Tech giant, Meta, has seen an unexpected increase in diverse hires since expanding its remote working options. Facebook, also known as Meta, is one of many companies that have introduced new remote working options for its employees following the pandemic. As a result, between 2021 and 2022, the tech company reported a slight increase in the share of Black, Hispanic, and Asian employees joining its US workforce, while the proportion of white workers dropped by 1.5%. According to Facebook’s Chief Diversity Officer, Maxine Williams, employees from underrepresented backgrounds and people
Social media giant Facebook is on a mission to create some of the most innovative forms of technology in society today. The platform recently announced the launch of its new AI translator, No Language Left Behind (NLLB-200), the first multilingual machine that can translate up to 200 languages without relying on English data. The NLLB-200 aims to help people better connect in society today by eliminating the language barrier. Meta’s AI model uses one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers and is already used to translate content on Facebook and Wikipedia.
District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine has sued Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal. Karl has accused the Facebook co-founder of direct knowledge of policies that allowed firm to gather data of millions of Americans. “This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release. “This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including
Social media giant Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook, Inc., faces prosecution in South Africa for unfairly trying to block local startups from using its WhatsApp Business Application Programming Interface (API), a government agency said Monday. It comes after the country’s competition regulator, the Competition Commission, said in a statement that it has referred Meta Platforms and its subsidiaries WhatsApp Inc and Facebook South Africa to the Competition Tribunal for prosecution for abusing its market dominance. According to Anadolu Agency, the commission alleges that Facebook in July 2020 threatened to
With over 93,000 members, the Black Fathers group has grown into one of the largest groups of dads on Facebook. It was launched by Matt Prestbury in 2008 after he grew increasingly frustrated with the notion that ‘Black fathers weren’t around.’ He knew there were involved Black fathers across the US and the globe – so he set up a group so they could all connect with one another using Facebook. “When I got on Facebook, I figured that was the best opportunity for us to present positive images of black
Facebook is planning to shut down its face-recognition system and delete faceprints of more than 1 billion people. At the present moment – more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people. But according to AP – it recently began scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago. The move comes years after organizations and people of color complained about how problematic AI and facial recognition
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence robots and is reportedly launching touch sensitivity with two new sensors it has created. They include a high-resolution robot fingertip sensor called DIGIT and a thin and replaceable robotic “skin,” known as ReSkin. DIGIT was first released in 2020 as an open-source design; it uses a tiny camera pointed at the pads to produce a detailed image of the touched item. While Reskin can help AI robots to discern information such as an object’s texture, weight, temperature, and state. According
Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are back up and running after an outage that lasted almost six hours and impacted millions across the globe. The services were down from about 4 pm GMT until around 10 pm on Monday. Users flocked to Twitter to share their frustrations, jokes, and assumptions about why the social media giant had shut down. But in a statement, Facebook said that the site’s faulty configuration change affected the company’s internal tools and systems which complicated attempts to resolve the problem. Downdetector, which tracks outages, said
A Facebook-backed subsea communications cable is set to become the world’s longest – directly connecting three continents — Africa, Europe, and Asia. On Tuesday, the major tech firm announced that the 2Africa cable would now extend more than 45,000 kilometers (27,960 miles) once it’s completed. The 8,000-kilometer extension will see 2Africa become the most extended subsea cable system in the world upon completion, Facebook said. This means it will also beat the current record set by the SEA-ME-WE 3 line that stretches 39,000 km and connects 33 countries across South East Asia,
Facebook is set to donate millions to Black-owned Wine Collection McBride Sisters to help them continue their efforts to give back to other Black women-led businesses. Through the SHE CAN Fund, run by the collection, Black women entrepreneurs will be eligible to receive $20,000 in Facebook advertising credits. They’ll also receive guidance from the Facebook Elevate community and learning program designed to fuel the growth of Black and Latinx and Hispanic-owned businesses, according to Afrotech. Members of the program are also encouraged to visit the Elevate Hub to join the Facebook Elevate
