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Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) nearly $1 billion to keep a case out of court that could break up his social media empire. Zuckerberg sat for a third day of testimony on Wednesday in an antitrust case brought against his company by the FTC, which is attempting to force Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp over what the government has said are Meta’s anticompetitive business practices. Zuckerberg called the head of the FTC, Chairman Andrew Ferguson, in March to try to settle the case out of court. Zuckerberg initially offered the...

A high-ranking Hollywood talent agent for stars including Justin Timberlake and Matthew McConaughey reportedly texted “Screw the left kill all” in reaction to the recent murder of six Israeli hostages by the Hamas terrorist organization. Brandt Joel, a top agent at WME, sent and then deleted the text to a WhatsApp group that contains other WME employees but isn’t officially affiliated with the company, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter. The WhatsApp group appeared to be for expressing pro-Israel sentiments.

The New York Times said it took disciplinary action against a reporter who acknowledged leaking data about a WhatsApp group chat for Jewish business people that led to its members being doxxed and harassed by activists sympathetic to Palestinians. Natasha Frost, a Times reporter who was based in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year, downloaded and shared 900 pages of content from the private WhatsApp chat that was launched by Jewish professionals in response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 Israelis. Frost acknowledged to the Wall Street Journal that she shared the...

London (PTI) -- Anjem Choudary, a radical Islamist preacher with dual British and Pakistani nationality, was on Tuesday jailed for life with a minimum term of 28 years behind bars by a UK court for directing a terrorist organisation.Choudary, 57, had been found guilty at Woolwich Crown Court of directing Al-Muhajiroun (ALM) and encouraging support for the proscribed organisation through online meetings. Sentencing him at the same court to a prison term means he would be in his 80s by the time he can seek parole. Justice Mark Wall told Choudary his behaviour was of the “highest culpability”. “Organisations such...

Gasp! Politico has uncovered a corner of the Web that as of yet remains uncensored and thus allows unapproved messages to reach people. This is simply intolerable, at least from the Politico POV as presented by their tech policy reporter Rebecca Kern on Friday in "WhatsApp Channels, used by millions, has no clear election rules." Yes, we humble prols need rules, rules, RULES to guide us on how to think and to steer us away from dangerous ThoughtCrimes in this election year.

Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2 My favorite part of the Trump raid search warrant:

Ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell will join her beleaguered husband Christian Horner at the Bahrain Grand Prix today in a show of solidarity after leaked text messages rocked Formula One. Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner broke cover at the Grand Prix on Saturday morning with no sign of his wife Geri Halliwell after his wife found out the texts were leaked as she was flying in a private jet. Halliwell, 51, and her husband, 50, had breathed a collective sigh of relief on Wednesday when Red Bull cleared Horner of inappropriate behaviour allegations which were made by a female employee....

On Thursday, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez launched a major legal offensive in an attempt to address the online risks faced by minors. The lawsuit targeted Meta Platforms, Inc., its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and associated entities such as Instagram, LLC and Facebook Holdings, LLC. This bold action seeks to prevent the exploitation of children on social media platforms. “Our investigation into Meta’s social media platforms demonstrates that they are not safe spaces for children but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex,” Attorney General Torrez said in a statement. “As a career...

Hunter Biden's lawyer has blasted the account of an IRS whistleblower who testified about a WhatsApp message where he appeared to threaten a Chinese businessman and claiming to be seated with his powerful father. Lawyer Chris Clark, who negotiated a plea agreement on Hunter's behalf with the Justice Department, called the whistleblower 'biased' and claimed the account covered 'a time of turmoil and addiction' for the president's son. He also disputed the veracity of Hunter's claim about now-President Biden in the WhatsApp message, saying his words have 'no connection to anyone in his family.' 'An extensive, five-year-long investigation conducted by...

That anonymous internet persona with an anime cartoon avatar in your Discord chat might actually be a contractor sent to spy on you. Enter the world of “threat intelligence.” It’s the term of art for a growing set of surveillance and security firms that create fake online personas to infiltrate and scrape data from private corners of the internet. The industry provides corporate and government clients with insight into conversations on private, invite-only Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums, and dark web message boards to help those powerful customers keep tabs on a variety of potential threats, from political hacktivists...

Twitter CEO Elon Musk warned users of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp that it is secretly accessing their device microphones without their knowledge and violating their privacy. Twitter’s director of engineering, Foad Dabri, posted a photo documenting his WhatsApp timeline which showed Zuckerberg’s messaging app was accessing his phone’s mic while he was asleep. Elon Musk responded to the tweet, simply stating, “WhatsApp cannot be trusted.” The WhatsApp Company later responded to the Twitter post claiming it had reached out to the Twitter engineer about the issue. As expected, the company would not accept any blame and attempted to write the issue...

Newly-released communications between the Biden administration and Meta show an effort to crack down on so-called "vaccine-skeptical" content shared on the private communications platform WhatsApp. Independent journalist David Zweig reported on Friday that the White House went beyond Twitter to curb COVID-related posts. Emails obtained through discovery from the ongoing Missouri v Biden legal battle show email exchanges from the White House to the tech giant began just days after President Biden took office. Zweig stressed that unlike Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, WhatsApp is an encrypted direct messaging platform, Citing Meta, "90% of WhatsApp...

I formed a Neighborhood Watch group and now need a messaging app. The police rep. mentioned WhatsApp but supposedly some people are moving away from it to Signal. Not knowing anything about social media I need some advice, our group already has Facebook which I don't have, don't do, and can't even seem to get, and someone else handles that Facebook account and it isn't used much by them I'm told. My first instinct is to use Signal, but I'm really in the dark about these things and once I sign-up someone else will be doing the mass communications on...

Facebook parent company Meta has announced it will be implementing a ‘fact checking’ service in its messaging platform WhatsApp, in order to counter so-called ‘fake news’ during the upcoming French presidential election. The move is part of the company’s efforts to tackle so-called ‘fake news’ during the upcoming French presidential election, with the Silicon Valley giant also announcing new anti-disinfo measures for its Instagram and Facebook platforms. Facebook has also promised that it will make “significant efforts to combat the dissemination of false information” on its platforms, saying that it will “remove content” that violates the company’s “Community Standards”, Also...

Meta Platforms which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is seeing its stock go into freefall. The shares were more than 22% in lower in premarket trading Thursday. If the shares finish more than 18.96% lower in regular trading in the day ahead, it will be the worst one-day plunge for the stock in the company’s history. While sales came in ahead of estimates, earnings were weaker than expected and the group’s guidance was truly dismal: Revenue is expected to come in between $27 billion and $29 billion in the current quarter. Representing comparatively anemic annual growth of 3% to 11%,...

FACEBOOK, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for seven hours in a major global outage yesterday – but why? Here's a quick guide on what actually happened to take three of the world's biggest websites and apps offline. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/16328655/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-crashed/ In 2021, it's easy to wonder how huge chunks of the internet can go offline. But it's surprisingly easy for outages to happen – due to how the internet works. World wide web Every website – including Facebook – exists on a computer server somewhere. So when you want to log on to Facebook.com, you have to connect to one of Facebook's...

Without warning, Facebook crashed on Monday morning.It’s unclear what caused today’s global outage which saw Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all crash.The shutdown comes after a former Facebook product manager turned “whistleblower” leaked tens of thousands of internal documents published in a blockbuster series of reports published by The Wall Street Journal.Facebook executives admit in the internal memos that Zuckerberg “hobbled” America to get vaccinated, facilitates human trafficking and that the company’s subsidiary, Instagram, is harmful to teenagers among the trove of damning information leaked.However, the whistleblower, 37-year old data scientist Frances Haugen who led Facebook’s Civic Integrity and Misinformation Group...

Facebook is down, and not in a minor way. The Big Tech mammoth is down worldwide in a way in which they will not be able to easily recover as the DNS A and AAA records have been deleted. Technically speaking, facebook.com is now for sale. They’re not alone. Instagram, WhatsApp, and others have also been affected in the same way. It’s clearly a coordinated attack on a massive scale, though it’s unclear how it was pulled off. We’re not talking about a simple DDoS attack. This is catastrophic and would have required high-level access to certain protocols that one...

Users reported having issues accessing Facebook apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook itself on the website Downdetector, which tracks outages and issues across various websites and services. The issues began around 11:45 a.m. ET on Monday, according to user reports on Downdetector. They appeared to affect users in many countries around the world. In a tweet addressing the outage, Facebook said, "We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." Instagram also addressed the outage on Twitter,...

Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp? Posted on August 15, 2021 by prestonbyrne In the middle of a conflict, good analysis is hard to come by. Because adversaries do not telegraph their plans to one another, plans depend greatly on the fact patterns surrounding their execution, and no human mind can possibly observe, much less comprehend, the movements of all players on the battlefield, the prosecution of wars, no matter how meticulously planned and no matter how eminently credentialed the planners, frequently defies the will of the planners. This phenomenon is known as the “Fog of War,” a...