The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed sweeping changes to a 2020 privacy order with Facebook—now called Meta. The FTC said the company has failed to fully comply with the order. Meta called the announcement a “political stunt.”
The job eliminations arrive after CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to reassure workers that he didn’t “anticipate more layoffs” after the company slashed 11,000 jobs—roughly 13 percent of its workforce—in November.
The case sprang from 2018 revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million users of the platform.
The move came a day after Facebook said it would “consider removing news from our platform” if lawmakers moved ahead with the measure, a threat that publisher groups denounced.
The layoffs mark a tumultuous new period in Silicon Valley, as tech giants long known as bastions of economic power and recession-proof have shed huge numbers of workers in recent weeks.
Facebook executives warned that marketers are pulling back spending in part because of an uncertain economic environment, which has some experts warning a recession could be on the horizon.
Facebook announced Thursday that it’s overhauling the design of its flagship social network by elevating content from creators over posts from friends and family in an effort to fend off intensifying competition for users’ attention.
Facebook is instructing its engineering managers to identify and weed out their lowest performing employees as the company seeks to rein in costs amid an economic downturn in the long-booming tech industry.
A resident claimed the county violated his First Amendment rights when he was blocked from the county government’s Facebook page.
More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people.
Facebook has agreed to pay penalties over findings that the company’s hiring practices intentionally discriminated against Americans in favor of foreign workers, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The six-hour outage at Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp was a headache for many casual users but far more serious for millions of people worldwide who rely on the sites to run their businesses or communicate with relatives, fellow parents, teachers or neighbors.
A former Facebook data scientist testified to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. She is accusing the company of being aware of apparent harm to some teens from Instagram and being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation.
The impact was major for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties—to run businesses, connect with online communities, log on to multiple other websites and even order food.
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday filed the new complaint in federal court in Washington, alleging that Facebook violated antitrust laws by buying Instagram and WhatsApp in order to eliminate them as competitors.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the lawsuits were “legally insufficient” and didn’t provide enough evidence to prove that Facebook was a monopoly.
In an unprecedented step, Facebook and Twitter suspended President Donald Trump from posting to their platforms Wednesday following the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
The lawsuits together represent the most significant political and legal threats to Facebook in its more than 16-year history, setting up a high-profile clash between U.S. regulators and one of Silicon Valley’s most profitable firms that could take years to resolve.
Federal regulators on Wednesday sued to force a breakup of Facebook as 48 states and districts accused the company in a separate lawsuit of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors.
The push against Facebook and Twitter accelerated Thursday after Republican senators threatened the CEOs of the companies with subpoenas to force them to address accusations of censorship in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign.
