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Facebook Could Be Messing With Your Phone. Here’s What We Know

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Facebook Could Be Messing With Your Phone. Here's What We Know

Battery life is one of the most important aspects of smartphone usage — without solid battery life, a phone becomes far less useful. Even worse are instances when a phone’s battery drains faster than expected for no apparent reason, which may result in the user being caught off guard with a dead battery while away from a charger.

That’s the issue that prompted Hayward’s complaint, according to The New York Post, which quotes the data scientist as saying, “I said to the manager, ‘This can harm somebody,’ and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses.” Hayward was allegedly fired in November 2022 after refusing to engage in the negative testing practices, leading to the lawsuit soon after. The big question is whether this practice — assuming the allegations are accurate — is widespread at Meta. 

If so, what other kinds of negative testing may be taking place without a user’s knowledge, and how might those tests impact their experiences with the company’s products? Hayward claimed that during his time working for the company, Meta gave him a training document that allegedly described types of negative tests that may be conducted — the document was reportedly titled, “How to run thoughtful negative tests.” Unfortunately, specific examples of those tests weren’t provided, and Meta hasn’t commented on the allegations to clarify how its testing practices may impact users, if at all.

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Biden White House urged Meta to crack down on ‘vaccine-skeptical’ content on WhatsApp private chat platform

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Biden White House urged Meta to crack down on 'vaccine-skeptical' content on WhatsApp private chat platform

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 messages are from one person to another. And groups typically have fewer than 10 people.” 

WHAT ELON MUSK’S TWITTER FILES HAVE UNCOVERED ABOUT THE TECH GIANT SO FAR

In an email from March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, pressed Meta executives how they were “measuring reduction of harm” on WhatsApp, insisting they must have a “good mousetrap” to observe what encrypted content was being shared on the platform.

The Biden White House pressured Meta to moderate COVID vaccine content on its private communications platform WhatsApp. (Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Flaherty also offered then-White House COVID senior adviser Andrew Slavitt, telling Meta he’d be “willing to get on the phone” a “couple of times per week if [it’s] necessary.” 

“Because of WhatsApp’s structure, targeted suppression or censorship of certain information did not appear possible. Instead, much of the aim of the content moderation on WhatsApp, therefore, was to ‘push’ information to users,” Zweig wrote. “The service partnered with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and more than 100 governments and health ministries to send Covid-19 updates and vaccine-related messages to users. The company created initiatives such as a WhatsApp chatbot in Spanish to aid in making local vaccination appointments.”

MATT TAIBBI CALLS OUT ‘CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX’ IN LATEST TWITTER FILES

Days after the previous email, Flaherty continued pressing Meta about moderating content on WhatsApp. He was told that Meta’s only moderation option would be “content-agnostic product interventions” which typically monitoring messages “that didn’t originate from a close contact” which it deemed “were more likely to contain misinformation” and reduce its “forwards” as a result. 

WhatsApp one of Meta's prominent apps including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

WhatsApp one of Meta’s prominent apps including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Flaherty asked Meta how it “measured success,” to which an employee replied by pointing to the “reduction of forwards” and that it bans accounts “that engage in mass marketing or scam behaviors – including those who seek to exploit COVID-19 misinformation.” The employee also noted that “3 billion” COVID-related messages were sent by “governments, nonprofits and international organizations” to citizens via WhatsApp chatbots “and over 300 million messages have been sent over COVID-19 vaccine helplines” during the first quarter of 2021. 

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION DEMANDS ELON MUSK TO ‘IDENTIFY ALL JOURNALISTS’ WHO HAD ACCESS TO TWITTER FILES

“In one of the follow up exchanges, Flaherty seemed dissatisfied with the response, and again pressed Meta to take action on vaccine hesitancy,” Zweig reported. ‘I care mostly about what actions and changes you’re making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse,’ he wrote. ‘I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters.’”

In the email, Flaherty dinged Facebook for not having implemented an “algorithmic shift” in election-related content to prevent the Jan. 6 “insurrection” from being plotted on the platform, suggesting he doesn’t want such laid-back content moderation to occur on WhatsApp. 

The Biden White House has repeatedly urged Big Tech companies to moderate COVID-related content.

The Biden White House has repeatedly urged Big Tech companies to moderate COVID-related content. (DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images)

“Flaherty wanted empirical data about the effectiveness of reducing ‘vaccine-skeptical content’ on a platform composed of non-public messages. He wanted supposed misinformation on a private messaging app to be ‘under control.’ What, exactly, was he hoping to get Meta to do?” Zweig wrote. “It was obvious from the start that WhatsApp’s interface didn’t allow for the granular control Flaherty appeared to desire. And his smiley face response suggests he well understood this. Yet he kept badgering the Meta executives anyway.”

Zweig continued, “The exchanges about WhatsApp are arresting not because of what Meta ultimately did or did not do on the platform—since the company’s options for intervention appear to be limited—but because efforts to moderate content on a private messaging service was a continued interest for a White House official at all… Fortunately, targeted censorship on a private messaging app is still out of government reach.”

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Fox News Digital asked the White House whether it had any concerns that such interactions with Meta have any First Amendment implications. The White House did not immediately respond.

Zweig, author of the “Silent Lunch” Substack newsletter, went viral in December with his contribution to the Twitter Files series, exposing how the White House under both President Biden and President Trump leaned on Twitter to moderate COVID-related content. 

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Mark Zuckerberg, wife Priscilla Chan welcome third baby girl

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Mark Zuckerberg, wife Priscilla Chan welcome third baby girl

From Facebook to family of five!

Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan announced on Friday that their third baby girl arrived.

“Welcome to the world, Aurelia Chan Zuckerberg!” the couple wrote via Instagram. “You’re such a little blessing.”

Zuckerberg and his former Harvard University classmate previously welcomed daughters Max, 7, and August, 5, in 2015 and 2017, respectively.

Priscilla Chan introduces daughter Aurelia
The couple named their daughter Aurelia.
zuck/Instagram

The entrepreneur, 38, mentioned the little ones in his September 2022 Instagram post announcing his 38-year-old wife’s pregnancy.

“Lots of love,” Zuckerberg captioned a smiling selfie with his hand on Chan’s budding belly.

“Happy to share that Max and August are getting a new baby sister next year!”

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg debuted Chan’s baby bump in September via Instagram.
zuck/Instagram
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan
“Lots of love,” he captioned the post.
Getty Images for Breakthrough Pr

The couple met in 2003 at a frat party while in line for the bathroom.

“He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” Chan told the New Yorker in 2010, joking that Zuckerberg had a “nerdy, computer-science appeal.”

On their first date, the Meta CEO told Chan that he would rather go out with her than “finish his take-home midterm.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Max and August
The couple previously welcomed Max and August in 2015 and 2017, respectively.
zuck/Instagram

The sentiment “appalled” the “the type-A first child,” the pediatrician told “Today” show co-hosts in 2014.

The couple got married in 2012, and Zuckerberg called Chan the “most important” part of his life in a commencement speech at their alma mater five years later.

While trying to start a family, the doctor struggled to conceive and suffered three miscarriages.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg wed the pediatrician in 2012.
zuck/Instagram

Zuckerberg called the pregnancy losses “a lonely experience” in a 2015 Facebook post.

As the CZI co-founder and co-CEOs’ family began growing, Zuckerberg told North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University students that he had been changed in a “pretty dramatic way” by parenthood.

“The thing that I’m most proud of and the thing that brings me the most happiness is my family,” he gushed in 2017.



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TikTok hearing obscures wider issue of Americans’ online privacy

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TikTok hearing obscures wider issue of Americans' online privacy

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For a brief moment in a five-hour House hearing on Thursday, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew let his frustration show. Asked if TikTok was prepared to split off from its Chinese parent company if ordered to do so by the U.S. government, to safeguard Americans’ online data, Chew went on offense.

“I don’t think ownership is the issue here. With a lot of respect: American social companies don’t have a great record with privacy and data security. I mean, look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” Chew said, referring to the 2018 scandal in which Facebook users’ data was found to have been secretly harvested years earlier by a British political consulting firm.

He’s not wrong. At a hearing in which TikTok was often portrayed as a singular, untenable threat to Americans’ online privacy, it would have been easy to forget that the country’s online privacy problems run far deeper than any single app. And the people most responsible for failing to safeguard Americans’ data, arguably, are American lawmakers.

U.S. government issues historic $5 billion fine against Facebook for repeated privacy violations

The bipartisan uproar over TikTok’s Chinese ownership stems from the concern that China’s laws could allow its authoritarian government to demand or clandestinely gain access to sensitive user data, or tweak its algorithms to distort the information its young users see. The concerns are genuine. And yet the United States has failed to bequeath Americans most of the rights it now accuses TikTok of threatening.

While the European Union has far-reaching privacy laws, Congress has not agreed on national privacy legislation, leaving Americans’ online data rights up to a patchwork of state and federal laws. In the meantime, reams of data on Americans’ shopping habits, browsing history and real-time location, collected by websites and mobile apps, is bought and sold on the open market in a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. If the Chinese Communist Party wanted that data, it could get huge volumes of it without ever tapping TikTok. (In fact, TikTok says it has stopped tracking U.S. users’ precise location, putting it ahead of many American apps on at least one important privacy front.)

That point was not entirely lost on the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which convened Thursday’s hearing. Last year, their committee became the first to advance a comprehensive data privacy bill, hashing out a hard-won compromise. But it stalled amid qualms from House and Senate leaders.

Likewise, worries about TikTok’s addictive algorithms, its effects on teens’ mental health, and its hosting of propaganda and extreme content are common to its American rivals, including Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram. Congress has not meaningfully addressed those, either.

And if Chinese ownership is the issue, TikTok has plenty of company there, as well: A glance at Apple’s iOS App Store rankings earlier this week showed that four of the top five apps were Chinese-owned: TikTok, its ByteDance sibling CapCut, and the online shopping apps Shein and Temu.

The enthusiasm for cracking down on TikTok in particular is understandable. It’s huge, it’s fast-growing, and railing against it allows lawmakers to position themselves simultaneously as champions of American children and tough on China. Banning it would seem to offer a quick fix to the problems lawmakers spent five hours on Thursday lamenting.

And yet, without an overhaul of online privacy laws, it ignores that those problems exist on all the other apps that haven’t been banned.

“In most ways, they’re like most of the Big Tech companies,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said of TikTok after the hearing. “They can use Americans’ data any way they want.” She and several other committee members said they’d prefer to address TikTok as part a broader privacy bill, rather than a one-off ban.

But the compromises required to pass big legislation can be politically costly, while railing against TikTok costs nothing. If Chew can take any consolation from Thursday’s hearing, it’s that congressional browbeating of tech companies are far more common than congressional action against them.

For an example, he has only to look at the one he raised in that moment of frustration: For all the hearings, all the grilling of Mark Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica, Russian election interference and more, Facebook is still here — and now Congress has moved on to a new scapegoat.

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