In the midst of the scandals of theFacebook papers, Facebookrebranded the company as Meta. The new name was designed to reflect a focus beyond the Facebook social network platform, and into the metaverse — the extension of the internet into three-dimensional virtual reality (VR) spaces. However, given Facebook’s handling —or mishandling— of their current social responsibilities, we should be cautious about how much control a single company should have over the potential metaverse....

In the middle of the last decade, Facebook decided it needed to build AI to fight hate speech. While the technology did work in some cases, we’ve also seen glaring failures. After the Christchurch shooting, for example, Facebook wasn’t able to quicklyremove the video. Over the weekend,the Wall Street Journalpublished a new report indicating Facebook’s AI can’t identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants consistently. Plus, there was a bizarre incident where the algorithm wasn’t able to separate cockfighting and car crashes....

Facebook is doing a terrible job of banning Donald Trump from its platform. From its failure to hold the former president accountable for the myriadmisinformation campaignsconducted on his behalf by members of his campaign team from 2015 through 2018, tothe most recent nonsense, it’s apparent that Facebook’s somehow vested in keeping Trump on the social network. Up front:Facebook’s allowing “Team Trump,” a Page directly associated with numerousleadership and conservative PACs run by Donald Trump, to remain up and advertising on the site as of today, 21 June....

WhistleblowerFrances Haugen has exposed major problems at Facebook, but the data scientist has also proposed some solutions. One of her most eye-catching suggestions is changing the ordering of news feeds on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook’salgorithmscurrently steer users to content that generates more engagement. Haugentold a Senate panelon Wednesday that this approach can have dire consequences: It is causing teenagers to be exposed to more anorexia content, it is pulling families apart, and in places like Ethiopia, it’s literally fanning ethnic violence....

“Trouble at Facebook” is like saying water is wet. This has been a tough year for Zuck and co with Capitol Riots and vaccine misinformation to handle. However, those were nothing compared to the last few weeks. The Facebook papers — a set of leaked internal documents of the company — have revealed shocking things about howthe firm thinks about young users, developing countries, and hateful content on its platform....