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'The Creepiest Possible Path': Meta Letting Facebook, Instagram Use Your Personal Posts for AI Image Generation
"People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy."
Jul 08, 2026
Tech giant Meta on Tuesday introduced an artificial intelligence image generation model that critics say is a major potential risk to users' personal privacy.
Meta, the parent company of social networks including Facebook and Instagram, described its new Muse Image model as a "creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story, or chat."
In its announcement, Meta explained how users can either alter existing images or create new ones from scratch using AI prompts.
"You can describe what you want in simple, conversational language, and Meta AI handles the rest thanks to Muse Image," the company said. "Ask it to mock up an image of you in front of a historical landmark, cleanly erase a photobomber from the background of a shot, or write a custom prompt to build a functional QR code."
However, tech publication The Verge on Tuesday flagged a potentially troublesome feature that could compromise user privacy, noting that "users can... mention other Instagram accounts in Muse Image prompts," which will let the AI model "incorporate their likeness into its output."
According to a Tuesday report from Wired, the feature will let users snatch photos from any public Instagram and Facebook accounts unless those accounts' owners specifically choose to opt out of the system.
What's more, opting out of the system is not a simple one-click operation.
"If you want to avoid these AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching your account to private, you’ll have to dig into the app’s settings," reported Wired. "Open the Instagram app, tap your profile, and then tap the three lines in the top-right corner of the screen. Then, scroll down to the Sharing and reuse tab. Here is where you should see a section labeled 'Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta,' with a toggle for Posts and one for Reels."
JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, blasted Meta for being careless with its users' privacy by making them jump through hoops to stop others from swiping their photos.
"Meta has once again chosen the creepiest possible path," said Branch. "People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy. Instead of asking for meaningful consent, Meta quietly defaults users into the system and buries the opt-out in account settings."
Branch added that while Meta had a long history of violating user privacy, forcing them to opt out of its new AI image generation model "crosses what should be a bright line."
"If our faces can be repurposed for AI simply because we posted a public photo, then very little remains off limits," Branch emphasized. "Congress should establish clear privacy protections that require affirmative consent before companies can use a person’s image or likeness for AI products."
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In Leaked Audio, Zuckerberg Tells Meta Workers He's Been Using Them to Train AI Ahead of Mass Layoffs
"AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion," said one engineer, urging his colleagues to sign a petition to stop Meta's use of an AI tracking program. "It’s not too late to pump the brakes."
May 20, 2026
Meta employees reported Wednesday that in the company's offices on the day mass layoffs hit thousands of their colleagues, fliers were taped to walls urging workers to sign a petition in support of stopping the company's new artificial intelligence data tracking program—which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted late last month as a way for its new AI models to "learn from watching really smart people do things."
A day before about 8,000 Meta employees began receiving emails notifying them that they were being laid off—a process that began in Singapore at 4:00 am local time Wednesday and continued in European and US offices in their respective time zones—the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union shared a leaked audio file in which Zuckerberg was heard explaining how the AI training program worked.
"The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks," said Zuckerberg. "So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."
LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs.
"The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is… pic.twitter.com/lt9eeJ3cwh
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 19, 2026
He assured the company's 78,000 employees that "no human is looking at or watching what people are doing on their computers... None of the data is being used for looking at what people are doing or surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that. It's purely just that we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks."
Zuckerberg explained how the employees have been used to train the model that could potentially replace many of them days after Meta announced it was planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce as the company invests heavily in AI, spending $125 billion to $145 billion on the technology—more than double what it spent last year.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that employees "revolted" when they learned about the AI tracking program, and expressed fears that they had unknowingly been training a model that would ultimately replace them.
An engineering manager asked on the company's internal communication platform how workers can opt out of having their computer activity monitored to train the AI model, only to be told by chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, "There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop."
Another employee told Bosworth, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
On Monday, The New York Times reported, employees learned that in addition to the layoffs, another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to help develop AI tools.
About 2,000 employees began working this month on a new Applied AI and Engineering team, which is set to use the data gathered by the AI tracking program Zuckerberg described to build AI tools. Those who volunteered to join the group would not be included in this week's layoffs, the Times reported.
"Every company is training AI on their employees," said Chen Avnery, an independent adviser on AI governance and data platforms. "Meta just said it out loud. The question stopped being, 'Will AI replace you?' a year ago. Now it's whether you're building the agents or generating their training data."
More than 1,000 people in the company have signed the petition calling to halt the AI data program, according to the newspaper.
Software engineer Mack Ward urged his colleagues to sign on earlier this month, telling them in an internal post that "AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion."
"It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Ward said. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”
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'Colossally Wrong Decision' as Facebook Parent Company Wins Instagram-WhatsApp Antitrust Case
"This court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side."
Nov 19, 2025
Anti-monopoly advocates are warning that a federal judge's ruling in favor of Facebook parent company Meta in a major antitrust case will have negative repercussions for US consumers by allowing Facebook to continue wielding monopoly power in the social media marketplace.
Judge James Boasberg in the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Tuesday that the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not violate US antitrust policy.
Boasberg found that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had not proven Meta holds monopoly power in the personal social networking market, "largely because he folded TikTok and YouTube into the same market and concluded that their popularity reduces Meta’s share below illegal levels," said the American Economic Liberties Project (ALEP).
John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, argued that Boasberg's ruling demonstrates a basic misunderstanding about the economics of the social media market.
"The court's opinion reflects a view of the market that is at odds with how digital-platform power operates today," he said. "Meta systematically acquired emerging competitors precisely because direct, head-to-head competition threatened its dominance. Meta’s consolidation strategy deprived consumers of innovative services and prevented the development of a truly competitive social-networking ecosystem."
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of ALEP, described the ruling as a "colossally wrong decision" that "turns a willful blind eye to Meta’s enormous power over social media and the harms that flow from it."
"These deals let Meta fuse Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into one machine that poisons our children and discourse, bullies publishers and advertisers, and destroys the possibility of healthy online connections with friends and family," she said. "By pretending that TikTok’s rise wipes away over a decade of illegal conduct, this court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side."
Hegde added that it should now fall upon US Congress to "step in and break up Big Tech, prohibit addictive surveillance algorithms, and create the conditions for building a better future."
Open Markets Institute policy counsel Tara Pincock said Boasberg's ruling was "profoundly misguided," and accused the judge of blocking the FTC from reversing a mistake it made last decade when it signed off on Meta's purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.
"Judge Boasberg erred in concluding that Facebook competes with TikTok and YouTube," said Pincock, a former state assistant attorney general in Utah. "I was part of the bipartisan coalition of states that brought this case alongside the FTC in December 2020, and the court’s framing misrepresents what is at stake. This case has never been about generic 'time and attention.' It is about how people connect, communicate, and build communities—and about how a powerful company abused its dominance to protect itself from competition."
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Siding With Trump, Facebook Suspends Chicago Community Group Issuing ICE Alerts
"This is the same company that had policies allowing for chatbots to have 'sensual' conversations with kids, but discussing local law enforcement among neighbors is a bridge too far, huh?"
Oct 15, 2025
Chicago residents in recent weeks have found numerous ways to resist the Trump administration's deployment of hundreds of federal agents in its increasingly violent "Operation Midway Blitz" anti-immigration campaign—with thousands of people marching to demand armed officers leave the city, some physically intervening in arrests, and community members volunteering to patrol their neighborhoods to warn the public when agents are nearby.
But the alliance between Big Tech and the Trump administration on Tuesday interfered with efforts by more than 80,000 Chicagoland residents to show solidarity with immigrants and people of color, as Facebook suspended a community group where people have been tipping off their neighbors when they see US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents in public areas.
Days after far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has gained considerable influence in the White House despite holding no formal government position, spoke out against a group called ICE Sighting-Chicagoland, Facebook parent company Meta suspended the group to stop its 84,000 members from sharing information about impending ICE raids and enforcement actions.
Loomer wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday that "Big Tech executives" such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should "use this as an opportunity to be in compliance and to support President [Donald] Trump’s immigration policies, but they aren’t."
She said the presence of the community group was evidence of Zuckerberg's "leftist subversion of Trump and his policies."
Two days later, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that action had been taken to stop Chicago area residents from discussing the deployment of federal agents.
"Today, following outreach from the [Department of Justice], Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target ICE agents in Chicago,” said Bondi Tuesday.
"If the Facebook posts happen to bother Trump, will they still be uncensored, and will their 'free expression' be protected? If you understand what a Trump suck-up Zuckerberg is these days, you can probably take a wild guess."
Bondi repeated a claim by the Department of Homeland Security that immigration agents have faced escalating violence from protesters in Chicago. Few specific examples have backed up the claim, while ICE agents and other officers have been filmed tear-gassing a residential neighborhood; shooting pepper spray at a priest at a demonstration; slamming a congressional candidate on the ground; and holding a journalist on the ground before shoving her in an unmarked car, ramming into another vehicle while speeding away, and eventually releasing her without charges.
The Chicago Sun-Times noted two examples of immigration officers being injured on the job in Chicago recently: one who said his injuries he sustained during a traffic stop that proved fatal for an immigrant named Silverio Villegas González were "nothing major," and another who "hurt his leg chasing a protester."
The administrator of ICE Sighting-Chicagoland posted a screenshot of messages they had received from Meta, which accused the group of failing to follow Facebook's community standards. The group had never been reported or flagged previously.
Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan—a former campaign adviser for Trump during the 2020 election—told the Sun-Times the group had violated Facebook's “Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime” policy, which bars groups and users from “outing the undercover status of law enforcement, military, or security personnel if the content contains the agent’s name, their face or badge, and any of the following: The agent’s law enforcement organization, the agent’s law enforcement operation, [or] explicit mentions of their undercover status.”
Facebook's policy was revised in 2023; it had previously banned people from sharing explicit identifying information about undercover agents, not mentions of the agencies they work for.
Zuckerberg said earlier this year that content moderation on Facebook had "gone too far" and apologized to Republican lawmakers for previously stopping users from spreading misinformation about Covid-19.
"If the Facebook posts happen to bother Trump, will they still be uncensored, and will their 'free expression' be protected? If you understand what a Trump suck-up Zuckerberg is these days, you can probably take a wild guess," wrote Joe Kukura at SFist on Tuesday.
Zuckerberg was one of several tech billionaires who attended Trump's inauguration in January. Last month he and other Silicon Valley executives attended a White House dinner where they "lavished praise" on the president as they discussed their investments in artificial intelligence and their hopes for a "pro-business, pro-innovation" approach to the technology from the administration.
At the AV Club on Wednesday, Mary Kate Carr said the removal of the ICE Sighting group was "yet another installment of 'How are tech billionaires carrying water for Donald Trump today?'"
"This is the same company that had policies allowing for chatbots to have 'sensual' conversations with kids, but discussing local law enforcement among neighbors is a bridge too far, huh?" wrote Carr.
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Top Human Rights Group Makes Case for Countries to 'Break Up' Big Tech
Amnesty International says Big Tech's consolidation of power "has profound implications for human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, nondiscrimination, and access to information."
Aug 28, 2025
One of the world's leading human rights groups, Amnesty International, is calling on governments worldwide to "break up with Big Tech" by reining in the growing influence of tech and social media giants.
A report published Thursday by Amnesty highlights five tech companies: Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which Hannah Storey, an advocacy and policy adviser on technology and human rights at Amnesty, describes as "digital landlords who determine the shape and form of our online interaction."
These five companies collectively have billions of active users, which the report says makes them akin to "utility providers."
"This concentration of power," the report says, "has profound implications for human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, nondiscrimination, and access to information."
The report emphasizes the "pervasive surveillance" by Google and Meta, which profit from "harvesting and monetizing vast quantities of our personal data."
"The more data they collect, the more dominant they become, and the harder it is for competitors to challenge their position," the report says. "The result is a digital ecosystem where users have little meaningful choice or control over how their data is used."
Meanwhile, Google's YouTube, as well as Facebook and Instagram—two Meta products—function using algorithms "optimized for engagement and profit," which emphasize content meant to provoke strong emotions and outrage from users.
"In an increasingly polarized context, the report says, "this can contribute to the rapid spread of discriminatory speech and even incitement to violence, which has had devastating consequences in several crisis and conflict-affected areas."
The report notes several areas around the globe where social media algorithms amplified ethnic hatred. It cites past research showing how Facebook's algorithm helped to "supercharge" dehumanizing rhetoric that fueled the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the violence in Ethiopia's Tigray War.
More broadly, it says, the ubiquity of these tech companies in users' lives gives them outsized influence over access to information.
"Social media platforms shape what millions of people see online, often through opaque algorithms that prioritize engagement over accuracy or diversity," it says. "Documented cases of content removal, inconsistent moderation, and algorithmic bias highlight the dangers of allowing a handful of companies to act as gatekeepers of the digital public sphere."
Amnesty argues that international human rights law requires governments worldwide to intervene to protect their people from abuses by tech companies.
"States and competition authorities should use competition laws as part of their human rights toolbox," it says. "States should investigate and sanction anti-competitive behaviours that harm human rights, prevent regulatory capture, and prevent harmful monopolies from forming."
Amnesty also calls on these states to consider the possible human rights impacts of artificial intelligence, which it describes as the "next phase" of Big Tech's growing dominance, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google alone controlling 60% of the global cloud computing market.
"Addressing this dominance is critical, not only as a matter of market fairness but as a pressing human rights issue," Storey said. "Breaking up these tech oligarchies will help create an online environment that is fair and just."
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Parents' Group Says New Revelations About Meta's AI Chatbot 'Confirm Our Worst Fears'
"When a company's own policies explicitly allow bots to engage children in 'romantic or sensual' conversations, it's not an oversight, it's a system designed to normalize inappropriate interactions with minors," said one advocate.
Aug 15, 2025
Four months after the children's rights advocacy group ParentsTogether Action issued an advisory about the potential harms Meta's artificial intelligence chatbot could pose to kids, new reporting Wednesday revealed how the Silicon Valley company's standards for the AI product have allowed it to have sexually provocative conversations with minors as well as make racist comments.
Reuters reported extensively on an internal Meta document titled "GenAI: Content Risk Standards."
The document said that Meta's generative AI products—which are available to users as young as 13 on the company's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are permitted to engage in "romantic or sensual" role-play with minors.
Examples of acceptable remarks from the AI bot included "Your youthful form is a work of art" and "Every inch of you is a masterpiece," which the document suggested could be said to a child as young as 8.
An example of an acceptable comment made to a high school student was, "I take your hand, guiding you to the bed."
New Republic contributing editor Osita Nwanevu said the reporting shows that "if we're going to have this technology, the content used to train models needs to be legally licensed from its creators and their applications need to be regulated."
"For example: I do not think we should allow children to be groomed by the computer," he said.
Reuters reported that Meta changed the document after the news outlet brought the sexually suggestive comments to the company's attention, with spokesperson Andy Stone saying such conversations with children should not have been allowed.
"The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed," Stone told Reuters. "We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role-play between adults and minors."
But Stone didn't say the company had revised the content standards to disallow other concerning comments, like those that promote racist views.
The document stated that the AI chatbot was permitted to "create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics"—for example, a paragraph about Black people being "dumber than white people."
Reuters' reporting suggested that Meta's allowance of sexually suggestive AI conversations with children was not an accident, with current and former employees who worked on the design and training of the AI products saying the document reflected "the company's emphasis on boosting engagement with its chatbots."
"In meetings with senior executives last year, [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg scolded generative AI product managers for moving too cautiously on the rollout of digital companions and expressed displeasure that safety restrictions had made the chatbots boring, according to two of those people," reported Jeff Horwitz at Reuters. "Meta had no comment on Zuckerberg's chatbot directives."
In April, ParentsTogether Action issued a warning about Meta's AI chatbots and their ability to "engage in sexual role-play with teenagers," which had previously been reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday's reporting provided "a fuller picture of the company's rules for AI bots," the group said.
"These internal Meta documents confirm our worst fears about AI chatbots and children's safety," said Shelby Knox, campaign director for tech accountability and online safety at ParentsTogether Action. "When a company's own policies explicitly allow bots to engage children in 'romantic or sensual' conversations, it's not an oversight, it's a system designed to normalize inappropriate interactions with minors."
The group said it tested Meta AI earlier this year, posing as a 14-year-old, and was told by the bot, "Age is just a number" as it encouraged the fictional teenager to pursue a relationship with an adult.
"No child should ever be told by an AI that 'age is just a number' or be encouraged to lie to their parents about adult relationships," said Knox. "Meta has created a digital grooming ground, and parents deserve answers about how this was allowed to happen."
As Stone assured Reuters that the company was reviewing its content standards for its AI chatbot, other new reporting suggested Meta isn't likely to impose strict rules discouraging the bot from making racist or otherwise harmful remarks any time soon.
As CNN reported Wednesday, Meta has hired Robby Starbuck, a "conservative influencer and anti-DEI agitator," to serve as an anti-bias adviser for its AI products.
The arrangement is part of a legal settlement following a lawsuit Starbuck filed against Meta in April, saying the chatbot had falsely stated he took part in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
An executive order signed by President Donald Trump last month seeks to rid AI products of so-called "woke" standards and prohibit the federal government from using AI technology that is "infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas such as critical race theory"—the term used by many conservatives in recent years for the accurate teaching of race relations in US history.
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How a Professional Bully Is Winning Control of the Media
Major media outlets from CBS to The Washington Post have “bent the knee” to President Trump’s specious demands.
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is following the authoritarian’s handbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to consolidate power in Hungary. He is attacking the independent institutions that comprise the infrastructure supporting democracy—universities, law firms, culture, and the media.
And he is winning.
Major media outlets have “bent the knee” his press secretary’s preferred phrase for capitulation to Trump’s specious demands. His latest conquest is CBS.
CBS
Days before the 2024 election, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit accusing the network of bias in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeking $10 billion in damages, the complaint claimed that the edited interview and associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in Harris’ favor.
Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that “the First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation.” Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet called it “ridiculous junk and should be mocked.” Attorney Charles Tobin warned, “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
A few days later, Trump won the election. And now CBS’ parent company, Paramount, wants to settle the case.
Whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion.
Through her family’s holding company, Shari Redstone who is “friendly with Trump” is Paramount’s controlling shareholder. If the Federal Communications Commission approves its pending merger with Skydance Media, Redstone will reap millions.
On February 6, Redstone told the Paramount board that she wanted to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The next day, Trump doubled his damages claim to $20 billion. As the media reported Redstone’s desire to resolve the case, Trump pounced. On April 13, he asserted on social media that the FCC should impose “the maximum fine and punishment” on CBS and the network “should lose its license.”
The parties have agreed on a mediator, but whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion. The more profound cost is the loss of CBS’ journalistic independence, which became apparent on April 22 when the producer of “60 Minutes” resigned.
In the program’s 57-year history, Bill Owens—who became the “60 Minutes” executive producer in 2019 after 30 years at CBS—was only the third person to run it. Owens’s memo to his staff should be a warning to all of us:
“[O]ver the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
CBS wasn’t Trump’s first media victim.
The Washington Post
In early November 2024, The Washington Post editorial board had signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Owner Jeff Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades, the paper did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.
A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump.
After Trump won the election, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million.
On February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift for the Post: It would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change. Prominent columnists followed him out the door, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times had an established record of presidential endorsements too—until 2024. Its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden blasted Trump. But in 2024, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong quashed an editorial that would have endorsed Vice President Harris. As at the Post, columnists and editorial board members resigned in protest, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers.
After the election, Soon-Shiong killed another editorial set to run with this headline: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”
Self-censorship is the most effective, enduring, and dangerous method of abridging free speech.
More than one-half of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. One-third of all adults in the U.S. get their news from Facebook (operated by Meta). Meta’s president Mark Zuckerberg was among the billionaires who traveled to Mar-a-Lago after the election, met with Trump, and donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. (With the help of corporate and billionaire megadonors like Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump raised a record $239 million for the fund.)
Then Zuckerberg gave Trump a bigger gift: Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking of Facebook posts. As his rationale, Zuckerberg repeated Trump’s false talking points that fact-checking was “censorship” and reflected an “anti-Trump bias.”
Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats” that Trump had made to him in the past, Trump answered: “Probably.”
Meanwhile, Meta invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to join its board of directors.
PBS and NPR
On April 26, Trump will send Congress his request to halt all funding for public media—including NPR and PBS.
Viktor Orbán’s Playbook—The Trump Sequel
Since his return to power, Hungary’s prime minister has used “muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends,” according to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Orbán is “attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media.”
Orbán began “working with friendly oligarchs to purchase and transform media companies into conservative stalwarts; directing government advertising budgets to politically-aligned outlets;… and pressuring the holdover state media… to provide more favorable coverage.”
Rufo insists that Hungary “has a media environment at least as competitive as that of many Western nations.” Experienced observers disagree:
Human Rights Watch found that the government is using its near media monopoly to strengthen its hold on democratic institutions… The government’s increased control over the media market is linked to its broader assault on rule of law in Hungary, including undermining judicial independence and state capture of public institutions…
Trump’s attacks on universities, law firms, culture, and the media are all of a piece. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary provides a roadmap of his battle plan and a preview of his end game.
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Today's Social Media Are No Longer Safe for Journalism
This existential moment calls for a global social media platform for independent news media.
Mar 21, 2025
Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist who studied totalitarian regimes, noted in 1974 that “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”
Fifty years later, we have nearly reached that moment. This is existential for all independent (i.e., not allied with a political party or authoritarian regime) news organizations and their ability to reach audiences in the social media space.
Social media like Twitter (now X) and Facebook became important environments for the news media to enter two decades ago because they are where millions of people congregate online. For journalism organizations, the goal has been to post interesting stories and get referrals—those users who click through to the news site and boost web page views.
Yet, that relationship has fallen apart. Ultimately, tech companies are not interested in helping journalism or aiding civil discourse. The annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report for 2025 notes “big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.”
The even bigger problem for independent news media is that most social media platforms are increasingly antithetical to freedom of the press.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and turned it into X, it’s become the disinformation-drenched social platform of the Donald Trump administration. This year, genuflecting to Trump, Meta (corporate parent of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) announced it would drop its independent fact-checking program in the U.S. in favor of an anemic, crowd-sourced “community notes” system, which has already been a failure at X. Another popular news platform, TikTok, has serious disinformation problems, security liabilities and an uncertain future.
Several news organizations around the globe decided they won’t take it anymore. NPR stopped posting on X in 2023, after the platform insisted on designating it as “U.S. state-affiliated media.” More recently, The Guardian announced it would stop posting on X, concluding it is “a toxic media platform.” Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper of record, Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, and La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper in Barcelona, quit X, too. The European Federation of Journalists, representing about 320,000 journalists, did the same. “We cannot continue to participate in feeding the social network of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists,” EFJ president Maja Sever wrote.
But, simply quitting X only eliminates the worst option and settles for the slightly less bad options that remain.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind. For example, 54% of Americans get their news often or sometimes from social media. Adults 18-29 are the heaviest users of social media platforms. They deserve a social media platform that respects and informs them.
That’s why legitimate news media should band together and regain the autonomy they ceded to third-party social media. Independent news organizations–large and small–should cooperatively create and control their own social media platform that amplifies news and public information, encourages links to member news organizations, and excludes misinformation and disinformation.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things.
The model for this is something almost as old as modern journalism, too: The Associated Press, an international cooperative nonprofit news agency. As the AP tells its founding story, “In 1846, five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.” The problem with social media is similar–if it’s not working, work collectively to build another way. And, like the AP, it could be a global cooperative.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things. But, a news-controlled social media platform could develop features that would demonstrate the multimedia ability of news organizations and enable the audience to create social connections in new and entertaining ways. Users could adjust their feeds to focus on local, regional, national, or international news, or whatever mix and topics makes sense to them, so all legitimate news organizations of any size get to be part of the platform.
Which news organizations and journalists could be part of such a social media cooperative?
Reporters Without Borders, the international journalism nonprofit, already has a powerful statement for fostering global information spaces for the common good, where “information can only be regarded as reliable when freely gathered, processed and disseminated according to the principles of commitment to truth, plurality of viewpoints and rational methods of establishment and verification of facts.” This would enable a broad range of journalism organizations to participate, and draw a bright line to exclude media propagating disinformation.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle.
From a business perspective, journalism organizations, not third-party social media, would retain analytic data and any advertising revenue. The social media app could be free for any person with a subscription to any member news organization (e.g., a local newspaper, a national magazine of opinion, or digital news site), or with a nominal subscription fee, to provide built-in authentication and help prevent bot accounts. There are also strong global standards for content moderation through the International Fact-Checking Network, which was formed in 2015 and has a nonpartisan code of principles and more than 170 fact-checking groups around the world.
What would such a social media platform cost to create?
Clearly, $44 billion is too much. Bluesky, which has gained favor as an X alternative in recent months, offers a case for comparison. It started internally with just a handful of workers at then-Twitter in 2019. In the past two years, it’s received $23 million in seed funding to get it where it is today.
Bluesky may be the current favorite of many journalists, and has many advantages over other social media platforms, but its worthy purpose to encourage a less toxic space for public conversation does not primarily serve the goals of globally disseminating independent journalism.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle. There has been talk for several years about Europe having its own social media platform to highlight democracy, diversity, solidarity, and privacy, and to avoid “foreign information manipulations and interference” from platforms based in the U.S. that have fallen into Trump’s power orbit and China-based platforms as well.
But, a nongovernmental platform, with a consortium of democracy-minded news organizations, may be most resistant to nationalisms and authoritarianism. The project could be built on an open-source structure like ActivityPub (the infrastructure behind Mastodon) or the AT Protocol (behind Bluesky), which would give more power to users.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse. The alternative is the independent press’s passive acceptance of whatever social media ecosystems Silicon Valley plutocrats or authoritarian governments decide to make, which is bad news for a free press.Keep ReadingShow Less
Human Rights Experts: Meta's Trump-Friendly Policies Could Be 'Conduit' for 'Genocide'
"Rather than learning from its reckless contributions to mass violence in countries including Myanmar and Ethiopia, Meta is instead stripping away important protections that were aimed at preventing any recurrence of such harms."
Feb 17, 2025
An expert on technology and human rights and a survivor of the Rohingya genocide warned Monday that new policies adopted by social-media giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, could incite genocidal violence in the future.
On January 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Meta policies that were widely interpreted as a bid to gain approval from the incoming Trump administration. These included the replacement of fact-checkers with a community notes system, relocating content moderators from California to Texas, and lifting bans on the criticisms of certain groups such as immigrants, women, and transgender individuals.
Zuckerberg touted the changes as an anti-censorship campaign, saying the company was trying to "get back to our roots around free expression" and arguing that "the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward, once again, prioritizing speech."
"With Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs lining up (literally, in the case of the recent inauguration) behind the new administration's wide-ranging attacks on human rights, Meta shareholders need to step up and hold the company's leadership to account to prevent Meta from yet again becoming a conduit for mass violence, or even genocide."
However, Pat de Brún, head of Big Tech Accountability at Amnesty International, and Maung Sawyeddollah, the founder and executive director of the Rohingya Students' Network who himself fled violence from the Myanmar military in 2017, said the change in policies would make it even more likely that Facebook or Instagram posts would inflame violence against marginalized communities around the world. While Zuckerberg's announcement initially only applied to the U.S., the company has suggested it could make similar changes internationally as well.
"Rather than learning from its reckless contributions to mass violence in countries including Myanmar and Ethiopia, Meta is instead stripping away important protections that were aimed at preventing any recurrence of such harms," de Brún and Sawyeddollah wrote on the Amnesty International website. "In enacting these changes, Meta has effectively declared an open season for hate and harassment targeting its most vulnerable and at-risk people, including trans people, migrants, and refugees."
Past research has shown that Facebook's algorithms can promote hateful, false, or racially provocative content in an attempt to increase the amount of time users spend on the site and therefore the company's profits, sometimes with devastating consequences.
One example is what happened to the Rohingya, as de Brún and Sawyeddollah explained:
We have seen the horrific consequences of Meta's recklessness before. In 2017, Myanmar security forces undertook a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. A United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Commission concluded in 2018 that Myanmar had committed genocide. In the years leading up to these attacks, Facebook had become an echo chamber of virulent anti-Rohingya hatred. The mass dissemination of dehumanizing anti-Rohingya content poured fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and helped to create an enabling environment for mass violence. In the absence of appropriate safeguards, Facebook's toxic algorithms intensified a storm of hatred against the Rohingya, which contributed to these atrocities. According to a report by the United Nations, Facebook was instrumental in the radicalization of local populations and the incitement of violence against the Rohingya.
In late January, Sawyeddollah—with the support of Amnesty International, the Open Society Justice Initiative, and Victim Advocates International—filed a whistleblower's complaint against Meta with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide.
The complaint argued that the company, then registered as Facebook, had known or at least "recklessly disregarded" since 2013 that its algorithm was encouraging the spread of anti-Rohingya hate speech and that its content moderation policies were not sufficient to address the issue. Despite this, it misrepresented the situation to both the SEC and investors in multiple filings.
Now, Sawyeddollah and de Brún are concerned that history could repeat itself unless shareholders and lawmakers take action to counter the power of the tech companies.
"With Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs lining up (literally, in the case of the recent inauguration) behind the new administration's wide-ranging attacks on human rights, Meta shareholders need to step up and hold the company's leadership to account to prevent Meta from yet again becoming a conduit for mass violence, or even genocide," they wrote. "Similarly, legislators and lawmakers in the U.S. must ensure that the SEC retains its neutrality, properly investigate legitimate complaints—such as the one we recently filed, and ensure those who abuse human rights face justice."
The human rights experts aren't the only ones concerned about Meta's new direction. Even employees are sounding the alarm.
"I really think this is a precursor for genocide," one former employee told Platformer when the new policies were first announced. "We've seen it happen. Real people's lives are actually going to be endangered. I'm just devastated."
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Zuckerberg Extols 'Masculine Energy' in Corporate America as Meta Kills DEI Programs
"Remember, Zuckerberg built Facebook not for social connection but to rate the hotness of his female college mates," noted one critic.
Jan 11, 2025
As numerous U.S. corporations bend to the right with the political winds swirling around Republican President-elect Donald Trump's imminent return to power, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is following up on his company's termination of its fact-checking program by ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and praising "masculine energy" in corporate America.
"I think a lot of the corporate world is, like, pretty culturally neutered," Zuckerberg said during an interview with the eponymous host of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast on Friday. Meta is the parent company of social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Explaining that he has "three sisters, no brothers" and "three daughters, no sons," Zuckerberg continued: "So I'm, like, surrounded by girls and women, like, my whole life. And it's like...I don't know, there's something, the kind of masculine energy, I think, is good."
"And obviously, you know, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it," he said. "And I do think that... all these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive."
The tech industry is built on 'masculine energy', a bro--no girls allowed--culture. Remember Zuckerberg built Facebook not for social connection but to rate the hotness of his female college mates. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
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— Amy Diehl, Ph.D. (@amydiehl.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Zuckerberg elaborated:
I do think that if you're a a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine. Right? And it's like there isn't enough of the kind of the energy that you may naturally have. And it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you. And that's not good either, 'cause you want women to be able to succeed.
But I think these things can... go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone. And I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I, I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the... spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to, like, get rid of it completely.
No... Both of these things are good, right? It's like, you want, like, feminine energy, you want masculine energy... I think that that's all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more, much more masculine culture.
While some social media observers attributed Zuckerberg's shift to factors like "the power of gym bro masculinity," others noted the rightward shift in corporate America accompanying Trump's White House return and Republicans' control of both houses of Congress.
"Zuck is a Cuck": Meta's Billionaire Bends The Knee to MAGA Mark Zuckerberg joins a rogue's gallery of billionaires capitulating to Donald Trump's threats and promoting MAGA's agenda against truth, democracy, and diversity for the sake of self-preservation. thelefthook.substack.com/p/zuck-is-a-...
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— Wajahat Ali (@wajali.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the wave of companies ending or dialing back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The growing list includes McDonald's, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Amazon, and—as of Friday—Meta.
According to an internal memo from Meta vice president of human resources Janelle Gale viewed by several media outlets, Meta is immediately ending DEI programs in hiring, training, and supplier selection because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."
"The term 'DEI' has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others," Gale explained.
Meta's move follows Tuesday's announcement that the company is ending its third-party fact-checking program because it is "too politically biased" and replacing it with community notes à la X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk, who will co-chair the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency.
The announcement also said Meta "will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other U.S. locations."
As part of its broad new "free expression" policy, Meta will also permit certain speech widely considered hateful by human rights defenders.
According to training materials
viewed by The Intercept and other media outlets, Meta users will be able to say things like "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit," "Black people are more violent than whites," "Italians are dickheads," women are "household objects" or "property," and transgender people are mentally ill. Calling trans people "trannies" or "it" is now also acceptable on Meta sites.
I got a warning for posting "you are an evil man" to Zuck but not for posting "you are a degenerate tranny." Real nice system they have at Meta.
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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) January 10, 2025 at 7:50 PM
The New York Times reported Friday that Meta has ordered its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, and Texas to remove the tampons which had been offered to transgender and nonbinary employees who use men's restrooms. The report also said that Meta has removed trans and nonbinary themes from its Messenger chat app.
Zuckerberg has also appointed UFC CEO Dana White, a friend and supporter of Trump, to Meta's board of directors,
explaining, "I've admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand."
These moves followed a November meeting between Trump and Zuckerberg at the former's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, after which Meta reportedly also gave $1 million to the president-elect's inauguration fund.
Zuckerberg's alignment with key elements of Trumpism represents a stark departure from just a few months ago, when, in a new book, Trump accused him of inimical "plotting" during the 2020 election and said he threatened to imprison the tech billionaire for life if he did so again in 2024.
Now, Zuckerberg's blasting outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden. He told Rogan Friday that during the coronavirus pandemic, Biden administration officials would "call up and, like, scream... and curse" at Meta leaders over Covid-19 misinformation.
Some internet users poked fun at Meta's new policies, with one popular meme satirically claiming that Zuckerberg "died of coronavirus and complications from syphilis."
Who needs dumb old facts anyways?
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— JonZoidberg ( @jonzoidberg.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 8:42 PM
But others took a more serious view of Zuckerberg's about-face, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asserting this week that "these changes reveal that Meta seems less interested in freedom of expression as a principle and more focused on appeasing the incoming U.S. administration."
"Meta has long been criticized by the global digital rights community, as well as by artists, sex worker advocacy groups, LGBTQ+ advocates, Palestine advocates, and political groups, among others," EFF added. "A corporation with a history of biased and harmful moderation like Meta [needs] a careful, well-thought-out, and sincere fix that will not undermine broader freedom of expression goals."
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