A selfie of tearful 42-year-old woman holding a colorful birthday cake bears the caption "Today is my 42nd birthday, no husband, no children, I baked the cake by myself…" Neither the woman nor the cake is real. It's an AI-generated image designed to turn sympathy into profit on Facebook. — Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg recently struck a new pose in hopes of pleasing President Trump, saying Meta would no longer check facts or censor free speech, and blaming other executives for previous policies at the company he runs. Since then, however, the company has struggled to explain why it was hiding search results for left-wing political topics—and now users are complaining it categorizes some posts about Linux as malware. — Read the rest

404 Media investigated the phenomenon of Facebook AI slop—grossly unpleasant images from "Shrimp Jesus" to begging amputee children—and uncovered a grossly unpleasant fact: Facebook is paying people to make it.

"Facebook itself is paying creators in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines for bizarre AI spam that they are learning to make from YouTube influencers and guides sold on Telegram," writes Jason Koebler. — Read the rest

Facebook slurped up the biometric data of users in Texas—their faces—without authorization. Parent Meta will pay $1.4bn to avoid further legal action.

"Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted," Paxton's office said.

Facebook banned Trump the day after he instigated a riot on on Capitol Hill on Jan 6, 2021. Fearing that he will return to office next year and not wanting any trouble, the company invited him to return Friday night and promised that remaining restrictions on the account would be lifted soon. — Read the rest

Researchers have discovered that taking a six-week detox break from Facebook can significantly reduce a person's chances of falling for online misinformation.

The study, published in PNAS, is the largest social media deactivation experiment ever conducted, involving over 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users who agreed to disconnect during the 2020 U.S. — Read the rest

Facebook supposely bans militias, but they're there all the same, reports Wired's Tess Owen—and using the plaform to coordinate their activities.

"Join Your Local Militia or III% Patriot Group," a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army.

At 404 Media, Jason Koebler reports that AI images of suffering children, some depicting them mutilated or dying, are appearing in Facebook users feeds. It's the latest and most alarming example of AI-generated garbage filling the platform, complete with inane replies from bots, from "boomers", and from unambigious humans helping spread the posts by angrily calling them out, a classic Facebook engagement success model. — Read the rest

It's often remarked that UK conservatives are a step or three to the left of America's, that even the right wingers are as gay as maypoles and that its government is the most diverse in history. But it turns out they're all on far-right Facebook groups full of Der Sturmer-tier racist hysteria, run by their staffers and now infiltrated by activists. — Read the rest

A Los Angeles man is taking a group of women to court over their Facebook posts about him. Stewart Lucas Murrey is suing members of the "Are We Dating The Same Guy?" group, claiming they've been spreading vicious lies about him online. — Read the rest

After years of growing alarm about convincing deepfakes, an election year is upon us and Meta/Facebook is set to embrace it: the company's "oversight board" says it neet not remove a fake video of President Joe Biden groping his own grand-daughter, signaling a policy of acceptance and "labeling". — Read the rest

In times past, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg personally and repeatedly thwarted efforts by Meta's management to address teen mental health dangers on the platform. Today, he made a show of apologizing for it in Congress.

Mr Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew agreed to appear at the Senate hearing to be grilled for four hours. — Read the rest

Barbara Furlow-Smiles is frowning today. The tech executive pleaded guilty to stealing $4m from the company and faces prison when sentenced in March.

Furlow-Smiles participated in an outrageous scam at massive scale in open view of everyone around her. But beyond her job duties at Facebook, she was also using the company's funds to pay for personal expenses and luxuries. — Read the rest

Harvard University assembled a team of prestigious experts and set them loose on the problem of Facebook cultivating and spreading disinformation. Then the Zuckerbergs gave Harvard University $500m. Then Harvard University shut the team down.

Dr. Joan Donovan, one of the world's leading experts on social media disinformation, says she ran into a wall of institutional resistance and eventual termination after she and her team at Harvard's Technology and Social Change Research Project (TASC) began analyzing thousands of documents exposing Facebook's knowledge of how the platform has caused significant public harm… In her whistleblower declaration, Donovan lays out in detail how she and her research team at Harvard's Kennedy School (HKS) came under sudden scrutiny from the school's dean, Douglas Elmendorf, and other Kennedy School leaders,after they started working on Haugen's Facebook Files – a cache Donovan describes as "the most important documents in the history of the internet."

In an alarming example of algorithmic bureaucracy with no option for appeal, a Python and Pandas instructor named Reuven Lerner was banned for life from advertising on Facebook.

Mystified as to why Facebook had banned him from advertising his programming course, he asked the company for an explanation and reconsideration. — Read the rest

Meta recently announced a new type of pointless use for AI-generated art: sticker reactions! As The Verge explains:

Powered by Meta's Llama 2 large language model — the company's ChatGPT rival — AI-generated stickers allow users to create "multiple unique, high-quality stickers in seconds" using text-based prompts.

In a TikTok video, Isabele Lomax shares a surprising discovery she made on Facebook. Lomax woke up to find a video of herself breastfeeding her baby at the beach, posted with a caption that attempted to shame her for not covering up. — Read the rest

Tax prep companies are often in the news for their peculiar ability to prevent the IRS promoting the same convenient, free online tax filing services enjoyed in other countries. Today they're in the news because they share your personal data with Google and Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, without your permission. — Read the rest

It's typically pretty cringe when corporations try to make their social media clever or funny, but there are definitely exceptions—the National Park Service twitter, for example, is awesome. I recently stumbled across the Wendy's Facebook page, and whoever runs that social media account should get a raise, because it's hilarious. — Read the rest

After Canada's Senate passed a law mandating that social media sites pay news sources a license fee whenever links to articles are posted there, Facebook has blocked users from doing so. The block, covering various Canadian news media, extends to Instagram. — Read the rest