Tech Roundup: Facebook Troubles, WeChat Bug & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• New allegations put forth by a second Facebook whistleblower reveals that company put profits ahead of efforts to fight hate speech and misinformation on its platform, routinely undermining steps to address dangerous and criminal behaviour to preserve its bottomline; claims the tech giant's the Internet.org project to connect people in the "developing world" had internal messaging that the goal was to give Facebook an impenetrable foothold and become the "sole source of news" so they could harvest data from untapped markets.
• The dominant business model of social media platforms, which emphasises scale over everything else, makes them particularly vulnerable to disinformation and other forms of problematic content that can have deleterious effect on its users.
• "Facebook is dangerous because of the collective impact of 3 billion people being surveilled constantly, then having their social connections, cultural stimuli, and political awareness managed by predictive algorithms that are biased toward constant, increasing, immersive engagement," Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote in WIRED.
• And businesses that are built on repeatedly misleading users, on data exploitation, and on choices that are no choices at all deserve reform.
• Tencent fixes a technical vulnerability that made some WeChat content available to Google and Bing, both of which are blocked in China; says "due to a recent tech upgrade on the platform, loopholes were created in the protocols for public accounts on WeChat and that allowed external crawlers to access some of the content."
• Russia's deep packet inspection censorship and filtering technology is now installed at 500 locations of telecom operators, covering 100 percent of mobile internet traffic and 73 percent of broadband traffic, as the government tightens its grip and attempts to gain leverage over Western internet companies.
• ByteDance-owned Douyin, the Chinese version of short video-sharing app TikTok, begins inserting five-second pauses reminding users to "put down the phone," "go to bed" or of "work tomorrow" along the feed in the wake of government's heightened scrutiny of addictive online behaviour and curb binge-viewing.

• Twitter rolls out the ability for all Android and iOS users to host a Space, after previously limiting access to accounts with at least 600 followers; allows users to subscribe to Revue newsletters just by clicking on a link in a Tweet after acquiring the platform in January 2021.
• Snap's (owner of Snapchat) reports 306 million daily active users for Q3 2021, up from 293 million the company reported in April; quarterly revenue takes a hit following privacy-oriented ant-tracking changes on iOS (that requires users' express consent to allow cross-app tracking), even as its revenue surpasses US$ 1 billion for the first time.
• Google lowers commissions on all subscription-based services to 15% on the Play Store, reducing its cut further to "as low as 10%" for apps that fit the Play Media Experience Program, such as apps for distributing books or streaming video or audio; comes as Apple and Google face mounting regulatory scrutiny over the app stores.
• Microsoft Teams adds support for end-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls.
• Facebook quietly abandons the "Hey Facebook" wake word for its Portal video chat device in response to disclosures that "customers indicated they were confused by the phrase “Hey Facebook” and it was hurting usage of the device."
• Music streamer Spotify to open up access to a new tool provided by its Anchor podcast creation platform for creators to begin publishing their video podcasts to its service.
• Apple updates App Store Guidelines to permit developers to contact customers about alternative payment methods, including allowing third-party apps to optionally request basic information like name and email address in a manner that prohibits using the collected specifics to "target individual users outside of the app to use purchasing methods other than in-app purchase."
• Google to expand its Work Profile tool for Android, which allows users to switch between personal and work-related apps on employee- and company-owned devices, to all Workspace (formerly G Suite) users next year; launches Google News Showcase in Ireland, and announces plans to remove music video playback support for free YouTube Music subscribers.