Media Perception Of Social Workers

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called Facebook a “cancer to democracy” in a tweet on Thursday shortly after the company announced that it was changing its corporate name to Meta to better represent its focus on building the metaverse . “Meta as in “we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!” said Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday . Meta as in “we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!” https://t.co/jzOcCFaWkJ — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 28, 2021 Ocasio-Cortez is one of Facebook’s loudest critics in Congress and has called the company a threat to democracy before. When lawmakers first started to critique Facebook’s market dominance in 2019 , she tweeted, “F...

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new name will be “Meta.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now, and is still closely linked to one product. “But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.” Zuckerberg owns the Twitter handle @meta (whose tweets are protected as of this writing) and meta.com , which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook outlining the changes. The site previously redirected to meta.org , a biomedical research discovery tool that was a project of the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative. That’s part of the...

The stickers appear in Stories posts, and can link out to external sites. | Image: Instagram Instagram’s link stickers, which let you include hyperlinks in Stories in the form of stickers, will now be available to everyone on the platform, the Facebook-owned social media network has announced. Instagram started testing link stickers in June , but until now the feature has been limited to verified accounts or accounts with a large number of followers. According to the social network, link stickers are useful for anyone from businesses linking out to their products to activists linking out to external resources. But Instagram concedes that anyone can benefit from link sharing to engage with their followers. It also says that accounts repeatedly sharing misinformation or hate speech will lose access. The successor to the swipe up To add a link, head into the sticker tool from the top navigation bar after uploading content to your story, tap the “Link” sticker ...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A second Facebook whistleblower has come forward with a new set of allegations about how the social media platform does business. First reported by the Washington Post , the person is a former member of Facebook’s integrity team and says the company puts profits before efforts to fight hate speech and misinformation on its platform. In the affidavit, copies of which were provided to The Verge , the whistleblower alleges, among other things, that a former Facebook communications official dismissed concerns about interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election, assisted unwittingly by Facebook. Tucker Bounds said, according to the affidavit, that the situation would be “a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement and we are fine.” The whistleblower alleged differences between Facebook’s public sta...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook announced Wednesday that it would start removing “severe sexualizing content” targeting public figures as part of a new update to its bullying and harassment policies. The policy changes also include coordinated harassment attacks against users. As part of this new policy update, Facebook said that it would remove any profiles, pages, groups, or events dedicated to sexualizing public figures, including celebrities, politicians, and content creators. The new policy bans sexualized photoshops and drawings and any degrading content “in the process of bodily functions,” Antigone Davis, global head of safety at Facebook, said in a blog post on Wednesday. Facebook also said that it would remove “unwanted sexualized commentary” and repetitive attacks harassing an individual sexually. “We made these changes because attacks like these can weaponize a public figure’s appearance” “Public figures — whether they’re polit...

Instagram is testing a feature that will announce serious outages in users’ Activity Feed. | Image: Instagram Instagram is testing a new feature that will alert users when the service is having major technical difficulties. The alert will appear as a notification in users’ Activity Feed when “people are confused and looking for answers,” says Instagram. In other words: when the app’s systems take a serious and prolonged nose-dive, as they did last week . It’s a sensible feature from Instagram’s parent company Facebook, given the chaos that’s caused when its services go down. When Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram fail, people often wonder if there’s something wrong with their connection, their internet, or their account. A little notification telling users, “Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s us” will probably save a lot of confusion in the future. Image: Instagram It seems users will also be notified when the outages are ...

Instagram to introduce new features to nudge teams away from harmful content | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram will introduce new measures to nudge teenagers away from harmful content and encourage them to “take a break,” from the platform, Facebook vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said on Sunday. Clegg made the remarks on CNN’s State of the Union show less than a week after whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress about internal research that showed Instagram can have a negative effect on the mental health of young people . “We’re going to introduce something which I think will make a considerable difference, which is where our systems see that a teenagers is looking at the same content over and over again, and it’s content which may not be conducive to their well being, we will nudge them to look at other content,” Clegg said. He added that in addition to pausing plans for an Instagram Kids platform and giving par...

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress on October 5th. | Photo by Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said Monday that she will speak to the platform’s independent Oversight Board at its invitation. “I have accepted the invitation to brief the Facebook Oversight Board about what I learned while working there,” Haugen tweeted . “Facebook has lied to the board repeatedly, and I am looking forward to sharing the truth with them.” Haugen, a former product manager in Facebook’s civic integrity group, leaked a large cache of internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal showing problems within the organization. She appeared on 60 Minutes two days before she testified before Congress that Facebook “repeatedly” misled the public about “what its own research reveals about the safety of children and the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems as a role in spreading divisive and extreme mes...

Instagram to introduce new features to nudge teams away from harmful content | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram will introduce new measures to nudge teenagers away from harmful content and encourage them to “take a break,” from the platform, Facebook vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said on Sunday. Clegg made the remarks on CNN’s State of the Union show less than a week after whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress about internal research that showed Instagram can have a negative effect on the mental health of young people . “We’re going to introduce something which I think will make a considerable difference, which is where our systems see that a teenagers is looking at the same content over and over again, and it’s content which may not be conducive to their well being, we will nudge them to look at other content,” Clegg said. He added that in addition to pausing plans for an Instagram Kids platform and giving par...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook says it has fixed an outage that lasted for about two hours across some of its services on Friday. The outage, which Facebook says was caused by a configuration change, impacted Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Workplace and affected people around the world. “We’re so sorry if you weren’t able to access our products during the last couple of hours,” Facebook said on Twitter . “We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue — thanks again for your patience this week.” The outage follows a massive one on Monday, which took down Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus for nearly six hours . In an explanation posted the day after, Facebook said the backbone connecting the company’s data centers around the world was inadvertently shut down . The outage was extensive enough that it even broke internal systems used by Facebook employees , forcing them to turn to ...

After a year of the pandemic, we asked Americans if their trust in big tech companies has changed — and if the biggest ones should be broken up In a year of isolation, fear, sickness, and death, the tech industry provided many of the ways people stayed connected. It also made Americans very aware of their reliance on the major tech companies. So have our attitudes toward them shifted? Starting in 2017, The Verge has conducted periodic surveys gauging Americans’ attitudes toward the major tech industry; our most recent one was published in March 2020 , just before life was upended by the novel coronavirus. Though the pandemic has changed a lot of American life, our findings reveal that it mostly hasn’t changed our feelings about tech companies. There are some exceptions, though: Thirteen percent of respondents who were familiar with the brand had unfavorable opinions of Amazon, compared to just 9 percent in 2020. The estimation of Facebook and Twitter also fell ...

Photo by Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images On Tuesday, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen appeared before a Senate Commerce Committee subcommittee in one of the most significant hearings for the company over the last few years. Haugen’s testimony followed bombshell reporting from the Wall Street Journal last month that detailed the ways in which Facebook’s products can inflict harm on users. The Journal stories were based on a series of internal reports at Facebook that Haugen leaked to the newspaper. One specific set of reports suggested that Facebook knew Instagram was “toxic” for teenage users, especially young girls. “Facebook has put profits ahead of people,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said on Tuesday. “I hope we will discuss whether there is such a thing as a safe algorithm.” Throughout her testimony, Haugen painted a picture of Facebook as both “internally dysfunctional” and unwilling to change its behaviors unless Congress, or some outside regul...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s newest whistleblower is set to testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday, and her testimony will likely to kick off a damaging new cycle in the yearslong effort to regulate the platform. This time, Facebook is dealing with an unusually damaging charge: that the most central parts of its business — its product optimization, its content promotion algorithms, and its drive for advertising profits — are actively hurting its most vulnerable users . It’s an alarming and specific claim, leveled from within the company and echoed by its most prominent critics. For lawmakers, it represents the best chance in years to take meaningful regulatory action against the world’s largest social network. On Sunday, Frances Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, revealed herself as the source for documents detailing how the company’s products can inflict harm in a series of articles from The W...

Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Congress will hear new concerns about child safety on the world’s largest social network On Tuesday, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is appearing before a Senate Commerce subcommittee in what promises to be one of Facebook’s toughest congressional hearings in years. After serving as a source for a string of bombshell reports from The Wall Street Journal , Haugen went public on Sunday with concerns about Instagram’s mental health impacts on its youngest users, drawn from internal Facebook reports. The result has been a new focus on child safety — a particularly sore point for Facebook . The company has disputed claims that Instagram exacerbates body issues in teenage girls, but the broader concerns about algorithmic amplification of harmful content have been harder to dismiss. In a hearing last week , Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) shared the results of a test in which his own staff was bombard...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is finally acknowledging that IGTV, its first big push into video, didn’t pan out. Today, the company is rebranding IGTV as “Instagram TV,” and it’s getting rid of the exclusive IGTV video format. Videos posted to the main Instagram feed can now run up to 60 minutes long — a length previously reserved for IGTV videos — and you’ll no longer have to leave the main app to view them. A spokesperson for Instagram says the IGTV app, now called the Instagram TV app, will remain as a “destination for people to visit with the intent of watching video.” Image: Instagram Feed videos and IGTV videos will be consolidated into Instagram TV, which will get a single tab on profile pages. Reels will remain discrete. IGTV was introduced in June 2018 and was essentially meant to become a mobile equivalent to YouTube, creating a space to discover and watch longer videos. But the longer format never ...

Facebook was down for six hours on Monday | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook said in a blog post Monday night that the six-hour outage that took it offline along with Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR was the result of a configuration change to its routers — not of a hack or attempt to get at user data. The explanation doesn’t give much in the way of detail, but it seems like Facebook’s machines weren’t able to talk to one another — Facebook says that “this disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an apology Monday evening, saying the platforms were coming back online. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” The outage began around 11:40AM ET Monday, and led to widespread problems for the company. It was Facebook’s worst outage since ...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Just as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens , its entire network of services suddenly went offline. The outage started just before noon ET and took nearly six hours before it was resolved . This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours , as the downtime hit hardest on the small businesses and creators who rely on these services for their income. Facebook issued an explanation for the outage on Monday evening , saying that it was due to a configuration issue. The company says it doesn’t believe any user data was impacted. After failing all tests for most of the day, a test of ISP DNS servers via DNSchecker.org showed most of them successfully finding a route to Facebook.com at 5:30PM ET. A few minutes later, we were able...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is back online after a six-hour outage due to DNS routing problems. The outage took down Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Oculus VR as well . For some, those services are back online now; however, after a DNS issue like this, it could take hours for everything to work properly on every network. The outage started just before noon ET on Monday. It was the most significant outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours . On Twitter, Facebook communications exec Andy Stone 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.” Inside Facebook, the outage broke internal systems as well, leaving employees unable to get into offices and communicate easily with each other . Some told The Verge they were using work-provided Outlook ema...