NEW RESOURCES

Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends (Or Family, Customers or Communities). “Today, we launch ‘How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends’ – a narrated slideshow and essay explaining how Facebook locks in its users, how interoperability can free them, and what it would feel like to use an ‘interoperable Facebook’ of the future, such as the one contemplated by the US ACCESS Act.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Independent: Meta employees revolt over plan to force them to share desks: ‘Complete and utter disconnect from reality’. “Meta staff have publicly voiced their frustration with the Facebook parent company after it announced a new desk sharing policy. It told staff that it would be testing a ‘new workplace experience’ as part of an ‘evolving workplace’. Most staff will not have their own place in the office, and instead be asked to reserve desks before they come in, Meta said.”

Semafor Media: Semafor Interview: Facebook could lift Trump’s suspension in January, Nick Clegg says. “Former President Donald Trump could be allowed back on Facebook once a suspension of his account expires in 2023, Nick Clegg of parent company Meta Platforms, said Thursday at an exclusive Semafor Exchange event in Washington, DC.”

Bloomberg: Amid job cuts, Meta is closing a New York office . “Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to close one of its offices in New York after scaling down its expansion plans in the city, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is exercising its option to terminate its lease at 225 Park Ave. South in Manhattan, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information was private.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

MarketWatch: Almost 100 Facebook janitors laid off as Silicon Valley’s dreaded service-worker cuts continue. “Nearly 100 Facebook janitors were laid off from the tech giant’s California offices Friday, two months after being told their jobs would be safe. The number of job cuts was actually supposed to be closer to 120, but about 30 janitors are being placed elsewhere, according to workers who spoke with MarketWatch as well as the union that represents them, SEIU United Service Workers West.”

BBC: Anti-vax groups use carrot emojis to hide Facebook posts. “Facebook groups are using the carrot emohttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/09/lawsuits-say-meta-evaded-apple-privacy-settings-to-spy-on-millions-of-users/ji to hide anti-vax content from automated moderation tools. The BBC has seen several groups, one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which the emoji appears in place of the word ‘vaccine’. Facebook’s algorithms tend to focus on words rather than images. The groups are being used to share unverified claims of people being either injured or killed by vaccines.”

New York Times: Meta Will Freeze Most Hiring, Zuckerberg Tells Employees. “In May, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, froze hiring for engineers and low-level data scientists. In July, Mr. Zuckerberg warned employees to buckle up for an ‘intense period’ of 18 to 24 months, and asked managers to start identifying weak performers. This week, he told his employees that the company would freeze hiring and reduce budgets across most teams at Meta, leading to layoffs in parts of the company that have previously seen unchecked growth.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: Unsealed docs in Facebook privacy suit offer glimpse of missing app audit. “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up… The scandal-hit company formerly known as Facebook has fought for over four years to keep a lid on the gory details of a third party app audit that its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally pledged would be carried out, back in 2018, as he sought to buy time to purge the spreading reputational stain after revelations about data misuse went viral at the peak of the Cambridge Analytica privacy crisis. But some details are emerging nonetheless — extracted like blood from a stone via a tortuous, multi-year process of litigation-triggered legal discovery.”

WIRED: A Sprawling Bot Network Used Fake Porn to Fool Facebook. “IN NOVEMBER 2021, Tord Lundström, the technical director at Swedish digital forensics nonprofit Qurium Media, noticed something strange. A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was targeting Bulatlat, an alternative Phillippine media outlet hosted by the nonprofit. And it was coming from Facebook users.”

Ars Technica: Coroner lists Instagram algorithm as contributing cause of UK teen’s death [Updated]. “In a London court this week, coroner Andrew Walker had the difficult task of assessing a question that child safety advocates have been asking for years: How responsible is social media for the content algorithms feed to minors? The case before Walker involved a 14-year-old named Molly Russell, who took her life in 2017 after she viewed thousands of posts on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest promoting self-harm.”

CNET: These 400 Apps Might Have Stolen Facebook Usernames and Passwords “A million Facebook users might have provided their usernames and passwords to harmful apps designed to help scammers take over their accounts, Facebook parent company Meta said Friday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Associated Press: Rohingya seek reparations from Facebook for role in massacre. “For years, Facebook, now called Meta Platforms Inc., pushed the narrative that it was a neutral platform in Myanmar that was misused by malicious people, and that despite its efforts to remove violent and hateful material, it unfortunately fell short. That narrative echoes its response to the role it has played in other conflicts around the world, whether the 2020 election in the U.S. or hate speech in India. But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false.”

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!