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Category: SocialMediaNews

SocialMediaNews

  • FBI & DOJ Investigating ByteDance & TikTok’s Surveillance of Journalists

    FBI & DOJ Investigating ByteDance & TikTok’s Surveillance of Journalists

    As if TikTok’s problems couldn’t get any worse, the FBI and DOJ are investigating its parent company for surveilling Forbes journalists.

    TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance. The company is under pressure around the globe as one jurisdiction after another bans TikTok from government devices over privacy concerns.

    One of the most egregious privacy and security violations involved ByteDance’s admission that it used TikTok to surveil Forbes journalists, tracking their locations. The admission has sparked an investigation by the FBI and DOJ, according to Forbes:

    According to a source in position to know, the DOJ Criminal Division, Fraud Section, working alongside the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has subpoenaed information from ByteDance regarding efforts by its employees to access U.S. journalists’ location information or other private user data using the TikTok app. According to two sources, the FBI has been conducting interviews related to the surveillance. ByteDance’s use of the app to surveil U.S. citizens was first reported by Forbes in October, and confirmed by an internal company investigation in December.

    At the time of the admission, ByteDance executives expressed their disapproval, with the executive responsible for the actions, Chris Lepitak, being fired. His direct superior who reported to the CEO, Song Ye, also resigned.

    “I was deeply disappointed when I was notified of the situation… and I’m sure you feel the same,” CEO Rubo Liang wrote in an internal email shared with Forbes at the time. “The public trust that we have spent huge efforts building is going to be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals. … I believe this situation will serve as a lesson to us all.”

    “It is standard practice for companies to have an internal audit group authorized to investigate code of conduct violations,” TikTok General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a second email. “However, in this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data.”

    ByteDance told Forbes it would cooperate with any official investigation:

    “We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals found to have been involved, and they are no longer employed at ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us,” said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

    The news comes at a time when TikTok is facing its most daunting challenges. In addition to being banned from government devices in the US, EU, UK, and Canada, the Biden administration has told ByteDance that TikTok will face a nationwide ban unless the company divests from TikTok.

  • Meta’s Blue Checkmark Verified Program Is Now Available…Sort Of

    Meta’s Blue Checkmark Verified Program Is Now Available…Sort Of

    Meta is launching its Verified program, adopting a feature that Twitter has long been known for.

    Verified badges, seen as little blue checkmarks, give users a measure of confidence that a person is who they say they are. Twitter has had the feature for years, although it has undergone some changes under Elon Musk’s leadership.

    Meta is now rolling out its own verification system, giving users the option to sign up on a waitlist to receive their Verified badge.

    Get started with the verification process. Activate your Meta Verified subscription for $14.99 USD/month (iOS/Android) or $11.99 USD/month on the web (Facebook only). It is currently available in the United States, Australia and New Zealand for people 18 years or older and is not yet available in all places or for businesses.

  • UK Joins US, EU, Canada In Banning TikTok From Government Devices

    UK Joins US, EU, Canada In Banning TikTok From Government Devices

    The UK has joined the US, EU, and Canada in banning TikTok from government devices, citing “a specific risk with government devices.”

    TikTok is facing an existential crisis as governments and jurisdictions struggle with the security implications of the social media app. The company has come under fire for its ties to Beijing, especially since Chinese companies are required to aid the government with surveillance. There have also been repeated lapses in privacy, including TikTok’s parent admitting to surveilling journalists.

    The UK has evidently determined the risks are too great, passing a ban involving the app and government devices, according to The Guardian. Oliver Dowden, the Cabinet Office minister in the Commons, said the ban was “with immediate effect.”

    The decision is a marked change of tune for the UK government, which had previously said it would not follow other governments in banning the app.

  • TikTok May Split From ByteDance to Avoid US Ban

    TikTok May Split From ByteDance to Avoid US Ban

    TikTok is considering drastic action in an effort to avoid a US ban, including the possibility of splitting from parent ByteDance.

    TikTok is increasingly under fire over privacy and security concerns. The company is owned by China-based ByteDance, raising concerns over national security, given China’s long history of surveillance and state-backed hacking.

    Facing a possible US ban, as well as increased restrictions in Canada and the EU, TikTok is considering what would once have been unthinkable, according to Bloomberg. According to the outlet’s sources, the measure is considered a last-ditch option, only to be used if existing efforts to appease national security officials fail. Even then, such a measure would have to be approved by the Chinese government, something that likely has a low chance of happening.

    In the meantime, TikTok is emphasizing the measures it is already taking to comply with US demands:

    “Neither a ban of TikTok nor a divestiture of TikTok from ByteDance does anything to address national security concerns about data transfers,” said Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok. “Under Project Texas, TikTok data for our US users would be held to a significantly higher security standard than any comparable American company.”

  • Reddit Is Coming Back Online After Major Outage

    Reddit Is Coming Back Online After Major Outage

    Reddit is coming back online Tuesday evening after a major outage that lasted several hours.

    Reddit went offline a little after 3:00 PM EDT. The company acknowledged the issue on their status page, saying they were working on a fix.

    Reddit is currently offline. We’re working to identify the issue.

    We’ve identified an internal systems issue and are working to determine a fix.

    Shortly after 8:00 PM, the company said it was almost back online.

    We’re almost back! You can find us hanging out in /r/downtimebananas, join us!

  • Meta Is Laying Off Another 10,000, Touts ‘Year of Efficiency’

    Meta Is Laying Off Another 10,000, Touts ‘Year of Efficiency’

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company is laying off an additional 10,000 employees and closing additional open roles.

    Meta laid off 11,000 in November, the biggest layoff of 2022. Rumors have been circulating for weeks that Meta planned another round of layoffs, which Zuckerberg has just announced:

    With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.

    Zuckerberg says the hiring freezes will be lifted once the company’s reorganization is complete:

    After restructuring, we plan to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group. Other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model. We also aim to have a steady stream of developer productivity enhancements and process improvements throughout the year.

    A major focus of the company’s efforts is reducing the various layers of management, streamlining and flattening the company’s communication:

    In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster.

    Meta’s image has already been tarnished, in the eyes of its employees, after its first round of layoffs. Many blame Zuckerberg and his obsession with the metaverse. Laying off another 10,000 employees is not likely to improve that perception.

  • Meta May Build a Twitter Alternative

    Meta May Build a Twitter Alternative

    Meta may be looking to build a Twitter alternative, taking advantage of the turmoil surrounding the company since Elon Musk’s takeover.

    Meta and Twitter are two of the biggest and oldest social media platforms. Twitter was recently purchased by Musk and has been in a near-constant state of turmoil since. Meta evidently sees an opportunity to capitalize on Twitter’s troubles and offer an alternative.

    “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates,” the company told BBC News.

    “We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”

    Only time will tell if Meta launches a Twitter rival. If it does, however, it would be well-poised to significant traction.

  • Reddit Is Killing Off Reddit Talk

    Reddit Is Killing Off Reddit Talk

    Reddit has announced it is killing off Reddit Talk, its Clubhouse clone unveiled in April 2021.

    Clubhouse was all the rage in the midst of the pandemic, spurring other social media platforms to copy its features. Reddit was one of those that jumped on the bandwagon, rolling out Reddit Talk.

    In a company announcement, Reddit has revealed it is sunsetting Reddit Talk. The company says the third-party audio vendor it relied on has shut down, making it too costly to keep the feature going.

    Our original plan was to maintain Talk while we worked on this. Unfortunately, the 3rd party audio vendor we use for Talk is shutting down its service. In other words, the resources required to keep Talk live during this transition increased substantially.

    We don’t have a timeline to bring Talk or an audio product back in the future, however we will share any updates when we have them.

  • Facebook Is Integrating Messenger Features With Its Mobile App

    Facebook Is Integrating Messenger Features With Its Mobile App

    Facebook is integrating Messenger features with its mobile Facebook app, potentially reducing the need to have Messenger installed.

    Until now, users have needed to have Messenger installed on their mobile devices to chat with their Facebook friends and family. The company is looking to unify the experience, incorporating some of Messenger’s functionality within the core Facebook app.

    Tom Alison, Head of Facebook, made the announcement in a blog post:

    We’re also seeing more people turning to messaging as a way to build community. We started introducing community chats to some Facebook Groups last year as a way for people to connect more deeply with their online communities in real time around the topics they care about. And, the early results are promising. Across Facebook and Messenger, we saw the number of people trying community chats increase by 50% in December 2022.

    Over the coming year, we’ll build more ways to integrate messaging features in Facebook. Ultimately, we want it to be easy and convenient for people to connect and share, whether in the Messenger app or directly within Facebook.

    The news will likely be welcome by most users, especially if it saves the trouble of switching back and forth between apps.

  • Meta Plans a Second Round of Layoffs This Week

    Meta Plans a Second Round of Layoffs This Week

    Meta is preparing for another round of layoffs, with the company reportedly dropping the bad news this week.

    Meta engaged in a massive round of layoffs in late 2022, letting some 11,000 employees go. Rumors have been building for weeks that the company planned another round of layoffs, even going so far as to give thousands poor performance reviews, in what many believed was a precursor.

    According to Bloomberg, the next round of layoffs could hit as soon as this week and will likely impact thousands of additional employees.

    Meta’s image and reputation have already been tarnished by its layoffs. Employees have become increasingly disillusioned with the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership in particular. Zuckerberg is seen, both in and outside the company, as being obsessed with the metaverse.

    This obsession has led some employees to believe Zuckerberg will ultimately cause the death of the company.

    “The Metaverse will be our slow death,” one user, identifying as a senior software developer, posted on the anonymous forum Blind late last year. “Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the meta-verse.”

    When the company announced its first round of 11,000 layoffs, Zuckerberg took responsibility for the action.

    “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” he said at the time. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”

    With another round of layoffs looming, it’s a safe bet the angst at Meta is about to get a lot worse, and the company’s image will continue to suffer.

  • Twitter Experiences More Outages

    Twitter Experiences More Outages

    Perhaps laying off a large portion of Twitter’s technical staff wasn’t such a good idea, with the platform experience yet another outage.

    Elon Musk has been slashing Twitter’s headcount since taking over the company. Unfortunately, it looks like the cuts may be cutting into the company’s ability to operate.

    According to BBC News, the company experienced technical issues for the second time in a week. Users experienced errors when clicking links in tweets. In fact, the problem was bad enough that Bloomberg posted a link to its coverage saying: “if you can click this link, Twitter’s fixed its bug.”

    Musk took the opportunity to blame the platform’s ‘brittleness.’

    Interestingly, as BBC points out, while Twitter certainly had issues prior to Musk’s takeover, there has been a marked increase since the acquisition.

    “It started shortly before the Musk takeover itself,” Alp Toker, director of internet outage tracker NetBlocks, told the outlet. “The main spike has happened after the takeover, with four to five incidents in a month – which was comparable to what used to happen in a year.”

    It’s a safe bet that eliminating such a large percentage of the company’s staff may be a factor.

  • Shopify Evolving Into World’s First Retail Operating System

    Shopify Evolving Into World’s First Retail Operating System

    “Shopify is evolving into the world’s first retail operating system,” says Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein. “We think the future of retail is retail everywhere. A brand that’s going to be successful in 5, 10 or 15 years from now needs to sell across any platform and across any channel where they have customers. The idea is that it all feeds back in one centralized back-office, the retail operating system, which is Shopify.”

    Harley Finkelstein, COO of Shopify, discusses how COVID has dramatically sped up the timeline for commerce moving online and has also moved Shopify closer to its goal of becoming the world’s first retail operating system:

    Shopify Evolving Into World’s First Retail Operating System

    Most people assume that Shopify is an ecommerce provider. We have more than a million stores on Shopify. If you were to aggregate our stores in the US we’d be the second-largest online retailer in America. Of course, we’re not a retailer but we’re a platform. But we now have these great economies of scale that we’re using to level the playing field for entrepreneurs and small businesses. That being said, what really Shopify is evolving into is the world’s first retail operating system. 

    What we’re trying to figure out is what do brands and entrepreneurs and retailers need, not just now but in the future? We think the future of retail is retail everywhere. A brand that’s going to be successful in 5, 10 or 15 years from now needs to sell across any platform and across any channel where they have customers. This idea of enabling Shopify merchants to very easily push their products to the Amazon Marketplace or the eBay marketplace or now the Walmart marketplace, that gives them access to a new set of consumers. The idea is that it all feeds back in one centralized back-office, the retail operating system, which is Shopify. 

    Then we’ve gone ahead and asked what else can we do for these merchants? Can we do capital? We’ve now given out about a billion dollars worth of cash advances and loans to small businesses. We’re doing fulfillment and we’re doing shipping. We’re increasing the scope and the relationship that we have with the million stores on Shopify. This is allowing them to become category leaders.

    COVID Speeds Up The Ecommerce Revolution

    From our view, it seems like the commerce world that would have existed in the year 2030 has really been pulled into the year 2020 (as a result of the COVID crisis). We’ve seen ecommerce as a percent of total retail go from 15 percent to 25 percent in the last three months. That’s the same growth rate that we’ve seen over the last 10 years. What really has emerged here is sort of this tale of two retail worlds. On one side you have these resilient retailers that are doing great, they’re pivoting, and they’re expanding their businesses. On the other side, you have these resistant retailers who have not made it. In many ways, it’s probably the most exciting time for retail in a very long time. 

    We talk a lot about these direct to consumer brands that are becoming category leaders. The Allbirds and the Gymsharks who started on Shopify when they were very small and have grown to become the incumbents in their industry. Every 25 seconds a brand new entrepreneur makes his or her (products) for sale on Shopify. We talk a lot about those new startups, those new DTC brands. But actually, what we’re also seeing on Shopify are companies like Lindt Chocolate or Heinz ketchup or Chipotle. They are signing up for Shopify and basically from like five days from contract to launch they are completely changing their businesses. 

    This resiliency isn’t simply in the hands of just the smallest of brands. Big companies are also beginning to think a lot more about how to stay resilient in this time. They’re moving well beyond ecommerce or thinking about offline commerce now. They’re thinking about how do they sell across social media? How do they sell across different marketplaces? So no, I don’t think it’s too late (to enter ecommerce) but I do think they have to rethink their strategies.

    Shopify Evolving Into World’s First Retail Operating System Says Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein
  • Twitter Blue Is Now Available in More Than 20 Countries

    Twitter Blue Is Now Available in More Than 20 Countries

    Twitter Blue has undergone a major expansion, with the service now available in more than 20 European countries.

    Twitter Blue is the social media platform’s service that provides a number of major features not available to free users. Those features include the ability to edit tweets, post 60-minute videos, and post up to 4,000 character tweets.

    According to TechCrunch, the company has expanded the service to 20+ countries, including “Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, and Cyprus.”

    The expansion is a clear effort to help the platform convert users to paid accounts. Since Twitter started charging $8/mo for the service, it hasn’t exactly been a hit, with reports indicating it has less than 300,000 subscribers.

  • TikTok Introduces New Features to Protect Teens

    TikTok Introduces New Features to Protect Teens

    TikTok is unveiling new features designed to protect teens as the social media app is under fire from all sides.

    TikTok is facing increased pressure from jurisdictions around the world over its ties to Beijing and its handling of user data, especially that of children. The company has been accused of abusing child privacy on multiple occasions, and multiple states have launched investigations into the platform’s effect on children.

    The company is now rolling out measures to better protect children, including limits on how much teenagers can use the app per day:

    In the coming weeks, every account belonging to a user below age 18 will automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen time limit. While there’s no collectively-endorsed position on the ‘right’ amount of screen time or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we consulted the current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital in choosing this limit. If the 60-minute limit is reached, teens will be prompted to enter a passcode in order to continue watching, requiring them to make an active decision to extend that time. For people in our under 13 experience, the daily screen time limit will also be set to 60 minutes, and a parent or guardian will need to set or enter an existing passcode to enable 30 minutes of additional watch time.

    Teens will be able to opt out of the 60-minute limit, but TikTok will prompt them to set some limits:

    Research also shows that being more aware of how we spend our time can help us be more intentional about the decisions we make. So we’re also prompting teens to set a daily screen time limit if they opt out of the 60-minute default and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok in a day. This builds on a prompt we rolled out last year to encourage teens to enable screen time management; our tests found this helped increase the use of our screen time tools by 234%. In addition, we’ll send every teen account a weekly inbox notification with a recap of their screen time.

    The company is also rolling out a number of features to help parents have greater input on how their children use TikTok.

    Ultimately, it’s unclear if these measures will save the platform. It has already been banned from government-owned devices in the EU, Canada, and the US, and some lawmakers are putting forth bills to ban it entirely.

  • Canada Bans TikTok From Government Devices

    Canada Bans TikTok From Government Devices

    Canada is the latest jurisdiction to ban TikTok from government devices, another setback for the Chinese social media platform.

    According to AP News, the Canadian government has banned the popular app from all government-owned devices. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t rule out additional steps down the road.

    “I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” Trudeau said.

    “I’m always a fan of giving Canadians the information for them to make the right decisions for them,” he added.

    The EU Commission and US Congress has already banned the app on government devices. US lawmakers have introduced legislation that would ban the app entirely, and the EU has signaled it could do the same if TikTok fails to respect user privacy.

  • Twitter Payments Head Esther Crawford Has Been Laid Off

    Twitter Payments Head Esther Crawford Has Been Laid Off

    The carnage at Twitter continues, with Twitter Payments head Esther Crawford laid off, along with most of her team.

    Esther Crawford was head of Twitter Payments, putting her in charge of Twitter Blue. According to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer, Crawford is the latest to be purged from Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover.

    Crawford’s departure is especially surprising since she was viewed as a Musk loyalist. in fact, she was one of those employees that answered Musk’s call to fully commit to the company.

    The Verge’s Alex Heath says the layoff extends to most of “product org.”

    Crawford’s departure makes one thing crystal clear: No one is safe in Musk’s Twitter.

  • B2B Influencer Marketing Adds Up To Nurture and Ultimately Conversion

    B2B Influencer Marketing Adds Up To Nurture and Ultimately Conversion

    “We co-create content with (B2B Influencers) in concert with brand messaging,” says TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden. “So now instead of people just ignoring the press release we actually have storytelling happening with these different voices. You have this intersection of one or two or three or four influencers talking about this topic and those audiences intersect and cross. Your customer is hearing this credible message not only from the brand but also from people that they trust in different channels. That all adds up to yes. That all adds up to nurture and ultimately conversion.”

    Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, discusses how B2B influencer marketing can be a highly effective force in driving leads and conversions for companies. Lee was interviewed by Tim Washer at the 2019 Content Marketing World Conference & Expo:

    Influencer Marketing Is Powerful Because Of Influence Itself

    Influencer marketing is powerful because of influence itself, not about the people. Influence has always been a factor in being persuasive and being effective as a communicator, as a marketer, and really being able to tap into the dynamics of that. The psychology and sociology of that is something that is everlasting, it’s evergreen. While there are trends in terms of tactics that come and go, there’s this consumerization of B2B. B2C influencers are misbehaving and have fake followers, etc. and some of that’s leaking over into B2B. But I think that’ll reconcile a little bit and kind of clean itself out. In the future brands are going to be looking at influence as a really key component of their holistic marketing strategy internally and externally.

    A lot of people when they think of influencer marketing they think of a Kardashian or some people think of something like Baddiewinkle, a 90-year-old woman who wears hip-hop clothes and now has her own makeup line on Sephora versus someone like Tamara McCleary interviewing an executive at Dell about the right IT infrastructure for doing edge computing. That’s really what it’s about in B2B.

    B2B Influencers Actually Have To Have The Main Expertise

    One of the big differences between B2B and B2C influencers is that in B2B you actually have to have the main expertise. You actually have to be knowledgeable and have a depth of that expertise in what it is that you’re influential about. It’s also important to have a network for distribution and a place to publish your content. It’s great to have a personality and that’s less common in B2B, where you have charisma. Well, lack of personality is a form of personality I suppose. 

    The good thing is that we’ve figured out ways to coach folks that have that domain expertise and an active following but they’re not necessarily used to being social. We are coaching them in how to activate themselves and to pull out the best of what they have to share in a way that’s very promotable. Many of them start to open up a little bit after we show them how to do it.

    B2B Influencer Marketing Adds Up To Nurture and Conversion

    In the planning stages (with a client looking to promote something) we’ll look at the topics that are important around the announcement and how it affects customers and how customers will think of that news and how it’ll affect or change their lives. Those topics are then what we want to be influential about. We’ll use those keywords or topics to search our network using influencer marketing software to find who is influential around those topics, who’s publishing content, who self-identifies around that topic, and whose audience is actually activated around that topic. We find those people who have trusted voices with an active community and we invite them to collaborate on content and give their opinion about the announcement. 

    We co-create content with them in concert with brand messaging. So now instead of people just ignoring the press release we actually have storytelling happening with these different voices. You have this intersection of one or two or three or four influencers talking about this topic and those audiences intersect and cross. They intersect across channels too. Your customer is hearing this credible message not only from the brand but also from people that they trust in different channels. That all adds up to yes. That all adds up to nurture and ultimately conversion.

    B2B Influencer Marketing Adds Up To Nurture and Conversion – TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden
  • Reddit’s IPO May Be on Track for the Second Half of 2023

    Reddit’s IPO May Be on Track for the Second Half of 2023

    Reddit may finally be moving forward with its IPO after laying the groundwork for nearly two years.

    Reddit hired its first CFO in early 2021 in what many saw as one of the first major steps toward an IPO. At the end of 2021, the company filed paperwork with the SEC to go public, but little forward movement has happened since then, thanks to the economic downturn and other factors.

    According to The Information, however, it appears the social media company is once again moving forward. The outlet’s sources say the company plans to move forward later this year, likely in the second half.

    Interestingly, unlike other tech firms — ServiceTitan, StockX, and Cohesity — that have allowed their IPO paperwork to lapse, thereby taking the option off the table in the short term, Reddit has been maintaining its filing with the SEC. This would support The Information’s sources, essentially keeping Reddit in a ‘holding pattern’ until the market improves.

  • EU Commission Bans TikTok On Staff Phones

    EU Commission Bans TikTok On Staff Phones

    The EU Commission has followed the US Congress, banning TikTok on all government-owned devices.

    TikTok has increasingly been in the crosshairs of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic over privacy concerns and the company’s link to Beijing. The issues have taken a sharp turn for the worse after the company admitted to surveiling journalists.

    According to BBC News, the EU Commission has banned the app from government-owned devices to “protect data and increase cybersecurity.”

    “The measure aims to protect the Commission against cybersecurity threats and actions which may be exploited for cyberattacks against the corporate environment of the commission,” EU spokeswoman Sonya Gospodinova said.

    In the meantime, legislation has been introduced in the US that would ban the app entirely, and the EU has warned TikTok that a similar measure could be taken in the EU if the company fails to respect user privacy.

  • Instagram Founders’ Second Act Launches Publicly

    Instagram Founders’ Second Act Launches Publicly

    Artifact, the AI-powered social news feed app created by Instagram’s founders, has launched and is available to the public.

    Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the company following Meta’s acquisition of it. Their latest project is an AI-powered news feed that brings in social aspects.

    The project became available as an invite-only preview in late January, but has now launched to the public. Users can download the Android and iOS apps to get started.

  • Meta Plans to Lay Off More Personnel

    Meta Plans to Lay Off More Personnel

    Meta appears to be moving forward with plans to lay off additional personnel despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicating the contrary.

    Meta laid off 11,000 employees in late 2022, marking the biggest layoffs of the year among tech firms. According to The Washington Post, Zuckerberg framed the layoffs as a necessary step to “minimize the chance of having to do broad layoffs like this for the foreseeable future.”

    “I obviously can’t sit here and promise you that nothing will happen in the future because it’s a very volatile environment,” he added. “But what I can say is that for where we are right now, that’s what I foresee.”

    Unfortunately, according to the Post, Meta appears to be preparing for another major round of layoffs, despite Zuckerberg’s assurances. The company is having its lawyers, financial experts, executives, and human resources personnel devise a plan that would reorganize the company and possibly lead to thousands of jobs being cut.

    Part of leadership’s goal is to flatten the corporate hierarchy, reducing the path between Zuckerberg and the company’s interns. The move will see some team leaders taking on lower-level roles. The Post’s sources said the company expects some of the individuals whose roles have changed to eventually resign, naturally reducing the company’s headcount through attrition.

    The Post’s report confirms other rumors regarding the company’s plans. Meta recently gave thousands of its employees the second-lowest review possible, raising concerns it was laying the groundwork for another round of layoffs.

    Meta’s actions also appear to be a concerted effort to streamline its operations and return to the startup-style way of operating it enjoyed before becoming a multi-billion dollar corporation. The company has recently taken fire for its ‘self-sabotaging’ behavior by none other than legendary developer John Carmack.

    “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort,” Carmack wrote when he departed the company in December. “There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”

    “I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it,” he added.