Reddit won’t interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans
Reddit is staying out of the current revolt against social media website X and, to a lesser degree, Meta, on its platform.
Since Tuesday, hundreds of subreddits have discussed and/or implemented bans against the site formerly called Twitter, as reported by 404 Media. Dozens of subreddits have already agreed to disallow the sharing of any links to X, with moderators (volunteer Reddit users) agreeing to enforce the bans.
The trend seemed to start among subreddits focused on sports-related topics, like the subreddits for the NFL, the Vancouver Canucks NHL team, and the Liverpool Football Club, as reported by Mashable. However, as of today, subreddits of various topics are discussing X bans. Reddit users in support of X bans like the one instituted by r/londonontario have pointed to various reasoning, including not being able to see tweet links without having an X account, Elon Musk appearing to make a Nazi salute at the presidential inauguration on Monday (as cited by r/Christianity’s and r/newjersey’s bans, for example), and general dislike for Musk and/or how he runs X.
Yesterday, the mods of r/Seahawks, for example, enacted a rule that bans sharing links to X but allows X videos that aren’t AI-generated, per a post from one of the subreddit’s moderators yesterday:
… we feel that social media platform owners and investors have a responsibility to remain out of the political, social and economic media forum for the benefit and neutrality of they’re [sic] business and services they provide. The internet has never been a place of free speech and it never will be. We are all accountable for things we do and say. We would hope you all understand the dynamics of this decision and stay to talk Seahawks football.
Reddit won’t interfere
Ars Technica reached out to Reddit for a response to X bans and whether such bans could be interpreted as breaking any of Reddit’s rules. Reddit users will recall that when moderators were recently viewed by Reddit as breaking Reddit rules at scale (by making subreddits read-only or private in protest of Reddit’s new API access rules and pricing), Reddit responded by removing moderators that refused to re-open protesting subreddits. This time, though, moderators’ actions are aboveboard.
Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future
Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.”
Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to “move out low performers faster” so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.
“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management,” Zuckerberg said. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
Cuts will likely impact more than 3,600 employees, as Meta’s most recent headcount in September totaled about 72,000 employees. It may not be as straightforward as letting go anyone with an unsatisfactory performance review, as Zuckerberg said that any employee not currently meeting expectations could be spared if Meta is “optimistic about their future performance,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Any employees affected will be notified by February 10 and receive “generous severance,” Zuckerberg’s memo promised.
This is the biggest round of cuts at Meta since 2023, when Meta laid off 10,000 employees during what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency.” Those layoffs followed a prior round where 11,000 lost their jobs and Zuckerberg realized that “leaner is better.” He told employees in 2023 that a “surprising result” from reducing the workforce was “that many things have gone faster.”
“A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2023. “People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible.”
Elon Musk could be China’s pick to buy TikTok, report says
TikTokers could also flock to YouTube, which remains one of the most profitable platforms for creators on the planet. But that would surely rile some YouTube users who dislike YouTube Shorts clogging up the homepage.
Rather than move to a popular US app, however, many contrarian TikTokers are eyeing other Chinese-owned apps, including ByteDance-owned Lemon8. Both Lemon8 and an app owned by another Chinese company called Xiaohongshu—which Americans know as Red Note—reached the top two spots in Apple’s App Store rankings Monday, Business Insider reported.
On Red Note, TikTokers are gathering under a hashtag, “TikTokrefugee,” The New York Times reported. As of Tuesday, the hashtag had been viewed more than 100 million times and referenced in 2.5 million comments.
According to a Times review of TikTok videos, TikTokers said they were moving to Red Note because “they wanted to show they do not share Washington’s concerns about TikTok’s ties to China.” But TikTokers could be in for a rude awakening if TikTok is banned and the Chinese-owned app they choose as their new home quickly becomes the next app to be blocked in the US within a few months.
Under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that would force TikTok’s sale or require a ban, any “foreign adversary controlled” social media app with more than 1 million monthly active users could be banned. ByteDance and TikTok are both singled out by the law, meaning any meaningful spike in US users on other ByteDance apps would likely trigger scrutiny.
It’s unclear if Red Note would be as easily targeted by the government, but any Chinese-owned social media app that meets very basic requirements—allowing more than a million monthly active users to share content that can be viewed by others—could potentially be banned if the Supreme Court upholds the law.
An analyst at the market research company Emarketer, Jasmine Enberg, told The Independent that TikTokers recommending apps like Lemon8 “may not be aware of the possible implications for the other ByteDance apps because the law does not identify them.”
Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg
And perhaps in a nod to Meta’s recent changes, Mastodon also vowed to “invest deeply in trust and safety” and ensure “everyone, especially marginalized communities,” feels “safe” on the platform.
To become a more user-focused paradise of “resilient, governable, open and safe digital spaces,” Mastodon is going to need a lot more funding. The blog called for donations to help fund an annual operating budget of $5.1 million (5 million euros) in 2025. That’s a massive leap from the $152,476 (149,400 euros) total operating expenses Mastodon reported in 2023.
Other social networks wary of EU regulations
Mastodon has decided to continue basing its operations in Europe, while still maintaining a separate US-based nonprofit entity as a “fundraising hub,” the blog said.
It will take time, Mastodon said, to “select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe” before Mastodon can then “determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability.”
While Mastodon is carefully getting re-settled as a nonprofit in Europe, Zuckerberg this week went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to call on Donald Trump to help US tech companies fight European Union fines, Politico reported.
Experts told France24 that EU officials may “perhaps wrongly” already be fearful about ruffling Trump’s feathers by targeting his tech allies and would likely need to use the “full legal arsenal” of EU digital laws to “stand up to Big Tech” once Trump’s next term starts.
As Big Tech prepares to continue battling EU regulators, Mastodon appears to be taking a different route, laying roots in Europe and “establishing the appropriate governance and leadership frameworks that reflect the nature and purpose of Mastodon as a whole” and “responsibly serve the community,” its blog said.
“Our core mission remains the same: to create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms, or corporate monopolies,” Mastodon’s blog said.
The stage is set! Advertisers, don’t miss this cultural moment. ADWEEK House The Big Game is headed to New Orleans on February 7. RSVP.
In a move seen by some as an olive branch to President-elect Donald Trump, Meta said Tuesday that it will scrap the third-party fact-checking program that has been in place since 2016 in the U.S. in favor of a Community Notes initiative, resembling that used on X (formerly Twitter).
Joel Kaplan—who was promoted to chief global affairs officer, the company’s most senior policy role, last week, replacing the outgoing Nick Clegg—said in a blog post that the aim is to provide context from “people across a diverse range of perspectives.” Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users, with Meta having no part in the process or in determining which ones appear. The blog post detailed other changes that were made to how the platform handles high and low severity violations.
“The reality is, this is a tradeoff,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an accompanying video. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
“I think it’s safe to say no one predicted that Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter would become a trend that other tech platforms would follow, and yet here we are,” Damian Rollison, director of market insights at artificial intelligence platform SOCi, told ADWEEK. “We can see now in retrospect that Musk established a standard for a newly conservative approach to the loosening of online content moderation—one that Meta has now embraced in advance of the incoming Trump administration.”
Meta is also removing restrictions on civic content in topics like gender, gender identity, and immigration across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, as well as throttling back changes the company introduced in 2021 to reduce the amount of political content users see.
The Trump effect
Reactions across the industry tie Meta’s policy change directly to Trump’s election victory.
Journalist, podcast host, and political commentator Saagar Enjeti said of Zuckerberg’s video, “I highly recommend that you watch all of it, as tonally, it is one of the biggest indications of ‘elections have consequences’ I have ever seen.”
“The move will elate conservatives, who have often criticized Meta for censoring speech, but it will spook many liberals and advertisers, showing just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go to win Trump’s approval,” Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an email.
The shift started nearly one full year before the vote, with Meta reversing its ban on ads questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in which current President Joe Biden held off Trump’s bid for a second term.
Kaplan debuted Zuckerberg’s video in an appearance on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, The New York Times reported, adding that officials in the incoming administration were alerted about the changes before Tuesday’s announcement.
In the weeks since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has met with Trump and potential secretary of state appointee Marco Rubio at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.; donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund; promoted Republican Party ally Kaplan; and added Trump ally Dana White, CEO of UFC, to the company’s board of directors.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an accountability organization not affiliated with the company, said the changes announced Tuesday represent Meta going “full MAGA” and “political pandering,” adding in a statement, “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation.”
Too many mistakes
However, Kaplan maintained that the motivation behind the move was cutting back on mistakes when content is erroneously removed, or when users find themselves in “Facebook jail” with little recourse and slow response times. Kaplan noted that while Meta removed “millions of pieces of content every day” in December 2024, representing under 1% of posts to its surfaces each day, it now believes “one to two out of every 10” removals were mistakes.
Kaplan said the goal of launching independent third-party fact-checking in 2016 was a desire by then-Facebook to avoid being “the arbiters of truth,” and it was the best solution at the time, but experts “have their own biases and perspectives,” which led to too much legitimate political speech and debate being fact-checked.
People can sign up via Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to be in the first group of Community Notes contributors, which Meta plans to phase in over the next two months in the U.S.
The bigger picture
The policy changes will be a blow to the researchers working to keep platforms accountable for what they host, journalist Jane Lytvynenko, who is currently reporting out of Kyiv, Ukraine, for The Wall Street Journal, posted on Bluesky.
But don’t expect an X-like advertiser exodus.
Enberg added, “Meta’s massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulates it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus. But any major drop-off in engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business, given the intense competition for users and ad dollars.”
Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term
Meta announced today that it’s ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what’s used on Elon Musk’s X platform.
The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political,” Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
Meta says the soon-to-be-discontinued fact-checking program includes over 90 third-party organizations that evaluate posts in over 60 languages. The US-based fact-checkers are AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch, and USA Today.
The independent fact-checkers rate the accuracy of posts and apply ratings such as False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire, and True. Meta adds notices to posts rated as false or misleading and notifies users before they try to share the content or if they shared it in the past.
Meta: Experts “have their own biases”
In the blog post that accompanied Zuckerberg’s video message, Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the 2016 decision to use independent fact-checkers seemed like “the best and most reasonable choice at the time… The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.”
La sentenza della Corte Ue sul caso Schrems-facebook
“La circostanza che Maximilian Schrems si sia espresso sul suo orientamento sessuale in occasione di una tavola rotonda pubblica non autorizza il gestore di una piattaforma di social network online a trattare altri dati relativi al suo orientamento sessuale ottenuti, se del caso, al di fuori di tale piattaforma, al fine di aggregarli e analizzarli per proporgli della pubblicità personalizzata”, così si legge nell’incipit della sentenza della Corte di Giustizia dell’Unione europea contro facebook del Gruppo Meta.
Il caso è stato sollevato dalla Corte suprema austriaca, che ha chiesto alla Corte di giustizia dell’Unione di interpretare il Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati (il Gdpr).
Il caso
Tutto nasce in occasione di una tavola rotonda aperta al pubblico, alla quale Schrems ha partecipato a Vienna il 12 febbraio 2019, su invito della rappresentanza della Commissione europea in Austria, dove l’interessato ha fatto riferimento al suo orientamento sessuale.
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Schrems intendeva in tal modo criticare il trattamento di dati personali effettuato da Facebook, tra cui il trattamento dei suoi propri dati. Questa tavola rotonda è stata diffusa in streaming e una registrazione è stata successivamente pubblicata sotto forma di «podcast», nonché sul canale YouTube della Commissione. Tuttavia, l’interessato non ha mai menzionato tale aspetto della sua vita privata nel suo profilo facebook.
Le motivazioni della sentenza
Secondo la Corte Ue, “la circostanza che una persona si sia espressa sul suo orientamento sessuale in occasione di una tavola rotonda pubblica non autorizza il gestore di una piattaforma di social network online a trattare altri dati relativi all’orientamento sessuale di tale persona ottenuti, se del caso, al di fuori di tale piattaforma a partire da applicazioni e siti Internet di partner terzi, ai fini di aggregarli e analizzarli per proporre a tale persona della pubblicità personalizzata”.
I giudici di Bruxelles, in questo caso, hanno applicato il principio della «minimizzazione dei dati», che vieta l’aggregazione, l’analisi e l’elaborazione di dati ai fini di pubblicità mirata ottenuti da piattaforme social.
Rimane da valutare se, in occasione della tavola rotonda, “il sig. Schrems abbia manifestamente reso pubblico il suo orientamento sessuale”, ma in questo caso, secondo il tribunale europeo, spetta alla Corte suprema austriaca verificarlo.
Circostanza che, tuttavia, si legge sempre nella sentenza, “non autorizza di per sé, il trattamento di altri dati personali relativi all’orientamento sessuale di tale persona”.
Anche il Dsa contro facebook
Anche perché la pubblicità online è ormai regolamentata dal Digital service act (Dsa), che mira a creare un nuovo equilibrio tra la tutela dei dati personali ed esigenze del mercato advertising.
Il phishing è una delle minacce informatiche più diffuse e pericolose che colpiscono utenti e aziende di tutto il mondo. Perché abbia successo, i criminali informatici creano copie perfette di siti web legittimi, inducendo le vittime a credere di trovarsi di fronte a una comunicazione autentica.
Nonostante la crescente consapevolezza e le campagne di sensibilizzazione, le tecniche si fanno sempre più sofisticate, il che spiega perché il phishing continui a mietere vittime, con danni economici e reputazionali importanti.
I giganti del web sono tra i bersagli principali di questi attacchi e, secondo un nuovo studio condotto da Kaspersky su 25 aziende globali di grande rilievo, nel 2024 Google, Facebook e Amazon sono stati i brand più frequentemente presi di mira da attacchi di phishing.
Nel 2024 l’incremento di attacchi è stato infatti quasi 1,5 volte superiore rispetto all’anno precedente.
La ricerca ha evidenziato che nella prima metà di quest’anno gli utenti di tutto il mondo hanno tentato di accedere a risorse false che imitavano questi brand quasi 26 milioni di volte, un aumento di quasi il 40% rispetto allo stesso periodo del 2023.
Gli esperti di Kaspersky attribuiscono questo forte aumento a una maggiore aggressività dei criminali informatici piuttosto che a una diminuzione della vigilanza degli utenti.
Secondo uno studio condotto da Kaspersky, Google, Facebook e Amazon sono stati i brand più frequentemente presi di mira da attacchi di phishing nel 2024.
Tra i brand analizzati, Google è risultato il più colpito, con oltre 4 milioni di tentativi di phishing bloccati dalle soluzioni di Kaspersky. Seguono Facebook, con circa 3,7 milioni di tentativi, e Amazon con circa 3 milioni.
Microsoft e DHL completano la top five con rispettivamente 2,8 e 2,6 milioni di tentativi. Altri brand come PayPal, Mastercard, Apple, Netflix e Instagram sono anch’essi tra i primi 10 obiettivi preferiti dai cybercriminali per il furto di credenziali e denaro nel 2024.
Gli attacchi contro Google sono aumentati del 243% nella prima metà del 2024 rispetto allo stesso periodo dell’anno precedente, facendo di Google uno degli obiettivi principali per i phisher. Mastercard ha registrato un incremento del 210% dei tentativi di furto di dati sensibili e denaro, seguita da Facebook e Netflix, entrambi con un raddoppio degli attacchi.
Olga Svistunova, esperta di sicurezza di Kaspersky, ha spiegato che il phishing contro Google è particolarmente preoccupante perché, ottenendo l’accesso a un account Gmail, i criminali possono accedere a una vasta gamma di altri servizi, rendendo Google un obiettivo privilegiato.
Il phishing contro Mastercard, d’altra parte, è aumentato in concomitanza con la proliferazione di falsi negozi online che simulano la vendita di beni e accettano pagamenti con presunte carte Mastercard.
Nonostante l’incremento generale, alcuni brand hanno registrato un calo nei clic sulle risorse di phishing. Microsoft, ad esempio, ha visto diminuire l’incidenza di questi attacchi, probabilmente grazie a una maggiore consapevolezza nelle organizzazioni. Anche DHL ha registrato un calo simile, un fenomeno osservato tra diversi brand nel settore trasporti e logistica.
Altri brand, pur non rientrando nella top 10, hanno visto crescere grandemente gli attacchi. HSBC, ad esempio, ha registrato un aumento di otto volte fino a 240.000 tentativi di phishing, ed eBay ha visto triplicare gli attacchi, superando i 300.000 casi. Airbnb, American Express e LinkedIn hanno registrato aumenti rispettivamente del 174%, 137% e 122%.
Per le aziende, è fondamentale identificare tempestivamente se il proprio brand sia stato preso di mira dai phisher. Kaspersky consiglia di monitorare regolarmente la presenza online del brand, informare i clienti sui canali ufficiali e segnalare tempestivamente alle autorità eventuali tentativi di phishing.
Queste misure, unite a una costante sensibilizzazione dei propri utenti, possono contribuire a ridurre l’efficacia di questi attacchi e a proteggere meglio i dati sensibili. L’industria della cybersicurezza deve dunque continuare a evolversi e a innovare per fronteggiare una minaccia che non mostra segni di rallentamento, mantenendo alta la guardia contro un nemico invisibile ma estremamente pericoloso.
RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine group can’t sue Meta for agreeing with CDC, judge rules
Enlarge/ Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Children’s Health Defense (CHD), an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has once again failed to convince a court that Meta acted as a state agent when censoring the group’s posts and ads on Facebook and Instagram.
In his opinion affirming a lower court’s dismissal, US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Miller wrote that CHD failed to prove that Meta acted as an arm of the government in censoring posts. Concluding that Meta’s right to censor views that the platforms find “distasteful” is protected by the First Amendment, Miller denied CHD’s requested relief, which had included an injunction and civil monetary damages.
“Meta evidently believes that vaccines are safe and effective and that their use should be encouraged,” Miller wrote. “It does not lose the right to promote those views simply because they happen to be shared by the government.”
CHD told Reuters that the group “was disappointed with the decision and considering its legal options.”
The group first filed the complaint in 2020, arguing that Meta colluded with government officials to censor protected speech by labeling anti-vaccine posts as misleading or removing and shadowbanning CHD posts. This caused CHD’s traffic on the platforms to plummet, CHD claimed, and ultimately, its pages were removed from both platforms.
However, critically, Miller wrote, CHD did not allege that “the government was actually involved in the decisions to label CHD’s posts as ‘false’ or ‘misleading,’ the decision to put the warning label on CHD’s Facebook page, or the decisions to ‘demonetize’ or ‘shadow-ban.'”
“CHD has not alleged facts that allow us to infer that the government coerced Meta into implementing a specific policy,” Miller wrote.
Instead, Meta “was entitled to encourage” various “input from the government,” justifiably seeking vaccine-related information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as it navigated complex content moderation decisions throughout the pandemic, Miller wrote.
Therefore, Meta’s actions against CHD were due to “Meta’s own ‘policy of censoring,’ not any provision of federal law,” Miller concluded. “The evidence suggested that Meta had independent incentives to moderate content and exercised its own judgment in so doing.”
None of CHD’s theories that Meta coordinated with officials to deprive “CHD of its constitutional rights” were plausible, Miller wrote, whereas the “innocent alternative”—”that Meta adopted the policy it did simply because” CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta “share the government’s view that vaccines are safe and effective”—appeared “more plausible.”
Meta “does not become an agent of the government just because it decides that the CDC sometimes has a point,” Miller wrote.
Equally not persuasive were CHD’s notions that Section 230 immunity—which shields platforms from liability for third-party content—”‘removed all legal barriers’ to the censorship of vaccine-related speech,” such that “Meta’s restriction of that content should be considered state action.”
“That Section 230 operates in the background to immunize Meta if it chooses to suppress vaccine misinformation—whether because it shares the government’s health concerns or for independent commercial reasons—does not transform Meta’s choice into state action,” Miller wrote.
One judge dissented over Section 230 concerns
In his dissenting opinion, Judge Daniel Collins defended CHD’s Section 230 claim, however, suggesting that the appeals court erred and should have granted CHD injunctive and declaratory relief from alleged censorship. CHD CEO Mary Holland told The Defender that the group was pleased the decision was not unanimous.
According to Collins, who like Miller is a Trump appointee, Meta could never have built its massive social platforms without Section 230 immunity, which grants platforms the ability to broadly censor viewpoints they disfavor.
It was “important to keep in mind” that “the vast practical power that Meta exercises over the speech of millions of others ultimately rests on a government-granted privilege to which Meta is not constitutionally entitled,” Collins wrote. And this power “makes a crucial difference in the state-action analysis.”
As Collins sees it, CHD could plausibly allege that Meta’s communications with government officials about vaccine-related misinformation targeted specific users, like the “disinformation dozen” that includes both CHD and Kennedy. In that case, it appears possible to Collins that Section 230 provides a potential opportunity for government to target speech that it disfavors through mechanisms provided by the platforms.
“Having specifically and purposefully created an immunized power for mega-platform operators to freely censor the speech of millions of persons on those platforms, the Government is perhaps unsurprisingly tempted to then try to influence particular uses of such dangerous levers against protected speech expressing viewpoints the Government does not like,” Collins warned.
He further argued that “Meta’s relevant First Amendment rights” do not “give Meta an unbounded freedom to work with the Government in suppressing speech on its platforms.” Disagreeing with the majority, he wrote that “in this distinctive scenario, applying the state-action doctrine promotes individual liberty by keeping the Government’s hands away from the tempting levers of censorship on these vast platforms.”
The majority agreed, however, that while Section 230 immunity “is undoubtedly a significant benefit to companies like Meta,” lawmakers’ threats to weaken Section 230 did not suggest that Meta’s anti-vaccine policy was coerced state action.
“Many companies rely, in one way or another, on a favorable regulatory environment or the goodwill of the government,” Miller wrote. “If that were enough for state action, every large government contractor would be a state actor. But that is not the law.”
https://arstechnica.com/?p=2042567
Meta risks sanctions over “sneaky” ad-free plans confusing users, EU says
Surprisingly, this step wasn’t taken under laws like the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Instead, the EC announced Monday that Meta risked sanctions under EU consumer laws if it could not resolve key concerns about Meta’s so-called “pay or consent” model.
Meta’s model is seemingly problematic, the commission said, because Meta “requested consumers overnight to either subscribe to use Facebook and Instagram against a fee or to consent to Meta’s use of their personal data to be shown personalized ads, allowing Meta to make revenue out of it.”
Because users were given such short notice, they may have been “exposed to undue pressure to choose rapidly between the two models, fearing that they would instantly lose access to their accounts and their network of contacts,” the EC said.
To protect consumers, the EC joined national consumer protection authorities, sending a letter to Meta requiring the tech giant to propose solutions to resolve the commission’s biggest concerns by September 1.
That Meta’s “pay or consent” model may be “misleading” is a top concern because it uses the term “free” for ad-based plans, even though Meta “can make revenue from using their personal data to show them personalized ads.” It seems that while Meta does not consider giving away personal information to be a cost to users, the EC’s commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders, apparently does.
“Consumers must not be lured into believing that they would either pay and not be shown any ads anymore, or receive a service for free, when, instead, they would agree that the company used their personal data to make revenue with ads,” Reynders said. “EU consumer protection law is clear in this respect. Traders must inform consumers upfront and in a fully transparent manner on how they use their personal data. This is a fundamental right that we will protect.”
Additionally, the EC is concerned that Meta users might be confused about how “to navigate through different screens in the Facebook/Instagram app or web-version and to click on hyperlinks directing them to different parts of the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy to find out how their preferences, personal data, and user-generated data will be used by Meta to show them personalized ads.” They may also find Meta’s “imprecise terms and language” confusing, such as Meta referring to “your info” instead of clearly referring to consumers’ “personal data.”
To resolve the EC’s concerns, Meta may have to give EU users more time to decide if they want to pay to subscribe or consent to personal data collection for targeted ads. Or Meta may have to take more drastic steps by altering language and screens used when securing consent to collect data or potentially even scrapping its “pay or consent” model entirely, as pressure in the EU mounts.
“Subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries,” Meta’s spokesperson told Ars. “Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and we are confident it complies with European regulation.”
Meta’s model is “sneaky,” EC said
Since last year, the social media company has argued that its “subscription for no ads” model was “endorsed” by the highest court in Europe, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
However, privacy advocates have noted that this alleged endorsement came following a CJEU case under the GDPR and was only presented as a hypothetical, rather than a formal part of the ruling, as Meta seems to interpret.
What the CJEU said was that “users must be free to refuse individually”—”in the context of” signing up for services—”to give their consent to particular data processing operations not necessary” for Meta to provide such services “without being obliged to refrain entirely from using the service.” That “means that those users are to be offered, if necessary for an appropriate fee, an equivalent alternative not accompanied by such data processing operations,” the CJEU said.
The nuance here may matter when it comes to Meta’s proposed solutions even if the EC accepts the CJEU’s suggestion of an acceptable alternative as setting some sort of legal precedent. Because the consumer protection authorities raised the action due to Meta suddenly changing the consent model for existing users—not “in the context of” signing up for services—Meta may struggle to persuade the EC that existing users weren’t misled and pressured into paying for a subscription or consenting to ads, given how fast Meta’s policy shifted.
Meta risks sanctions if a compromise can’t be reached, the EC said. Under the EU’s Unfair Contract Terms Directive, for example, Meta could be fined up to 4 percent of its annual turnover if consumer protection authorities are unsatisfied with Meta’s proposed solutions.
The EC’s vice president for values and transparency, Věra Jourová, provided a statement in the press release, calling Meta’s abrupt introduction of the “pay or consent” model “sneaky.”
“We are proud of our strong consumer protection laws which empower Europeans to have the right to be accurately informed about changes such as the one proposed by Meta,” Jourová said. “In the EU, consumers are able to make truly informed choices and we now take action to safeguard this right.”
