Internet & Websites - Page 6

The Russian government has announced it will soon be ending Instagram throughout Russia in a move that bans the social media service of all Russians.

Russia's communications agency Roskomnadzor claimed in its announcement that Instagram moderators have allowed for content that encourages violence towards Russian soldiers depending on where they originated from. The announcement from the Russian government comes only a week after it announced Facebook was banned, citing "discrimination against Russian media".

Adam Mosseri, a former executive at Facebook and current head of Instagram, tweeted out about the announcement, writing that 80 million Russians won't be able to communicate with each other once the ban has taken place, going on to describe the decision as "wrong". According to a report from Russian state-owned media Novosti, the ban will take effect on March 14 and won't apply with Meta's encrypted messaging app "What's App".

Facebook pressed the big red button inside of Mark Zuckerberg's offices a few weeks ago, right in front of Zuck's duct-tape-covered front-facing webcam (screw your privacy, not his) when it rebranded itself amid non-stop chaos to Meta.

The rebranding to Meta saw the Facebook-owned Instagram blocking the account of the user with the handle @metaverse, out of nowhere and with no explanation. The owner of the @metaverse handle on Instagram is Australian artist Thea-Mai Baumann, who had her Instagram account banned once Meta stepped into the world.

Baumann told The New York Times after her @metaverse account on Instagram was snuffed: "This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet. That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time".

President Donald Trump has announced that he is launching a new social media network, which will be a direct competitor to Facebook -- at least we can call it Facebook for now, which has stepped in multiple big piles of sh*t over the last few months (years) and will be rebranded next week -- and Twitter: TRUTH Social.

TRUTH Social will be competing with whatever Facebook rebrands itself in emergency meetings next week, with President Trump announcing Trump Media & Technology Group and Digital World Acquisition Corp. have entered into a definitive merger agreement that makes TMTG into a publicly listed company, subject to regulatory and stockholder approval.

The new social network "TRUTH Social" will be rolling out nationwide in Q1 2022, with President Donald J. Trump, Chairman of TMTG explaining: "I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon".

Facebook is preparing for a huge rebranding with a change to the company name to be announced next week, according to the very latest rumors.

The company will change its name and talk about its focus on building the metaverse, "according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter" reports The Verge. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will talk at the company's annual Connect conference on October 28, but we could hear about the rebrand sooner than that.

The new name for Facebook isn't known widely within the company according to The Verge, which says that the new name is a "closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership". One of the names being thrown around is "Horizon".

Can you imagine a world where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey actually purchased the Facebook.com domain out from Facebook... well, Dorsey did question "how much?" would it cost in a teaser tweet.

Dorsey didn't expect the tweet to blow up so much, where at the time of writing there had been over 72,000+ likes on the tweet and close to 5,000 quote tweets and 18,500+ retweets. Dorsey posted the picture of the Facebook.com domain up for sale, which I reported about below, and simply tweeted "how much?"

Once the tweet from Dorsey blew up, the Twitter CEO linked to his SoundCloud with a track by Kanye West titled "Off The Grid". I don't know if that's a warning... off the grid meaning the supply of electricity is usually cut, and you're surviving off the grid -- no water, electricity, etc. Weird.

Signal is still up, and is currently welcoming everyone to their app in the dark times that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are experiencing right now.

The company took to Twitter, tweeting: "Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it's like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays".

If you don't know about Signal, it's a cross-platform centralized encrypted messaging app, for the desktop, and mobile with iOS and Android apps. You can download Signal here. I'm sure Signal is going to be receiving a helluva lot of new users right now, with billions of people unable to use Messenger and WhatsApp right now.

You have probably heard by now that Facebook is down, and with it Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Well, it goes from bad to worse to epic bad with their domains now up for sale.

We don't know exactly what has caused Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to go dark but the DNS A and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been "nuked". The actual Facebook.com domain was for sale, with a third-party that doesn't own Facebook.com listing the website on Uniregistry.com.

Don't worry, Facebook.com isn't being sold -- at least for now. The listing for Facebook.com is just another coincidence, and I guess a chuckle, at the mess Zuck and his crew are swimming through right now. The listing for Facebook.com has been removed, with a GoDaddy spokesperson confirming the domain was removed from sale not too long ago now.

I've been writing for the last few hours as it's been happening in real-time about Facebook going down, and bringing with it Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. But at the same time, #DeleteFacebook was trending on Twitter alongside #FacebookDown.

As I went to take a screenshot for the article, #DeleteFacebook disappeared from Twitter's trending list for me, but you can easily search for the hashtag separately on Twitter and see thousands of people tweeting out about #DeleteFacebook.

It should come as no surprise if you consider Facebook is down just as a whistleblower exposes the company and some of its darker side, over 1.5 billion Facebook users' data up for sale on a hacker forum, and the fact that the entire service and its owned apps -- Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp -- are all down right now.

Update: A Telegram representative reached out to me, to clarify: "Only a handful of users are affected. These affected users are mostly seeing a slowdown and some notification issues. Our distributed service means that Telegram can remain stable globally even when there are issues in some regions".

Telegram is joining in on the party in the dark, hanging out with fellow outage members in Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

DownDetector tweeted out that there are many users experiencing issues with Telegram, with plenty of people tweeting in with issues using Telegram. I'm using it here on the desktop on Windows and it's fine, and my phone is fine for now, but I did have issues about an hour ago (at the time of writing).

Facebook has gone dark and with it taken its services including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp -- across desktop, web, and mobile apps. But it seems TikTok is joining the outages, too.

TikTok is down for what seems like most people, with DownDetector showing that TikTok is experiencing issues right now and plenty of people on Twitter are tweeting that TikTok is down right now. I can access it here from Australia on the desktop but mobile is having issues for me right now.

I guess this isn't the end of whatever is happening right now, but Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are just lights off right now. TikTok seems very unstable, but there are lots of people who seem to not be having any issues right now. This is all happening in real-time, so let us know in the comments... if you're able to, if TikTok is down for you.

Facebook is down right now across the planet, as well as Facebook-owned services including Instagram and WhatsApp... but hours before, at the start of the day, Facebook stock started plunging.

The price of Facebook stock started dropping because over the Facebook whistleblower in an interview with 60 Minutes that the social media giant puts "profits over people". Frances Haugen, who was the former product manager at Facebook revealed herself as the whistleblower behind the leak to The Wall Street Journal.

Haugen said that Facebook knew it was creating a dark online environment for teenage girls and said that Facebook used different rules for VIP accounts and that the social media giant also had a hand in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building. Haugen said: "There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests like making more money".

I'm sitting here at 2:30AM here in South Australia and then I noticed that Facebook wasn't working on the desktop for me, and thinking I had networking issues tried to do a few things before I realized it wasn't just me.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all down worldwide right now, with Facebook owning Instagram and WhatsApp. All of these services are completely dead right now, with the desktop Facebook website not working, while the app remains wobbly at best.

The outage is suspicious AF with Frances Haugen revealed her identity as the Facebook whistleblower, showing documents that the Mark Zuckerberg-led social networking giant prioritized "growth over safety" and then bam, Facebook is down worldwide.

It has been 9 months since the world banned President Trump from virtually every platform in the planet, and now President Trump has asked a Florida judge to force Twitter to reinstate his Twitter account.

President Trump's Twitter account was banned after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, when people were ushered in by Capitol Police. Trump's attorneys filed a motion in US District Court in Miami, where they seek a preliminary injunction against not just Twitter, but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Twitter, ever-so-vocal when they banned Trump, didn't comment on Trump's filing on Saturday. Back in July, President Trump filed lawsuits with the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida against not just Twitter, but Facebook and Google as well -- also not just the companies, but their respective CEOs, too.

If you're under 14 years of age and in China, you've just had your time limit per day of using TikTok to 40 minutes per day. Beijing is cracking down on "internet addiction" by putting these hardcore time limits on children playing games, and using social media.

The Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, can only be used between the hours of 6am and 10pm for anyone under 14 years old in China. So not only do they have 40 minutes per day as a time limit, but they only have between 6am and 10pm to use it -- after that, it's inaccessible.

It might sound crazy, but there are over 600 million daily active users (DAUs) using Doujin in China... so imagine how many millions of underage users will be affected by this. ByteDance, the parent company that owns TikTok, has said that parents could "help their children complete the process in order to enter youth mode".

Facebook has found itself in another mess, this one being one of the most under-reported, and one of the worst stories from the Mark Zuckerberg-led social media network.

In a new report by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has been well aware of a massive human trafficking service on its platform and has done nothing about it. Apple got a little mad at Facebook over it at least, threatening to pull the Facebook app from its App Store after a 2019 report from the BBC said that human traffickers were selling people using Facebook.

Selling people on Facebook. Just thought I'd repeat that.

Did you know Google paid $10 billion to Apple in 2020 to stay on as their default search engine? If you didn't, it should blow your mind 50% more knowing that Google is paying $15 billion to Apple in 2021 to continue as the default search engine on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

In a new investor note seen by Ped30, Bernstein analysts estimate that Google will be paying Apple a huge $15 billion in 2021 to remain as the default search engine... but somewhere between $18 billion and $20 billion for the rights in 2022.

Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi notes that Google is probably splashing the cash to "ensure Microsoft doesn't outbid it". The analysts continue:

An Amazon delivery truck has been caught on video veering of the I-45 highway in Texas to seemingly by-pass bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The video was posted on TikTok by Camihardman and has since been viewed more than 13.7 million times. The video shows an Amazon delivery truck driving straight off the highway, over the grass, and reportedly through a shortcut to avoid the traffic. One user said, "I'd be the car behind. Truck drivers know what's up and I'd trust him to get us to a faster route."

Most of the people that have commented on the video are poking fun at Amazon and its delivery service, with one user saying, "We're sorry to inform you your package has been dela... will be arriving earlier than expected." The video also shows another vehicle following the road the truck was following. It should be noted that the creator of the video mentioned that she saw "probably 10 cars do it before them".

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke at length about something called the "metaverse" during Facebook's second-quarter earnings call.

According to Investorplace.com, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned "metaverse" sixteen different times throughout the earnings call and even stated that he expects the public perception of Facebook being a "social media company" to transition to Facebook being seen as a "metaverse company". So, what is a metaverse, and why does Zuckerberg want to lean Facebook in that direction?

Essentially a metaverse is a collection of interactive virtual worlds that users will be able to enter and interact with each other in. Within these worlds or shared 3D virtual spaces, users will be able to do everything they can do in real life, plus more. The word metaverse is usually described as a conceptual future version of the internet where everyone connects with each other via virtual reality.

A man that has decided to remain anonymous has spoken out about his experience working as a content moderator at Facebook.

The bombshell interview appeared on VICE at the end of last month, and it shows a man wearing a mask discussing what it was like working as a content moderator at Facebook. The ex-employee says that his job is basically removing any content that breaks community guidelines, so Facebook users don't have to see it. The ex-Facebook employee goes on to say he spent eight hours a day looking at "all the worst things that people post online so that you don't have to see it."

Throughout the interview, the man explains that he originally didn't believe in post-traumatic-stress-disorder or PTSD and that he thought it was just a thing for useless people, but after experiencing at least "five to ten percent" of "traumatizing" images and videos, he began to feel the effects. "You remember some image that you had seen, and you suddenly realize there was a naked girl on one side - or an ISIS flag in the background, so now it should have been deleted under the terrorism policy", he explained.

The Biden administration is moving towards recruiting many online personalities in an effort to get a message out to people aged between twelve and eighteen.

According to a report from The New York Times, the White House is currently recruiting many online influencers on TikTok, YouTube and Twitch to raise awareness about COVID-19 vaccines. The individuals who are apart of the program have been selected based on their large follower counts, as the Times was in contact with an influencer who received inquiries from a White House marketing agency and said there was "a massive need to grow awareness within the 12-18 age range."

The report also states that state and local governments are moving towards the same kind of programs, but with local influencers and prominent online figures. These moves by the United States government are an example of the administration acknowledging the power social media and the impact prominent figures in the space can have on younger generations. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.