Facebook: We’ll pull US news content if Congress passes law to pay December 6, 2022 Facebook’s parent company Meta has threatened to pull news content from the US if Congress push forward with plans to make the company pay for content. Meta’s head of policy communications, Andy Stone, tweeted the thread, saying that “if Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced [...]
Facebook owner Meta sued for selling personal data for ads November 21, 2022 Facebook owner Meta has been sued in the high court after claims that it disregarded the right to object against the collection of personal data to sell to advertisers. Human rights advocate Tanya O’Carroll alleges that the Silicon Valley giant has breached UK data laws by failing to respect her right to demand that it [...]
Deep dive with DreamWorks’ former CTO: ‘Forget social media, the Metaverse tracks people much more intimately’ November 12, 2022 The novel Snow Crash has had the privilege of coining a term that would later become one of the most important words of the 21st century: metaverse. Google search trend data for the term shows an explosion from relative obscurity with a search volume score of 4/100 in early October 2021, to an all-time global high by search [...]
Facebook and WhatsApp owner Meta cuts 11,000 jobs November 9, 2022 Over 600 UK Meta employees could lose their jobs as the owner of Facebook launches its biggest job cull in history, cutting 11,000 jobs worldwide. In a note published this morning, chief exec Mark Zuckerberg said he would be reducing the global headcount by 13 per cent, regarding it as “some of the most difficult [...]
Mass layoffs at Meta: Is Facebook’s ‘absolute monarch’ Mark Zuckerberg finally listening? November 8, 2022 Facebook-owner Meta did not do well with investors during and after the latest earnings releases. Large institutional investors concluded that founder Mark Zuckerberg is not listening to investor concerns over capital expenditure plans for next year and ballooning operating expenses. But the Wall Street Journal is writing that Meta is now planning a large layoff [...]
WhatsApp users in UK get new feature that allows Brits to ‘bundle’ group chats November 3, 2022 A WhatsApp feature that enables users to bundle several group chats together under the umbrella of a single topic and share updates across them all has gone live in the UK. First announced earlier this year and in testing since then, the Communities feature will allow users to organise different group chats together under a [...]
Meta struggles: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner’s profits halved October 27, 2022 Owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta, reported a fall in its revenue for the third quarter driven by plummeting ad revenue. The social media giant’s intake was four per cent down on last year’s third quarter, from £29bn to £27bn, while its costs and expenses were up almost 20 per cent. Income was down [...]
WhatsApp down globally, 40m Brits and hundreds of millions impacted around the world October 25, 2022 Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp went down for over an hour this morning in dozens of countries around the world, including the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Kenya, India, France and most of the United States and Canada. City A.M. can confirm that the outage was for both personal chats as well as group chats and hundreds [...]
Competition watchdog orders Facebook owner Meta to sell Giphy October 18, 2022 The competition watchdog told Facebook’s parent firm Meta this afternoon that it would need to dump Giphy, marking the first time the regulator has blocked a deal struck by a Big Tech firm. In its “final decision”, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ruled that the combination of the two companies would allow Meta to [...]
Big pay for Big Tech: Facebook UK staff bank £134k a year on average October 6, 2022 Despite reports that tech firms are facing job cuts and a slowdown of hiring, new filings reveal that the average salary for a Facebook employee in the UK hit £134,000 last year. Facebook’s headcount climbed 37 per cent to 5,148 in the UK, with the wage bill up to £693m in 2021. This made the [...]