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- Fox News personality (and former NFL reporter?) Michele Tafoya taking a strong stance against transparency, if you can believe!
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Fresh details from a mega-lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook’s parent company Meta just went public. And they’re not pretty.
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In late October, over three dozen state attorneys general filed a landmark lawsuit alleging that Meta purposefully engineered its platforms to turn children into social media addicts and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts. The legal complaint underpinning that lawsuit has now been unsealed. The legal filing states that the social media giant received millions of complaints of underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. This massive number of underage users was an “open secret” at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal corporate documents as evidence.
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On one internal email thread, employees discussed why a 12-year-old girl’s four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl’s mother who had reported her daughter’s age and requested her accounts be taken down. Employees concluded that “the accounts were ignored” because Meta representatives “couldn’t tell for sure” that the girl was underage, according to the lawsuit.
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The newly-unsealed complaint states that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of Instagram accounts of users under 13, but only disabled 164,000. The lawsuit notes that at times, Meta has had a backlog of up to 2.5 million accounts of underage users awaiting action. According to the complaint, this and other incidents violate the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, a statute which requires social media companies to provide notice and parental consent before collecting data from children.
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Meta has even more for which to answer related to protecting children.
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Instagram Reels is a video service designed to compete with TikTok to show users short videos based on subjects its algorithm decides will interest them. An investigation by The Wall Street Journal found that the algorithm continues to work this way even if the “subject” is a possible sexual interest in children. The Journal set up test accounts to follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders, and other teenage and preteen influencers on the platform, and found that Instagram’s algorithm began serving inappropriate videos of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos, intermixed with ads for some of the largest brands in the United States.
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The Journal began running these tests after observing that thousands of followers of young people/preteen accounts included vast numbers of adult men. Many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sexual content featuring both children and adults. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection separately ran similar tests and found similar results. Meta responded by saying that the Journal’s tests produced an unrepresentative, manufactured experience, and declined to comment on why the algorithms compiled these streams of videos showing children, sex, and advertisements. Meta’s own behavioral tracking has concluded that some Instagram users who follow preteen girls will want to engage with videos sexualizing children, and then its recommendation system directs that content to them. Preventing the system from doing this would require significant changes to the algorithm itself. Crooked contributor and Offline co-host Max Fisher (who literally wrote a book about the ways in which social media algorithms have wrought havoc on our society) had this to say: “This isn't some algorithmic quirk, it's core to how the platform works. Meta knows it, and they won't fix it.”
Current and former Meta employees told the Journal in interviews that this problem was known internally in the company. Meta’s safety staff flagged the risk of the algorithm linking videos of children with inappropriate content, but the company did not adopt their safety team’s recommendations. The company hasn’t offered a timetable for resolving the issue, nor has it explained how it might restrict such content from being promoted in the future.
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TODAY is the LAST day of our holiday sale! You have until midnight to snag that merch you’ve been eying all year and check some gifts off your list. Everything is 20% OFF. We haven’t been this excited since we first saw Trump’s mugshot! Head to crooked.com/store to shop now.
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Tuesday marked the fifth day of an extended pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas. Twelve hostages (nine Israeli women, one child, and two foreign nationals) were transferred to the custody of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday, according to a Qatari spokesperson. The Israel Defense Forces also confirmed the news, and the families of the hostages were informed that their loved ones had been returned to Israel. Thirty Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons were also released on Tuesday.
The Biden administration told Israeli officials that it must work to avoid “further displacement” of Palestinian civilians in southern Gaza if and when it resumes its ground campaign, senior U.S. officials told The Associated Press. Some two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million-person population have been displaced since October 7. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that the Israel Defense Forces will restart military operations after the conclusion of the temporary pause to continue swapping hostages for Palestinains held in Israeli prisons.
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Fulton County prosecutors overseeing the election interference case do not intend to offer plea deals to disgraced former president Donald Trump, his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, nor his former lawyer and man with the scariest teeth in America, Rudy Giuliani.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers informed the House Oversight Committee that he will testify on December 13 in response to their inquiry, but only if he can do so publicly.
The Koch Network (evil billionaires who want to destroy what little is left of the social safety net and ensure that the super wealthy and corporations pay as close to nothing in taxes as possible) endorsed Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley for president.
Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) became the third Senator to call for a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting have offered Infowars founder Alex Jones a deal to settle the $1.5 billion debt for just six percent of what he owes them, or $85 million over ten years—along with half of any income Jones earns over $9 million a year.
A Russian court extended the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for the third time since he was taken into custody in March on allegations of espionage. Gershkovich and the Journal vehemently deny the charges, as does the U.S. government.
Australia will ban disposable, single-use vape imports beginning in January, with the country’s health minister citing “disturbing” levels of youth nicotine addiction. The nation will lower its flag depicting a child furiously inhaling nicotine to half-mast.
Elon Musk endorsed the definitively-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory…can the U.S. government please stop giving him billions of dollars in contracts now?
President Biden, former president Bill Clinton, and all five living first ladies joined former president Jimmy Carter—who emerged from hospice care—at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral on Tuesday in Atlanta.
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Puerto Rico’s healthcare system is crumbling—and that’s having dire consequences for the island’s inhabitants. The U.S. territory has experienced a surge in deaths that reached historic proportions in 2022, according to a joint investigation between The Washington Post and Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism. Puerto Rico recorded 35,400 deaths last year, which was almost 3,300 more than experts would have predicted based on historic patterns. That was partly due to a covid spike, which killed 2,300 people. But elevated death rates continued for months after the wave of covid faded, suggesting a broader breakdown in the island’s medical system. In 2022, Puerto Rico experienced 110 deaths per 10,000 residents, a rate 10 percent higher than in the U.S. Part of the problem is that doctors and medical staffers have moved away from the island. Yet the analysis found that Puerto Rico’s leading killers include many illnesses that are potentially less lethal with medical care.
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