NEW RESOURCES

Gizmodo: We’re Publishing the Facebook Papers. Here’s What They Say About the Ranking Algorithms That Control Your News Feed.. “Today, as part of a rolling effort to make the Facebook Papers available publicly, Gizmodo is releasing a second batch of documents—37 files in all. In our first drop, we shared 28 files related to the 2020 election and the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. Only a few of the pages had ever been shown to the public before. Gizmodo has partnered with a group of independent experts to review, redact, and publish the documents.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Business Insider: Facebook is freezing hiring. Here’s why, who it impacts, and when it’s happening.. “Facebook is pausing on hiring and scaling back plans to acquire new talent across the company. CFO David Wehner said the company, which has rebranded to Meta, is doing so as part of its ‘reprioritization’ as it tackles challenges that caused it to miss revenue targets, according to an internal memo shared on Wednesday seen by Insider. Insider’s Kali Hays and Rob Price were the first to report Facebook’s hiring freeze.”

Bloomberg: Facebook Plans to Leave the Podcast Business After Just a Year. “Facebook is pulling out of podcasts and plans to remove them altogether from the social-media service starting June 3. Part of Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook will stop letting people add podcasts to the service starting this week, according to a note sent to partners. It will discontinue both its short-form audio product Soundbites and remove its central audio hub.”

CNET: Facebook Is Growing Its Daily Users Again. “The number of people using Facebook every day is growing again. In the first quarter, which ended in March, the number of daily users at the giant social network rose to 1.96 billion from 1.93 billion the previous quarter, the company said Wednesday. The rise was higher than a Wall Street estimate of 1.95 billion.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Just Security: Facebook Provided Warning to FBI Before January 6, GAO Report Reveals. “A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that seven federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies were aware of open source information on social media about ‘potential violence’ planned for January 6, 2021. The report suggests that federal agencies had ample authority and information to anticipate and prepare for a violent assault on the Capitol.”

Wall Street Journal: Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say. “When Facebook blocked news pages last year to pre-empt Australian legislation that would force it to pay for content, it also took down hospitals, emergency services and charities. The company says that was inadvertent; whistleblowers allege it was a negotiating tactic.”

The Robesonian: Social media causes controversial start to one-stop voting. “An investigation is underway after a Facebook page presenting itself as the Robeson County Board of Elections posted a cover photo with the words ‘re-elect John Cantey.’ The post comes at the start of one-stop early voting which began Thursday and will run through May 14. John Cantey is running for re-election to his Lumberton City Council seat, in which he represents Precinct 5 residents.”

CNET: Facebook Struggles to Control All the Data It Gathers, Report Says. “Facebook’s ad systems struggle to cope with the amount of user data they gather, and the social network’s privacy engineers warned that it could run into trouble with regulators in the US, Europe, India and other countries, Vice reported Tuesday. The issue lies in the ‘open borders’ of the system that Facebook parent company Meta has built, the engineers said in an apparent leaked report written last year.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PYMNTS: Meta Challenges Order to Kill $315M Deal to Acquire Giphy. “Meta Platforms Inc. is fighting allegations by the United Kingdom’s antitrust watchdog that the tech giant is violating anticompetitive rules, Bloomberg reported Monday (April 25). Meta has accused the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of being ‘irrational’ and ‘inconsistent’ when it determined Giphy, the GIF search engine, was a competitor in the display advertising market.”

Engadget: Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Instagram compromised in $2.4 million NFT phishing scam. “Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs is investigating a phishing attack after a hacker stole nearly $2.5 million worth of NFTs through the official Bored Ape Instagram account. The company disclosed the hack on Monday morning in a tweet warning followers not to click on links or mint new tokens.”

Reuters: Russia fines Meta Platforms over ‘LGBT propaganda’, Ifax says. “A Russian court on Tuesday fined Meta Platforms Inc. 4 million roubles ($54,030) for failing to delete posts that contained what it calls ‘LGBT propaganda’, the Interfax news agency reported.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PennState: Outage outrage: Facebook outage may reveal depth of social media dependency. “In a study of user reactions to a six-hour Facebook outage in the fall of 2021, the researchers said that members of the site flooded rival Twitter with nearly a quarter million tweets about the outage, quickly making #facebookdown a top trending topic. While many comments reflected anger about the situation and others ridiculed Facebook, users also expressed a need to find other social media outlets, according to S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State.”

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