Facebook parent Meta’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday revealed a startling statistic: For the first time ever, the company’s growth is stagnating around the world. Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021, to 1.93 billion logging in each day.
WhatsApp users are receiving an in-app notice regarding the service’s new terms and privacy policy. Among the updates, the messaging service has updated its terms regarding the data of users. These changes will go into effect on February 8th, and users will have no choice but to accept these changes if they wish to continue using WhatsApp.
Pakistan along with Russia and Mexico accounted for almost half of global Facebook content removal requests. A total of 15,826 content restrictions were made by Facebook globally during July-December 2019. Facebook restricted 2,300 items within Pakistan (the second highest after Russia with 2,900 pieces removed) during the second half of 2019. In the first half, Pakistan had reported the highest volume of content (31 per cent) to Facebook.
Facebook said it was shutting its London office and part of its Singapore base for “deep cleaning” after an employee in the Asian city-state was diagnosed with coronavirus. A staff member working at the US technology giant’s Marina One office in Singapore was on Friday diagnosed with COVID-19. Facebook has already closed its Shanghai office until further notice, while employees in Italy and South Korea have been encouraged to work from home.
Facebook has agreed to expedite information sharing with Pakistani authorities in connection with investigations in cyber crime cases. A team from Facebook’s Asia Pacific headquarters visited the office of Director General Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Wajid Zia to discuss issues of cooperation and data sharing between FIA and Facebook. The two teams discussed mutual collaboration and cooperation in data sharing as well as cyber crime awareness among social media users in Pakistan.
Short-video platform, TikTok has dethroned Facebook to become the second most downloaded app in the world behind WhatsApp. Since launching in 2017, the app has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times. Recently the app hit 1.5 billion downloads worldwide, outperforming Instagram. Anyone with a smartphone can use TikTok to tell their own story in under 60 seconds.
Earlier this week Brazil announced to fine Facebook $1.6 million for privacy breach. According to the Consumer Protection department of the ministry, that information of 443,000 people had been shared with one of the apps called “thisisyourdigitallife”. The ministry claims that the data was shared with the app for very concerning reasons.
Facebook, in an attempt to become self-sufficient, has announced that the company is working on an operating system (OS) of its own- built completely from scratch, according to the company’s executive, Ficus Kirkpatrick. The social media giant has kept the release date of the OS under the wraps for now, however, Facebook might also be working on some hardware running the new OS in the near future.
Facebook removed the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Karachi chapter’s official page from its platform, allegedly over the party’s promotion of its Kashmir March to be held on December 22. According to Ameer JI Karachi Naeem ur Rehman , the accounts admins of the page had also been banned following the page’s removal. Naeem-ur-Rehman took to twitter to register his protest saying Facebook cannot suppress their right of free speech in support of Kashmiris.
Facebook says that Islamophobic posts distributed through a clandestine network of far-right pages meet its “community standards”. It was alleged that an Israel-based group had gained access to at least 21 far-right Facebook pages to hate targeting Muslims. Despite revelations that the pages are part of a coordinated scheme profiting from hate and disinformation, Facebook told users that the posts were acceptable.