This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee interviewed multiple employees, which failed to locate a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his take on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there was something to the GOP conspiracy theory.
Specifically, he said that in 2021 the Biden administration asked Meta “to censor some Covid-related content.” Meta did take the posts down, and Zuckerberg now regrets the decision. He also conceded that it was wrong to take down some content regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the company did after the FBI warned that the reports might be Russian disinformation.
What stood out to me, besides the letter’s simpering tone, was how Zuckerberg used the word “censor.” For years the right has been using that word to describe what it regards as Facebook’s systematic suppression of conservative posts. Some state attorneys general have even used that trope to argue that the company’s content should be regulated, and Florida and Texas have passed laws to do just that. Facebook has always contended that the First Amendment is about government suppression, and by definition its content decisions could not be characterized as such. Indeed, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuits and blocked the laws.
Now, by using that term to describe the removal of the Covid material, Zuckerberg seems to be backing down. After years of insisting that, right or wrong, a social media company’s content decisions did not deprive people of First Amendment rights—and in fact said that by making such decisions, the company was invoking its free speech rights—Zuckerberg is now handing its conservative critics just what they wanted.
I asked Meta spokesperson Andy Stone if the company now agrees with the GOP that some of its decisions to take down content can be referred to as “censoring.” Stone said that Zuckerberg was referring to the government when he used that term. But he also pointed me to Zuckerberg’s affirmation that the ultimate decision to remove the posts was Meta’s own. (Responding to the Zuckerberg letter, the White House said, “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” and left the final decision to Facebook.)
Meta can’t have it both ways, The letter is clear—Zuckerberg said the government pressured Meta to “censor” some Covid content. Meta took that material down. Ergo, Meta now characterizes some of its own actions as censorship. Seizing on this, the GOP members of the Judiciary Committee quickly tweeted that Zuckerberg has now outright admitted “Facebook censored Americans.”
Stone did say that Meta still does not consider itself a censor. So is Meta disputing that GOP tweet? Stone wouldn’t comment on it. It seems that Meta will offer no pushback while GOP legislators and right-wing commentators crow that Facebook now concedes that it blatantly censored conservatives as a matter of policy.
Meta’s CEO presented Jordan and the GOP with another gift in his letter, involving his private philanthropy. During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg helped fund nonpartisan initiatives to protect people’s right to vote. Republicans criticized Zuckerberg’s effort as aiding the Democrats. Zuckerberg still insists he wasn’t advocating that people vote a certain way, just ensuring they were free to cast ballots. But, he wrote Jordan, he recognized that some people didn’t believe him. So, apparently to indulge those ill-informed or ill-intentioned critics, he now vows not to fund bipartisan voting efforts during this election cycle. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or even appear to play a role,” he wrote.
Cat Quest III departs from the first two games of this light-hearted action-adventure series in a variety of ways, especially with its pirate-themed naval combat. Still, it also retains a lot of familiar gameplay mechanics and concepts that ensure if you played the previous games, you’ll feel right at home. Whether you’re a returning player well-versed in Cat Quest’s history, or you’re brand new to the franchise, we’ve compiled a solid list of tips to help you get started in this feline-focused adventure. – Billy Givens Read More
JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. – As students across Colorado head back to school this month, authorities are warning about social media posts meant to celebrate the new school year.
Taking a picture of a child on the first day of school is a tradition for many families, but Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Michael Harris with the Child Sex Offenders Internet Investigations Unit (Cheezo) said sharing those photos can come with unintended consequences.
“Once you send something, whether it’s a message or a photo, you lose all control over that photo. Just like when you have your kid go to the mall, you tell them not to talk to strangers, but yet you’re posting these photos. And if you don’t know everyone in your social media or on your friends list, there could be somebody that takes an interest in your cute child,” Harris said.
Harris suggests only sending first day of school pictures to family and friends who parents know and trust.
But Harris said if parents choose to post those pictures on social media, they should double check their privacy settings to make sure only their friends can see them or stick to platforms like WhatsApp which encrypt photos.
“When we go and teach at schools, we tell the kids, you need to turn off location services, because it shows the exact place where that picture was taken. We don’t want that, because if you’re taking it at home, now they have your home address if you’re taking it at school. Now we know what school you go to,” Harris said.
Harris said now is the time to be vigilant and put parental controls in place.
Colorado authorities warn first day of school pictures could pose safety risks
Meta’a AI Studio handbook says that users can customize a chatbot by providing a detailed description, along with a name and image, and then specifying how it should respond to specific input. Llama will then draw on those instructions to improvise its responses. Meta says Instagram users can “customize their AI based on things like their Instagram content, topics to avoid, and links they want it to share.”
Over the past year, Meta has become an AI success story thanks to its decision to offer robust AI models for free. Last week, the company released a powerful version of its large language model Llama, providing developers, researchers, and startups with free access to a model comparable to the powerful paid model one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company says its new chatbots are all based on the latest version of Llama.
And yet Meta has struggled to find the right tone and niche for its own AI offerings. Last September, the company launched a range of AI chatbots loosely based on real celebrities. These included a fantasy roleplay dungeon master bot based on Snoop Dogg; a wisecracking sports bot based on Tom Brady; and an everyday companion inspired by Kendall Jenner.
These bots failed to become big hits, however, and Meta has retired them. Jon Carvill, a spokesman for Meta, said the company had learned from the earlier experiments. “AI Studio is an evolution,” he said.
There is plenty of evidence that users may find fully customizable bots more compelling. A company called Character AI, founded by several ex-Google employees who helped make breakthroughs in AI, has attracted millions of users to its own custom chatbots.
Zuckerberg also touted other new open source AI advances from Meta at SIGGRAPH. The company has developed a new tool for identifying the contents of images and video called Segment Anything Model (SAM) 2. The previous version is widely used for image analysis. Meta says SAM 2 could be used to more efficiently analyze the contents of video, for instance. Zuckerberg showed off the technology tracking the cattle roaming his Kauai ranch. “Scientists use this stuff to study coral reefs and natural habitats and evolution of landscapes,” he told Huang.
Earlier in the day, in an on-stage interview with WIRED’s Lauren Goode, Huang, the NVIDIA CEO, said he would “absolutely” want a “Jensen AI” that knows everything he’s ever said, written, and done. “You’ll be able to prompt it, and hopefully something smart gets said,” he said. He could force stock analysts to pepper the bot—instead of him—with questions about the company. “That’s the first thing that has to go,” he said with a laugh.
So-called sextortion scams are on the rise, with criminals from Nigeria frequently targeting adult men in the U.S., according to social media giant Meta.
Meta on Wednesday said it has removed about 63,000 accounts from Nigeria that had been attempting to target people with financial sextortion scams. In such scams, criminals pretend to be someone else, typically an attractive woman, in an attempt to trick potential victims into sending nude photos of themselves. Upon receiving nude pics, the scammer then threatens to release the photos unless the sender pays up.
Meta’s crackdown on sextortion has included the removal of 200 Facebook pages and 5,700 Facebook groups, all from Nigeria, that were providing tips for conducting such scams, such as scripts for talking with victims. The groups also included links to collections of photos that scammers could use when making fake accounts to catfish victims, Meta said.
Meta is also testing new technology that could steer victims away from falling for sextortion scams, such as a new auto-blur feature in Instagram DMs that will blur images if nudity is detected, the company said.
“First of all, this goes without saying that financial sextortion is a horrific crime and can have devastating consequences,” said Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, in a call with reporters. “It’s why we are particularly focused on it right now.”
The most common platforms for sextortion scams are Instagram, owned by Meta, and Snapchat, according to a recent study from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Thorn, a nonprofit that uses technology to battle the spread of child sexual abuse material. According to the study, most sextortion scams originate from either Nigeria or Cote d’Ivoire.
Indiscriminate scammers
Meta said it found that scammers are “indiscriminate,” sending requests to many individuals in order to get a few responses, Davis said. While most of the attempts were sent to adult men in the U.S., Meta did see some scammers trying to reach teens, she added.
Some of the Facebook accounts, pages and groups removed by Meta were run by the Yahoo Boys, a loose federation of scammers that operate in Nigeria, Davis said.
The FBI has sought to highlight the issue of financial sextortion scams targeting teenagers, with the agency noting that at least 20 children who were victims of these scams had died by suicide. Many victims feel fear, embarrassment and concerns about long-term consequences, according to the Thorn and NCMEC report.
Social media users should be cautious if an account with a “very stylized, especially good-looking” photo reaches out to them or asks to exchange messages, Davis said. “If you have never been messaged by this person before, that should give you pause,” she added.
“If somebody sends you an image first, that is often to try to bait you to send an image second, or try to gain trust and build trust,” Davis noted. “This is one of those areas where if you have any suspicion, I would urge caution.”
Social media users should also look at their privacy settings for messaging, she recommended. For instance, people can control their Facebook Messenger settings to filter the people from whom they can receive messages, such as blocking people other than their Facebook friends.
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
Militia and anti-government groups across the United States are using the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump as an opportunity to organize, recruit, and train.
“An attack on President Trump was an attack on us, people like us—like-minded American patriots,” says Scot Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), in a video posted to TikTok on Sunday. APIII is a decentralized militia network with chapters across the US. “There comes a point in time where everybody in this group needs to start being accountable for what they’re doing to help grow the organization and building a network of like-minded people in their area. Because they’re coming for us.”
Seddon goes on in the video to say that he’s looking at coordinating a meeting with other militias around Pennsylvania. “This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,” says Seddon. “Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.”
In the aftermath of the shooting at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—which left the former president wounded in his ear, one person dead, and two people injured—incendiary rhetoric and calls for retaliatory violence exploded online.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, says that this type of rhetoric has been pretty commonplace in online spaces since 2020, especially since January 6. But she’s particularly concerned about the heightened rhetoric in tandem with aggressive recruitment efforts by militia groups, who historically have opportunistically pounced on moments of national chaos to encourage organizing and training. Paul says the confluence of militia activity and heightened rhetoric could inspire “individuals who are susceptible to online influence and acceleration” who “could be triggered to act on their own.” She also sees militias’ emphasis on organization over knee-jerk calls for retaliatory violence as a sign that the movement is focused on long-term goals and growth.
In the past year, APIII has made a significant recruitment push across major social media platforms, such as Facebook, X, TikTok, and even NextDoor, according to research from the Tech Transparency Project shared exclusively with WIRED. Despite featuring “Three Percenters” in its name—a clear nod to the militia movement—APIII touts a disclaimer on its website insisting that it is not a militia. That’s in line with the broader trend seen since January 6, 2021, when paramilitary activists scrambled to distance themselves from the militia movement implicated in the Capitol riot.
But groups like APIII have increasingly been trying to rebuild the militia movement from the ground up, urging people to get organized in their communities. According to Seddon, APIII and the Light Foot Militia, another decentralized paramilitary group with chapters nationwide, have been coordinating closely. Last month, a video circulated on TikTok and Facebook purporting to show a training meetup with APIII and Light Foot in an undisclosed location. About 100 heavily armed men and women in fatigues are shown standing in formation. Text over the video reads: “Now is the time to join a MF’in Militia, Not a Political Party,” and “We came into this world screaming covered in blood and will be leaving the same way. No retreat no surrender.”
Richard Simmons, the colorful fitness guru who turned aerobic dancing and positive energy into decades of fame, died Saturday, law enforcement sources said. He was 76.
Simmons was found at his home, and there was no evidence of foul play, sources told The Times.
Simmons specialized in helping obese people lose weight, starting with a Los Angeles fitness studio and eventually making appearances on TV shows, including a popular stint on “General Hospital.”
In his biography, he said struggling with being overweight himself inspired him to help others.
Over the years, he hosted a variety of shows, produced fitness videos and even had a chain of fitness studios. All the while, he made regular appearances in movies and TV shows.
In recent years, Simmons had become the subject of fascination, some of it unwanted. He retreated from public view, and some worried about his health.
In 2017, the “Missing Richard Simmons” podcast revisited the speculation behind Simmons’ welfare, although he refuted many of the rumors.
Simmons’s representative, Tom Estey, recently told Entertainment Tonight that he was celebrating his 76th birthday by working on a new Broadway musical.
Simmons, who was active on social media, appeared to be in good spirits in recent days. He posted a black-and-white photograph of himself next to a cake on his birthday to mark the occasion.
“I never got so many messages about my birthday in my life!” Simmons wrote on Facebook. “I am sitting here writing emails. Have a most beautiful rest of your Friday.”
It was a marked change of pace from earlier in the year when Simmons had posted cryptic messages ruminating over his mortality.
“I am … dying,” Simmons wrote on Facebook. “Oh I can see your faces now. The truth is we all are dying. Every day we live we are getting closer to our death. Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to enjoy your life to the fullest every single day. Get up in the morning and look at the sky … count your blessings and enjoy. “
Meta, the parent company of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, has decided to remove restrictions placed on former President Donald Trump’s accounts.
Meta updated its original statement announcing the end of Trump’s suspension on Facebook and Instagram in January of 2023 to reflect the Republican presumptive presidential nominee’s new online status. Axiosfirst reported on the news.
Meta removed Trump from all of its platforms following the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 amid “extreme and highly unusual circumstances,” according to Meta’s original statement.
Seven people were killed as a result of violence on or collateral damage as a result of the attack on the Capitol building.
The following May, the Oversight Board ruled that Facebook failed to apply an appropriate penalty with its indefinite suspension of Trump’s accounts for “severely” violating Facebook and Instagram’s community guidelines and standards. Trump said in a video statement released less than three hours after the violence began “We love you. You’re very special” and called the insurrectionists “great patriots.” Those and other statements made in the wake of the US Capitol attack convinced the board that Trump violated its standard against praising or supporting people engaging in violence on its platforms.
Two years later, Meta restored Trump’s accounts following a time-bound suspension with stricter penalties for violating its terms of service, a standard that was higher than any other user on Facebook and Instagram. Meta noted in its latest update that the ex-president will be subject to the same standard as everyone else.
“With the party conventions taking place shortly, including the Republican convention next week, the candidates for President of the United States will soon be formally nominated,” according to Meta’s statement. “In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis.”
Twitter, now X, also took action against President Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol for three tweets he posted that were labeled for inciting violence. It started with a 12-hour suspension on Jan. 6, 2021. Two days later, Twitter banned him completely after determining that subsequent posts also violated its community standards. The following year, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk conducted an informal poll on his account asking if he should remove President Trump’s ban and reinstated his account a few days later.
After Meta started tagging photos with a “Made with AI” label in May, photographers complained that the social networking company had been applying labels to real photos where they had used some basic editing tools.
Because of the user feedback and general confusion around what level of AI is used in a photo, the company is changing the tag to “AI Info” across all of Meta’s apps.
Meta said that the earlier version of the tag wasn’t clear enough for users to indicate that the image with the tag is not neccesarily created with AI, but might have used AI-powered tools in the editing process.
“Like others across the industry, we’ve found that our labels based on these indicators weren’t always aligned with people’s expectations and didn’t always provide enough context. For example, some content that included minor modifications using AI, such as retouching tools, included industry standard indicators that were then labeled ‘Made with AI’,” the company said in an updated blog post.
Image Credits: Meta
The company is not changing the underlying technology for detecting use of AI in photos and labeling them. Meta still uses information from technical metadata standards such as C2PA and IPTC that include information about use of AI tools.
That means, if photographers use tools like Adobe’s Generative AI Fill to remove objects, their photos might still be tagged with the new label. However, Meta hopes that the new label will help people understand that the image with the tag is not always created entierly by AI.
“‘AI Info’ can encompass content that was made and/or modified with AI so the hope is that this is more in line with people’s expectations, while we work with companies across the industry to improve the process,” Meta spokesperson Kate McLaughlin told TechCrunch over email.
The new tag will still not solve the problem of completely AI-generated photos going undetected. And it won’t tell users about how much AI-powered editing has been done on an image.
Meta and other social network will need to work to set guidelines without being unfair to photographers who have not made alterations to their editing workflows, but the tools they used to touch up photos have some generative AI element. On the other hand, companies like Adobe should warn photographers that when they use a certain tool, their image might be tagged with a label on other services.
For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead.
Launched in November 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as fines, legal cases and regulatory attention pressured the company to change the way it asks users to consent to targeted advertising. On Monday, however, the European Commision rejected its latest solution, arguing its “pay or consent” subscription is illegal under the bloc’s new digital markets act (DMA).
“Our preliminary view is that Meta’s “Pay or Consent” business model is in breach of the DMA,” Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the EU’s Internal Market, said in a statement. “The DMA is there to give back to the users the power to decide how their data is used and ensure innovative companies can compete on equal footing with tech giants on data access.”
Meta denied its subscription model broke the rules. “Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and complies with the DMA,” Meta spokesperson Matt Pollard told WIRED, referring to a Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision in July that said that Meta needed to offer users an alternative to ads, if necessary for an appropriate fee. “We look forward to further constructive dialogue with the European Commission to bring this investigation to a close.”
In a press briefing on Monday morning, Commission officials said their concern was not that the company was charging for an ad-free service. “This is perfectly fine for us, as long as we have the middle option,” they said, explaining there should be a third option that may still contain ads but are just less targeted. There are different, less-specific ways of providing advertising to users, they added, such as contextual advertising. “The consumer needs to be in a position to choose an alternative version of the service which relies on non personalization of the ads.”
Under the DMA, very large tech platforms must ask users for consent if they want to share their personal data with other parts of their businesses. In Meta’s case, the Commission said it is particularly concerned about the competitive advantage Meta receives over its rivals by being able to combine the data from platforms like Instagram and its advertising business.
Meta has a chance to respond to the charges issued on Monday. However if the company cannot reach an agreement with regulators before March 2025, Brussels has the power to levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s global turnover.
In the past week, the EU has issued a series of reprimands to US tech giants. The Commission warned Apple that its App Store is in breach of EU rules for preventing app developers offering promotions directly to their users. Brussels also accused Microsoft of abusing its dominance in the office-software market, following a complaint from rival Slack.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that the plaintiffs who’d sued the US government for allegedly violating the First Amendment—by communicating with social media companies about misleading and harmful content on their platforms—did not present enough evidence to prove that they had standing to sue.
The case was brought by the attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that government agencies have had undue influence on the content moderation practices of platforms and coerced the platforms into taking down conservative-leaning content, infringing on the First Amendment rights of their citizens. Specifically, the case alleged that government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) coerced social media companies into removing content, including posts that questioned the use of masks in preventing Covid-19 and the validity of the 2020 election.
In a May 2022 statement, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleged that members of the Biden administration “colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to remove truthful information related to the lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, election integrity, and more.” Last year, a federal judge issued an injunction that barred the government from communicating with social media platforms.
Today, the court said that the plaintiffs could not prove that communications between the Biden administration and social media companies resulted in “direct censorship injuries.” In the majority opinion for Murthy v. Missouri, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that “the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”
While it is the government’s responsibility to make sure it refrains from jawboning—the practice in which governments and leaders appeal to the public in an effort to influence the behavior of private companies, and in ways that potentially violate free speech—Kate Ruane, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says that there are very valid reasons why government agencies might need to communicate with platforms.
“Communication between the government, social media platforms, and government entities is critical in providing information that social media companies can use to ensure social media users have authoritative information about where you’re supposed to go to vote, or what to do in an emergency, or all of those things,” she says. “It is very useful for the government to have partnerships with social media to get that accurate information out there.”
Google and Meta declined to comment on the case.
David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that the court’s decision earlier this cycle on a case called National Rifle Association v. Vullo was likely an indicator for how it would approach the Murthy decision. In the Vullo case, the NRA alleged that New York Department of Financial Services superintendent Maria Vullo pressured banks and insurance companies not to do business with the NRA by threatening “enforcement actions,” and suppressed the organization’s advocacy. In a 9–0 decision, the court ruled that the NRA had presented enough evidence that a case against Vullo could move forward. In the opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the NRA’s complaint “plausibly alleges that Vullo threatened to wield her power against those refusing to aid her campaign to punish the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy.”
In Murthy, however, the justices found that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to show that the government had used similar tactics to pressure platforms into making content moderation decisions.
“Other than that the facts involved are sort of politically motivated, the legal issue itself is not something that I think traditionally breaks down along partisan lines,” says Greene.
But Greene says that without clear guidelines, state, local, and federal government bodies—of all political leanings—could feel freer to contact platforms now. “We will see a lot more of that type of government involvement in these processes,” he says.
In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the inhabitants of this new empire, it is only through this record of a retired school teacher’s humdrum rural life, his petty vanities and attempts to breed prize-winning chickens, that they begin to learn about 20th-century Britain.
If I were to teach futuristic beings about life on earth, I once believed I could produce a time capsule more profound than Sherriff’s small-minded protagonist, Edgar Hopkins. But scrolling through my decade-old Facebook posts this week, I was presented with the possibility that my legacy may be even more drab.
Earlier this month, Meta announced that my teenage status updates were exactly the kind of content it wants to pass on to future generations of artificial intelligence. From June 26, old public posts, holiday photos, and even the names of millions of Facebook and Instagram users around the world would effectively be treated as a time capsule of humanity and transformed into training data.
That means my mundane posts about university essay deadlines (“3 energy drinks down 1,000 words to go”) as well as unremarkable holiday snaps (one captures me slumped over my phone on a stationary ferry) are about to become part of that corpus. The fact that these memories are so dull, and also very personal, makes Meta’s interest more unsettling.
The company says it is only interested in content that is already public: private messages, posts shared exclusively with friends, and Instagram Stories are out of bounds. Despite that, AI is suddenly feasting on personal artifacts that have, for years, been gathering dust in unvisited corners of the internet. For those reading from outside Europe, the deed is already done. The deadline announced by Meta applied only to Europeans. The posts of American Facebook and Instagram users have been training Meta AI models since 2023, according to company spokesperson Matthew Pollard.
Meta is not the only company turning my online history into AI fodder. WIRED’s Reece Rogers recently discovered that Google’s AI search feature was copying his journalism. But finding out which personal remnants exactly are feeding future chatbots was not easy. Some sites I’ve contributed to over the years are hard to trace. Early social network Myspace was acquired by Time Inc. in 2016, which in turn was acquired by a company called Meredith Corporation two years later. When I asked Meredith about my old account, they replied that Myspace had since been spun off to an advertising firm, Viant Technology. An email to a company contact listed on its website was returned with a message that the address “couldn’t be found.”
Asking companies still in business about my old accounts was more straightforward. Blogging platform Tumblr, owned by WordPress owner Automattic, said unless I’d opted out, the public posts I made as a teenager will be shared with “a small network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models” per a February announcement. YahooMail, which I used for years, told me that a sample of old emails—which have apparently been “anonymized” and “aggregated”—are being “utilized” by an AI model internally to do things like summarize messages. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also said my public posts were being used to train AI although some “personal” details included in those posts were excluded, according to a company spokesperson, who did not specify what those personal details were.
A plane crashed into a Steamboat Springs mobile home park on Monday afternoon, starting a fire involving at least two homes, according to Steamboat Springs Fire Rescue.
A Cessna 421 crashed into the West Acres mobile home park, 2990 W. Acres Drive, at 4:23 p.m., engulfing two homes and several outbuildings, Steamboat Springs police said on Facebook.
All mobile home residents have been accounted for, but information about how many passengers were inside the Cessna was not immediately available.
The mobile home park is just south of the single-runway Steamboat Springs Airport, which is also known as Bob Adams Field.
Social media platforms should post warning labels, similar to those now used on cigarette packs, for teenagers who are increasingly suffering from mental health issues that are partly tied to the apps, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Monday in an opinion piece in the New York Times.
“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” Murthy wrote.
The push would be similar to the warnings printed on cigarette packages, which Murthy noted have shown to “increase awareness and change behavior.” However, adding warning labels to social media platforms would require Congress to pass legislation, he noted.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Murthy has previously stressed the potential harms that teenagers encounter from social media platforms, pushing last year for stronger guidelines for children and teens amid growing research that indicates the apps pose what he described at the time as a “profound risk” to young people’s mental health. On Monday, Murthy noted that warning labels alone wouldn’t make the platforms safe for kids and said that creating safety measures “remain the priority.”
Congress also needs to implement legislation that will protect young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation and from exposure to extreme violence and sexual content, he wrote.
“The measures should prevent platforms from collecting sensitive data from children and should restrict the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use,” Murthy said.
The surgeon general is also recommending that companies be required to share all their data on health effects with independent scientists and the public — which they currently don’t do — and allow independent safety audits.
Murthy said schools and parents also need to participate in providing phone-free times and that doctors, nurses and other clinicians should help guide families toward safer practices.
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn’t be able to scale. “They said, let’s just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest is online history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions of users,” he says.
Orkut featured a digital Scrapbook and the ability to give people compliments (ranging from “trustworthy” to “sexy”), create communities, and curate your very own Crush List. “It reflected all of my personality traits. You could flatter people by saying how cool they were, but you could never say something negative about them,” he says.
At first, Orkut was popular in the US and Japan. But, as predicted, server issues severed its connection to its users. “We started having a lot of scalability issues and infrastructure problems,” Büyükkökten says. They were forced to rewrite the entire platform using C++, Java, and Google’s tools. The process took an entire year, and scores of original users dropped off due to sluggish speeds and one-too-many encounters with Orkut’s now-nostalgic “Bad, bad server, no donut for you” error message.
Around this time, though, the site became incredibly popular in Finland. Büyükkökten was bemused. “I couldn’t figure it out until I spoke to a friend who speaks Finnish. And he said: ‘Do you know what your name means?’ I didn’t. He told me that orkut means multiple orgasms.” Come again? “Yes, so in Finland, everyone thought they were signing up to an adult site. But then they would leave straight after as we couldn’t satisfy them,” he laughs.
Awkward double meanings aside, Orkut continued to spread across the world. In addition to exploding in Estonia, the platform went mega in India. Its true second home, though, was Brazil. “It became a huge success. A lot of people think I’m Brazilian because of this,” Büyükkökten explains. He has a theory about why Brazil went nuts for Orkut. “Brazil’s culture is very welcoming and friendly. It’s all about friendships and they care about connections. They’re also very early adopters of technology,” he says. At its peak, 11 million of Brazil’s 14 million internet users were on Orkut, most logging on through cybercafes. It took Facebook seven years to catch up. But Orkut wasn’t without its problems (and many fake profiles). The site was banned in Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Government authorities in Brazil and India had concerns about drug-related content and child pornography, something Büyükkökten denies existed on Orkut. Brazilians coined the word orkutização to describe a social media site like Orkut becoming less cool after going mainstream. In 2014, having hemorrhaged users due to slow server speeds, Facebook’s more intuitive interface, and issues surrounding privacy, Orkut went offline. “Vic Gundotra, in charge of Google+, decided against having any competing social products,” Büyükkökten explains.
But Büyükkökten has fond memories. “We had so many stories of people falling in love and moving in together from different parts of the world. I have a friend in Canada who met his wife in Brazil through Orkut, a friend in New York who met his wife in Estonia and now they’re married with two kids.” he says. It also provided a platform for minority communities. “I was talking to a gay journalist from a small town in São Paulo who told me that finding all these LGBTQ people on Orkut transformed his life,” he adds.
Büyükkökten left Google in 2014 and founded a new social network, again featuring a simple five-letter title: Hello. He wanted to focus on positive connection. It used “loves” rather than likes, and users could choose from more than 100 personae, ranging from Cricket Fan to Fashion Enthusiast, and then were connected to like-minded people with common interests. Soft-launched in Brazil in 2018 with 2 million users, Hello enjoyed “ultra-high engagement” that Büyükkökten claims surpassed the likes of Instagram and Twitter. “One of the things that stood out in our user surveys was that people said when they open Hello, it makes them happy.”
The app was downloaded more than 2 million times—a fraction of the users Orkut enjoyed—but Büyükkökten is proud of it. “It surpassed all our dreams. There were numerous instances where our K-Factor (the number of new people that existing users bring to an app) reached 3, leading us to exponential growth,” he says. But, in 2020, Büyükkökten bid goodbye to Hello. Now he’s working on a new platform. “It’ll leverage AI and machine learning to optimize for improving happiness, bringing people together, fostering communities, empowering users, and creating a better society,” he says. “Connection will be the cornerstone of design, interaction, product, and experience.” And the name? “If I told you the new brand, you would have an aha moment and everything would be crystal clear,” he says.
Once again, it’s driven by his enduring desire to connect people. “One of the biggest ills of society is the decline in social capital. After smartphones and the pandemic, we have stopped hanging out with our friends and don’t know our neighbors. We have a loneliness epidemic,” he says. He is fiercely critical of current platforms. “My biggest passion in life is connecting people through technology. But when was the last time you met someone on social media? It’s creating shame, pessimism, division, depression, and anxiety,” he says. For Büyükkökten, optimism is more important than optimization. “These companies have engineered the algorithm for revenue,” he says. “But it’s been awful for mental health. The world is terrifying right now and a lot of that has come through social media. There’s so much hate,” he says.
Instead, he wants social media to be a place of love and a facilitator for meeting new people in person. But why will it work this time around? “That’s a really good question,” he says. “One thing that has been really consistent is that people miss Orkut right now.” It’s true—Brazilian social media has recently been abuzz with memes and memories to celebrate the site’s 20th birthday. “A teenage boy even recently drove 10 hours to meet me at a conference to talk about Orkut. And I was like, how is that even possible?” he laughs. Orkut’s landing page is still live, featuring an open letter calling for a social media utopia.
This, along with our collective desire for a more human social media, is what makes Büyükkökten believe that his next platform is one that will truly stick around. Has he decided on that all important name? “We haven’t announced it yet. But I’m really excited. I truly care. I want to bring that authenticity and sense of belonging back,” he concludes. Perhaps, as his Finnish fans would joke, it’s time for Orkut’s second coming.
This story first appeared in the July/August 2024 UK edition of WIRED magazine.
The front of the mansion has a hospital-like appearance.
William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
A unique house on the real estate market in Warren Township, New Jersey, has been getting a lot of attention online thanks to its fascinating design — and some of its rooms that will make you ask “what?!”
Staircases William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
It’s called The Ravinn Estate and it sits on over seven acres that appears to be its very own little world. On the outside in front, with its circular driveway, the eight-bedroom, 12-bathroom home — which is listed for $3.499 million — looks a little like a hospital, with a resort feel in the back.
Back of the mansion William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
Yes, they almost look like two completely different estates.
Indoor swimming pool William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
And inside is a trip.
Fireplace William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
Take notice of the grand foyer, with its high ceilings, massive butterfly staircase and an eye-catching chandelier. Other features spread throughout the vast home, per the listing, include:
Indoor pool
Tennis court
Two-story waterfalls
Pond
Gazebo
Elevator
Granite flooring
Gym
Library
Bridge
Wet bar
Dance floor
Media room
Wine-cellar
Living room William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
But what’s getting the most attention is the primary suite’s bathroom, which is “spa-like.” The odd layout has fascinated folks on Zillow Gone Wild, a Facebook page and X (formerly Twitter) account that highlights spectacularly interesting homes up for sale across the globe.
Bathroom William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
“It’s like an alien was told to build what it thought was a human mansion after watching hours of footage of late 1980s early 90s office buildings and mega churches,” one person commented on Facebook.
Interior William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
“It looks like it was a hospital in its former life!” another pointed out.
Kitchen William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
“I still don’t understand the bathroom (and) all the steps. And they would be slick if wet,” someone noted about the bathroom.
Sun room William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
Interior William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
The listing is held by Kacey Carrig of Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty.
Interior William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
Warren is about a 20-mile drive southwest from Newark.
Back of the mansion. William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty
TJ Macías is a Real-Time national sports reporter for McClatchy based out of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Formerly, TJ covered the Dallas Mavericks and Texas Rangers beat for numerous media outlets including 24/7 Sports and Mavs Maven (Sports Illustrated). Twitter: @TayloredSiren
The Supreme Court will hear an appeal from Facebook’s parent company Meta related to a lawsuit over how the company relayed a data breach to investors. A lower court previously ruled the investors’ suit could move forward. CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford has more on that and other major cases the court has on its docket.
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Rosa, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s oldest sea otter and one of its social media stars, died Wednesday, the aquarium said in a statement.
The southern sea otter, 24, had served as a surrogate mother for 15 otters, the most in the aquarium’s history. She outlived the life expectancy for her species in the wild, which is typically 15 to 20 years, according to a post by the aquarium on Facebook.
Rosa was known for her blond head and “her signature head-all-the-way-back swimming style,” the aquarium wrote.
“Rosa was one of our most playful sea otters, and even at 24 years old, she would still be seen frolicking and wrestling with the younger otters when she instigated it,” said Melanie Oerter, curator of mammals.
“Rosa was usually found sleeping against the window while on exhibit with her chin tucked tight into her chest and her tail swishing back and forth,” she said.
She first arrived as a “five-pound, four-week-old pup after being stranded as an orphan in September 1999,” and was released into the wild for several years, according to a page about Rosa on the aquarium’s website. She returned to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2002 after experts determined that she had become too accustomed to humans and was not suited for life in the wild.
In the past several weeks, Rosa’s health deteriorated, and experts at the aquarium decided to euthanize her. “She passed away peacefully, surrounded by her caretakers,” according to the aquarium’s post.
In the post, the aquarium called Rosa a “charismatic ambassador for her threatened species” who played “a leading role in the story of sea otter recovery from near-extinction during the fur trade.”
Update, 7:50 p.m. ET: AT&T says the issue has now been fixed, telling Gizmodo over email, “We collaborated with the other carrier to find a solution and appreciate our customers patience during this period.” The original article remains below.
Google’s Antitrust Case Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to AI
AT&T customers across the U.S. are reporting major network issues on Tuesday that’s stopping them from making calls to people with other network carriers. DownDetector appears to show reports from customers at T-Mobile and Verizon as well, though both carriers tell Gizmodo they’re not experiencing outages and those reports are from people simply trying to reach AT&T users.
“There is a nationwide issue that is affecting the ability of customers to complete calls between carriers,” an AT&T spokesperson told Gizmodo. “The carriers are working as quickly as possible to diagnose and resolve the issue.”
The company told ABC News that calls to 911 are not impacted and should be working normally.
AT&T suffered a widespread outage across the country back in February that hampered not only voice calls but any connectivity on the network nationwide. Initial suspicions online saw users speculate it may have been the result of a cyberattack, a rumor that AT&T denied.
AT&T eventually apologized for the outage and offered customers a $5 credit. Some customers complained, but AT&T defended the rebate by saying it was roughly the “average cost of a full day of service.”
Other tech companies have experienced major outages recently, with ChatGPT down for thousands of users Tuesday morning. The first ChatGPT outage appears to have started around 3:00 a.m. ET and a second outage hitting around 10:30 am ET. Things appear to be back up and normal with the AI chatbot service as of Tuesday evening.
Hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users experienced a serious outage earlier this year and LinkedIn saw the same thing back in March. It seems a number of companies are just struggling to keep their sites up for a host of different reasons.
Ethan Gaskill, a 29-year-old content creator, begins everyday the same way: “When I wake up in the morning—most people get on their phone and start checking Instagram—I check Facebook Marketplace.”
With his Los Angeles home furnished almost exclusively with second-hand items and a TikTok with over 220,000 followers interested in his thrifty hauls, Gaskill trusts the shopping platform to be a reliable source for hidden gems: a thousand-dollar Herman Miller light and pendant he nabbed for $400; a $5,000 bed from the same designer he bought for 20% of the original price; and, a Founders mid-century dresser worth $4,000 that Gaskill got for $800.
“It gives an opportunity for people to possibly bring in really rare items or just one-of-a-kind items into their home that otherwise they wouldn’t have had if they couldn’t make it out to a flea market or estate sale,” Gaskill told Fortune.
Facebook Marketplace has not only become a trusted source for LA’s second-hand scene. It’s made itself a real contender to go toe-to-toe with well-established e-commerce sites. Facebook has grown to 3.07 billion monthly active users (MAUs) as of the end of 2023, a 3% year-over-year increase. Of those, up to 40%, or 1.2 billion, are active users shopping on Marketplace, according to a March report from Capital One Shopping.
Meta’s online second-hand market is already challenging the sector’s goliaths. Marketplace eclipsed Craigslist’s MAUs years ago, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying in 2018 that there were 800 million Marketplace MAUs, compared to the 55 million visitors on Craigslist in 2017. In contrast, Amazon had 310 million monthly users in 2023, per Tech Report, about one-fourth of Marketplace’s MAUs. Marketplace is the second most popular site for second-hand purchases behind Ebay, according to a 2022 Statista report.
“This is a growth area,” Charles Lindsey, associate professor of marketing at University at Buffalo School of Management, told Fortune. “It wouldn’t surprise me if in three years, five years, it actually overtakes Ebay.”
Amazon and Ebay did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
From online garage sale to e-commerce giant
Marketplace’s astronomical growth is in large part because the platform is simply easy to use and already linked to a site where so many people are pre-existing members, Lindsey argued.
“There’s a trust factor because it’s associated with Facebook,” he said. “It has an easy-to-use interface. It’s integrated with Facebook Messenger, so it’s easy to kind of go back and forth.”
Launched in 2016, Marketplace was originally a way to facilitate sales among neighbors, with most users offering up a used item for sale at a reasonable price, and buyers picking up the item and coordinating with the seller over Facebook Messenger about collection and payment. But Marketplace grew into a formidable e-commerce platform, with one-in-three U.S. Facebook users on the platform by 2018. Through the pandemic, Marketplace exploded thanks to increased reliance on e-commerce and supply chain and shipping delays that inconvenienced traditional shopping.
“We’re seeing everyone from artisans hand making goods, to wood workers to car sellers thrive,” Deb Liu, founder and then-Marketplace vice president, told Modern Retail in 2021.
By then, Marketplace had become a boon not only for thrifty shoppers, but small businesses looking for unique sales avenues. Springfield, Missouri-based Beautiful Fight Woodworking generated $168,000 of its $266,000 revenue in 2020 exclusively through Marketplace sales.
To be sure, the platform isn’t without significant problems, particularly as scammers and bot accounts have proliferated the site, giving well-intentioned buyers a tough time. One South Carolina user claimed in February he was scammed out of $18,000 after putting his 2016 Audi up for sale on Marketplace. A 2022 thinkmonkey survey of 1,000 Brits found that one in six had been scammed on the platform.
“What happens offline often makes its way into online environments, and that unfortunately includes scams,” Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesperson, told Wired. Meta said it works “aggressively to quickly identify, disable, and ban scams and accounts associated with them.”
Gen Z’s new favorite social media
Through its ascension, Marketplace has won over a generation of young people who had largely turned away from Facebook.
“I look at it like it’s like a social media app,” Dre Vez, a 25-year-old content creator, told Fortune.
Vez spends about six to 12 hours a day on Marketplace, where he makes a living “trolling” sellers by asking them over voice memos to test the product, before uploading the interactions to TikTok for his 755,000 followers.
He finds Marketplace not just fodder for entertaining videos but also as a real social media tool for Gen Z and millennials because it’s fast-paced and highly stimulating.
“It’s the ability to have several interactions in a short duration of time, where I could go on Facebook marketplace, and I could search up for a bike, and I could reach out to seven to 10 different people and have all these conversations going on at the same time,” he said.
Even on days when he can’t find a good deal, Vez finds some laughs on the site. Sellers have gotten away with listing used toe nail clippers, toilet brushes, plungers—even a Dorito in the shape of a face going for $10,000, he recalled.
Meta has taken notice of its enthusiastic young users. While Facebook’s popularity among teens has dwindled in the wake of TikTok’s rise, Facebook now has over 40 million daily young adult users aged 18 to 29 in the U.S. and Canada, a three-year high, with one in four using Marketplace, Meta told Fortune.
To second-hand connoisseur Gaskill, who checks Marketplace five to 10 times a day, the platform is compelling to young people because it appeals to their desire for independence, to save money, and protect the environment against the strains of mass production and freight.
“Just given the circumstances with the economy, but also just the mindset of like Gen Z, they love uniqueness, and they love self expression,” he said. “But they also really like finding things for a good price.”
Finding room to grow
But just because Meta boasts a growing fandom for its Marketplace platform doesn’t mean its a lucrative arm of the company. Meta did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on how it makes money through Marketplace, but marketing professor Lindsey suggests the company benefits from seller transaction fees, as well as more eyes on the website’s advertisements.
“Just overall, the more likely someone uses Facebook Marketplace, probably the more likely they also log into Facebook so many times per month,” he said. “Then Facebook capitalizes on that by being able to have companies pay for advertising that then hits my feed, hits your feed.”
The EU’s European Commission alleged in December 2022 that Facebook and Marketplace tie together and use data in a way that infringe on the EU’s competition rules, according to a December 2023 SEC filing.
Marketplace is, in part, an important facet of Facebook’s financial puzzle because its locally based exchanges are low-expense, according to Sucharita Kodali, retail industry analyst for market research firm Forrester—especially, compared to Ebay, which requires a massive international infrastructure.
“It’s an enormous transaction volume,” she told Fortune. “With that transaction volume comes a kind of a necessary investment in a lot of automation, customer service, seller management, seller tools, etc.”
While Facebook Marketplace doesn’t need an elaborate system to manage local transactions, it also means it’s likely not making as much money as its e-commerce competition. In fact, Kodali went so far as to call Marketplace an “anti-commerce” platform because it has so many “buy nothing” groups and peer-to-peer exchanges. She took a similar stance as Lindsey, arguing the financial merit of the platform is to help better target ads for active users.
“It’s not really about, like, ‘Let’s make money off of the volume of posts that we see on the marketplace section,’” she said.
Marketplace’s virtual garage sale vibes and community feel of the platform may not be raking in billions of dollars for Meta, but they’re exactly what keeps users coming back to the site.
“You never know when that next amazing thing is gonna pop up,” Gaskill said. “That’s the fun of it. That’s kind of what keeps it addicting.”
