TECHDIGEST – Amid Republican discord, Trump insists he’s going to stay in politics

After two years, Meta has considered reinstating former president Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Facebook Global Affairs president, Nick Clegg, confirmed the decision on Meta’s blog, seen by Ripples Nigeria on Thursday.

Trump’s two-year suspension expired this month after his controversial ban in January 2021.

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“Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out,” Clegg explained on the planned reinstatement.

Trump was banned from Meta platforms after the riot on January 6, 2021, at the Capitol where protesters made unsubstantiated assertions that the election had been rigged during the riots.

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TECHDIGEST – Meta Platforms Inc. today announced that the U.K.’s former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is getting a promotion, one that will put him on a level just under Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Clegg  is currently Meta’s head of policy and communications and was the vice president of global affairs. He’s now been elevated to president of global affairs and will now represent Meta when it comes to big policy decisions and interacting with governments around the world.

“For the last three years, Nick has managed some of the most complex issues our company faces, including content policy, elections, the establishment of the Oversight Board, and more,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work.”

It may look as though Clegg is now to be Meta’s fall guy, given the amount of flak that Zuckerberg takes. Clegg certainly has an impressive resume, although a somewhat strange one for someone now at the top of a social media company. He was the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in the U.K. from 2007 to 2015 and served as deputy prime minister of the country from 2010 to 2015.

He lost his constituency seat in the 2017 general election and later in 2018 got out of politics (mostly) to become Facebook Inc.’s vice president for global affairs and communications. Since then, he has been called “Europe’s man in Silicon Valley” and has spent much of his time trying to improve the image of Facebook and now Meta, as well as doing things such as creating the company’s Oversight Board.

“Given the expanded scope of this new role, he will now report directly to me as well as Sheryl,” said Zuckerberg. “As Nick takes on this new leadership role, it will enable me to focus more of my energy on leading the company as we build new products for the future, and it will support Sheryl as she continues to focus on the success of our business.”

Sandberg said it was a “crucial” time for Clegg to step into these new shoes “as new rules for the internet are written all over the world.” Given the avalanche of criticism Meta has come under of late, she might just have a point.

read more here : siliconangle.com

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TECHDIGEST – As US legislators examine how Facebook and its subsidiaries, such as Instagram, influence young people’s mental health, the company plans to implement new measures on its applications to steer adolescents away from harmful content.

The “take a break” and “nudge” feature will prompt teens away from harmful content on all its platform

This comes after Frances Haugen, a whistleblower and former Facebook product manager, testified before the US Congress about how the company was aware of the harm its social media network was causing to its users’ well-being but chose to ignore it.

The ‘take a break’ feature is a notification that users have spent too much time on the app and that they should “take a break”. This choice is optional and depends solely on the user.
The ‘nudge’ feature will detect when a teen looks at a specific piece of content repeatedly and determine whether it is beneficial to their well-being. The user will then be ‘nudged’ by a prompt or suggestion of other available content that may be of interest to them.

This feature, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on the user’s preferences. Because the feed being seen will not be forcedly updated, the user may choose whether or not to ignore the ‘nudge.’

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of Global Affairs told CNN, “We’re going to introduce something which I think will make a considerable difference, which is where our systems see that the teenager is looking at the same content over and over again and it’s content which may not be conducive to their well-being, we will nudge them to look at other content,”

“We’re introducing something called, ‘take a break,’ where we will be prompting teens to just simply just take a break from using Instagram,” Clegg added.

Clegg noted that Facebook had recently put on hold its plans for developing Instagram Kids, aimed at pre-teens, and was introducing new optional controls for adults to supervise teens.

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