Meta (Facebook's parent company) has joined other major tech companies in making more climate change pledges as the UN’s COP26 summit commences. Along with taking measures to reduce its own carbon footprint, Meta is focused on "helping people find accurate, science-led information, while also tackling misinformation," according to Nick Clegg, Meta's vice-president of global affairs and communication.

The company says that when its fact-checking partners rate a piece of content as false, a warning label is added and the post pops up less often on users' News Feeds. There's a keyword detection feature that Meta switches on during "critical public events" to help fact checkers find relevant content faster. This will be enabled during COP26 to help fact-checkers in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, French and Dutch find and debunk climate misinformation more quickly.

The Climate Change Information Center, which debuted last year to provide users with knowledge from experts on the issue, is now being rolled out to more countries and it will soon be available in more than 100 territories. The hub will also show national greenhouse gas emissions alongside countries' targets and commitments to perhaps make governments more accountable. On top of that, in more than a dozen countries, Facebook is expanding its use of labels on climate change posts to direct users to the center.

The UN will soon update its ActNow chatbot on Messenger, Instagram and its website to suggest 10 more actions users can take to fight combat change. There are new camera stickers on Messenger, Instagram and Messenger Kids that aim to help users "strike up a conversation" about climate change.

In addition, Meta is starting up a program to help businesses that use its apps reduce their carbon footprint and adopt more sustainable practices. The Green Boost for Small Businesses project will start this month in the UK and Spain, primarily centered on food producers, restaurants and the hospitality sector. Meta will broaden the program to Italy, France and other nations in 2022.

Elsewhere, Meta says it's a founding member of the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance. The group's goal is to push toward net zero air travel by investing in sustainable aviation fuel.

These efforts are intended to complement internal actions Meta has undertaken to combat climate change. The company hit net zero carbon emissions in 2020 and as of earlier this year, it's using 100 percent renewable energy. Other environmentally conscious efforts include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 97 percent in the last four years and supporting measures to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Like Microsoft, Meta aims to restore more water than it uses by 2030.

As promised earlier in the year, Tesla is expanding access to its Supercharger charger network. Starting today, the company is opening 10 locations in the Netherlands to non-Tesla EVs as part of a pilot program. Provided you live in the country and you’ve installed the Tesla app on your phone (version 4.2.3 or later), you can use them to charge your car. The stations are located in Sassenheim, Apeldoorn Oost, Meerkerk, Hengelo, Tilburg, Duiven, Breukelen, Naarden, Eemnes and Zwolle.

The one thing to note about the pilot is it's only open to EV drivers who live in the Netherlands. However, if you drive a Tesla vehicle and you’re visiting the country, you can charge your car as normal at the stations. Additionally, how the program expands beyond this initial pilot will depend on congestion at the stations. “Future sites will only be opened to Non-Tesla vehicles if there is available capacity,” the company said.

On Monday, the company also put a non-Tesla port home charger on sale. Both the pilot and charger are a sign Tesla is looking outside of its ecosystem for revenue. That said, it may take a while before we see the automaker open its charging stations in the US to EVs from other companies since those use a proprietary connector.

Despite Facebook’s attempts at verifying suspiciously popular accounts, it isn’t perfect (to say the least). The Verge has reported that the company has mistakenly verified a Facebook fan page for Elon Musk as Musk’s own official account. On top of that, it appears to be run by a Bitcoin scammer.

The page, which has 153,000 followers as of this writing, actually acknowledges it isn't Musk... at least in the About section. It says there: “This is a fanpage, uploading tweets etc from him.” But then the URL ends in "ElonMuskoffici", which indicates they're certainly pretending as if it's official. In the Page Transparency section, it says that the people who manage the page are “based in Egypt,” not in the US, which is where Musk resides.

Engadget

The account currently has 11 posts, and while most of them are just reposts of Musk’s tweets, the most recent one is clearly a phony Bitcoin giveaway (the post has since been removed). The earliest is on October 21st, but as The Verge pointed out, the page was actually created on July 28th 2019 under the name “Kizito Gavin” with several name changes since then. It changed its name to Elon Musk on October 17th.

Facebook verification requires account owners to submit proof of their identity, such as driver's license or passport, but scammers have at times found ways around the official process.

We’ve reached out to Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, for comment, but have not received a response just yet. 

Sega is partnering with Microsoft to use the company’s Azure cloud platform to produce “large-scale, global games” as part of its recently announced Super Game project. The publisher first teased the initiative this past May during an investor event. At the time, the company said it would become available sometime during its fiscal 2026 year. In this latest announcement, Sega said the project is integral to its mid to long-term strategy and will see it creating games with a global online component.

“This proposed alliance represents SEGA looking ahead, and by working with Microsoft to anticipate such trends as they accelerate further in future, the goal is to optimise development processes and continue to bring high-quality experiences to players using Azure cloud technologies,” the company said. At this point, we wouldn’t read too much into the fact that Sega and Microsoft are partnering on the project. Plenty of companies, including ones like Sony, depend on Microsoft for their cloud infrastructure, in part because they want to avoid building an online backend from scratch. 

“We look forward to working together as they explore new ways to create unique gaming experiences for the future using Microsoft cloud technologies,” Microsoft’s Sarah Bond said of the alliance. “Together we will reimagine how games get built, hosted, and operated, with a goal of adding more value to players and Sega alike.”

Following last week’s rollout of link stickers, Instagram is introducing a new sticker called “Add Yours.” The company describes it as a way to create public threads in Stories. It also notes it’s the first time it’s added a way for people to publicly participate in the format. Effectively, the sticker acts as both a prompt for other people to upload their own Stories and a way for them to discover new people to follow. That’s because when you tap on the sticker the interface will display everyone who has contributed to the thread and you can view their Stories from there.

The tool could help Instagram boost engagement at a time when it’s reportedly losing users, especially younger ones, to competing platforms like TikTok. It’s not a coincidence the screenshot the company shared shows teens using the feature to its fullest. Since 2018, Instagram has spent millions advertising to teens in an effort to attract them to the platform.  

Facebook (and now, Meta) might just be experiencing its most sustained and intense bout of bad press ever, thanks to whistleblower Frances Haugen and the thousands of documents she spirited out of the company.

The Wall Street Journal was the first publication to report on the contents of the documents, which have also been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since then, the documents have made their way into the hands of more than a dozen publications who formed “a consortium,” much to the dismay of Facebook’s PR department.

There have now been more than a hundred stories based on the documents. And while many of those reference the same documents, the details are significant. But as important as they are, it’s also a dizzying amount of information. There are detailed documents written by the company's researchers, free-form notes and memos, as well as comments and other posts in Workplace, the internal version of Facebook used by its employees.

This mix of sources, together with the fact that the consortium has not released most of the documents to researchers or other journalists, makes the Facebook Papers difficult to parse. Gizmodo has been publishing some of the underlying documents, but new revelations could be trickling out for weeks or months as the material becomes more widely distributed.

But amid all that noise, a few key themes have emerged, many of which have also been backed up by prior reporting on the company and its policies. This article will detail Haugen’s disclosures, and additional details that have arisen from reporting on the Facebook Papers. We'll continue to update it as fresh allegations emerge.

Facebook allowed politics to influence its decisions

This likely won’t be a surprise to anyone who has followed Facebook over the last five years or so, but the Facebook Papers add new evidence to years-long allegations that Mark Zuckerberg and other company leaders allowed politics to influence their decisions.

One of the first stories to break from Haugen’s disclosures (via The Wall Street Journal) included details about Facebook’s “cross check” program, which allowed politicians, celebrities and other VIPs to skirt the company’s rules. The initial motivation for the program? To avoid the “PR fires” that may occur if the social network were to mistakenly remove something from a famous person’s account. In another document, also reported byThe Journal, a researcher on Facebook's integrity team complained that the company had made “special exceptions” for right-wing publisher Brietbart. The publication, part of Facebook’s official News Tab, also had “managed partner” status, which may have helped the company avoid consequences for sharing misinformation.

At the same time, while Facebook’s policies were often perceived internally as putting their thumb on the scale in favor of conservatives, Zuckerberg has also been accused of shelving ideas that could have been perceived as benefiting Democrats. The CEO was personally involved in killing a proposal to put a Spanish language version of its voting information center into WhatsApp ahead of the 2020 presidential election, The Washington Post reported. Zuckerberg reportedly said the plan wasn’t “politically neutral.”

Facebook has serious moderation failures outside the US and Europe

Some of the most damning revelations in the Facebook Papers relate to how the social network handles moderation and safety issues in countries outside of the United States and Europe. The mere fact that Facebook is prone to overlook countries that make up its “rest of world” metrics is not necessarily new. The company's massive failure in Myanmar, where Facebook-fueled hate helped incite a genocide, has been well documented for years.

Yet a 2020 document noted the company still has “significant gaps” in its ability to detect hate speech and other rule-breaking content on its platform. According to Reuters, the company’s AI detection tools — known as “classifiers” — aren’t able to identify misinformation in Burmese. (Again, it’s worth pointing out that a 2018 report on Facebook’s role in the genocide in Myanmar cited viral misinformation and the lack of Burmese-speaking content moderators as issues the company should address.)

Unfortunately, Myanmar is far from the only country where Facebook’s under-investment in moderation has contributed to real-world violence. CNN notes that Facebook’s own employees have been warning that the social network is being abused by “problematic actors” to incite violence in Ethiopia. Yet Facebook lacked the automated tools to detect hate speech and other inciting content even though it had determined the country was one of the most “at risk” countries.

Even in India — Facebook’s largest market — there’s a lack of adequate language support and resources to enforce the platform’s rules. In one document, reported byThe New York Times, a researcher created a test account as an Indian user and started following Facebook’s automated recommendations for accounts and pages to follow. It took just three weeks for a new user’s feed to become flooded with “hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence.” At the end of the experiment, the researcher wrote: “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life.” The report was not an outlier. Facebook groups and WhatsApp messages are being used to “spread religious hatred” in the country, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of several internal documents.

Facebook has misled authorities and the public about its worst problems

Lawmakers, activists and other watchdogs have long suspected that Facebook knows far more about issues like misinformation, radicalization and other major problems than it publicly lets on. But many documents within the Facebook Papers paint a startling picture of just how much the company’s researchers know, often long before issues have boiled over into major scandals. That knowledge is often directly at odds with what company officials have publicly claimed.

For example, in the days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, COO Sheryl Sandberg said that rioters had “largely” organized using other platforms, not Facebook. Yet a report from the company’s own researchers, which first surfaced in April, found that the company had missed a number of warning signs about the brewing “Stop the Steal” movement. Though the company had spent months preparing for a chaotic election, including the potential for violence, organizers were able to evade Facebook’s rules by using disappearing Stories and other tactics, according to BuzzFeed.

Likewise, Facebook’s researchers were internally sounding the alarm about QAnon more than a year before the company banned the conspiracy movement. A document titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” detailed how a “conservative mom” could see QAnon and other conspiracy theories takeover their News Feed in just five days only by liking Pages that Facebook’s algorithms recommended. “Carol’s” experience was hardly an outlier. Researchers ran these types of experiments for years, and repeatedly found that Facebook’s algorithmic recommendations could push users deeper into conspiracies. But much of this research was not acted on until “things had spiraled into a dire state,” one researcher wrote in a document reported by NBC News.

The documents also show how Facebook has misleadingly characterized its ability to combat hate speech. The company has long faced questions about how hate speech spreads on its apps, and the issue sparked a mass advertiser boycott last year. According to a document cited by Haugen, the company’s own engineers estimate that the company is taking action on “as little as 3-5% of hate” on its platform. That’s in stark contrast to the statistics the company typically showcases.

Similarly, the Facebook Papers indicate that Facebook’s researchers knew much more about vaccine and COVID-19 misinformation than they would share with the public or officials. The company declined to answer lawmakers’ questions about how COVID-19 misinformation spreads even though, according to The Washington Post’s reporting, “researchers had deep knowledge of how covid and vaccine misinformation moved through the company’s apps.”

Facebook has misled advertisers and shareholders

These are the allegations that could end up being some of the most consequential because they show serious problems affecting the company’s core business — and could tie into any future SEC action.

Instagram has long been viewed as a bright spot for Facebook in terms of attracting the teens and younger users Facebook needs to grow. But increasingly, teens and younger users are spending more time and creating more content in competing apps like TikTok. The issue is even more stark for Facebook, where “teen and young adult DAU [daily active users] has been in decline since 2012/2013,” according to a slide shared byBloomberg.

The story points out another issue that could get the company into hot water with the SEC: that the company is overcharging advertisers and misrepresenting the size of its user base due to the number of duplicate accounts. Though this is hardly the first time the issue has been raised, the company’s own reports suggest Facebook “undercounts” the metric, known as SUMA (single user multiple account), according to Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg prioritized growth over safety

While the Facebook Papers are far from the first time the company has faced accusations that it puts profit ahead of users’ wellbeing, the documents have shed new light on many of those claims. One point that’s come up repeatedly in the reporting is Zuckerberg’s obsession with MSI, or meaningful social interaction. Facebook retooled its News Feed around the metric in 2018 as a strategy to combat declining engagement. But the decisions, meant to make sure Facebook users were seeing more content from friends and family, also made the News Feed angrier and more toxic.

By optimizing for “engagement,” publishers and other groups learned they could effectively game the company’s algorithms by, well, pissing people off. But politicians learned they could reach more people by posting more negative content, according to The Wall Street Journal. Publishers also complained that the platform was incentivizing more negative and polarizing content. Yet when Zuckerberg was presented with a proposal that found reducing the amount of some re-shared content could reduce misinformation, the CEO “said he didn’t want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement.”

That wasn’t the only time a Facebook leader was unwilling to make changes that could have a detrimental effect on engagement, even if it would address other serious issues like misinformation. Several documents detail research and concerns about Facebook’s “like” button and other reactions.

Because the News Feed algorithm prioritized a “reaction” more than a like, it boosted content that received the “angry” reaction even though researchers flagged that these posts were much more likely to be toxic. “Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience,” The Washington Post wrote. The company finally stopped giving extra weight to “angry” last September.

Facebook slow-walked, and in some cases outright killed, proposals from researchers about how to address the flood of anti-vaccine comments on its platform, the APreported.

The company has also been accused of downplaying research that found Instagram can exacerbate mental health issues for some of its teen users. The documents, which were some of the first records to emerge from Haugen’s disclosures, forced Facebook to “pause” work on an Instagram Kids app that had already drawn the attention of 44 state Attorneys General. The research also prompted the first Congressional hearing as a result of Haugen's whistleblowing. 

What does all this mean for Facebook Meta?

While the Facebook Papers contain a dizzying amount of details about Facebook’s failures and misdeeds, many of the claims are not entirely new allegations. And if there’s one thing Facebook’s history has taught us, it’s that the company has never let a scandal affect its ability to make billions of dollars.

But, there are some signs that Haugen’s disclosures could be different. For one, she has turned over the documents to the SEC, which has the authority to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the company’s actions. As many experts have pointed out, it’s not clear what could actually come from such an investigation, but it could at the very least force Facebook’s top executives to formally answer detailed questions from the regulator.

And though Haugen has said she is not in favor of antitrust action against the social network, the FTC has reportedly begun to take a look at the disclosures. (The FTC is already in the midst of a legal battle with Facebook.) Facebook already seems to be reacting as well. The company has asked employees to preserve documents going back to 2016, The New York Times reported this week. There are other, more practical, issues too. The company is reportedly struggling to recruit engineering talent, according to documents reported by Protocol.

The constant scandals and internal roadblocks have also taken a toll on existing employees. For as much scrutiny as the company has faced externally, the Facebook Papers paint a picture of a company whose employees are at times deeply divided and frustrated. The events of January 6th in particular sparked a heated debate about Facebook’s role, and how it missed opportunities to recognize the threat of the “Stop the Steal Movement.” But there have been fundamental disagreements between researchers and other staffers, and Facebook’s leaders for years.

As Wiredpoints out, the Facebook Papers are full of “badge posts” — Facebook speak for the companywide posts employees write upon their departure from the social network — from “dedicated employees who have concluded that change will not come, or who are at least are too burned out to continue fighting for it.”

Amazon has hit another milestone on the way to its goal of putting 3,236 low Earth orbit to blanket most of the planet with internet access. On Monday, the company filed a license application with the Federal Communications Commission to launch two prototype satellites, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2. They will feature many of the technologies the company plans to include in the final production variant of its constellation satellite, giving it the chance to test how those systems fare outside of a lab environment. At the same time, the tests will allow it to validate its launch procedures and mission management when it comes time to start putting its full network in orbit.

"We’ve invented lots of new technology to meet our cost and performance targets for Project Kuiper. All of the systems are testing well in simulated and lab settings, and we’ll soon be ready to see how they perform in space," said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper. "There is no substitute for on-orbit testing, and we expect to learn a lot given the complexity and risk of operating in such a challenging environment."

According to Amazon, it will launch KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 toward the end of 2022. Once the test is complete, the company plans to deorbit the satellites so they don’t add to the junk pile that’s circling the planet. Additionally, one of the satellites will feature a sunshade so Amazon can see if it helps make it less reflective and thereby less visible to telescopes on the ground. 

With today’s announcement, Amazon shared it’s working with ABL Space Systems to put KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 in space. The company’s new RS1 rocket will ferry the satellites to orbit. One of the main design features of Amazon’s Kuiper craft is that they’re compatible with multiple launch systems, including the Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance.

Once it completes the test, Amazon will need to move quickly to put the entire system into space. When the FCC approved its initial plan, the company said it would put half the satellites in orbit by 2026 and the entire constellation by July 30th, 2029.

One of the most famous cars Chevrolet ever built is now an electric vehicle. The company teamed up with Cagnazzi Racing and Hot Rod publisher MotorTrend to electrify the 1957 Chevy Project X vehicle.

MotorTrend's defunct Popular Hot Rodding magazine bought the Project X car for $250 in 1965. Over the decades, it has been used to test a range of power technologies. Before the electric system, it had a Chevy LSX V-8 engine.

The car now has a 400-volt electric powertrain with an estimated 340 horsepower and 330 pound-feet of torque — those are very similar numbers to Cadillac's Lyriq EV. Chevrolet says the battery can store 30 kilowatt-hours of electricity. The range depends on the quick-change differential that's fitted, which can be swapped to optimize the car for acceleration or range. Still, Chevy claims the now-EV has "enough range for weekend cruising."

Although the car still has the front suspension that was installed in 2007, Cagnazzi Racing made some changes, such as swapping to an electric brake booster and electrohydraulic power steering pump. Some springs have been switched too, as there's less weight under the hood and more at the rear compared with the previous incarnation. Project X now has the same push-button gear selector as the 2021 Chevrolet Corvette as well.

This is the third straight year that Chevy has converted a classic car into an EV for SEMA. The automaker did so to show off the capabilities of the eCrate Connect and Cruise system, as Autoblog points out. That's an electric crate motor and battery combination designed to make it easier for tinkerers to build battery-powered projects.

With the UN’s COP26 climate summit now underway, Qualcomm has become the latest company to announce a sustainability pledge. The chipmaker says it will achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. Here’s the roadmap the company laid out. By 2030, Qualcomm says it will reduce its Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from base 2020 levels. That same year, it plans to reduce its Scope 3 emissions by 25 percent from where they were in 2020.

Scope 1 includes all pollution produced directly by the company or any emissions sources it owns or controls. Scope 2, meanwhile, entails indirect emissions created from the electricity, heating and cooling Qualcomm consumes. Lastly, Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions produced by its value chain.

In the context of a company like Qualcomm that relies on TSMC, Samsung and other foundries to produce its chips, reducing its Scope 3 emissions is the most impactful (and difficult) way the company can lessen its impact on the environment. According to an estimate from Imec, which recently announced a sustainable chip program involving Apple, approximately 75 percent of the greenhouse emissions tied to a mobile device are produced when it’s made, with almost half coming from the chip fabrication process.

Notably, that’s where Qualcomm says the least about its sustainability plans. It notes it’s working towards purchasing all of the power it uses at its San Diego headquarters from renewable sources and decarbonizing its operations using a “minimal” amount of Renewable Energy Credits and carbon offsets. That’s not to say the company is trying to greenwash its environmental responsibilities, but there’s a significant difference between making its offices environmentally friendly and doing the same for its supply chain.      

Facebook has taken out a government-run troll farm in Nicaragua, where multiple government agencies helped run a network of fake accounts and media pages that spanned across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Facebook shared details of the network in its monthly report on coordinated inauthentic behavior on the platform.

In addition to hundreds of fake accounts on its platform, the troll farm also operated a “a complex network of media brands” on Blogspot, Wordpress and Telegram, Facebook said in a statement. Some fake accounts posed as government supporters, while some posed as university students, who led protests against the government in 2018. The fake account also mass-reported activists and other government critics in an attempt to get them banned from Facebook. Beginning in 2019, the group also began "posting and artificially amplifying praise about the Nicaraguan government and the ruling FSLN party."

While it’s not the first time Facebook has caught a government running this kind of operation, Facebook said the Nicaraguan effort was unique because they were able to link it to multiple government institutions, including the Social Security Institute and Supreme Court. The country’s post office headquarters Managua served as a “main hub” for the troll farm, and government workers even appeared to post on a regular 9am-5pm schedule.

“This was really the closest thing we've yet seen to a whole-of-government operation,” Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead for Influence Operations, Ben Nimmo, said during a call with reporters. “This is the first time that I can think of [that] we've seen so many different institutions getting involved.”

It’s also notable that Facebook traced the start of the operation back to 2018, meaning much of the activity went undetected for years. Nimmo noted that while the company’s automated systems were able to detect and disable some of the fake accounts in 2018, the operation was “complex” and time-consuming to investigate.