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      How Meta Distanced Itself From Politics

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      In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections.Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Brothers Sentenced to More Than 17 Years in Prison in Sextortion Scheme

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      Two brothers from Nigeria helped run an online sextortion operation that prosecutors said resulted in the death of a high school student.A federal judge in Michigan on Thursday sentenced two brothers from Nigeria to 17 and a half years in prison for their roles in a social media sextortion scheme that claimed more than 100 victims across the United States and resulted in the death of a high school student.The brothers, Samuel Ogoshi, 24, and Samson Ogoshi, 21, who each pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to exploit minors, will be on supervised release for five years after completing their prison terms, prosecutors said in a news release.The brothers, who are from Lagos, Nigeria, were extradited to the United States from Nigeria in August 2023 after they were indicted in November 2022.The extradition marked a new chapter in cooperation with Nigerian authorities in extraditing perpetrators of this kind of scam. Last month, the Justice Department announced the extradition of two other Nigerian nationals on similar charges in Pennsylvania.A third defendant in the case, Ezekiel Robert, is pending extradition from Nigeria, prosecutors said.The brothers were sentenced in a case involving a popular relatively new scam the authorities call financial sextortion, in which scammers pose as young women on social media and send flirty messages to young men and teenage boys before soliciting nude photographs that they then hold as ransom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.

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      If deals are struck, Meta may incorporate the actors’ voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, people with knowledge of the effort said.Meta is in discussions with Awkwafina, Judi Dench and other actors and influencers for the right to incorporate their voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, as the company pushes to build more products that feature artificial intelligence.Apart from Ms. Dench and Awkwafina, Meta is in talks with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key and other celebrities, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. They added that all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations with the tech giant.The talks remain fluid, and it is unclear which actors and influencers, if any, may sign on to the project, the people said. If the parties come to an agreement, Meta could pay millions of dollars in fees to the actors.A Meta spokesman declined to comment. The discussions were reported earlier by Bloomberg.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, which the biggest tech companies are racing to develop and lead. Meta has plowed billions into weaving the technology into its social networking apps and advertising business, including by creating artificially intelligent characters that could chat through text across its messaging apps.On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, increased how much his company would spend on A.I. and other expenses this year to at least $37 billion, up from $30 billion at the beginning of 2024. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would rather build too fast “rather than too late” to prevent his competitors from gaining an edge in the A.I. race.One area of A.I. that is rapidly emerging are chatbots with voice abilities, which act as virtual assistants. In May, OpenAI, a leading A.I. company, unveiled a version of its ChatGPT chatbot that could receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos. It was part of a wider effort to combine conversational chatbots with voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Shares Manipulated Harris Video, in Seeming Violation of X’s Policies

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      Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has waded into one of the thorniest issues facing U.S. politics: deepfake videos.On Friday night, Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, reposted an edited campaign video for Vice President Kamala Harris that appears to have been digitally manipulated to change the spot’s voice-over in a deceptive manner.The video mimics Ms. Harris’s voice, but instead of using her words from the original ad, it has the vice president saying that President Biden is senile, that she does not “know the first thing about running the country” and that, as a woman and a person of color, she is the “ultimate diversity hire.”In addition, the clip was edited to remove images of former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, and to add images of Mr. Biden. The original, unaltered ad, which the Harris campaign released on Thursday, is titled “We Choose Freedom.”The version posted on X does not contain a disclaimer, though the account that first uploaded it Friday morning, @MrReaganUSA, noted in its post that the video was a “parody.” When Mr. Musk reposted the video on his own account eight hours later, he made no such disclosure, stating only, “This is amazing,” followed by a laughing emoji.Mr. Musk’s post, which has since been viewed 98 million times, would seem to run afoul of X’s policies, which prohibit sharing “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meta Rolls Back Restrictions on Trump’s Instagram and Facebook Accounts

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      Meta on Friday said it was rolling back some restrictions to former President Donald J. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts so people on its services could hear from those running for the presidency “on the same basis.”Under the restrictions on Mr. Trump’s accounts, he could have been suspended from Meta’s services — which also include Threads and WhatsApp — if he had posted content that sought to delegitimize this November’s election, among other things. But Meta said it was now relaxing those restrictions, reducing the potential for a suspension if Mr. Trump violated the company’s terms of service.The move further returns Mr. Trump’s social media accounts to what they had been before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. At the time, Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were indefinitely suspended on the grounds that his posts ran the risk of inciting more violence. Last year, Meta reinstated Mr. Trump’s accounts, but with the restrictions.As of Friday, those penalties are no longer applicable.“We believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a statement. He said the penalties placed on Mr. Trump’s accounts had been “a response to extreme and extraordinary circumstances” after Jan. 6, and were no longer needed.Presidential nominees still need to abide by Meta’s terms of service, however, the company said.In a statement, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, said that removing the restrictions on Mr. Trump’s accounts was “a direct attack on our safety and our democracy,” adding that the decision “will allow Trump and his MAGA allies to reach more Americans with their fundamentally undemocratic, un-American misinformation.”At the Republican National Convention next week, Mr. Trump is expected to accept the party’s nomination for president. The Democratic National Convention is in August, though calls from prominent Democrats for President Biden to step aside as the nominee have complicated that process. Mr. Biden has maintained that he has no plans to drop out.Axios previously reported on Meta’s policy update. More

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      Meta’s Ad-Free Subscription Violates Competition Law, E.U. Says

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      Regulators said the subscription service introduced last year is a “pay or consent” method to collect personal data and bolster advertising.When Meta introduced a subscription option last year that would allow users in the European Union to pay for an advertising-free experience of Instagram and Facebook, it was meant to fix regulatory problems the company faced in the region.The plan created new legal headaches instead.On Monday, European Union regulators said Meta’s subscription, which costs up to 12.99 euros a month, amounted to a “pay or consent” scheme that required users to choose between paying a fee or handing over more personal data to Meta to use for targeted advertising.Meta introduced the subscription last year as a way to address regulatory and legal scrutiny of its advertising-based business model. Of most concern was the company’s combination of data collected about users across its different platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — along with information pulled from other websites and apps.Meta argued that by offering a subscription, users had a fair alternative.But regulators on Monday said the system was no choice at all, forcing users to pay for privacy. The authorities said Meta’s policy violated the Digital Markets Act, a new law aimed at reining in the power of the biggest tech companies.The law, known as the D.M.A., is intended to prevent large tech companies from using their size to coerce users into accepting terms of service they would otherwise reject, including the collection of personal data. The concern was platforms like Instagram and Facebook are so widely used that people have to choose to either hand over their data or not join at all.Regulators said the law required companies to allow users to opt out of having their personal data collected while still getting a “less personalized but equivalent alternative” of the service.“Meta’s ‘pay or consent’ business model is in breach of the D.M.A.,” said Thierry Breton, the European commissioner who helped draft the law. “The D.M.A. is there to give back to the users the power to decide how their data is used and ensure innovative companies can compete on equal footing with tech giants on data access.”In a statement, Meta said that the subscription service complied with the Digital Markets Act and that it would work with European regulators to resolve the investigation.Last week, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president, said that Europe was falling behind economically because of overregulation. “Europe’s regulatory complexity and the patchwork of laws across different member states often makes companies hesitant to roll out new products here,” he said.The announcement on Monday is one step in a longer process. The European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-nation bloc, has until March to complete its investigation. If found guilty, Meta could face fines of up to 10 percent of its global revenue and up to 20 percent for repeat offenses.Meta is the second company to face charges under the Digital Markets Act. Last week, the commission brought charges against Apple for unfair business practices related to the App Store. More

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      Gabbi Tuft, First Openly Trans Former W.W.E. Star, Returns to Wrestling

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      Ms. Tuft, who retired from the W.W.E. more than a decade ago and came out as transgender in 2021, will return to the ring on Tuesday, she said on social media.Gabbi Tuft, a former World Wrestling Entertainment star and the first current or former member of the organization to come out as transgender, will return to the ring this month, she said on social media on Sunday.Ms. Tuft, who retired more than a decade ago, fought in the W.W.E. under the name Tyler Reks, a dreadlocked gladiator who weighed 250 pounds. She left the organization shortly after the birth of her child, and has since become an online personal fitness and nutrition coach and a TikTok personality with more than a million followers.On Sunday, Ms. Tuft announced that she would be performing for West Coast Pro Wrestling on Tuesday at the Irvine Improv, a venue in Irvine, Calif., which hosts professional wrestling events. The match, she said, would air at a later date on YouTube and other national TV stations.“Mother Arrives,” Ms. Tuft said on social media. “Everything that is unfolding is per the plan,” she added. “Stay faithful. There is more to the plan than what you see or what you think.” Her opponent was not announced.In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Tuft, who came out publicly as transgender in 2021, said she first began dressing as a woman during the pandemic, but was initially in denial, believing it was similar to adopting a persona in the ring and justifying it as another “form of role play.”Months later, she came out to her wife. The following year, she posted a photograph of herself in front of a portrait of her old W.W.E. persona, Tyler Reks, to Instagram.“This is me. Unashamed, unabashedly me. This is the side of me that has hidden in the shadows, afraid and fearful of what the world would think; afraid of what my family, friends, and followers would say or do,” Ms. Tuft wrote in the accompanying caption. “I am no longer afraid and I am no longer fearful.”In Sunday’s social media posts announcing her return to wrestling, Ms. Tuft wrote, “Mother will guide her children to salvation.” More