Tech Roundup: Everything Facebook Announced in December '17

A roundup of everything Facebook announced in the last one month, its continuing efforts to win back users' trust and the tough existential questions it faced as its role in shaping today's society is plagued by heightened scrutiny...

• Issued official notices by French data protection watchdog CNIL over WhatsApp's controversial decision (taken in August 2016) to share user data with its parent Facebook and its other offerings (like Instagram etc.); gives WhatsApp a month to stop sharing or else face additional investigation.
• Launches Messenger for kids under 13; lawmakers demand that Facebook explain clearly what data it's collecting about its new, young users, and what it's planning to do with it.
• Says 'passively consuming' the News Feed will make you feel worse about yourself, while 'actively interacting with people' is linked to improvements in well-being, reaffirming the negative effects of social media, even as former high-ranking employees express guilt for creating "tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works."
• Makes it possible to import Instagram contacts into Messenger; begins testing a standalone app for direct messaging on Instagram called Direct in Chile, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Uruguay.
• Launches Did You Know questionnaire on its flagship social network in a new attempt to glean personal information off users; officially rolls out Snooze button to mute friends, groups and pages for up to 30 days.
• Updates its News Feed algorithm to penalise posts and updates that encourage users to like, comment or tag people in its comments to gain more visibility; introduces new augmented reality effects for Messenger.
• Launches new facial recognition feature called Photo Review that alerts users when friends upload photos they are not tagged in, so that they can either tag themselves or ask the uploader to take the photo down.
• Confirms it has killed Ticker, a real-time feed of friends' Facebook activity.
• Adds support for live streaming and video chats in Messenger games; introduces pre-roll ads for videos on its Watch streaming platform.
• Begins injecting recommended posts to users' algorithmic feeds on Instagram and adds capabilities to follow hashtags; to begin displaying links to news articles from reputed publishers to dispel fake news on the platform and releases tool to allow users check if they liked or followed any pages managed by Russian-backed troll accounts during U.S. elections in 2016.
• Signs new partnership with Universal Music Group to let users upload videos with recorded music and other social features.
• Defends practice that it lets advertisers exclude certain age groups in recruitment ads; says it's not discriminatory just as "it can be OK to run employment ads in magazines and on TV shows targeted at younger or older people."
• Makes it possible for users to archive expired Stories on Instagram and create collections of past Stories called Stories Highlights.