Meta

According to Pratiti Raychoudhury, Vice President, Head of Research, Meta, research shows that mainstream media plays a bigger role disseminating disinformation than popularly accepted. "Polarisation is decreasing in parts of the world where social media use is rising. More and more research also discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber that causes polarisation and political upheavals," she countered.

Reacting to a decision by Facebook Oversight Board, Meta agreed to remove the exception from its policy. "As the board notes in this recommendation, removing the exception for 'publicly available' private residential information may limit the availability of this information on Facebook and Instagram when it is still publicly available elsewhere," the company said.

Meta will instead organise its "inaugural business messaging event", called Conversations, on May 19. "Similar to years past, we are taking a brief break in programming and will not hold F8 in 2022 while we gear up on new initiatives that are all tailored towards the next chapter of the internet, and the next chapter of our company too: building the metaverse," Meta said in a blog post late on Wednesday.

Between February 1-28, Meta received 478 reports through the Indian grievance mechanism, and responded to 100 per cent of these reports. Of these reports, the social network provided tools for users to resolve their issues in 402 cases. These include pre-established channels to report content for specific violations, self-remediation flows where they can download their data, avenues to address account hacked issues etc.

"Across metros and smaller towns, India lives and connects on WhatsApp. When we thought about expanding our existing business skilling efforts, we couldn't think of a more powerful solution than one on WhatsApp," Archana Vohra, Director, Small and Medium Business, India at Meta, said in a statement.

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is adding a new Slack-like "@everyone" functionality that will notify all participants in a chat about a new message. When you start a message with @everyone, all participants in the chat will be notified. @everyone is perfect for group reminders, impromptu get-togethers or when you need to gather the braintrust to crowdsource an answer to a time-sensitive question.

Meta-owned encrypted messaging service WhatsApp is reportedly working on a new feature that will allow users to share bigger-sized files and media with others over their platform. According to a WABetaInfo report, WhatsApp will soon start testing the "Media File Size" feature in Argentina which will allow users to share media files up to 2GB in size. The feature will initially be limited to Beta testers in Argentina.

The ACCC alleged that Meta aided and abetted or was knowingly concerned in false or misleading conduct and representations by the advertisers. "The essence of our case is that Meta is responsible for these ads that it publishes on its platform," the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chair Rod Sims said in a statement late on Friday.

 Meta (formerly Facebook) has announced to start showing people in Ukraine a message at the top of feed to connect them to high-quality, timely information to stay safe, find family and friends, and locate support services like housing and immigration assistance.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will soon arrive on Instagram. Addressing one of the sessions at the South By Southwest event late on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that "over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment".