All posts tagged "Instagram"

Former FBI Director James Comey was given the Secret Service treatment usually reserved for "serious threats" after posting a seashell photo to Instagram with the numbers "86 47."

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the post captioned, "Cool shell formation on my beach walk," led to federal law enforcement surreptitiously tailing his car while agents tracked his cellphone.

Comey described the post as "silly" and said he was unaware of the meaning that MAGA ascribed to the numbers....

New reporting in The New York Times detailed a major "clash" at the Department of Justice over a Columbia University investigation that led to a rebellion on the part of prosecutors in the civil rights division.

Top DOJ official Emil Bove III launched the investigation into students who "barged into" a building at the Columbia-affiliated Barnard College in February, according to The Times. The students were protesting the expulsion of students accused of disrupting a “History of Modern Israel” class, during which a security guard was allegedly attacked.

The primary target was "one particular student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest," the report said. "Prodded by Mr. Bove, prosecutors in the civil rights division were told to obtain a membership list of the group. Investigators, however, pushed back on those instructions because they were skeptical such a list even existed, given the amorphous nature of online forums, and even if it did, scrutinizing people for their membership seemed like a possible violation of their First Amendment rights," according to The Times's sources....

CNN anchors Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner were nonplussed when reporting on extremely violent content accidentally showing up on Instagram feeds.

"Social media platform Meta apologizing for an error that resulted in flooding Instagram feeds with graphic content. For some users, they were suggested content that showed people being killed. I had to read this a few times to believe what I was saying. What's happened here?" Bolduan asked reporter Clare Duffy.

"Yeah, it's really disturbing," Duffy began. "People said that on their Instagram reels feed — the short form video feature — they were getting these videos that had sensitive content warnings, video showing people being maimed or killed — really violent, graphic content. And Meta said this was a 'glitch.' It's an error that it is fixing."...

MSNBC's Michael Steele raged at Meta's Mark Zuckerberg Sunday for doing away with fact-checking and allowing "suggestive comments" beneath the pictures of "young girls" on its platforms, among other questionable practices.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, announced last week that it would no longer fact check posts, essentially opening the floodgates for bigoted and inappropriate content. Zuckerberg's change in tactics is seen as a nod to President-elect Donald Trump and the GOP who claimed Meta fact-checking was biased against conservative content.

Steele, Symone Sanders-Townsend, and Alicia Menendez all expressed outrage as they read "permissible" posts from a leaked Meta training manual published by The Intercept. ...

When you use Facebook Messenger these days, a new prompt greets you with this come-on: "Ask Meta AI anything." You may have opened the app to send a text to a pal, but Meta's new artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot is tempting you with encyclopedic knowledge that's just a few keystrokes away. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has planted its home-grown chatbot on its WhatsApp and Instagram services. Now, billions of internet users can open one of these free social media platforms and draw on Meta AI's services as a dictionary, guidebook, counselor or illustrator, among many other tasks......

Washington (AFP) - A consortium of US states announced a joint probe Thursday of Instagram's parent company Meta for promoting the app to children despite allegedly knowing its potential for harm, in fresh regulatory trouble for the scandal-hit network. The social media giant is battling one of its most serious reputational crises yet after a whistleblower leaked reams of internal documents showing executives knew of their sites' risks for teens' well-being, prompting a renewed US push for regulation. "Facebook, now Meta, has failed to protect young people on its platforms and instead chose to......