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Tag: Facebook

  • Supreme Court Rules That US Government Can Continue Talking to Social Media Companies

    Supreme Court Rules That US Government Can Continue Talking to Social Media Companies

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    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.

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    Vittoria Elliott

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  • My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

    My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

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    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.

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    Morgan Meaker

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  • Plane crashes into Steamboat Springs mobile home park

    Plane crashes into Steamboat Springs mobile home park

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    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.

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    Katie Langford

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  • Social media platforms should have health warnings for teens, U.S. surgeon general says

    Social media platforms should have health warnings for teens, U.S. surgeon general says

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    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.

    —With reporting by the Associated Press. 

    Aimee Picchi

    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.

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  • Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia

    Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia

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    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.

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    Kyle MacNeill

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  • Strange bathroom in New Jersey mansion for sale has folks asking questions. See it

    Strange bathroom in New Jersey mansion for sale has folks asking questions. See it

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    The front of the mansion has a hospital-like appearance.

    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
    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
    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
    Indoor swimming pool William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty

    And inside is a trip.

    Fireplace
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    Sun room William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty

    “Don’t know if I should bathe or play Tetris,” one person said in the comment section of the bathroom photo.

    Elevator
    Elevator William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty

    “My son said ‘inspired by Minecraft,” someone joked.

    Bedroom
    Bedroom William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty

    “I’ve never actually seen a 20 person bathtub,” another said.

    Interior
    Interior William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty

    “I didn’t know homes could be business casual,” one person joked on X.

    Interior
    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
    Interior William Marks Photography/Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty

    Warren is about a 20-mile drive southwest from Newark.

    Back of the mansion.
    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

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  • Supreme Court to hear Facebook appeal linked to investor lawsuit over data breach

    Supreme Court to hear Facebook appeal linked to investor lawsuit over data breach

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    Supreme Court to hear Facebook appeal linked to investor lawsuit over data breach – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    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, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s oldest otter and a social media star, dies at 24

    Rosa, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s oldest otter and a social media star, dies at 24

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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.”

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    Terry Castleman

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  • AT&T Users Report Major Problems Making Calls in U.S.

    AT&T Users Report Major Problems Making Calls in U.S.

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    Photo: Pau Barrena / AFP (Getty Images)

    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.

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    Matt Novak

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  • Mark Zuckerberg is quietly sitting on a shopping empire with 4 times the customers of Amazon, as Facebook Marketplace skyrockets

    Mark Zuckerberg is quietly sitting on a shopping empire with 4 times the customers of Amazon, as Facebook Marketplace skyrockets

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    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.”

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    Sasha Rogelberg

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  • Meta says the future of Facebook is young adults (again)

    Meta says the future of Facebook is young adults (again)

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    When you think of the 20-year-old social network that is Facebook, its popularity among “young adults” is what comes to mind. Naturally, Meta wants to change that and the company is once again telling the world it intends to reorient its platform in order to appeal to that demographic.

    In from Tom Alison, who heads up the Facebook app for Meta, he says that the service is shifting to reflect an “increased focus on young adults” compared with other users. “Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, we’ve made significant changes with young adults in mind,” he wrote.

    If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Meta executives have been trying to win over “young adults” for years in an effort to better compete with TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg said almost ago that he wanted to make young adults the company’s “North Star.” And Alison and Zuckerberg have both been talking about the Facebook app’s pivot to a feed rather than one based on users’ connections.

    That shift is now well underway. Alison said that the company’s AI advancements have already improved recommendations for Reels and feed, and that “advanced recommendations technology will power more products” over the next year. He added that private sharing among users is also on the rise, with more users sharing video (though no word on the plan to bring messaging back into the main app).

    Notably, Alison’s note makes no mention of the “metaverse,” which Zuckerberg also once saw as a central part of the company’s future. Instead, he says that “leaning into new product capabilities enabled by AI” is a significant goal, along with luring younger users. That’s also not surprising, given that Meta and Zuckerberg have recently tried some of the company’s metaverse ambitions as AI advancements.

    But it’s also not clear how successful Meta will be in its efforts to win over young adults. Though Alison says Facebook has seen “five quarters of healthy growth in young adult app usage in the US and Canada,” with 40 million young adult daily active users, that’s still a relatively small percentage of the 205 million daily US Facebook users the company reported in February, the last time it would break out user numbers for the app.

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    Karissa Bell

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  • Instagram makes its status update feature more interactive

    Instagram makes its status update feature more interactive

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    Instagram launched Notes in December 2022 as a way for people to share statuses (not so dissimilar to Facebook) on the platform. Now, the Meta-owned app is taking inspiration from its sister site for more features, with the addition of Note Prompts.

    Instagram first experimented with Note Prompts earlier this year, and the feature allows users to share questions such as “What should I eat?” or “Who is going to be in X city this weekend?” Friends can then respond with tips, suggestions and random thoughts on the subject. It feels very Facebook circa 2012, as does another new feature, Mentions, in which users can tag a friend directly in their Notes. The example Instagram gives, “Hanging with @user later,” would be right out of the early 2010s with just adding “Text! :)” Instagram also announced Note Likes, which works similarly to how likes function everywhere else on Instagram — all users need to do is double tap a note or click the heart.

    Notes have only emerged on Instagram in the past couple of years. They mirror stories in many ways, lasting only 24 hours and with controls as to who can see them (such as just mutual followers). Notes are visible in a user’s inbox and on profiles.

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    Sarah Fielding

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  • A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own

    A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own

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    Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019, frustrated at feeling a lack of support from executives. “The work that teams like the one I was on, civic integrity, was being squandered,” Massachi said in a recent conference talk. “Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”

    Massachi first conceived the idea of using expertise like that he’d developed at Facebook to drive greater public attention to the dangers of social platforms. He launched the nonprofit Integrity Institute with Allen in late 2021, after a former colleague connected them. The timing was perfect: Frances Haugen, another former Facebook employee, had just leaked a trove of company documents, catalyzing new government hearings in the US and elsewhere about problems with social media. It joined a new class of tech nonprofits such as the Center for Humane Technology and All Tech Is Human, started by people working in industry trenches who wanted to become public advocates.

    Massachi and Allen infused their nonprofit, initially bankrolled by Allen, with tech startup culture. Early staff with backgrounds in tech, politics, or philanthropy didn’t make much, sacrificing pay for the greater good as they quickly produced a series of detailed how-to guides for tech companies on topics such as preventing election interference. Major tech philanthropy donors collectively committed a few million dollars in funding, including the Knight, Packard, MacArthur, and Hewlett foundations, as well as the Omidyar Network. Through a university-led consortium, the institute got paid to provide tech policy advice to the European Union. And the organization went on to collaborate with news outlets, including WIRED, to investigate problems on tech platforms.

    To expand its capacity beyond its small staff, the institute assembled an external network of two dozen founding experts it could tap for advice or research help. The network of so-called institute “members” grew rapidly to include 450 people from around the world in the following years. It became a hub for tech workers ejected during tech platforms’ sweeping layoffs, which significantly reduced trust and safety, or integrity, roles that oversee content moderation and policy at companies such as Meta and X. Those who joined the institute’s network, which is free but involves passing a screening, gained access to part of its Slack community where they could talk shop and share job opportunities.

    Major tensions began to build inside the institute in March last year, when Massachi unveiled an internal document on Slack titled “How We Work” that barred use of terms including “solidarity,” “radical,” and “free market,” which he said come off as partisan and edgy. He also encouraged avoiding the term BIPOC, an acronym for “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” which he described as coming from the “activist space.” His manifesto seemed to echo the workplace principles that cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase had published in 2020, which barred discussions of politics and social issues not core to the company, drawing condemnation from some other tech workers and executives.

    “We are an internationally-focused open-source project. We are not a US-based liberal nonprofit. Act accordingly,” Massachi wrote, calling for staff to take “excellent actions” and use “old-fashioned words.” At least a couple of staffers took offense, viewing the rules as backward and unnecessary. An institution devoted to taming the thorny challenge of moderating speech now had to grapple with those same issues at home.

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    Paresh Dave

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  • Germany’s Far-Right Party Is Running Hateful Ads on Facebook and Instagram

    Germany’s Far-Right Party Is Running Hateful Ads on Facebook and Instagram

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    Earlier this month, a German court ruled that the country’s nationalist far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), was potentially “extremist” and could warrant surveillance by the country’s intelligence apparatus.

    Campaign ads placed by AfD have been allowed to appear on Facebook and Instagram anyway, according to a new report from the nonprofit advocacy organization Ekō shared exclusively with WIRED. Researchers found 23 ads that accrued 472,000 views from the party on Facebook and Instagram that appear to violate Meta’s own policies around hate speech.

    The ads push the narrative that immigrants are dangerous and a burden on the German state ahead of the European Union’s elections in June.

    One ad placed by AfD politician Gereon Bollman asserts that Germany has seen “an explosion of sexual violence” since 2015, specifically blaming immigrants from Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The ad was seen by between 10,000 and 15,000 people in just four days, between March 16 and 20, 2024. Another ad, which had over 60,000 views, features a man of color lying in a hammock. Overlaid text reads, “AfD reveals: 686,000 illegal foreigners live at our expense!”

    Ekō was also able to identify at least three ads that appear to have used generative AI to manipulate images, though only one was run after Meta put its manipulated media policy into place. One shows a white woman with visible injuries, with accompanying text saying “the connection between migration and crime has been denied for years.”

    “Meta, and indeed other companies, have very limited ability to detect third party tools that generate AI imagery,” says Vicky Wyatt, senior campaign director at Ekō. “When extremist parties use those tools with their ads, they can create incredibly emotive imagery that can really move people. So it’s incredibly worrying.”

    In its submission to the European Commission’s consultation on election guidelines, obtained by a freedom of information request made by Ekō, Meta says “it is not yet possible for providers to identify all AI-generated content, particularly when actors take steps to seek to avoid detection, including by removing invisible markers.”

    Meta’s own policies prohibit ads that “claim people are threats to the safety, health, or survival of others based on their personal characteristics” and ads that “include generalizations that state inferiority, other statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, expressions of dismissal, expressions of disgust, or cursing based on immigration status.”

    “We do not allow hate speech on our platforms and have Community Standards that apply to all content – including ads,” says Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts. “Our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live, and this system is one of many we have in place to protect European elections.” Roberts told WIRED the company plans to review the ads flagged by Ekō but didn’t respond to questions about whether the German court’s designation of the AfD as potentially extremist would invite further scrutiny from Meta.

    Targeted ads, says Wyatt, can be powerful because extremist groups can more effectively target people that might sympathize with their views and “use Meta’s ads library to reach them.” Wyatt also says this allows the group to test which messages are more likely to resonate with voters.

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    Vittoria Elliott

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  • Memorial Day Weekend Is a Great Time to Adopt These Adorable Senior Dogs

    Memorial Day Weekend Is a Great Time to Adopt These Adorable Senior Dogs

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    Dog shelters are currently overwhelmed in many parts of the U.S., with some of the oldest dogs often at the highest risk of being euthanized. But now is a great time to consider adopting a dog, especially from a place like San Francisco’s Muttville Senior Dog Rescue, which maintains some of our favorite social media accounts on the internet.

    Tackling the Legend of Zelda Film

    Muttville has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting new technology. And that makes sense when you remember that many of the volunteers and staff behind the Bay Area rescue live in the heart of America’s tech industry. In fact, the domain for Muttville was purchased in 1998, likely before any other pet rescue in the country was even thinking about establishing a presence on the web.

    “We were on Vine like the first week,” Jane Goldman, the Chief Content Officer at Muttville, told Gizmodo about the late great video-sharing service. “What we have to offer are cute dogs. And video was like the perfect medium.”

    And while Vine is no longer around (despite Elon Musk’s hints that he might resurrect it at X) Muttville’s still constantly churning out new photos and videos on sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, and TikTok, including the newbies of the week videos, guaranteed to make you smile. The goal, of course, is to get the public interested in adoption by bringing those dogs to a larger audience of potential adopters.

    It’s not just the public-facing tech that’s helping these elderly dogs find homes. Goldman told Gizmodo about an internal app built by one of the shelter’s volunteers that allows staff, volunteers, and foster families to easily access available information about any given dog in their system.

    “We used to have a binder of all the available dogs, and we would take it out,” Goldman said. “Now we scrape the data on our shelter’s software and bring in the info about intake information and medical information that our fosters use to talk to the potential adopters.”

    Muttville also has a livestream called the Wagcam, which anyone can watch from noon to 4 p.m. ET, providing a special behind-the-scenes peek at dogs straight from the shelter in San Francisco.

    Here is Muttville Senior Dog Rescue, 2023!

    Animal shelters have struggled in recent months with overcrowding that’s forcing them to make tough decisions, especially in California. The San Diego Humane Society is currently at 157% capacity and they’re waiving adoption fees for the first 100 adoptions this weekend. After the first 100, adoption fees will still be at the incredibly low rate of just $25.

    Shelters in Los Angeles are struggling even more, with L.A. Animal Shelters currently at 212% capacity, with 1,566 dogs housed in a space built for just 737. There are currently 97 dogs on the city’s Red Alert List scheduled to be euthanized soon if they’re not adopted.

    It’s always a good time to adopt a pet in need, especially a senior dog. If you’ve been thinking about it for a while and want to get a new addition to your family, this might be the weekend to do the most good.

    Muttville is hosting an adoption event in San Francisco on Saturday, May 25 and their Memorial Day Mutt Walk, in honor of Muttville volunteer Jennie Chen, is being held at Crissy Field on Monday, May 27.

    And if you don’t live in California, there are dog shelters all across the country that are just a Google search away. Muttville may have been an extremely early adopter of new tech, but so many dog rescues around the country are finding waysa to connect animals with their forever homes thanks to social media.

    Platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and X get a lot of well-deserved criticism for some of the social harms that have emerged in the past decade. But organizations like Muttville are harnessing that kind of reach to make a positive impact in the world. And sometimes it’s good to get a reminder that technology really can be a force for good.

    And if you’re interested in the dogs at the top of this post, those are Pyrex (left, #11860), Sundae (middle, #11732), and Kabob (right, #11852), but you can also check out the complete list of available mutts.

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    Matt Novak

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  • A Far-Right Indian News Site Posts Racist Conspiracies. US Tech Companies Keep Platforming It

    A Far-Right Indian News Site Posts Racist Conspiracies. US Tech Companies Keep Platforming It

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    “The goal is to amplify this disinformation, and you have BJP leaders sharing this, so people think it’s authentic,” says Naik. “In the long term, this kind of builds the case against a critic, a journalist, that this person is bad, because there is reporting against them.”

    When WIRED contacted OpIndia for comment, Sharma responded to our emailed questions by posting her responses on X.

    When asked about hate speech and disinformation on her site, Sharma wrote: “Our critics are mostly Islamists, Jihadis, Terrorists, Leftists and their sympathizers—like yourself. We don’t particularly care about any of them.” She then added that “Islamophobia does not exist” and pointed to an OpIndia article that outlines her position. Sharma added that it was “none of your concern” when asked if OpIndia was funded by the BJP. Sharma’s post also tagged one of the authors of this story, who then faced a torrent of abuse from Sharma’s followers.

    For years, activists and researchers have tried to highlight the problematic content published by OpIndia. A 2020 campaign from UK-based advocacy group Stop Funding Hate led to a number of advertisers removing their ads from the site. Google, however, says the content published on the site does not appear to breach its own rules.

    “All sites in our network, including Opindia, must adhere to our publisher policies, which explicitly prohibit ads from appearing alongside content promoting hate speech, violence, or demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in an election,” Google spokesperson Michael Aciman says. “Publishers are also subject to regular reviews, and we actively block or remove ads from any violating content.”

    Despite this, users can find ads for Temu or the Palm Beach Post next to many OpIndia articles promoting conspiracies and Islamophobia, placed with the help of ad-exchange platforms like Google’s Ad Manager, which is the market leader.

    Facebook, meanwhile, says Wiley, is more of a “walled garden.” Once a publisher meets the company’s criteria for monetization, including having more than 1,000 followers, it can earn money from ads that run on the page.

    While researchers that spoke to WIRED were unable to tell exactly how much the site has made from Google Ads and Facebook monetization, they said it’s likely that OpIndia is not solely reliant on the ad exchange for its revenue. It appears that, as with many news outlets in India, part of that funding comes in the form of more traditional advertising from a major client: the government.

    “A large section of India’s mainstream press depends on the government ads for their survival,” says Prashanth Bhat, professor of media studies at the University of Houston. “That revenue is critical for the mainstream media survival in a hypercompetitive media environment like in India. We have about 400 round-the-clock television news channels in India in different languages, and we have over 10,000 registered newspapers. For them to survive, they definitely need government patronage.”

    Sharma confirmed that OpIndia is reliant in part on ads from the government. “Literally every media house gets advertising from various political parties,” said Sharma. “In fact, a part of your salary could also be funded by such parties and/or their sympathizers. Do get down from your high horse.”

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    Vittoria Elliott, David Gilbert

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  • Threads gets its own fact-checking program

    Threads gets its own fact-checking program

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    This might come as a shock to you but the things people put on social media aren’t always truthful — really blew your mind there, right? Due to this, it can be challenging for people to know what’s real without context or expertise in a specific area. That’s part of why many platforms use a fact-checking team to keep an eye (often more so look like they’re keeping an eye) on what’s getting shared. Now, Threads is getting its own fact-checking program, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and de-facto person in charge at Threads, announced. He first shared the company’s plans to do so in December.

    Mosseri stated that Threads “recently” made it so that Meta’s third-party fact-checkers could review and rate any inaccurate content on the platform. Before the shift, Meta was having fact-checks conducted on Facebook and Instagram and then matching “near-identical false content” that users shared on Threads. However, there’s no indication of exactly when the program started or if it’s global.

    Then there’s the matter of seeing how effective it really can be. Facebook and Instagram already had these dedicated fact-checkers, yet misinformation has run rampant across the platforms. Ahead of the 2024 Presidential election — and as ongoing elections and conflicts happen worldwide — is it too much to ask for some hardcore fact-checking from social media companies?

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    Sarah Fielding

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  • Still no verdict in trial for alleged murderer Timmy Chan

    Still no verdict in trial for alleged murderer Timmy Chan

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    LOWELL — Approximately 11 hours of jury deliberations and still no verdict in the trial for alleged murderer Timmy Chan.

    On Tuesday, for the second day in a row, Judge Robert Ullman sent the Middlesex Superior Court jury home with Chan’s fate still hanging in the balance.

    The jury, composed of nine women and three men, began deliberating in the late morning on Monday, after the closing of witness testimony in the trial, which began May 6.

    Tuesday marked the first full day of deliberations, lasting approximately six and a half hours. The jury did not submit a single question throughout the day. The only question the group has asked thus far came on Monday, and it involved a technical issue they experienced while attempting to watch surveillance footage entered as evidence.

    The issue was resolved.

    Jurors are scheduled to dive back into the case at 9 a.m. Wednesday.

    Chan is charged with several crimes, the most serious first-degree murder, for the shooting death of 20-year-old Nathaniel Fabian on the night of Oct. 13, 2021. The murder charge carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.

    If they decide against first-degree murder, the jury has the option of instead finding Chan guilty of the lesser charges of either second-degree murder, or voluntary manslaughter.

    Fabian’s death was the result of online bullying initiated by Samantha Chum. Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Christopher Tarrant said during his opening remarks that Chum was Fabian’s ex-girlfriend who “did not take the breakup well.”

    The target of Chum’s bullying was Thailynn Voraphonh, who was in an on-again, off-again relationship with Fabian. Voraphonh reached out to Fabian in the hopes he could put an end to the harassment. Fabian tried by contacting Chum, ultimately setting off the firestorm that ended in his death.

    After Fabian contacted her, Chum reached out to her friends, Isabella Lach (Chan’s girlfriend), Jessie Sadia Segal-Wright, Chan, and Brian Lach (Isabella Lach’s brother, and Segal-Wright’s boyfriend), recruiting them to confront Fabian.

    During the trial, Brian Lach and Segal-Wright, who were granted immunity for their testimony, implicated Chan as the gunman. Both were with Chan before and after the shooting, while Brian Lach testified he was with Chan at the time of the shooting. Segal-Wright, meanwhile, testified to using her car to drive them both from the murder scene. Isabella Lach was in the car at the time.

    Chan is the only one who was charged for the crime.

    As the jury began deliberating on Monday, Fabian’s mother, Stacey Braley, who along with many other loved ones has been in the courtroom gallery throughout the trial, expressed disappointment that more people were not charged for her son’s death.

    At the same time, she pointed out she understood the prosecution’s decision to grant immunity to Brian Lach and Segal-Wright if it helped them capture the person who actually pulled the trigger.

    Braley pointed out that all those involved in the shooting, except Chum, did not even know her son.

    “The thing I keep on thinking of is if all these kids that were involved actually knew my son, they would have loved him,” Braley said. “Everybody he met, they always fell in love with him. … He was genuinely a very good person, and if they had an opportunity, they really would have liked him.”

    Chan’s attorney, Jeffrey Sweeney, has contested during the trial that Brian Lach was the gunman. During his closing statements, he insisted to jurors that Brian Lach and Segal-Wright lied on the stand as a means to protect themselves.

    Right before the jury was dismissed for the day on Tuesday, Sweeney said the trial “went as well as it could have gone.”

    “The evidence came in really well,” he said. “Everything came in as I expected it to.”

    In addition to murder, Chan is charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful possession of a loaded firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition, and discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a building.

    Follow Aaron Curtis on X, formerly known as Twitter, @aselahcurtis

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    Aaron Curtis

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  • Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups

    Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups

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    “Join Your Local Militia or III% Patriot Group,” a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: “Now more than ever. Support the American militia page.”

    Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an “armed militia group” on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence.

    Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country.

    After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook—with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED.

    Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit “active patriots” and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be “prepared” for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for “war” or to “stand up” against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists—and the US government.

    These groups are also rebuilding at a moment when anti-government rhetoric has continued to surge in mainstream political discourse ahead of a contentious, high-stakes presidential election. And by doing all of this on Facebook, they’re hoping to reach a broader pool of prospective recruits than they would on a comparatively fringe platform like Telegram.

    “Many of these groups are no longer fractured sets of localized militia but coalitions formed between multiple militia groups, many with Three Percenters at the helm,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “Facebook remains the largest gathering place for extremists and militia movements to cast a wide net and funnel users to more private chats, including on the platform, where they can plan and coordinate with impunity.”

    Paul told WIRED that she’s been monitoring “hundreds” of militia-related groups and profiles since 2021 and has observed them growing “increasingly emboldened with more serious and coordinated organizing” in the past year.

    One particularly influential account in this Facebook ecosystem belongs to Rodney Huffman, leader of the Confederate States III%, an Arkansas-based militia that, in 2020, sought to rally extremists at Georgia’s Stone Mountain, a popular site for Confederate and white supremacist groups. Huffman has created a network of Facebook groups and spreads the word about local meetups. His partner, Dabbi Demere, is equally active and on a mission to recruit “active” patriots into the groups. Huffman and Demere are also key players in the pro-Confederate movement known as “Heritage, not Hate.”

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    Tess Owen

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  • How Sidechat Fanned the Flames of University Campus Protests

    How Sidechat Fanned the Flames of University Campus Protests

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    In the months following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, conversation on college campuses has been defined by a palpable tension. Increased antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric embroiled numerous universities in free-speech debates. In late April, as the Israel-Hamas War moved into its fifth month, students at Columbia University and other institutions across the US began protesting, calling for a ceasefire. Amid all of this, one platform has served as a locus: Sidechat, a social media app that’s become both a place for dialog about the protests and a breeding ground for hate speech.

    Over the past few weeks, as demonstrations erupted at Columbia, NYU, Yale, Princeton, the University of Texas, and elsewhere, students took to the app to share memes and express dismay at their administrators’ responses.

    On April 22, following a weekend of arrests at Columbia, Colin Roedl, editorial page editor at the student-run Columbia Daily Spectator, told Slate that students were seeing “calls for solidarity” on the app. The following day, some 3,000 Columbia staff, students, and community members signed a letter to university president Minouche Shafik, the board of trustees, and the school’s deans supporting “campus safety and academic freedom.” It included a link to a folder of Sidechat screenshots showing people asking how to join the encampments on campus and discussions of Zionism.

    On Tuesday, the New York Police Department arrested hundreds of protesters at Columbia and City College of New York.

    Prior to the protests, administrators at other colleges, like Harvard and Brown, had sought to increase moderation on Sidechat, citing increased reports of harassment and hate speech from students using the platform. Rhetoric on the app had become “dehumanizing, racist, homogenizing, (and) hateful,” says Aboud Ashhab, a Palestinian student at Brown. Andrew Rovinsky, a Jewish student at the university, calls it “a cesspool.”

    Because the app’s defining feature is student discourse done anonymously (users don’t post with their real names), toxic messages and demeaning language flow freely. “What you see on Sidechat is a bunch of people actually engaging in the most vile rhetoric you’ve seen, because it’s anonymous,” Rovinsky says.

    Launched in 2022 as a mechanism for college students to whisper about campus happenings, Sidechat quickly spread across US universities. Like the early version of Facebook, the app requires a university email address to log in, and while it initially served as a hub for gossip and collective complaining, university administrators began to take notice of more heated discussion on the platform in recent months and implored Sidechat to strengthen its content moderation.

    While the app’s user guidelines state that the platform does not allow content that “perpetuates the oppression of marginalized communities by promoting discrimination against (or hatred toward) certain groups of people,” both Sidechat and its predecessor Yik Yak have come under fire for facilitating an online environment that bodes well for hate speech.

    In fact, before Sidechat’s acquisition of Yik Yak in 2023, Yik Yak took a four-year hiatus after a bombardment of complaints regarding racism, discrimination, and threats of violence circulating on the app. Hateful comments in the months following the October 7 attack suggest Sidechat is not so different from its forerunner.

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    Sofia Barnett

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