Sci-Tech Politics

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Excerpt from news.google.com

Facebook and Instagram parent Meta is facing a lawsuit from Polish billionaire Rafal Brzoska and his wife. The billionaire has alleged that the social media major failed to remove fake advertisements featuring him and is spreading false information about his wife on its platforms. Brzoska, who is the creator of Polish parcel locker company InPost, also highlighted that, despite notifying Meta of the issue in July, the company has allegedly failed to take adequate action.

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Excerpt from news.google.com

According to traffic monitoring site Similarweb, Elon Musk’s platform, X, has achieved a significant milestone by surpassing Facebook and Instagram in global traffic. In June, X recorded an impressive 13.14 billion visits worldwide, eclipsing Facebook’s 12.44 billion and Instagram’s 5.798 billion. This marks a significant achievement for the platform, showcasing its growing popularity and reach.

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Excerpt from news.bloomberglaw.com

A California lawmaker has revised her measure that would force platforms like Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for displaying their content in a renewed bid to move the bill in face of strong tech opposition.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D) reworked the bill (AB 886) after an almost year-long pause to respond to tech critics, who so far have not publicly budged over their opposition. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a June 25 hearing on the measure, which has passed the state Assembly and needs to clear the state Senate by the end of August.

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Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Facebook-parent Meta is reportedly looking to cut short some of vice president-level staff as the company continues its cost-cutting measures to balance the books. A report has said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is continuing efforts to simplify the company’s reporting structure, which includes implementing a stack ranking system and stricter performance evaluations for some high-level executives.

Citing three people with knowledge of the situation, a report by Business Insider says that Meta is looking to reduce the number of VP-level executives.

The “year of efficiency” initiative – in which more than 20,000 Meta employees were laid off – includes implementing stricter performance evaluations for some high-level executives, leading to additional team cuts on top of the layoffs.

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Excerpt from nordicmonitor.com

An amendment to the Personnel Law of the Turkish Armed Forces that introduces new restrictions on social media use by soldiers was passed by the Turkish Parliament on Wednesday. The legislation aims to address security concerns following recent incidents of leaks and ambushes.

Under the new regulations, soldiers are now strictly prohibited from using social media platforms. The ban is intended to prevent the dissemination of sensitive information that could compromise military operations and endanger personnel. This move comes in response to several security breaches that have been attributed to the misuse of social media by military personnel.

Previous orders had already prohibited soldiers from using mobile phones capable of taking photos and video during military operations, with disobedience resulting in investigations for insubordination. However, this is the first time the military’s own disciplinary regulations are being amended.

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Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, recently announced plans to train its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, specifically the Llama language models, using the publicly shared social media content by users in Europe. After receiving some backlash on the same, the company has now detailed how it will use the publically available content on its social media platforms, and pointed out that it is not the first company to do it by saying that Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI has done the same.

“Meta is not the first company to do this – we are following the example set by others, including Google and OpenAI, both of which have already used data from European users to train AI,” the company said in a blog post.

“Our approach is more transparent and offers easier controls than many of our industry counterparts already training their models on similar publicly available information,” it added.