• The Bluesky vs. Mastodon question is on every ex-Xer’s mind.
• Which social media alternative is best for you?
• We weigh up Bluesky vs. Mastodon so you don’t have to.

The Twitter-becomes-X debacle has been discussed weekly since a certain someone bought the social media company and turned it into the handcart in which we’re all going to Hell. We’re tired of talking about it, frankly. Although the mass migration from the site that was threatened by many users never quite came to pass, a new dawn broke for alternative social media sites.

Meta-owned Instagram tried to go toe-to-toe with X by launching its own microblogging platform, Threads, but it was outliers Mastodon and Bluesky that took in those users who couldn’t bear to keep using what used to be Twitter.

With images from ITSFOSS‘s review, let’s take a look at the sites and see what users are saying.

Mastodon was launched in 2016 by Eugen Rochko as a decentralized microblogging platform that was really quite hit-and-miss. It spent a while trying to replicate Twitter too closely, eventually developing into a social medium operating on distributed servers, called instances, allowing for independent networks with different themes and topics.

Bluesky, on the other hand, began as a team funded by Twitter to build an open and decentralized standard for social media, in 2019. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was on the team, hoping the platform would be the first to utilize the protocol.

When you-know-who took over, the plan for an open standard Twitter (and the name itself) disappeared. Since 2021, Bluesky has been an independent company backed by Dorsey ever since, and open sourced the client code for the platform, with an invite-only system for the website. Now, it’s opened up to everyone.

Jack Dorsey left Twitter and is now on Bluesky’s board.

In terms of user experience, Mastodon has the benefit of being around for longer. The site has had time to evolve with community requirements. The interface is relatively similar to Twitter, with all the right differences to make the move feel worth it.

There’s no algorithm dictating what you see in the public feed (which some of us might miss, despite its foibles) and posts with more organic engagement will likely show up first. Otherwise, the feed shows posts by users you follow chronologically.

Experience does vary somewhat based on the instance you signed up to, because that impacts what you see and what server rules are complied with. This is pretty adjustable to your taste, though.

The number of instances to choose from is often lauded as a big plus for Mastodon. In fact, many reviews and user guides focus on all the benefits of the system but doesn’t elaborate on how best to make use of it.

That means it’s difficult to actually find the community that’s supposedly on offer – not many people want to put that much effort into building their social media profile. We’ve all gotten used to a handy algorithm to do it for us.

Glance too quickly and you’d think you were on the Twitter of old.

Another double-edged sword is the human moderators. In almost every way, servers moderated by humans are better for users, particularly when you can essentially choose servers moderated by individuals whose values align with your own.

Some have critiqued the system because, like the forum days of old, the people in charge can tend towards being power-crazed leaders with too much time on their hands. Not that that’s a Mastodon problem: it’s just people.

Bluesky, on the other hand, uses automated moderation. In many ways, it closely mimics Twitter in its heyday (unsurprising, really, given the Dorsey involvement) and you’d be forgiven for forgetting you’d switched to a new platform.

You get the option to choose an algorithm to follow per your requirements; limit your feed to just people you follow, or a custom one that learns what you like (a ‘for you’ feed tailored to your needs, baby!).

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Although it’s separated from Twitter, Bluesky is still a corporate-backed product. It’s open source, and may soon let you host your own instance, Mastodon-style, but for now it’s a board-controlled entity.

Even if it completes its federation network and lets you self-host instances, Bluesky as a primary platform will use advertising and other monetization strategies.

Another one-up for Mastodon, perhaps, is its non-profit status and crowdfunded development. It’s not reliant on investors (like Twitter was…) and companies and users donate to Mastodon, keeping it free from monetization.

When it comes to privacy, both Mastodon and Bluesky get points for not requiring a phone number for sign up. Beyond that, Mastodon seems to come out ahead.

It allows users to push public posts or post only for followers and interact with individual followers using private mentions (a bit like direct messaging, which isn’t technically an option). You can also request an archive of your data and export it in an Activity Pub compatible format, and easily move your data to another instance or (within some limits) even move your account data to another handle.

Mastodon’s privacy policy is simple and easy to understand.

You can’t make your profile private in the same way you can on Instagram or X, but there is a setting that automatically deletes posts, and you can set up your account so you manually approve followers.

Bluedsky does offer private accounts but doesn’t use two-factor authentication – which Mastodon does. Plus, if your Bluesky account is private, your posts are only hidden from view for users who haven’t logged in to the site. The data is public to any other server connected to the network.

Data export is in the beta phase, so getting it all downloaded is a mammoth task. Bluesky’s privacy policy does clarify it might use your personal information for marketing and research and share it with third party services. FOSS doesn’t think it’s a good privacy policy for web service in 2024.

The thing is, both Bluesky and Mastodon come out remarkably well against the platform they might replace – and the major social media that’s owned and run by tech giants. Depending on what’s spurred you to seek an X alternative, the two platforms offer a well-rounded selection.

Mastodon, though perhaps on the moral high ground, definitely requires more effort to set up and establish a presence – or at least a timeline that keeps you scrolling in the same way algorithm-run feeds do. Bluesky offers pretty much what was lost in the switch to X, perhaps without the years of user-feedback-influenced improvements.

Early reviews of Bluesky, back in invite-only beta, all celebrated its comparative positivity, harking back to ‘simpler times’ online. Whether it’s remained quite so fluffy and nice is questionable – as is how strong a marketing factor that will be.

Increasingly, you’ll notice that if you scroll to the bottom of a company’s website there’ll be a link to a Bluesky or Mastodon account – maybe even both. While the more mainstream services are still going, there is a sense that they’ve exhausted their peak and a new era of social media feels closer to realization than it has for years – maybe even since the beginning of Instagram.

So, give one of the alternatives a go, even if only to say you were there when it all started.

Tired of the Twitter swamp? Be more Groot…

The post Leave your X behind, head for Bluesky appeared first on TechHQ.

• Ultimately, Meta wants to break free from Nvidia’s AI chips while challenging other tech giants making their silicon.
• Meta expects an additional US$9 billion on AI expenditure this year, beyond the US$30 billion annual investment.
• Will Artemis mark a decisive break from Nvidia, after Meta hordes H100 chips?

A whirlwind of generative AI innovation in the past year alone has exposed major tech companies’ profound reliance on Nvidia. Crafting chatbots and other AI products has become an intricate dance with specialized chips largely made by Nvidia in the preceding years. Pouring billions of dollars into Nvidia’s systems, the tech behemoths have found themselves straining against the chipmaker’s inability to keep pace with the soaring demand. Faced with this problem, industry titans like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are trying to seize control of their fate by forging their own AI chips. 

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More of Meta’s missteps released

After all, in-house chips would enable the giants to steer the course of their own destiny, slashing costs, eradicating chip shortages, and envisioning a future where they offer these cutting-edge chips to businesses tethered to their cloud services -creating their own silicon fiefdoms, rather than being entirely dependent on the likes of Nvidia (and potentially AMD and Intel).

The most recent tech giant to announce plans to go solo is Meta, which is rumored to be developing a new AI chip, “Artemis,” set for release later this year. 

The chip, designed to complement the extensive array of Nvidia H100 chips recently acquired by Meta, aligns with the company’s strategic focus on inference—the crucial decision-making facet of AI. While bearing similarities to the previously announced MTIA chip, which surfaced last year, Artemis seems to emphasize inference over training AI models. 

H100 Tensor Core GPU. Source: Nvidia.

However, it is worth noting that Meta is entering the AI chip arena at a point when competition has gained momentum. It started with a significant move last July, when Meta disrupted the competition for advanced AI by unveiling Llama 2, a model akin to the one driving ChatGPT. 

Then, last month, Zuckerberg introduced his vision for artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an Instagram Reels video. In the previous earnings call, Zuckerberg also emphasized Meta’s substantial investment in AI, declaring it as the primary focus for 2024. 

2024: the year of custom AI chips by Meta?

In its quest to empower generative AI products across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and hardware devices like Ray-Ban smart glasses, the world’s largest social media company is racing to enhance its computing capacity. Therefore, Meta is investing billions to build specialized chip arsenals and adapt data centers. 

Last Thursday, Reuters got hold of an internal company document that states that the parent company of Facebook intends to roll out an updated version of its custom chip into its data centers this year. The latest iteration of the custom chip, codenamed ‘Artemis,’ is designed to bolster the company’s AI initiatives and might lessen its dependence on Nvidia chips, which presently hold a dominant position in the market. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/Getty Images via AFP).

If successfully deployed at Meta’s massive scale, an in-house semiconductor could trim annual energy costs by hundreds of millions of dollars, and slash billions in chip procurement expenses, suggests Dylan Patel, founder of silicon research group SemiAnalysis. The deployment of Meta’s chip would also mark a positive shift for its in-house AI silicon project. 

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Meta in the hotseat… again

In 2022, executives abandoned the initial chip version, choosing instead to invest billions in Nvidia’s GPUs, dominant in AI training. The upside of that strategy is that Meta is poised to accumulate many coveted semiconductors. Mark Zuckerberg revealed to The Verge that by the close of 2024, the tech giant will possess over 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs – the primary chips used by entities for training and deploying AI models like ChatGPT. 

Additionally, Zuckerberg anticipates Meta’s collection to reach 600,000 GPUs by the year’s end, encompassing Nvidia’s A100s and other AI chips. The new AI chip by Meta follows its predecessor’s ability for inference—utilizing algorithms for ranking judgments and user prompt responses. Last year, Reuters reported that Meta is also working on a more ambitious chip that, like GPUs, could perform training and inference.

Zuckerberg also detailed Meta’s strategy to vie with Alphabet and Microsoft in the high-stakes AI race. Meta aims to capitalize on its extensive walled garden of data, highlighting the abundance of publicly shared images and videos on its platform and distinguishing it from competitors relying on web-crawled data. Beyond the existing generative AI, Zuckerberg envisions achieving “general intelligence,” aspiring to develop top-tier AI products, including a world-class assistant for enhanced productivity.

The post Meta is gearing up to join the AI chips race appeared first on TechHQ.

• How much is Facebook worth to its users?
• Utility of large social platforms and services determined.
• $5 or $100 a month to stop using Instagram?

A mainstay of any product or service for sale today is its value to the end-user, considered as a key component of its offered price. If product X brings value Y to the lives of the K people who buy it, then we have an immediate idea of its price at the point of sale (Z), where Z is affected by the cost of production and distribution over the product’s lifetime.

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But, if goods or services are distributed for free, that is, a series of zeroes on the price tag to the consumers, what value does the item or service provided actually have? That’s the question asked in a working paper titled The digital welfare of nations: new measures of welfare gains and inequality, authored by Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, and Asad Liaqat, among others, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research [pdf download]. The paper attempts to measure the welfare gains from 10 digital platforms in 13 countries. It asked over 40,000 Facebook users what they would need to be paid monthly to abstain from using a range of digital platforms. With these figures collated, the authors surmised that the perceived value from digital goods globally was worth more than $2.5 trillion each year.

That’s around 6% of total world GDP.

The experiment showed that those living in more developed countries placed less value on the likes of Snapchat, X, and Facebook than those in the developing world and that X was ranked lowest in perceived value overall (despite its recent growth into a live news source above and beyond many traditional outfits). Facebook ranks somewhere in the middle of the list of values, while Google Search, it turns out, is given a higher worth than ‘meeting friends.’

How much is Facebook worth in terms of value gained?

The survey group was drawn from active Facebook users; those who had used the social media platform in the last 30 days, and measured the relative willingness to stop using the ten digital services or goods, in addition to “not meeting friends in person.”

“Cash Money – 100 Euro Notes” by viZZZual.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The chosen platforms (or pastime) were, in order of perceived value, Google Search, Meeting Friends in Real Life, YouTube, Google Maps, WhatsApp, Amazon Shopping, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and X. The least valued option was Snapchat, and other activities were measured against that platform’s low popularity taken as a baseline.

The survey found a “highly significant negative relationship” between the value of the digital services as a percentage of the participants’ per capita GDP. Those in Mexico, for example, valued Facebook higher as a percentage of their country’s GDP than those in the US. Yet relatively wealthy individuals in their respective countries (well-off Mexicans and well-off US citizens, for example) considered Facebook to have lower value overall than their poorer fellow nationals.

Despite the huge accrued wealth of social media operators and other digital platforms, the working paper shows that end-users quantify their gains from using the platforms in monetary terms as much higher than the companies’ incomes. In short, users get more value from Google Search than Alphabet (Google’s ownership vehicle) earns from those users.

The paper’s authors admit that compared to the fairly concrete GDP figures available for each country, the survey’s methods produced “relatively noisy” results, yet the authors were “confident” that digital goods create trillions of dollars-worth of value to users. The paper also states that some estimates of value placed on using services are skewed due to “digital addiction,” but it also points out that estimates of GDP are likewise subject to “irrational […] externalities” – that is, the concepts of worth or value in the opinion of individual consumers.

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Now solve for X

For the survey, respondents were asked: ‘Would you be willing to stop using [service] for one month in exchange for [N]?” where N was chosen randomly from a range of nine values from $5 to $100, using localized currencies of equivalent value, relative to GDP of the nation of the citizen. In the case of Facebook, three-quarters of respondents would forswear the platform for the top stipend of $100 a month (or local equivalent), and fewer than 20% would go Facebook-cold-turkey for a mere $5. The question of how much is Facebook worth to users, therefore, had a statistically sound monetary value.

The survey’s findings suggest that current GDP estimates do not consider the value gained by end-users of the goods and services provided by the selected platforms for ‘free.’ Additionally, they quantify the relative amount of money users feel they would need to not give Meta, X, and Google data about themselves and their online activities. On that issue, the revenues from digital platforms, while huge, are not indicative of the true value of that data. Those in developing countries gain the most utility and presumably offer the least monetary reward to the like of Meta, as data from users with less disposable income is not valued as highly on the open data market as that of US citizens, for example.

The key takeaway though is that the utility users feel they gain from using digital platforms dwarfs the platforms owners’ incomes.

The post $100 a month to NOT use Facebook: 75% would do it appeared first on TechHQ.

Just because introducing AI into the restaurant industry paves the way for greater automation doesn’t mean that every kitchen is going to be run by robots (although some might be in the future, and a tiny handful are already). “At the end of the day, it’s a people business,” Zhong Xu – CEO and co-founder of Deliverect, a provider of food ordering software – told TechHQ. What’s more universal is the need for food outlets to build a presence online and convert that audience into sales, and that’s a big part of how AI is transforming the restaurant industry.

Xu has been helping restaurants to go digital since a young age and that journey led him to co-found Deliverect. The Belgium-based tech firm’s software platform not only abstracts away the complexity of receiving food orders online and via social media, it gives restaurant owners the opportunity to personalize their offerings to customers, and brings a wealth of analytics.

Deliverect CEO and co-founder, Zhong Xu.

Today, the company has offices in major cities around the world and has helped clients process 500 million meal orders in five years. Food ordering and fulfilment software enables restaurants to become omni-channel operations, much like how retail platforms have transformed brick-and-mortar stores into more versatile digital shopping hubs.

Digital tools support customers who want to dine in, those who’d like to pick up their orders at the restaurant, as well as integrating well-known delivery partners such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo, DoorDash, and Hungry Panda – to give just a few examples.

Writing social media posts and taking orders

Highlighting how AI is transforming the restaurant industry, algorithms help users to prepare their social media posts and launch promotions around specific events. Menus can be changed dynamically – for example, to reflect that a major soccer match or a music concert is taking place near one of the outlets in a medium to large chain of restaurants.

Deliverect is a Meta partner, which enables the food ordering software provider to integrate its solutions with massive social networks such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Consumers can browse their Instagram feed and order directly from an Instagram story that appeals to them – a feature that has a very high conversion rate of clicks to food sales, according to Xu.

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Menus can also be adjusted on the fly. If a menu item is going out of stock, it can be snoozed until more food supplies arrive – avoiding having to deal with disappointed diners and enabling a better customer experience. The food ordering software gives restaurants the opportunity to tailor their offerings to different audiences and run multiple menus at the same time – naturally, only showing one to each of the segments.

On TechHQ, we’ve written about how AI enables firms to create a digital personal shopper for each of their customers on a huge scale. And this strategy plays out in the restaurant industry too. Food outlets have the opportunity to remember their customers’ favourite orders and make recommendations based on those analytics.

AI is transforming the restaurant industry by streamlining menu adjustments at busy times – for example, when fewer staff are on shift, the number of options can be reduced. Complicated menu items can be paused at busy times. Alternatively, pricing can be adjusted dynamically. Xu points out that raising prices during busy times might mean that you lose a few potential orders, but it’s an opportunity for food outlets to capitalize on their popularity.

Data insights can be a game changer for restaurant owners. Digital tools can quickly highlight which menu items are the most profitable and put them in front of more eyeballs. Conversely, analytics help chefs to identify which meals need to be revised or dropped from the menu.

An operational helping hand on wheels.

Describing the benefits of these various operational helping hands begin to show how AI is transforming the restaurant industry. And being able to digitalize and appeal to the tastes of a new online audience without needing any specialized tech skills has helped businesses to survive.

AI has also meant that software providers such as Deliverect, which typically market themselves to mid-size and larger restaurant chains, can support smaller customers too – by integrating the latest automation tools for onboarding and fielding support calls.

Returning to the topic of robot kitchens, it could be something that will catch on if it’s made part of the show – restaurant dining is experience-based, after all. However, the design would need to be significantly more entertaining than a giant vending machine to tempt this author to the table.

The post How AI is transforming the restaurant industry appeared first on TechHQ.

• The Australian Federal Police report a significant rise in radicalized right-wing children.
• Investigations center on gaming platforms like Roblox.
• There’s a difference between correlation and causation – but the existence of things like the manosphere suggests gaming platforms could be a fertile recruitment tool.

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According to the Australian Federal Police, Australian children are being targeted by extremists who are infiltrating online gaming platforms. Rising numbers of children as young as 12 are being investigated for radicalized ideologies.

Ahead of the Christmas period, when many parents will gift technology to their children and teenagers, the Australian Federal Police is urging parents and guardians to be mindful of who their children are interacting with this holiday season.

Do not mess with the Australian Federal Police. They have a kangaroo on their badge.

Of course, we have to avoid the easy mindset of “New thing bad, make kids evil”: Dungeons and Dragons didn’t cause a generation of Devil worshippers [Hail Satan, roll for initiative – Ed]; Call of Duty didn’t make them “feral warhounds.”

But the AFP has experienced an increase in young people being investigated across Australian state and territory jurisdictions, and has seen far-right terrorism-related investigations increase from two per cent prior to 2020 to around 15 per cent in 2022.

Looking for support online, ideologically and religiously motivated extremists often use gaming platforms to meet individuals who can be manipulated. Roblox, a hugely popular gaming platform, is one example that’s rife with extremism.

Users can program their own games for others to play in a virtual universe, and some games feature virtual worlds where players can act out extremist ideological narratives, disseminate propaganda, recruit other users and generate funds online. Others feature scenarios such as Nazi concentration camps, Chinese communist “re-education camps” of Muslims, and Islamic State-style conflict zones.

Around half of Roblox’s 65 million daily users are 12 or younger. When the online extremist community encourages and validates a young person, it can become socially and emotionally reinforcing, say the Australian Federal Police.

It also normalizes violence, allowing them to take part in criminal acts within the game.

Correlation is not causation – but…

Some commonalities among users include neurodiversity or mental health conditions, being raised in a disruptive, unstable or harmful environment, and experiencing social problems at school.

Imagine a generation of iPad babies fed right-wing propagana… photo via Alamy.

Rachel Kowert, director of research at Take This, a nonprofit that supports the mental health of game developers and players, told Wired in 2021 that “there’s this process of othering in some games, us versus them. All of these things do seem to make a cocktail that would be prime for people to recruit to extreme causes. But whether it does or not is a totally different question. Because nobody knows.”

There’s a long history of gaming platforms as a breeding ground for fringe groups to form and encourage each other, all too often into dangerous movements like incel culture.

AFP Assistant Commissioner Krissy Barrett said that “With more than 3.22 billion active gamers online around the world, these extremists are attempting to target a significant part of the global population to spread their views and propaganda.”

“These extremist groups and individuals are using these gaming and online platforms as a mode to transmit violent material and propaganda, across a range of extremist ideologies.”

AFP Assistant Commissioner Krissy Barrett.

Some recent games are little more than a “Trojan horse to promote their worldview, blurring the reality of young users with the aim to radicalize them,” said Barret.

Joint counter-terrorism teams comprising AFP, state and territory police, and Asio and the NSW Crime Commission are working to prevent and identify the extremist activity online.

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Roblox community standards state that they “believe in building a safe, civil, and diverse community” and “for some behavior that violates these standards, such as behavior that poses a real-world risk to others, we reserve the right to contact or cooperate with the relevant authorities in order to keep everyone safe.”

Earlier this year a Roblox spokesperson told the New York Times: “We recognize that extremist groups are turning to a variety of tactics in an attempt to circumvent the rules on all platforms, and we are determined to stay one step ahead of them.”

Last year the company told Wired that it works “closely with the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counter-terrorism (CTEC), a world leading counter-terrorism institute and other governments and NGOs across the world to help us prevent extremist activity on our platform”.

Australian Federal Police warn of Trojan horse games

In 2019, reenactments of the terrorist attack at Christchurch began taking place on Roblox. At the time, the Australian Federal Police said their concern was that “extremist groups are exploiting these platforms to target a very young group of Australia’s population, by creating content to share and encourage far-right/extremist ideologies and abhorrent violence against others.”

The Australian Federal Police link gaming platforms to radicalization.

More recently, arguably showing that politicizing online can be good, users joined virtual rallies in support of Palestine – but, as in reality, some pro-Israel counteractions cropped up. Some players violently (but virtually) attacked others with opposing views.

“While our Community Standards allow for expressions of solidarity, we do not allow for content that endorses or condones violence, promotes terrorism or hatred against individuals or groups, or calls for supporting a specific political party,” a Roblox spokesperson told CNBC.

In reality, the internet isn’t what makes young people interact with adults who have bad intentions – yes, it’s an enabler, but an older sibling’s friend could have as much sway in a child’s life.

What’s unique about the gaming community is that it’s a great equalizer, something especially attractive to people who feel somehow disadvantaged. When it provides community for a teen plagued with hormonal anxiety, that’s not a bad thing. But when it feeds emotionally vulnerable or especially receptive young audiences with an idology, that equalization can become a normalizing factor, whether the message is positive, progressive and self-caring, or politically regressive, racist, or violent.

The post Kids radicalized by only a game? appeared first on TechHQ.

• The Meta lawsuit reveals internal communications that seem to prove Meta was lax on child users because it was good for business.
• Meta has begun its own campaign to start lawsuits against app store owners like Apple and Google.
• The Meta lawsuit is being brought by 33 attorneys general simultaneously.

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Meta in the hotseat… again

In the latest release from the Meta lawsuit, we learned that the company purposefully engineered its platforms to addict children. It also knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint.

Read those sentences again and replace “Meta” with “Big Tobacco” or “Corporate Cocaine” and see how comfortable you feel.

If you’re of a certain generation, you’ll remember schoolmates proudly uploading party pics to a Facebook profile with an incorrect birthday – predated to meet the site’s age requirements. Because that’s how hard it was to get around due diligence on that platform. As Facebook lost its sheen and Instagram became the social media platform du jour, the same method enabled very young people to post pictures to the site.

Unsurprisingly, this get-around didn’t go unnoticed by Meta, the company behind the social media site. But why didn’t it close underage accounts?

The lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October. It alleges that the company knew – but never disclosed – that it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram, but only disabled a fraction of them.

33 attorneys general – it’s possible they’re all wrong simultaneously, but the odds aren’t good if they’re lining up to sue you.

The volume of underage users was an “open secret” at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. One example cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl’s accounts weren’t deleted following complaints from the girl’s mother requesting the account be taken down due to her child’s age.

It’s super-easy to use… even a baby could do it! Image via Getty.

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Instagram Lands $400 Million Fine For Mishandling Children’s Data

Employees concluded “the accounts were ignored” partly because representatives from Meta “couldn’t tell for sure the user was underage.”

In 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but less than half of the reported accounts (164,000) were disabled that year. At times, the lawsuit’s complaint notes, Meta has a backlog of up to 2.5m accounts of younger children awaiting action.

The lawsuit alleges that this and other incidents violate the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires social media companies to provide notice and get parental consent before collecting children’s data.

It also focuses on longstanding assertions that Meta knowingly created products that were addictive and harmful to children. This was brought into the spotlight by Frances Haugen, who revealed internal studies showed platforms like Instagram led children to anorexia-related content.

Senator Richard Blumenthal speaks during the 2021 hearing.

According to company documents that are cited by the complaint, several Meta officials acknowledged that the company designed its products to exploit youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called Teen Fundamentals, highlighting certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development.

It discussed teen brains’ relative immaturity and their tendency to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward” and asked how these characteristics could manifest… in product usages.”

According to a statement from Meta, the complaint misrepresents its work over the past decade to make the online experience safe for teens. It tries to point out “over 30 tools to support them and their parents.”

That doesn’t really make up for ignoring complaints from parents that their younger children are using the app despite being underage. Meta argues age verification is a “complex industry challenge,” though it doesn’t seem – based on internal correspondences – to be one Meta is interested in tackling.

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Meta fined over $400m for EU data misuse

Instead, Meta says it favors shifting the burden of policing underage usage to app stores and parents like Google and Apple, by supporting federal legislation that would require app stores to obtain parental approval whenever under-16s download apps.

Meta lawsuit: company tries to shift the blame

On the same day that the Senate began investigation Meta’s failure to shield children using its platforms, the company began calling on US lawmakers to regulate Google and Apple’s app stores to better protect children.

A blogpost titled “Parenting in a Digital World is Hard. Congress Can Make It Easier,” written by Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, called for federal legislations mandating app stores to notify parents when a child between 13 and 16 downloads an app, soliciting the parents’ approval.

Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety.

Although it doesn’t directly name Apple or Google, Meta’s blogpost is unlikely to be directed anywhere other than at the two biggest smartphone app stores in the world.

Davis’s call was published the same day that the Senate judiciary committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, requesting that he “provide documents related to senior executives’ knowledge of the mental and physical health harms associated with its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.” The letter asks for the documents by 30 November.

One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users would hurt the company’s business in a 2019 email. A year later, the same executive expressed frustration that Facebook didn’t show the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger users and remove them from the platforms as it did for studying the usage of underage users for business reasons.

The Meta lawsuit alleges the company knew its product was addictive to young users.

The outcome of the Meta lawsuit remains to be seen, but the added scrutiny on social media companies is bound to have a knock-on effect – though what that effect is depends largely on Meta’s willingness to be goverened by data rules, and/or spend large sums of money on putting right any systems found to be overly addicting.

The post More of Meta’s missteps released appeared first on TechHQ.

• Big tech companies are suddenly being held accountable for their influence and impact around the world.
• Meta is even being sued by over 30 Attorneys-General in the US.
• Tighter regulations will have to be complied with in Asia

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Amazon and Microsoft both fined millions for violating children’s data privacy

It’s not been a great week for big tech companies. In the US, Apple is in hot water due to concerns that the Chinese government is influencing the company’s program commissioning, and Elon Musk’s X has failed to pay a fine imposed by Australian regulators. Sam Altman has been fired, hired, and rehired again, leaving a gaping insecurity in OpenAI’s investor confidence.

Across the world, too, regulators and governments are cracking down on big tech companies and emphasizing the need for compliance.

New legal powers in the European Union have changed the landscape for Apple-Android messaging, and in the US, new digital payments regulations have been proposed. Now, Asian countries are paying attention – and are increasingly concerned by the dominance of just a few tech companies.

Across the region it’s indicated that big tech companies will have to comply with standards that might soon be international benchmarks. Let’s have a look at some specifics.

Japan

In June, a Japanese government panel led by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno proposed regulations that would open up the Apple and Google app stores to competition, as well as stopping a bias toward the companies’ respective smartphone operating systems.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno lets the little guys compete with big tech companies.

The panel said that the bias is caused by the companies making it difficult to download apps or use payment services developed by third parties – both Apple and Google charge commissions on app payments.

In October, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) revealed it had begun an investigation into Google blocking rival services and a potential breach of antitrust regulations.

The Justice Ministry has made another push for foreign technology companies to register their overseas headquarters in the country to extend government oversight in online harassment cases. That would enable victims to file lawsuits in Japan instead of having to go overseas.

Most social media companies have registered already, after a warning in 2022 that 48 foreign tech businesses were in breach of this rule. Google, Meta and X all registered their headquarters in the country.

FTC officials are on a recruitment drive to hire more lawyers to enhance scrutiny of big tech companies as Japan shows increasing concern that the domestic units of tech companies are undermining fair competition.

Nepal

Nepalese government officials announced the country would ban TikTok on November 13^th. The move comes in response to TikTok’s negative impact on the country’s “social harmony” and how it “disrupts family structures and social relations.”

It’s been criticized by some as blocking freedom of expression and a group of journalists and nonprofits released a statement saying the ban would limit speech and the opportunity for Nepalis to participate in the global online community. Dozens have organized protests around the country.

There are around 2.2 million TikTok users in Nepal, said Sudhir Parajuli, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of Nepal. Many use the platform as a source of income.

Ashish Dangi holds a placard as he takes part in a protest against the ban on TikTok in Kathmandu, Nepal November 18, 2023. Via REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar

Over 1,600 cybercrime cases, most of them related to TikTok, have been registered over the last four years in Nepal, according to local media reports.

The government also passed a directive this month requiring social media platforms to establish offices in the country as a means of broadening government oversight. The legislation further outlines a range of prohibited online actions – from spreading fake news to publishing photos of private affairs without permission. Embarrassing outbursts on public transport might be safe from internet trolls, but so will government officials in compromising positions.

Indonesia

Indonesia made headlines in late September as the first country to ban social media sales, bidding goodbye to TikTok Shop. The development was somewhat surprising, as TikTok’s e-commerce push was cited by experts as indication of the sector’s potential in the country.

Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO.

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew said in June that the company planned to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia, referencing Indonesia as a crucial part of the strategy.

Ah, how well that worked out.

Indonesian officials say that small businesses need protection from big tech companies, and banning e-commerce on social media will support offline businesses.

“Now, e-commerce cannot become social media. It is separated,” Trade Minister Zulfiki Hasan said.

Previously, President Joko Widodo had warned the country needed to be careful about e-commerce.

TikTok released a statement saying it was complying with the rules and would “no longer facilitate e-commerce transactions in TikTok Shop Indonesia … and will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities on the path forward.”

India holding big tech companies accountable

In August, the Indian government rolled out a digital personal data protection bill that “seeks to better regulate big tech companies and penalize firms for data breaches,” placing more onerous requirements on big tech companies, like renegotiating contracts with local partners and overhauling data handling processes.

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A number of companies had to request extensions of up to 18 months to comply with the rules. The law has further sparked concern about government overreach and a shrinking of digital freedoms in the country, particularly against a backdrop of media freedom concerns.

Another antitrust probe into Google began in May, focusing on its app payments.

Australia

Australia may not have been traditionally thought of as an “Asian” country, but it is by geography a member of the Asia-Pacific region (APAC), so geopolitically it counts in our round-up.

Is TikTok looking for a way around the TikTok Shop separation?

In February, the social media site X – still called Twitter back then! – was instructed by Australia’s internet safety watchdog to better police child abuse material shared on the platform. The same was asked of YouTube, Google and TikTok, and financial penalties were threatened.

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In October, a report by the eSafety commissioner singled X out for allowing child abuse material to proliferate across the platform. It was issued a fine by eSafety on the day of the report’s publication because of its failure to detail plans to get rid of child abuse content on the site or be proactive in tackling the issue.

“Twitter/X has not paid the infringement notice within the allotted time frame and eSafety is now considering further steps,” a spokesperson for the regulator said.

There was a new logo to be designed, though! The social media site was in the middle of a rebrand – pesky regulators should understand that.

Big tech companies have for years acted as though they were above the law, and as thought massive regulatory fines were merely the cost of doing multi-million dollar business. If they are now to be faced with stronger regulatory curbs on their behavior, it’s hard to find many people who will cry for them. The only issue, as in the case of Nepal and TikTok Shop, will arise when big tech companies use vendors further down the food chain as a kind of human shield to prevent regulations applying to them.

Governments like those in Indonesia though have shown they give very few clicks about such tactics, and have done what they feel is for the overall betterment of their society, rather than bending to the special pleading of the big tech companies.

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• Circular economy trends in technology could play a significant role in building sustainability into the industry.
• The circular economy depends on three phases – recover, refresh, and remarket.
• Many tech items can be recycled at near net-zero cost.

Online retailers of refurbished technology are encouraging shoppers to opt for a Green Friday when looking for bargains on November 24^th. However, it’ll take more than a change of messaging for the circular economy to achieve its full potential, and one of the biggest trends is happening right inside the buying basket.

In the past, consumers may have received a voucher for handing in their old tech when purchasing a new device. Early adopters could have drawers full of electronic goods, having never gotten around to selling unwanted items – despite their best intentions. And this is where circular technology economy enablers – such as Alchemy – are helping to change behavior through device trade-in services and systems.

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“The experience from the customer perspective wasn’t good,” James Murdock – Alchemy co-founder – told TechHQ, referring to the gap that he and his colleagues saw in the market when setting up the business back in 2017. Since then, Alchemy has grown to become one of the largest and fastest-growing circular tech companies in the world.

Its services fall into three categories, which the company – headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and with global operations – refers to as ‘recover,’ ‘refresh,’ and ‘remarket.’

Recover, refresh, remarket – circular economy trends

“When a user buys a new tech product, we enable them to trade in their current device,” writes Alchemy on its website. “We do this for some of the world’s most prominent retailers and carriers, as well as managing large programs for enterprises and their resellers.”

This first action is key when it comes to circular economy trends – it removes the roadblocks that stopped purchasers of new devices from contributing to the secondary technology market. As Murdock points out, buyers of new devices are important as they start the circle.

On TechHQ we’ve written about how firms such as Back Market recreate the buzz of buying a new device to attract buyers of refurbished smartphones and other electronics. And there’s more to expanding the circular technology economy than just getting consumers to avoid shiny new things.

Happy #earthday2023
Let's recognize one of the most impactful sectors to reduce e-waste
The Global #refurbished #smartphones industry grew by 5% in 2022 while new smartphone shipments fell.#CounterpointTR #circulareconomy #sustainability #Apple #Samsung pic.twitter.com/cee81qBiVW

— Glen (@GlenCardoza) April 22, 2023

In fact, Murdock’s comments suggest that there’s room for different types of purchaser. “We are enabling the journey at the same time as shoppers are buying the new thing,” he said. “And that’s strengthening the circular economy.”

He draws parallels between top-end smartphone firms and leading carmakers, explaining how devices made by premium brands such as Apple and Samsung hold their value, much like vehicles manufactured by BMW, Mercedes, and Audi fare well in second-hand automotive markets.

Reuse and repurpose

Helping electronics partners to recover, refresh, and remarket devices allows customers to experience brands at lower price points, and can contribute directly to profits. For example, automakers add revenue through servicing, even though the customer didn’t buy new. And cell phone carriers benefit financially from all subscriber devices connected to their networks – not just ones that are box-fresh.

Considering other circular economy trends, Murdock agrees that blockchain technology is an interesting idea for product passports – particularly at the component level. However, there are operational issues to consider.

Running a refurbished technology business is cash-intensive, requiring large amounts of working capital and lines of credit. And no firm is going to invest heavily in setting up a product passport scheme only to see competitors reap the rewards.

That being said, larger players such as Alchemy do see the same devices come through their system multiple times as owners’ device needs and tastes change. Apple’s iPhones are reportedly designed for a seven-year lifecycle, which means that devices can efficiently serve three owners or more before being sent for recycling.

Murdock and his colleagues – today, the firm has over 350 staff – help clients not just with the mechanics of how to participate in the circular economy, the team brings expertise in pricing too. For example, services include residual value modeling and commercial forecasting.

“The iPhone is worth more today than it’s ever been worth, as a percentage of its new value,” Murdock reveals.

Devices will fall in price over their lifetime, but there will still be movements up and down. And things can change quickly when global events impact supply chains.

Money saving RFP knowhow

In conversation with TechHQ, Murdock notes that North America is no laggard when it comes to capitalizing on the savings of buying used devices. In the US, organizations are ahead in recognizing that circular economy trends include being able to write an RFP that specifies not just the number, age, and types of devices required – for example, by a large school or college –  but also spells out the equipment that will be traded in as part of the contract.

However, sustainable purchasing decisions are less common elsewhere, with many public bodies and governments continuing to buy new devices – even when capable refurbished technology is available in large quantities.

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Trends in other sectors, such as fashion, could help to change that – where buying vintage clothes and choosing items made from recycled materials is seen as responsible, given the resources needed to grow cotton.

Murdock sees the use of social media platforms such as TikTok as another driver of the circular economy, especially when they include e-commerce features. And he wants more to be done to accept old cables and chargers – noting how Apple’s switch from Lightning to USB-C designs will add to the amount of e-waste.

The good news is that many of these items can be recycled at near net-zero cost. In other words, the value of the reclaimed materials supports that step of the circular journey. And the incentives are stronger still for precious and rare-earth materials found in chips and other high-end electronics. Even sim cards can be turned into gold.

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• Omegle closes, founder cites his own health as among reasons.
• Site still subject of law suit.
• Moderation on all social sites not huge priority.

For some 73 million people a month, the closure of the anonymous video chat platform Omegle will come as a disappointment. For many others, however, among them abuse victims and law enforcement officers, its demise will be welcomed. For many technology observers, especially those of a particular age, its shuttering will be regarded perhaps wistfully as a representation of another nail in the coffin of a simpler, more innocent age of the internet.

The site’s founder, owner, and probably only employee, Leif Brooks, has decided to retire the site for reasons of his own physical and mental health, plus its financial situation. Despite an increasing number of laws enacted worldwide designed to protect internet users from potential abuse, Omegle had little or no moderation of its content.

A BBC article covering the closure claims that “When he [Brooks] was asleep or offline, no complaints were acted upon,” for example.

The idea behind the germinal Omegle was that users would be randomly paired with a stranger for a video chat. The internet and Omegle were, in the mind of the site’s creator, part of a safer world compared to the threats one might encounter meeting new people in real life. “If I said ‘no’ to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head,” Brooks noted in his closure notice still hosted on the site’s homepage.

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Over the years, the site grew largely by word of mouth (or its digital equivalents) and, in turn, became an occasional conduit for pedophiles and similar deviants. At the time of writing, the site is the subject of a legal case brought by an American citizen who claims she was groomed by a Canadian pedophile whom the site paired her with when she was a minor. Brooks himself admitted that “some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes,” yet reiterated that “meeting new people [was] a basic human need,” and that meeting that need was Omegle’s sole purpose.

Brooks says the site and what it represented was emblematic of “the Internet I fell in love with,” and that that ideal “may cease to exist, and in its place we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption.”

Omegle closes – the internet moves on

Although developed by the US military, what we now term the internet was popularized, arguably, by the invention of the world wide web, which was especially used and promoted by academic institutions enthused by the technology’s ability to disseminate information. Sharing knowledge was more efficient in the digital realm, so meeting new people was similarly done more easily online.

However, as more aspects of existence can now take place digitally and the internet has risen in importance everyone’s lives, it has increasingly fallen under the auspices of government lawmakers whose remit is at least in part to protect their citizens. But unlike the streets of cities, national borders, and domestic economies, the oversight and control of daily activity don’t fall to law enforcement agencies in the first instance. Instead, those duties fall to the large organizations that run social media sites, places where complete strangers are brought into contact with one another, irrespective of any commonality of viewpoint.

Omegle 2009-2023 pic.twitter.com/kYUWWqfJCd

— Saumil (@OnTheGrapevine) November 9, 2023

Omegle’s failure was one of enabling an innocent ideal but not having the funds to protect its users from the platform’s misuse. The irony is that larger platforms that are significantly better funded are inclined to scale back on the (expensive) oversight and mediation they are legally forced to undertake. The whistleblowing of a former Meta employee testifying to the US Congress is another example of, at best, a lack of enthusiasm from the large social platforms to mediate or otherwise limit a site’s use. Twitter, too, is suffering from the results of its actions in attempting to find a balance between the maximum number of users and the minimum amount of hate speech and generally abusive online behavior.

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As Omegle closes, it’s worth noting that its lack of funds was a continuation of those early internet ideals, where such funds weren’t necessary, because the perceived level of threat was minimal.

Meeting strangers, for meeting’s sake, was not intended to be monetized, and without any stream of income derived from its users or the extraction of their behavioral data, the site could not oversee activity on the site to keep within the law. Like every other area of human activity online, to exist, it had to create income to survive. Merely enabling what Omegle’s founder considered a human need, for the betterment of all, was never going to cut it.

After all, even doing something simple on the internet in 2023 means some form of monetization or data harvesting. To take a single example, locating resources online in 2023 is nearly impossible without the involvement of the world’s largest advertising agency, i.e., Google, a company that gets paid as a result of people browsing the web (the Chrome browser), looking for things (Google Search), asking for directions (Google Maps)  or any one of a hundred more activities.

The demise of Omegle can be attributed to the changes that time has wrought on the context in which it existed: the internet. The original ideals of human and informational interchange still exist, but they are deliberately more difficult to find. ChatGPT-powered Bing searches don’t show the contents of the Gemini network, for example, and perhaps that’s a good thing for idealists like Leif Brooks and people who (still) think like him. As Omegle closes, the question is whether people like him are being written out of the history of the internet altogether.

“Foggy graveyard” by hugovk is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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• Lawsuit sees Meta sued across the US, potentially costing millions of dollars in penalties. 
• Instagram and Facebook trialling paid subscriptions in Europe.
• The new Meta lawsuit could see the company paying out millions of dollars.

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Dozens of US states are bringing a new Meta lawsuit, accusing Meta platforms and its Instagram unit of fuelling a youth mental health crisis by making their platforms addictive.

In a complaint filed Tuesday last week, the attorneys general of 33 states including California and New York said Meta repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms and knowingly induced young children and teenagers into addictive and compulsive social media use.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” according to the complaint filed in the Oakland, California federal court. “Its motive is profit.”

Children and young people are an appealing demographic to businesses: attracting them as consumers while they’re more impressionable to solidify brand loyalty. It’s a strategy as old as cigarettes and as pernicious as fizzy soft drinks.

Much of the focus on Meta stemmed from a whistleblower’s release of documents in 2021 that showed the company knew Instagram, which began as a photo-sharing app, was addictive and worsened body image issues for some teen girls. | REUTERS

For Meta, young consumers might secure more advertizers, who hope children will keep buying their products as they grow up.

Unfortunately for profit margins, research has associated children’s use of Meta’s social media platforms with “depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and many other negative outcomes.”

Meta said it was “disappointed” in the lawsuit – a paternalistic response that paints the attorneys general themselves as spoilt children.

“Instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” the company said.

Similar lawsuits are being filed against Meta by eight other US states and Washington DC.  The total number of authorities taking action against the company is 42. Meta’s shared fell 0.6% on the Nasdaq.

There have been a string of legal actions against social media companies on behalf of children and teens recently. ByteDance’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube already face hundreds of lawsuits pertaining to the addictiveness of social media.

It may not be your fault if your child can’t stop scrolling. They may be on eyeball-crack – or Instagram, as it’s also known.

In the past, Mark Zuckerberg has defended his company’s handling of content that some critics find harmful, saying, “At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That’s just not true.”

This case could see Meta facing civil penalties of $1,000 to $50,000 for each violation of various state laws – an amount that could add up quickly.

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The Meta lawsuit came after focus was put on the company due to a whistleblower’s release of documents in 2021 that showed the company knew Instagram was addictive and worsened body image for some teen girls.

The lawsuit alleges that Meta has worked to ensure young people spend as much time as possible on social media, despite knowing they’re susceptible to the need for approval that is satisfied by “likes” from other users.

“Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose state includes Meta’s headquarters.

Rob Bonta has spoken out against Meta’s practices. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)

Meta is also accused of violating a law banning the collection of data on children under 13, as well as deceptively denying the harms of its social media.

“Meta did not disclose that its algorithms were designed to capitalize on young users’ dopamine responses and create an addictive cycle of engagement,” the complaint said.

The complaint asserts that Meta’s refusal to accept any responsibility for the young people using the app extended as far as distancing itself from a 14-year-old girl’s suicide in the UK after she was exposed to content about suicide and self-injury on Instagram.

A coroner rejected a Meta executive’s claim that such content was “safe” for children, finding that the girl likely binged on harmful content that normalized the depression she had felt before killing herself.

By suing, authorities are aiming to patch holes left by the US Congress’ inability to pass new online protections for children despite years of discussions.

Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser said the whistleblower’s revelations showed Meta knew how Facebook and Instagram were harming children.

“It is very clear that decisions made by social media platforms, like Meta, are part of what is driving mental health harms, physical health harms, and threats that we can’t ignore,” he said.

Meta lawsuit: making back the money?

Not a direct response, but Facebook and Instagram seem to be mitigating money lost in lawsuits and from ad revenue. Both platforms are launching subscriptions across Europe that will remove adverts from the platforms.

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People using Meta’s platforms will be able to pay €9.99 ($10.64) monthly for an ad-free experience. It won’t be available in the UK.

In January this year, Meta was fined €390m (around $41m) for breaking EU data rules around ads. The regulator said at the time that the firm could not “force consent” by saying consumers must accept how their data is used or leave the platforms.

Access to the subscription tier will only be available in the EU, European Economic Area and Switzerland, and only to over 18-year-olds. The firm will look into how it can serve ads to children without breaking the rules.

Meta says its new subscription is about addressing EU concerns, not making money.

“We believe in an ad-supported internet, which gives people access to personalized products and services regardless of their economic status,” the firm wrote in a blog.

“The option for people to purchase a subscription for no ads balances the requirements of European regulators while giving users choice and allowing Meta to continue serving all people in the EU, EEA and Switzerland.

“We respect the spirit and purpose of these evolving European regulations and are committed to complying with them.”

Users can choose between continuing to use the platforms for free – and having their data collected – or to pay and completely opt out of targeted ads. They could end up paying more than their initial monthly fee, though: the service will cost an additional €3 per month if paid for on iOS or Android, to account for the additional fees taken by these platforms.

To avoid the charge, subscriptions can be paid for directly on the Facebook and Instagram websites, rather than on mobile apps.

Further, from March 2024, users will have to pay more for each additional account they have on the platform – like having a business and personal account.

All of this comes after Elon Musk announced paid subscriptions for X would be trialled. There’s a cheaper subscription tier on X, which will still feature ads but allow users to edit their posts, and a standard premium tier that grants a blue checkmark among other things.

The backlash to all that ought to have shown that charging for social media use might push many offline, but instead it seems the idea will become a new norm. TikTok has also tested a monthly subscription service to remove ads, but as yet there’s no indication it will be rolled out globally.

“Deceptive and unfair trade practices…”

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