Social

Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove. It is the third such test of Facebook’s ability to detect hateful language — either via artificial intelligence or human moderators — that the

Russian regulators have fined chat service WhatsApp and Snapchat for failing to store Russian users’ data on local servers, part of government efforts to control online activity. A Moscow court on Thursday imposed an 18 million ruble (roughly Rs. 2,40,00,00) fine on chat service WhatsApp and a 1 million ruble penalty on disappearing message platform

Meta Platforms says it will no longer pay US news organisations to have their material appear in Facebook’s News Tab as it reallocates resources in the face of the economic downturn and changing user behavior. The company said Thursday that most people “do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn’t

Kenya’s ethnic cohesion watchdog has given Meta’s Facebook seven days to tackle hate speech and incitement on the platform relating to next month’s election, failing which its operations will be suspended. East Africa’s biggest economy is in the throes of campaigning ahead of presidential, legislative and local authorities elections on August 9. Advocacy group Global Witness

Indonesia has blocked search engine website Yahoo, payments firm Paypal, and several gaming websites due to failure to comply with licensing rules, an official said on Saturday, sparking a backlash on social media. Registration is required under rules released in late November 2020 and will give authorities broad powers to compel platforms to disclose data

Elon Musk countersued Twitter on Friday, escalating his legal fight against the social media company over his bid to walk away from the $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3.5 lakh crore) purchase, although the lawsuit was filed confidentially. While the 164-page document was not publicly available, under court rules a redacted version could soon be made public.

Twitter warned Thursday that governments around the globe are asking the company to remove content or snoop on private details of user accounts at an alarming rate. The social media company revealed in a new report that it fielded a record number of legal demands — nearly 60,000 during a six-month period last year —-

India made the highest number of legal demands globally to remove content posted by verified journalists and news outlets on Twitter during July-December 2021, the microblogging platform said. In its latest transparency report, [Twitter](https://gadgets360.com/tags/twitter) said India was only behind the US in seeking Twitter account information, accounting for 19 percent of global information requests. It

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently held a virtual meeting with employees of group firm Facebook, where he appeared annoyed over a question about vacation days, according to a report in The Verge. The meeting was held on June 30, around the same time Mr Zuckerberg announced plans to slash hiring of engineers by at least

Twitter has been spotted working on a new Status feature by a few users in the US and Australia. The new feature, which is currently under development, allows Twitter users to assign one of several predetermined labels to their tweets. Twitter confirmed to a publication that the company is testing the feature on the microblogging

A bipartisan group of three US senators urged Meta’s Facebook, Twitter and Telegram to do a better job of stopping Russian efforts to spread Spanish-language disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine. Senators Bob Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent the letters, dated Wednesday, along with Senators Tim Kaine, also a Democrat, and

Elon Musk asked a judge to schedule a five-day trial beginning October 17, not October 10 as requested by Twitter, to resolve his bid to walk away from his $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,51,540 crore) deal to acquire the social media platform, according to a court filing on Tuesday. A lawyer for Musk, the world’s richest person,

Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Tuesday responded to criticism of the platform’s new TikTok-style design for videos, saying that the layout was “not yet good,” and the company would have to “get it to a good place if we’re going to ship it” to all Instagram users. The image and video sharing service, which has

Elon Musk’s recent highly public back and forth with Twitter has given the market whiplash.Twitter, while initially resisting the tycoon, went on to sign an agreement with him worth $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,51,550 crore) in April 2022. The deal placed a 38 percent premium on Twitter’s then-share price. While the market would expect value to be

With the rising popularity of social media platforms, businesses have also learnt to tap into the massive reach that these websites and applications offer. Now, research suggests that brands are using TikTok users to promote their unhealthy food and beverages while turning them into brand ambassadors. The researchers concluded, after analysing the video content posted on

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) Monday told the Delhi High Court that WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy of 2021 has not been withdrawn and its probe concerning the policy should be allowed to proceed. The CCI also said the scope of its inquiry has no overlap with the issue of an alleged infringement of user

Big tech companies agreed on Monday to reduce harmful online content in New Zealand, making a move that critics said dodged the alternative of government regulation. Meta Platforms, Alphabet-owned Google, TikTok, Amazon and Twitter had signed a code of practice, said Netsafe, a government-funded internet-safety group. The companies would follow the code as self-regulation, Netsafe

Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur on Thursday said that the government blocked 94 YouTube channels, 19 social media accounts and 747 uniform resource locators (URLs) during 2021-22 for spreading fake news. Responding to a question in Rajya Sabha, Minister Thakur said that these actions have been taken under Section 69A of the Information Technology