-percent tumble in stock price from its peak in September when Meta was a trillion-dollar company.”

Vanity Fair: Metamates Unite! Zuck’s Rebrand Is Full Steam Ahead. “Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, appears to be confronting the reality that a name change is not enough to overcome its existential crisis. A series of moves this week shows how Meta is trying to rebrand not only its products but its strategic response, the deficiencies of which were laid bare in its reaction to last year’s Facebook Files leak.”

Mashable: Anti-vaxxers just killed Facebook profile frames. “Did you enjoy glamming up your Facebook photos with profile frames? Those graphics and slogans you could embed over your circular Facebook profile image were a great way to customize your page for a holiday or show support for your favorite sports team. Users could even get creative and create their very own custom frame images. Well, you won’t be able to do that anymore. Facebook is removing profile frames as we know it, essentially killing the feature. And anti-vaxxers are to blame.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Bloomberg: Meta’s Stock-Market Wipeout Is Unmatched in the Megacap Era. “The stock has seen a drumbeat of bad news, including Google’s announcement this week that it would bring a privacy initiative to Android phones. While the company said the move is ad-friendly, it’s reminiscent of Apple Inc.’s changed privacy policy, which dented digital advertising and was a factor behind Meta’s catastrophic earnings report this month. The results called its growth prospects into doubt and spurred the biggest selloff in Wall Street history in terms of value erased.”

CNET: Meta Faces New Whistleblower Complaints Over Climate Change, COVID Misinformation. “The two new complaints were filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission this month by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group representing former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen. The complaints allege that Facebook made ‘material misrepresentations’ and omitted information in statements to investors about its efforts to stem misinformation on its platforms, according to The Washington Post, which cited redacted copies of the documents.”

The Verge: How Facebook Twisted Canada’s Trucker Convoy Into An International Movement. “For many Canadians, it’s an overdue end to a chaotic protest that has stifled trade and brought alarming weaponry into otherwise quiet communities. But right-wing supporters have a wildly different view of events: figures like Tucker Carlson have portrayed the convoy as a working-class rebellion, and Trudeau’s response has been treated as enacting martial law, leading Elon Musk to tweet (and then delete) a meme comparing Trudeau to Adolf Hitler. It’s a shocking split, arguably the single most important factor in the protests, and much of it originates in the fractured way information travels online.”

CBC: B.C. mayors go Facebook-free to preserve mental health, find better ways to connect with their community. “A pair of B.C. mayors have given up using Facebook for the month of February in an effort to preserve their mental health and to find better ways of communicating with their community. Merlin Blackwell of Clearwater and Ange Qualizza of Fernie, both in B.C.’s Interior, challenged each other to get off social media after realizing they were spending too much time reading angry comments that weren’t helping them do their job.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Facebook, Instagram are hot spots for fake Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel. “Facebook owner Meta Platforms is struggling to stop counterfeiters from pushing fake luxury goods from Gucci to Chanel across its social media apps, according to research and interviews, as the company barrels into ecommerce.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Facebook accused by survivors of letting activists incite ethnic massacres with hate and misinformation in Ethiopia. “The company has known for years that it was helping to directly fuel the growing tensions in the country. Many of those fighting misinformation and hate on the ground – fact checkers, journalists, civil society organisations and human rights activists – say Facebook’s support is still far less than it could and should be. A senior member of Ethiopia’s media accused Facebook of ‘just standing by and watching this country fall apart’.”

The Register: Facebook is one bad Chrome extension away from another Cambridge Analytica scandal. “Multiple Chrome browser extensions make use of a session token for Meta’s Facebook that grants access to signed-in users’ social network data in a way that violates the company’s policies and leaves users open to potential privacy violations.”

TechCrunch: Meta axes a head of global community development after he appears on video in underage sex sting. “Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has confirmed to TechCrunch that Jeren A. Miles, who had been a manager of global community development, is no longer employed by the company after a video went viral on YouTube, which was then reposted on Reddit and other sites, featuring him in a sting operation conducted by amateurs with the intent of catching paedophiles.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

National Review: Against Meta. “The fact is, the Metaverse is not some benevolent service to the Reality Disprivileged — it is an attempt to improve upon the digital experience that technologists have already created, and which they too already fear and resent. They want to improve life for the Zoom class. The whole project is powered by the promise that it will give corporations power to prey upon people’s wallets, without returning to them anything of real value. It will be lifted up by the vision of the political elite who hope to further push-button control of a passive population of alienated individuals. The good news is that we have the means to stop such a project.”

CNN: Facebook is rebranding everything but faces the same old problems. “Nearly four months ago, amid a firestorm of critical coverage stemming from a whistleblower’s leaks, Facebook shifted its strategic focus to building an immersive version of the internet it calls the ‘metaverse’ and changed its company name to Meta. This week, the company continued with its rebranding campaign.”

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