Social Networks

Meta, the Facebook owner, will pay out $725m (£600m) to plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging privacy violations related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company has said in a court filing.The settlement will end a long-running dispute over the revelations that the political consultancy had accessed the data of tens of millions of Facebook

Meta’s oversight board, the quasi-independent “supreme court” of Facebook and Instagram, has forced the company to reinstate a clip of drill music originally removed from Instagram at the request of the Metropolitan police.The clip, a short excerpt of the song Secrets Not Safe by Chinx (OS), was removed after the Met flagged the track to

After shares in Facebook’s parent, Meta, slumped by as much as 25% in the wake of abysmal quarterly results, critics intensified their calls for its chief executive to abandon his astronomically expensive pivot to the “metaverse” – a 3D virtual world intended to replace much of real-world socialising.“The cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambition is

Meta employees have been warned of potential layoffs after the Facebook parent company announced on Thursday it would freeze hiring and “further restructure”, Bloomberg News has reported. In company communication with employees, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg cited the uncertain macroeconomic environment for the changes. The announcement comes after several tech companies have been forced to

Would you rather be banned for life from Tesco or Apple? Or, to go further: would you find it easier to cope with losing access to all major supermarkets, or Google alone? The answer will depend on your particular circumstances, but there’s no denying that losing access to a major technology company can be catastrophic.

If you’re going to change a social media platform synonymous with celebrity culture, make sure the Kardashian-Jenners are onboard first.Instagram was forced into a partial retreat last week as influencer royalty joined a user rebellion against the app, driven by complaints that it had become too video-centric and was pushing content from accounts that people

Join our live discussion on Wednesday, 6 July, 1pm-2pm ET.Facebook and Instagram have begun removing posts related to abortion pills, as posts about such medication spiked following the supreme court’s ruling stripping away constitutional protections for abortions.Memes and status updates explaining how people can obtain abortion pills in the mail have exploded across social platforms

Question: what do men and Excel have in common? Answer: they’re always automatically turning things into dates when they’re not. To younger people – that is, anyone under the age of 20 – Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, a tool as essential to accountants as saws are to carpenters, is the contemporary equivalent of mom jeans, handwritten

Asking people to be nice on Twitter makes people nicer on Twitter, the company has announced, hailing the success of an experiment that prompts users to reconsider tweets that might be hurtful or offensive.Since 2020, the social network has tried to encourage users to be more considerate of others, by algorithmically spotting posts that appear

If you are reading this, odds are that you are one of the 2.87 billion daily users of the products offered by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. If you are not using any of these products, you are connected to people who do use them. And this connects you…

Three hours into Facebook’s Australian news blackout on 17 February 2021, a concerned employee sent a note to colleagues at the social media company.“Australian news ban took down pages that are not news sources,” the note said, pointing to blocked government pages, fire and emergency services, official health pages and domestic violence charities.“We should be…