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Meta has been fined €91M ($101M) after it was discovered that to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text.

Some of those passwords had been unprotected since 2012, and were searchable by more than 20,000 Meta employees …

Meta announced Monday that it has banned RT and other Russian state media outlets from its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among others, citing ‘foreign interference activity’ in the US presidential election.

Meta has admitted to scraping all public Facebook and Instagram posts made since 2007 in order to train its generative AI model, adding to the privacy contrast with Apple Intelligence.

While the admission was made during a public enquiry in Australia, the company’s statement applies globally …

Over the last several days, Facebook users have revolted after the app’s iPhone icon seemingly adopted a new black and blue design. As it turns out, however, this is just a bug, and Facebook is already rolling out a fix.

Back in May, Meta started testing the ability to cross-post from Instagram to Threads, and the company is now rolling this out to everyone.

The feature also lets you cross-post from Facebook, continuing Meta’s integration of its three different social media platforms …

Update: Both the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office and the European Commission have now launched investigations into the legality of making it opt-out instead of opt-in.

If you use Instagram or Facebook, Meta is using your data to train its AI models. The company uses posts as training material for its generative AI systems. Privacy legislation in the UK and European Union means that the company is forced to offer an opt-out option – but it is doing so in a rather sketchy way …

An EU investigation has been opened into growing concerns about teen Instagram addiction, to determine whether parent company Meta is breaking the law by deliberately seeking to make its apps addictive.

The investigation will also look into whether the company’s age-verification procedures are sufficiently robust, and the phenomenon of sending users down potentially harmful ‘rabbit holes’ …

A court is being asked to decide whether or not Meta has a legal obligation to allow the use of Unfollow Everything – a browser tool which effectively empties your Facebook feed.

The idea behind the tool is that instead of being sucked into an effectively endless feed of posts from every friend, group, and page you have ever followed, you get to proactively choose the posts you read …

Yesterday’s global meta outage seemingly took out the company’s entire network, with users unable to access Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Threads, and Quest headsets.

The outage lasted between one and two hours for most users, and while everything now appears back to normal, questions are naturally being asked about what went wrong …

In a blog post on Thursday, Meta announced changes to how advertisers pay for “boosted posts” on Facebook and Instagram. According to the company, advertisers will now pay a 30% fee when they purchase boosts from inside the Facebook or Instagram apps on iPhone. This is due to changes to the App Store guidelines that went into effect over a year ago.

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple responded to Meta’s criticism and its attempt to shift the blame to Apple.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s AI announcement has raised major concerns, after he said that the company had more user data than was used to train ChatGPT – and would soon be using it to train its own AI systems.

The company’s plan to use Facebook and Instagram posts and comments to train a competing chatbot raises concerns about both privacy and toxicity …

The Senate hearing on social media saw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologise to families who hold social media responsible for children who harmed themselves, including some who took their own lives.

It also saw some bizarre racism by one senator who apparently can’t tell the difference between Singapore and China …

The timing of Meta’s announcement of new teen safety measures earlier this week likely wasn’t coincidental: Mark Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs are set to testify to Congress on the topic.

Facebook’s founder will be joined by the chief execs of TikTok, Snap, Discord and X as Congress seeks to determine whether the companies are doing enough to protect teens from harm …

Meta is beefing up protections against grooming of teens on Instagram and Facebook by further limiting who is able to send them direct messages.

The latest measure builds on a previous Instagram protection, based on who teenagers follow in the app …

The start of a new year is a time many of us use to take stock – of our goals, our habits, the ways in which we spend our time. For me, one significant change has been adopting a more sane approach to social media, and apps in general.

I’m a huge fan of technology, of course, but I also fully acknowledge that tech also has its downsides – and social media in particular has been a very mixed blessing …

Meta has announced a radical new move to comply with European antitrust requirements taking effect in March. The company will let you unlink your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger accounts – as well as those for Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Gaming.

This means you’ll have the option of setting each up as a completely separate account, with no shared data between them …

Instagram and Facebook collect your data from thousands of companies, according to an experiment carried out by Consumer Reports.

Separately, the company is the largest reporter of potential child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), but there is a legal problem with the way many of these reports are submitted …