Reuters: “Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with children”

An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual, generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are dumber than white people.

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity, but said that after receiving questions earlier this month from Reuters, the company removed portions which stated it is permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.

Jeff Horwitz

Despicable, even by Facebook’s abysmal standards. I was browsing my blog to link to examples of their horrible past behaviors, and the list just kept getting longer and longer!

Ars Technica: “Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg”

The news comes after leaders of other social networks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have sparked backlash over sudden changes to popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). For years, Musk has drawn criticism for changing Twitter's hate speech policies through his X rebranding. And more recently, Zuckerberg this month defended Meta’s decision to relax hate speech policies (permitting women to be called “property” and gay people to be called “mentally ill”) by calling bans on such speech out of touch with mainstream discourse.

Mastodon is hoping to provide an alternative social network for users who are potentially frustrated with their lack of control over their timelines and content on other networks.

But to achieve the envisioned independence for all users, Mastodon’s structure needed to evolve, the blog said, as the community grew to about 1.5 million monthly active users in 2023. Remaining headquartered in Europe primarily, Mastodon’s day-to-day operations will be managed by the new European not-for-profit entity, establishing a new legal home for Mastodon.

Ashley Belanger

Good intentions, but there is already precedent of a company starting out as a nonprofit with good intentions on paper, only to succumb to investor pressure once its product became a hit – on course, I’m talking about OpenAI.

TechCrunch: “Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze”

In other words, the company is using its first consumer AI device to create a massive stockpile of data that could be used to create ever-more powerful generations of AI models. The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.

The implications are concerning because Ray-Ban Meta users may not understand they’re giving Meta tons of images – perhaps showing the inside of their homes, loved ones, or personal files – to train its new AI models. Meta’s spokespeople tell me this is clear in the Ray-Ban Meta’s user interface, but the company’s executives either initially didn’t know or didn’t want to share these details with TechCrunch. We already knew Meta trains its Llama AI models on everything Americans post publicly on Instagram and Facebook. But now, Meta has expanded this definition of “publicly available data” to anything people look at through its smart glasses and ask its AI chatbot to analyze.

Maxwell Zeff

I’ve been vaguely following the news around these new smart glasses from Meta to see how they would fare compared to Google’s failed attempt with Glass a decade ago, and Apple’s massive VR helmet. This reporting underscores what some remarked repeatedly about ad-driven companies like Google and Facebook: their products are built for the core purpose of data collection for ad targeting. The privacy implications are as egregious as with Google Glass: everything in the visual field of these glasses will likely end up in a facial recognition database and might get exposed publicly – in fact, some college students have already hacked the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to reveal the name, address, and phone number of anyone they look at.

ABC News: “Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option”

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?

Claybaugh: Correct.

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Jake Evans

Hardly surprising coming from Facebook – or any other American tech giant for that matter; the latest example being LinkedIn, which has covertly opted its users in to supply data for AI training without even bothering to update their terms of service.

This is why GDPR is so important in the EU, and why, despite all its critics and lackluster enforcement, the core of the legislation is sound and future proof. In simple terms, companies need to have legitimate reason, or consent, to use consumers’ data for new purposes. Training AI models is clearly a new purpose that doesn’t precisely have a legitimate reason, so companies should in theory ask for distinct consent before using the data.

Mobile Dev Memo: “Europe’s misguided hostility towards Pay or Okay”

Pay or Okay has already been scrutinized by the EU privacy machinery and deemed compliant with the GDPR. As we discuss in the Pay or Okay episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, the Pay or Okay model is widely used throughout the EU in compliance with the GDPR, primarily by news publishers like Der Spiegel, Bild, and Zeit. The model has been interrogated under the restrictions of the GDPR and deemed permissible. The EC’s objection to Meta’s use of Pay or Okay hints at a vague interpretation of the DMA that proscribes the “accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers” that is absent in the text. Further, that nebulous aspiration orbits the regulatory influence of privacy, not competition, which is the DMA’s purview. By the same token: the EDPB, which enforces the GDPR, will issue guidance on Meta’s use of the Pay or Okay model imminently. Why would the EC need to investigate the model separately under the guise of competition concerns?

Eric Seufert

This article is highly misleading, all in the name of defending Meta’s advertising business and tracking practices. ‘Pay or Okay’ being adopted by some publishers does not mean it’s ‘widely’ used (notice how the only examples given are German newspapers, revealing that it’s not in fact that common throughout Europe); moreover, doing something in practice doesn’t make it compliant overnight – see how Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb regularly skirted local regulations to grow their platforms riding on the power imbalance between VC-backed US corporations and urban authorities.

noyb: “noyb files GDPR complaint against Meta over ‘Pay or Okay’”

“Freely given” consent at a high price? Under EU law, consent to online tracking and personalized advertising is only valid if it is “freely given”. This is to ensure that users only give up their fundamental right to privacy if it is their genuine free will to do so. Meta has now implemented the exact opposite of a genuinely free choice: Facebook alone will introduce a “privacy fee” of up to €12.99 per month if users do not consent to their personal data being processed for targeted advertising. Each linked account (such as Instagram) will cost another €8, making a total of €251.88 a year for one person using Instagram and Facebook. By comparison: Meta says its average revenue per user in Europe between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023 was $16.79. This equates to an annual revenue of just €62,88 per user – and puts the monthly fee way out of proportion.

Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a “privacy fee” of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection.

noyb

Back at the end of October, Facebook (or I should say Meta, since this applies to multiple products) introduced an advertising-free subscription for EU users at the whopping monthly price of €9.99. It was obvious from the start that this limited choice between consenting to tracking and ‘privacy as a luxury’ does not comply with the principles of GDPR, so it’s good to see this move immediately challenged – the European Consumer Organisation has filed a complaint as well, calling out Meta’s practice as amounting to charging for privacy.

XDA: “Facebook Messenger widget makes its debut in latest Windows 11 preview”

It’s been a long time coming, but the first non-Microsoft widget to appear on Windows 11 is finally here — as long as you’re a Windows Insider, at least. Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 build 25284 to Insiders in the Dev channel, and with it comes a widget for Facebook Messenger, the first third-party widget to ever grace the OS.

Microsoft enabled support for third-party widgets a few months ago with an earlier build, and then updated the Windows App SDK to allow these widgets to be developed. Now, we’re seeing the first results of that. The Messenger widget will make your most recent messages easily available on the Widgets board, so it’s easier to get to your recent conversations.

João Carrasqueira

I recently noticed and added the new Messenger widget as well, so it’s safe to assume this update has been rolled out to the Windows 11 stable channel. A couple of other apps have widgets available, though the selection remains tiny; for now Facebook and Spotify seem to be the only non-Microsoft companies to have opted in.

Café Lob-On: “Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?”

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

Bloonface

The (now imminent) launch of Meta’s newest Twitter-like product based on the decentralized protocol ActivityPub has sparked a weirdly virulent reaction among some Mastodon instances, the other network built on the protocol and moonlighting as a Twitter alternative. The instances decided to pre-emptively block Meta’s new entry; this would prevent Threads – and by association Meta – from accessing posts on these instances, but is also effectively shutting these communities off from this newcomer with a great potential to scale.

The Atlantic: “Why Would Anyone Pay for Facebook?”

On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram announced Meta Verified, a subscription service that will give benefits to people who pay a fee and confirm their identity. The perks include algorithmic boosts to posts, human customer service, and added protection from impersonation. Meta’s paid verification follows Elon Musk’s controversial decision last year to include its famous blue check marks in its Twitter Blue subscription package. Not long after Twitter’s decision, Tumblr launched its own paid verification plan, which was initially meant as a joke mocking Musk’s ham-fisted business strategy but ended up increasing the company’s revenue. Netflix is also looking to squeeze extra money out of its viewers with its plan to end password sharing across different households.

Taken together, the vibe feels a bit like trying to use a familiar service and getting hit with a pop-up that says, “Thank you for using Web 2.0. Your free-trial period has ended!”

I am not a Meta power user, and I certainly won’t be paying for a blue check mark. Still, the Verified announcement depressed me. It felt at first like Meta had gone full Spirit Airlines, that paying for customer service is akin to ponying up for glasses of water or any carry-on larger than a purse.

Charlie Warzel

The analogy with the airline industry doesn’t quite land here. Ultimately, airlines provide a physical service and the business has slim margins that are constantly threatened by fuel prices and new regulations. Facebook on the other hand has enjoyed hefty profit margins on its digital ads business, and is only struggling recently because of Zuckerberg's enormous investments into the metaverse. Another key distinction is that air travel is essential for lots of people, either for business or leisure – or both, and cannot easily be substituted with other forms of travel; social networks however come and go depending on popular whims and cultural trends, and some of their core functions can be easily replaced.

Analytics at Meta: “Notifications: why less is more”

We had a hunch that such a trade-off should be avoidable: if users are more satisfied with their experience, we believe this would be reflected in usage gains too. We decided to keep the experiment of sending only a few notifications running for a year. And lo and behold: little by little Facebook usage started inching back up! After a year we saw that in the fewer notifications experience, users were using Facebook more — it just took a long time for user behavior to shift and less disruption led to high organic usage, which increased both user satisfaction and app usage. We wrote this blogpost to socialize this finding as we believe other data science teams outside Facebook could benefit from the same lessons we learnt:

1. Experiments in the very long-run can show different results than in the short run.
2. Sending only a few notifications and the most relevant ones (e.g. those predicted to receive a 5/5 rating in the survey mentioned above) can improve user sentiment and usage too in the long run.

Weijun C., Yan Q., Yuwen Z., Christina B., Akos L.

Seems a rather obvious insight that people become frustrated with high volumes of notifications, and after a short period of increased engagement they start to pay less attention to them. This is especially true as people tend to add more friends and follow more sources over time, and Facebook crams new features into the feed, both contributing to even more notifications. But it’s nice to see this confirmed with actual research and, as far as I understand from this post, implemented into real product changes at Facebook.

Galaxy Brain: “Welcome to Geriatric Social Media”

I’ve been trying to talk myself into the social-media death-spiral idea, but it feels like the wrong framework to describe what is essentially just an evolution of the way people use the internet. To suggest that momentary stalls or plateaus, or even declines in platforms, spell certain death is, to some degree, to buy into Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s notion that anything other than perpetual hockey-stick growth is a death knell (and I find that outlook generally toxic and grating).

There are a few things that I think are probably going on, instead. The first is that some platforms just have a natural network decay. Facebook was, at first, novel and exclusive (I got an invite from a friend who was in college! Very exciting!). Then, it grew and took on a different kind of utility (you could find all kinds of people on it from your past, or whom you met at a party!). Soon, every human you knew was on it, and, overnight, it morphed into a lot of people’s main news source. The loudest, angriest people—many of whom didn’t quite understand how to talk to people online—made it an unpleasant place to be, so a lot of people left or stopped engaging, and the loudest voices got louder.

The same thing is happening on Twitter. One thing I’ve noticed a lot is that a lot of my favorite power users have become power lurkers. They haven’t given up the platform, but they realize that posting is mostly a losing game full of professional liabilities, endless and futile fights, and diminishing returns. And that’s grim because, for those who do post, we’re much more likely to encounter the loudest, angriest, most politically charged voices in response, which in turn makes the place less fun to be around!

Charlie Warzel

I find this notion of the impending doom of social media hilarious. While a minority is arguing about the supposed death of social networks on Twitter, regular people are perfectly happy sharing and chatting over private messages. The only ones caring about this non-issue are those who obsess over status and signaling: politicians, celebrities and journalists, companies looking for their next incremental sale.

No Mercy / No Malice: “Hubris”

Corporate hubris takes various forms. Research shows overconfident CEOs are prone to distorting their investment decisions: They overinvest when cash flows are strong, and cut too deep when they need external financing. Case in point is Meta, where we’re witnessing hubris play out in dramatic form. The unconstrained boy-king is betting his company — his shareholder’s company, really — on a fever dream in which he is God in a world littered with Nissan and Nespresso billboards, a “metaverse”. More recently, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried believed he could defy the laws of economics and borrow against large sums of a fake currency he made up. Essentially, Bankman-Fried constructed the Burj Khalifa on a foundation of quicksand. And now comes the fall.

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Success can be our undoing when we’re promoted beyond our true capabilities. The Peter principle holds that because people get promoted on the basis of prior performance, they will inevitably rise to the level of their incompetence. Our brains make it easy for our ambition to exceed our ability: The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a demonstrated cognitive weakness, that the less we know about something, the more we overestimate our knowledge. That’s why stupid people, and people who make great cars and then buy media companies, are so dangerous.

This has been a banner week for the powerful coming undone. In no particular order, the largest social network company in history, Meta, which has lost more than two-thirds of its value over the past year, announced it was laying off 11,000 people; the most prominent crypto billionaire lost nearly his entire fortune after he overleveraged his empire to keep it expanding; and the richest man in the world … impregnated a bathroom sink before putting on a master class on how power corrupts.

Scott Galloway

The past year has not been kind to tech companies; between significant declines in stocks, hiring freezes, and more recently layoffs, you might say we’re experiencing a tech recession, affecting the entire sector from the largest companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Meta, to the mixed media & tech companies, such as Disney and Netflix, to startups and Bitcoin. The damage extends outside the US as well, as layoffs are happening in the Asian Internet sector and at our homegrown aspiring unicorn UiPath. A notable exception: TikTok, which apparently plans to double its staff.

The Wall Street Journal: “The Secret Talks that could have prevented the Apple vs. Facebook War”

In the years before the change, Apple suggested a series of possible arrangements that would earn the iPhone maker a slice of Facebook’s revenue, according to people who either participated in the meetings or were briefed about them. As one person recalled: Apple officials said they wanted to “build businesses together”.

One idea that was discussed: creating a subscription-based version of Facebook that would be free of ads, according to people familiar with the discussions. Because Apple collects a cut of subscription revenue for apps in its App Store, that product could have generated significant revenue for the Cupertino, Calif., giant.

The companies also haggled over whether Apple was entitled to a piece of Facebook’s sales from so-called boosted posts, said people familiar with the matter. A boost allows a user to pay to increase the number of people that see a post on Facebook or Instagram. Facebook, which considers boosts ads, has always contended that boosts are a form of advertising, in part because they are often used by small businesses to reach a bigger audience, said one of the people.

Apple, which doesn’t take a cut of advertising from developers, argued that Facebook boosts should be considered in-app purchases, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apple’s standard terms would entitle it to take a 30% share of those sales.

Salvador Rodriguez

Additional confirmation for something many people have been saying for a while: Apple’s supposedly privacy-focused changes to tracking on iOS are primarily a means to disadvantage competitors and grow its own ad business. While these secret negotiations with Facebook were not previously reported, pressuring other businesses, large and small, for a cut of their iOS revenues has become common practice for Apple – unless they sign a hefty licensing deal, as is the case with their Google search agreement.

The Verge: “Leap seconds cause chaos for computers — so Meta wants to get rid of them”

When a leap second was added in 2012, it caused substantial outages for sites like Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp. By 2015, when the next leap second was due, engineers had mostly learned their lessons, but there were still some glitches. Ditto 2016. As Linux creator Linus Torvalds put it: Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.

This is why social media conglomerate Meta wants to get rid of the leap second. In a blog post published yesterday, the company’s engineering team outlined their argument against adding leap seconds, saying it’s an adjustment that mainly benefits scientists and astronomers (as it allows them to make observations of celestial bodies using UTC). This benefit is less important than it once was, says Meta, and outweighed by the confusion leap seconds cause in the tech world.

Introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it, says the company.

James Vincent

Sounds like a self-serving proposal rooted in the arrogant belief that tech companies are so important to our lives and economy that their points of view take precedence over anyone else’s. Maybe Facebook should simply hire better software engineers, and devise methods to test run code related to handling leap seconds before deploying it into production. I mean, Facebook’s servers can’t handle leap seconds once in a while, but we’re supposed to trust them to build entire self-contained virtual reality worlds?!

The Verge: “Zuck turns up the Heat”

Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here, Zuckerberg said on the June 30th call, according to a recording obtained by The Verge. And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.

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Almost immediately after the Zuckerberg all-hands, one question took hold in the minds of employees: Who exactly are the people who don’t belong here?

I don’t see people around me slacking whatsoever, one employee wrote on Workplace. I see smart hard workers. Honestly, hearing some of you don’t belong here from a leader instead of Here are the challenges. Let’s rally together and overcome them. is disheartening and might not be the best way to get this point across.

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The term became a meme in no time. “Coast, Coasters, Me”, a riff on Meta’s recently introduced “Meta, Metamates, Me” mantra, made the rounds on Workplace. Employees mocked up posters for the walls of Meta’s headquarters that asked Should you be here? in bold, all-caps red letters, while others posted mockups of the question on literal coasters. Look at this dude coasting, one employee wrote above a picture of Zuckerberg hydrofoiling on a lake while holding the American flag.

Alex Heath & David Pierce

Honestly, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t be working at Facebook, that’s Mark Zuckerberg himself. He’s the one who dreamt up this pivot to the metaverse, and approved, if not proposed, the near-term chasing after short videos to compete with TikTok. But with his controlling interest, he can never be removed by the board, unless he steps down voluntarily. This finger-pointing towards low-level employees is bad form, demoralizing, and ultimately poor leadership. A good leader should assume his own errors in judgement and those of his subordinates, and propose a vision and plans how to rectify them. Blaming slackers for flawed strategic decisions and macroeconomic headwinds will only lead to more strategic failures and exacerbate the company’s problems.

CNET: “Facebook is testing a way to Add Multiple Profiles to an Account”

The social network has a rule that bars users from having multiple Facebook accounts but gives businesses, organizations and public figures the option to create pages. Now Facebook is testing a way for users to create up to five profiles linked to one account. Facebook said that switching between the profiles will require only two taps.

The experiment shows how the site has been trying to evolve beyond just a place to share updates with family and friends. Facebook users could create profiles dedicated to their hobbies, such as cooking, design or travel, the social network said Thursday. They could also have a separate profile where they correspond only with certain family members or friends.

Queenie Wong

That’s one way to boost traffic and active users after a drop that spooked the stock market: just let engaged users create more accounts! It will likely boost misinformation and toxicity as well, but hey, who cares if the company can squeeze a bit more profit out of its user base?

CNBC: “Mark Zuckerberg envisions 1 billion people in the metaverse”

We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall, he said.

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But the company’s investment in augmented reality and virtual reality dates back to 2014, when it paid $2 billion for headset maker Oculus VR. Shipments of headsets have failed to outnumber shipments of PCs or smartphones. Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the performance of its current-generation Meta Quest 2, which starts at $299.

Quest 2 has been a hit, Zuckerberg told the “Mad Money” host.

I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone. It has exceeded my expectations. But I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there. So that’s the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today.

Experiences in the metaverse can be more immersive than text, photos or videos, which are pervasive on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and so it will be a big theme for Meta over the next decade, Zuckerberg said.

Jordan Novet

Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not committed to this plan, I’ll give him that.

Bloomberg: “Mark Zuckerberg is Blowing Up Instagram to Try and Catch TikTok”

Over 14 years, since the invention of its news feed, Facebook has become extremely good at one thing: showing people what they definitely want to see, based on their past behavior and online activity. Facebook ranks your friends based on how much you engage with them and orders their posts accordingly. If you search for cake decorating videos on Instagram, expect to see more in your suggested follows the next time you log on. If you shop online for ankle boots, they’ll turn up in your feed. The upside of that kind of algorithm is a $116 billion advertising business. The downside is, people get bored.

TikTok delivers a level of algorithmic magic that’s a step beyond, introducing people to stuff they had no idea they would be entertained by—which has the effect of boosting no-name stars into the spotlight as long as they’re creating great content. Achieving that same effect has become a top priority, Zuckerberg said during a recent earnings call: I think about the AI that we’re building not just as a recommendation system for short-form video, but as a discovery engine that can show you all of the most interesting content that people have shared across our systems.

A company as big as Meta, with 3.6 billion users across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, has lots of ways to push features on people. Reels now appear in every Instagram user’s feed. Once someone clicks on a Reel, they’re suddenly in a full-screen mode where swiping up or down only gets you to more Reels. This design tweak can be jarring, like turning a corner in a quiet art gallery and finding yourself in the middle of a dance party.

Sarah Frier & Brad Stone

As others have pointed out, one of Facebook’s biggest issues going forward is simply… that neither the company nor its founder Mark Zuckerberg have actually delivered any original concept since its inception. After its initial success, it has relied on either acquiring the current popular app (Instagram and WhatsApp) or copying their features when it failed to purchase them (Stories from Snapchat, now Reels from TikTok – ironically, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom suggested to his superiors at Facebook that they should consider buying it back when it was still called Musical.ly).

Wired: “How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook”

But over the past year or so, Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has begun to look a little less invulnerable. Lawmakers have increasingly arrayed against it, and at brief moments—like the January 2021 mass exodus from WhatsApp, and a second one that followed a Facebook outage in October—the powerful network effects that drive Meta’s supremacy have seemed to shift briefly into reverse. Somehow Telegram, with its tiny staff, has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of those stumbles.

Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app”. This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to turn on the app’s “secret chats” function (which few people actually do); and that only individual conversations, not those among groups, can be end-to-end encrypted. For the millions of people who use Telegram under repressive regimes, experts say, that confusion could be costly.

But the term “messaging app” is itself somewhat misleading, in ways that lead many to underestimate Telegram. Over the years, the app has become a deliberate hybrid of a messaging service and a social media platform—a rival not only to WhatsApp and Signal but also, increasingly, to Facebook itself.

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Its blend of private messaging and public channels makes it a perfect organizing tool: ideal for evangelizing in public and then plotting in secret. I call it the one-two punch, says Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina who studies Telegram. You can do both propaganda and planning on the same app.

It’s been vital to pro-democracy protesters from Belarus to Hong Kong, but the global right seems to find Telegram particularly congenial. In Germany, a movement against Covid restrictions used the app to organize huge demonstrations in central Berlin in 2020, leading to the storming of parliament’s steps by a mob of extremists, in a sinister foreshadowing of January 6. (The stated aim of some protesters was to show Trump that they were ready for him to liberate Germany from a deep-state conspiracy.)

Darren Loucaides

I have always been somewhat skeptical of companies founded by Russians (including Revolut, which has grown quite popular here in Romania) – no matter how strongly they may deny connections to the Russian authorities, a repressive government could always find ways to coerce the company into complying with its demands, however illegitimate (same goes for Chinese companies). This extensive piece has only increased my apprehension; Durov’s admiration for Mark Zuckerberg, his cult-like status inside the company and outward secrecy, their (fortunately unsuccessful) forays into cryptocurrencies and almost complete lack of a sustainable business model, are all reasons to remain cautious of Telegram and its future. I personally like Telegram more than WhatsApp and similar messaging apps; it has a nicer interface and feels more well-built – probably owing to the Durov brothers’ background in mathematics and engineering – but everything else surrounding it feels shady.

City A.M.: “Mark Zuckerberg and team consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in Europe”

In its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Meta warns that if a new framework is not adopted and the company is no longer allowed to use the current model agreements “or alternatives”, the company will “probably” no longer be able to offer many of its “most significant products and services”, including Facebook and Instagram, in the EU, according to various media reports, including in iTWire, The Guardian newspaper and Side Line Magazine.

Sharing data between countries and regions is crucial for the provision of its services and targeted advertising, Meta stressed.

Therefore, it previously used the transatlantic data transfer framework called Privacy Shield as the legal basis to carry out those data transfers.

However, this treaty was annulled by the European Court of Justice in July 2020, because of data protection violations. Since then, the EU and the US did stress they are working on a new or updated version of the treaty.

Michiel Willems

Given how violently markets reacted to the recent disclosure that Facebook lost 1 million daily users in North America, I would venture to say that Zuckerberg would never dare to cut off 300 million European users, one of its more lucrative markets, no matter the final form of the data transfer agreement. They are probably more worried about the extent to which this will affect their ability to target advertising, the core of its business and already under threat by Apple’s changes to tracking on iOS.