The continued baby formula shortage has thousands of parents turning to Facebook groups as a way to feed their babies.

To address the shortage that is affecting at least three-fourths of babies in the country, a North Carolina woman is shipping formula across the states.

"I go to the grocery stores and I see what's available, then I stay at the grocery store and I post — there are specific requirements for how you have to post to these groups because some people have been scamming," Maria Shea said, adding that while she receives payment via PayPal after getting the product for parents across the nation, she has also sent out some formula for free if a person can't pay.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 26% of babies in the U.S. are exclusively breastfed, and Priscilla González's 2-month-old twins are among the 74% of babies not exclusively breastfed.

"When we were about to get discharged, I kind of into a panic because my milk hadn't come in and I didn't know what I was going to do," González said.

As she and other parents keep looking for baby formula that they're depending on, she's grateful for the social media community that helped her when she was in a pinch.

"We have a Facebook page and so anytime any of the neighbors go to the store, they post a picture of the formula aisle and post it on the page with a timestamp so that people in the community know where to go if they're looking for a specific one," González said.

However, officials are asking mothers to heed caution when turning to social media as scammers run amock.

"We've seen consumers report scams where they're actually seeing them on social media because it's so easy, whether it's through a direct message or an external link," said Alma Galvan, a marketing manager for the Better Business Bureau.

Galvan said you can report fake ads or websites to the BBB's scam tracker. By doing this, you can stop another parent from being scammed.

Doctors are also sending out a warning against making your own formula or buying breastmilk from the internet.

"It's very risky because you don't know what medications that breastfeeding person is on and all those medications go through the milk and there are certain infections that can pass through the breast milk," said Erik Fernández y García, an associate professor for Clinical Pediatrics at UC Davis.

He also warns against ordering formulas from other countries since those aren't regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The Human Milk Banking Association of North America accredits nonprofit milk banks, including two locations in California.

What to do about homemade, watered-down and imported baby formula

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration is strongly advising against homemade formula since it has already led to infant hospitalizations and death.

Likewise, with watered-down formula, UC Davis Well Newborn Care Medical Director Laura Kair said diluting formula by using too much water can be dangerous to a baby's health.

Infant formula outside of the U.S. does not meet FDA requirements and could be distributed by third-party vendors that are not required to follow U.S. safety standards.

Watch the video above for the full story.

Twitter will pay a $150 million penalty and put in new safeguards to settle federal regulators' allegations that the social platform failed to protect the privacy of users' data over a six-year span.

The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission announced the settlement on Wednesday with Twitter. The regulators allege that Twitter violated a 2011 FTC order by deceiving users about how well the company maintained and protected the privacy and security of their nonpublic contact information.

The government alleged that the violations occurred from May 2013 to September 2019.

“Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter’s primary source of revenue.”

Facebook's parent company Meta announced Thursday that they had removed many accounts affiliated with a far-right extremist group.

The Associated Press reported that around 480 Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages, and groups associated with the Proud Boys were taken down. The social media company banned the group in 2018.

The company said this year they've removed about 750 accounts linked to the Proud Boys, the news outlet reported.

Back in March, the Justice Department announced Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, was charged with conspiracy for his alleged role in planning the attack on the U.S. Capital on Jan. 6, 2021.

Tarrio and four other members of the group were federally charged with seditious conspiracy in June, the Associated Press reported.

According to the news outlet, the trial is slated to begin on Dec. 12.

Actions by Facebook and its parent Meta during last year's Gaza war violated the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation and non-discrimination, a report commissioned by the social media company has found.

The report Thursday from independent consulting firm Business for Social Responsibility confirmed long-standing criticisms of Meta's policies and their uneven enforcement as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It found the company over-enforced rules when it came to Arabic content and under-enforced content in Hebrew.

It, however, did not find intentional bias at Meta, either by the company as a whole or among individual employees. The report's authors said they found "no evidence of racial, ethnic, nationality or religious animus in governing teams" and noted Meta has "employees representing different viewpoints, nationalities, races, ethnicities, and religions relevant to this conflict."

Rather, it found numerous instances of unintended bias that harmed the rights of Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users.

In response, Meta said it plans to implement some of the report's recommendations, including improving its Hebrew-language "classifiers," which help remove violating posts automatically using artificial intelligence.

"There are no quick, overnight fixes to many of these recommendations, as BSR makes clear," the company based in Menlo Park, California, said in a blog post Thursday. "While we have made significant changes as a result of this exercise already, this process will take time — including time to understand how some of these recommendations can best be addressed, and whether they are technically feasible."

Meta, the report confirmed, also made serious errors in enforcement. For instance, as the Gaza war raged last May, Instagram briefly banned the hashtag #AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, a flash point in the conflict.

Meta, which owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining its algorithms had mistaken the third-holiest site in Islam for the militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular Fatah party.

The report echoed issues raised in internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen last fall, showing that the company's problems are systemic and have long been known inside Meta.

A key failing is the lack of moderators in languages other than English, including Arabic — among the most common languages on Meta's platforms.

For users in the Gaza, Syria and other Middle East regions marred by conflict, the issues raised in the report are nothing new.

Israeli security agencies and watchdogs, for instance, have monitored Facebook and bombarded it with thousands of orders to take down Palestinian accounts and posts as they try to crack down on incitement.

"They flood our system, completely overpowering it," Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook's former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017, told The Associated Press last year. "That forces the system to make mistakes in Israel's favor."

Israel experienced an intense spasm of violence in May 2021 — with weeks of tensions in east Jerusalem escalating into an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The violence spread into Israel itself, with the country experiencing the worst communal violence between Jewish and Arab citizens in years.

In an interview this week, Israel's national police chief, Kobi Shabtai, told the Yediot Ahronot daily that he believed social media had fueled the communal fighting. He called for shutting down social media if similar violence occurs again and said he had suggested blocking social media to lower the flames last year.

"I'm talking about fully shutting down the networks, calming the situation on the ground, and when it's calm reactivating them," he was quoted as saying. "We're a democratic country, but there's a limit."

The comments caused an uproar and the police issued a clarification saying that his proposal was only meant for extreme cases. Omer Barlev, the Cabinet minister who oversees police, also said that Shabtai has no authority to impose such a ban.

___

Associated Press reporter Josef Federman contributed from Jerusalem.

After being suspended by Meta on Friday, Kanye West posted on Twitter for the first time in nearly two years — a move celebrated by Elon Musk, who is in the process of buying the social media network.West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, tweeted a photograph of a hat that said 2024. Musk responded with his own tweet, reading "Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!"West last posted on Twitter in November 2020, just after the last U.S. presidential election. Following his first tweet on Friday, West posted another one which included a picture of himself with Meta Platforms Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of kicking him off Instagram.In a statement to CNN Business on Saturday, a Meta spokesperson said content from West's account was deleted for violating the company's policies and a restriction was placed on his account. It did not specify what was objectionable about the content or what kind of restriction was imposed.The move comes after West shared a since-deleted post that included a screenshot of a text conversation with Sean "Diddy" Combs that was criticized by the American Jewish Committee as "anti-Jewish."West was previously suspended by Instagram for 24 hours in March for directing a racial slur at "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah.Earlier this week, West stirred controversy for wearing a "White Lives Matter" shirt and dressing several Black models in shirts with the same phrase, deemed a "hate slogan" by the Anti-Defamation League, at his fashion show in Paris.

"Buy Nothing" groups have exploded in popularity. They can help people save money, cut down on waste and connect with their local community.

Idgie Watkins and Cathy Kusman-Kelly participate in their community "Buy Nothing" group. In their group, neighbors exchange items and services for free.

“Someone gave away plumbing work. We have a brand-new harmonica kit. We went from beds and furniture to household stuff, pots and pans,” said Kusman-Kelly.

Saving money wasn’t the original motivation behind the Buy Nothing Project.

Liesel Clark and her friend noticed plastics washing up on beaches near their Washington state home. They and their children logged all the plastics they were finding and learned they were coming from everyone.

“They’re coming from our homes, our cars, our workplaces.”

In 2013, the Buy Nothing Project started off as a social experiment to see if they could find items they might need or want from neighbors before purchasing something new.

People started sharing and giving right away. Soon, Liesel developed rules and guidelines for others to start their own hyper-local "Buy Nothing" groups. Now, there is an app that has grown to more than 6.5 million users nationwide.

Liesel says most people start by posting items they want to give away. She encourages people to ask for something they need before buying it.

“We’re challenging people to think creatively about how they might be giving to their loved ones," she said. "People share food even over the holidays. And this is a great time when people are traveling, you can borrow luggage.”

The Buy Nothing Project also offers free online courses to teach people how to grow this gift economy.

Facebook has been partially blocked by the Russian government after they said the social network "restricted" four Russian media outlets' accounts.

On Friday, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s tech and communications regulator, said in a statement that Facebook was violating the "fundamental human rights and freedoms, as well as the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens."

Roskomnadzor said they sent Facebook's parent company Meta requests on Feb. 24 to remove its restrictions for the accounts of the Zvezda TV channel, the RIA Novosti news agency, the Lenta.ru, and Gazeta.ru and to explain why they were restricted.

According to Roskomnadzor, their request was ignored.

Roskomnadzor also pointed out that since October 2020, they had recorded 23 cases of censorship by the social network.

In response, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, posted on Twitter that the company refused to comply with Russia's request "to stop fact-checking and labeling of content posted on Facebook by four Russian state-owned media organizations.”

Clegg added that they would not be turning off their services because it "would silence important expression at a crucial time."

"Ordinary Russians are using Meta's apps to express themselves and organize for action. We want them to continue to make their voices heard, share what’s happening, and organize through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger."

Ordinary Russians are using @Meta's apps to express themselves and organize for action. We want them to continue to make their voices heard, share what’s happening, and organize through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. pic.twitter.com/FjTovgslCe

— Nick Clegg (@nickclegg) February 25, 2022

AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Facebook owner, Meta.

Paxton alleges that Meta illegally collected users’ biometric data, including facial recognition technology, without their consent.

The lawsuit goes on to accuse Meta of sending the information to others for profit.

According to the suit, Facebook violated a Texas law that requires people to get permission before capturing a person’s biometric information.

The suit also alleges that Facebook failed to destroy the data in a reasonable amount of time, which violates state law.

The Attorney General’s Office says Facebook violated state law billions of times.

Meta is also accused of violating Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act because it reportedly misled users.

There is a $25,000 penalty for each unlawful capturing of a biometric identifier.

The lawsuit asks for an additional $10,000 civil penalty for each violation.

Paxton estimates that the penalties could add up to billions of dollars.

This lawsuit out of Texas is similar to another suit out of Illinois in 2021, where Facebook was accused of using its Tag Suggestions tool to store users’ biometric data without their consent.

The suit ended with a class action privacy settlement.

Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million.

Meta has not commented on the recent lawsuit in Texas.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-6 on Thursday to advance a bill limiting the way big companies like Amazon, Apple and Google do business.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act targets a practice known as self-preferencing.

"Self-preferencing is mainly intended to describe situations where, if you're a merchant selling a product through an e-commerce platform, and that e-commerce platform is a competitor of yours who offers the same product, the platform somehow induces the consumer to have a preference for its own product," said Tad Lipsky, the director of the Competition Advocacy Program at the Global Antitrust Institute.

"It's really easy to find examples of that tension," Lipsky continued. "For Amazon, it could be any of a whole range of products that they offer themselves. Google, same thing. There are a lot of e-commerce searches on Google sites that can relate to products that Google offers."

The bill does not identify any major companies by name. It says any new rules will apply to companies with at least a billion monthly users, a list which would include companies like Amazon, Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

In 2021, Amazon and Meta were two of the top three companies in terms of spending money to lobby Congress, according to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who spoke at Thursday's hearing.

"They are never going to like this bill," said Sen. Klobuchar. "When companies take them on, they have, for decades, formed an impenetrable shield. They're making a lot of money. They want to maintain and profit and keep their positions as monopoly gatekeepers."

The major tech companies did not comment on Thursday's hearing, but most have raised objections to the legislation moving through Congress.

Amazon has warned third-party sellers that they might be kicked off the marketplaces if the legislation passes.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said during the hearing that Apple CEO Tim Cook called him personally to talk about the bill for more than 40 minutes.

Cruz, and several other senators, said they were advancing the bill for a full Senate vote with the knowledge that more amendments will be made.

"This bill may become law without there ever having been a public hearing about how these particular provisions are supposed to operate," said Lipsky. "They're very extensive, complex provisions. It could lead to a tremendous amount of disruption and intervention in these companies' business, and nobody has established by the usual legislative procedures that there's a need for that to happen."

It's not clear when, or if, the bill will make it onto a crowded Senate calendar for a vote.

If it passes in the Senate, it would still have to clear some hurdles in the House before becoming law. But it has enjoyed some measure of bipartisan support throughout the process, a rarity in an often-divided Congress.

"It's nice and refreshing to see something resembling real debate on substance," said Sen. Cruz. "It's something we as a committee, and we as a Senate, ought to do more often."

After the Capitol insurrection, major social media and web hosting platforms that provide the tools for them to stay online, like Amazon Web Services, made substantial efforts to eradicate domestic violent extremists and conspiracy groups like QAnon from their platforms.

AWS removed far-right social media space Parler from its services, causing it to go temporarily offline. 

Since then, many of these far-right groups have jumped to online spaces like Gab.

These alternative hosting companies hold terms of service that allow hate speech and other unfavorable content to flourish on their platforms. 

The most well-known of these alternative hosting sites is Epik, backed by CEO Rob Monster, who over the years has provided services to several hate-speech-filled message boards like neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer and 8chan. 

 

In some cases, Epik has stepped in to provide these services after far-right spaces were dropped by their original web hosting providers. 

For example, after it was revealed that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting used Gab to post hate speech, the site was subsequently dropped by GoDaddy. Still, Epik stepped in to provide domain hosting services so Gab could stay online.

After being dropped by AWS, it also stepped in to provide Parler with domain hosting services. 

"What we're seeing now is some of the more reputable companies saying that we're not going to be a part of that, we're not going to let our systems be abused," said Bret Schafer, Media, and Digital Disinformation Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. "There is a huge ecosystem that allows disinformation to be monetized, and I think the more reputable companies are seeing this as a challenge to their business."

Jack Bratich, author and Rutgers University professor, said one worry he has about the pairing of companies like Epik and Gab is that it not only makes these companies financially dependent on each other, it also allows them to push different potentially dangerous ideologies even further. 

"I think there's something bigger going on socially and culturally around these media platforms... that expands beyond both the financial incentives," Bratich said. "This is tied to a kind of development of a kind of Christian nationalism and a desire for a kind of a theocracy in the U.S. People like [Rob] Monster, who owns Epik, have been pretty forthcoming about that."

Tyler Adkisson at Newsy first reported this story.

Facebook and Google are both forcing some users to switch to two-factor authentication in 2022.

The technology requires people to log in using a password and a secure code sent to their phone or email address. Critics say the decision poses too much of a burden for the average user. Cybersecurity experts insist it’s the least we can do.

“Passwords are breakable. Passwords can be stolen. Passwords can be guessed,” said Dr. Vahid Behzadan, a professor of computer science at the University of New Haven. “By adding two-factor authentication, we are making a successful compromise a little more difficult for the attacker.”

Dr. Behzadan said one of the biggest hurdles in cyber security is apathy from the general public.

“Many do not take security seriously,” he said. “Sharing passwords, writing passwords on a Post-it note and putting it on your desk, or choosing predictable, easy-to-guess passwords.”

Nearly 2 in 5 Americans shared one of their passwords with someone in 2021, according to a survey published in October. A different survey found that half of Americans believed their passwords are secure.

In a May post on the Google blog, the company’s director of product management, identity, and user security called passwords “the single biggest threat to your online security.” He said the company hopes to eliminate passwords altogether in the future.

“The internet is still suffering from that lack of foresight,” said Dr. Behzadan. “Internet protocols that were designed in the 80s are still in use, and they're still a major cause for concern in terms of cybersecurity.”

In the meantime, Google recommends using a password generator to create strong, unique passwords for every account. The company offers a password manager in its Chrome app so users don’t have to memorize everything. Similar products are available through Apple and Microsoft.

ADA, Mich. — An organic vegetable farm in West Michigan is now

adapting to the digital marketplace

and offering a new way to shop for local food.

Green Wagon Farm in Ada

has rallied farmers and producers to create an easy-to-use Facebook-based market in which customers can order and pick up their items once a week.

The

Reko Market

launched Thursday for the first time in West Michigan. Each week, small farms will post their products in the Facebook group, and then people can pick up the items the week after.

The market allows people to avoid grocery stores while supporting local businesses.

"We are excited to offer this online option to shop local and hope to provide easier access for customers to support their local economy," said farm manager Heather Anderson. :With this pandemic, we see the benefits of offering online payment, having shorter lines at a less busy market and knowing where your food comes from."

Vendors include bakeries and a local ice cream shop in addition to farms producing vegetables, meats, eggs, tea, herbs, and honey.

A list of vendors can be found

online.

This story was originally published by

WXMI

in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

MENLO PARK, Calif. —

Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

Related video above: Rite Aid Nixes Facial Recognition Software in 2020 Amid Accusations of Racial Bias.

"This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "Its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates."

He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology "against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules."

Facebook’s about-face follows a busy few weeks. On Thursday it announced its new name Meta for Facebook the company, but not the social network. The change, it said, will help it focus on building technology for what it envisions as the next iteration of the internet — the "metaverse."

The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harms its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.

More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people. But Facebook has recently begun scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago.

The company in 2019 ended its practice of using face recognition software to identify users’ friends in uploaded photos and automatically suggesting they "tag" them. Facebook was also sued in Illinois over the tag suggestion feature.

The decision "is a good example of trying to make product decisions that are good for the user and the company," said Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She added that the move also demonstrates the power of regulatory pressure, since the face recognition system has been the subject of harsh criticism for over a decade.

Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook's parent company, appears to be looking at new forms of identifying people. Pesenti said Tuesday's announcement involves a "company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication."

"Facial recognition can be particularly valuable when the technology operates privately on a person’s own devices," he wrote. "This method of on-device facial recognition, requiring no communication of face data with an external server, is most commonly deployed today in the systems used to unlock smartphones."

Researchers and privacy activists have spent years raising questions about the tech industry's use of face-scanning software, citing studies that found it worked unevenly across boundaries of race, gender or age. One concern has been that the technology can incorrectly identify people with darker skin.

Another problem with face recognition is that in order to use it, companies have had to create unique faceprints of huge numbers of people – often without their consent and in ways that can be used to fuel systems that track people, said Nathan Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought Facebook and other companies over their use of the technology.

"This is a tremendously significant recognition that this technology is inherently dangerous," he said.

Concerns also have grown because of increasing awareness of the Chinese government’s extensive video surveillance system, especially as it’s been employed in a region home to one of China’s largely Muslim ethnic minority populations.

At least seven states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of the technology amid fears over civil rights violations, racial bias and invasion of privacy. Debate over additional bans, limits and reporting requirements has been underway in about 20 state capitals this legislative session, according to data compiled by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in May of this year.

Meta’s newly wary approach to facial recognition follows decisions by other U.S. tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM last year to end or pause their sales of facial recognition software to police, citing concerns about false identifications and amid a broader U.S. reckoning over policing and racial injustice.

President Joe Biden’s science and technology office in October launched a fact-finding mission to look at facial recognition and other biometric tools used to identify people or assess their emotional or mental states and character.

European regulators and lawmakers have also taken steps toward blocking law enforcement from scanning facial features in public spaces, as part of broader efforts to regulate the riskiest applications of artificial intelligence.

Facebook’s face-scanning practices also contributed to the $5 billion fine and privacy restrictions the Federal Trade Commission imposed on the company in 2019. Facebook’s settlement with the FTC after the agency’s yearlong investigation included a promise to require "clear and conspicuous" notice before people’s photos and videos were subjected to facial recognition technology.

As the 2020 election approaches, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the social media networks are giving users an opportunity to limit most political advertisements.

The announcement was paired with several measures Zuckerberg said Facebook and Instagram are launching as part of its response to the upcoming election.

In order to limit the advertisements on Facebook, go to the Facebook mobile app, click on settings, ad preferences, and ad topics. The video below shows how it works:

For Instagram users, click on settings, ads, and ad topic preferences. The video below shows how it works:

Zuckerberg said in an op-ed to USA Today, “For those of you who've already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you — so we're also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We'll still remind you to vote.”

SPRINGBORO, Ohio —

The Springboro Police Department said in a Facebook post Thursday that they are aware 0f a group in southwest Ohio responsible for recent vehicle thefts.

The Springboro Police Department is actively investigating the incidents in partnership with other Ohio agencies, and has already apprehended several people involved with the group.

The department posted on Facebook after a civilian social media post began to circulate about the thefts made from garages that are left open.

Police say that there are no instances in the greater Springboro area where a perpetrator has entered a home, aside from the garage.

The Springboro Police Department encourages residents to secure their cars at night and to keep doors and windows locked. The department also asks that people call the station directly if they have any concerns instead of speculating information on social media.

If you experience any suspicious activity in your neighborhood please contact your local police department to investigate.

Facebook, in the aftermath of damning testimony that its platforms harm children, will be introducing several features including prompting teens to take a break using its photo-sharing app Instagram, and “nudging" teens if they are repeatedly looking at the same content that's not conducive to their well-being.

The Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is also planning to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis so that parents or guardians can supervise what their teens are doing online.

These initiatives come after Facebook announced late last month that it was pausing work on its Instagram for Kids project. But critics say the plan lacks details and they are skeptical that the new features would be effective.

The new controls were outlined on Sunday by Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president for global affairs, who made the rounds on various Sunday news shows including CNN's “State of the Union" and ABC's “This Week with George Stephanopoulos" where he was grilled about Facebook's use of algorithms as well as its role in spreading harmful misinformation ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

“We are constantly iterating in order to improve our products,” Clegg told Dana Bash on “State of the Union" Sunday. “We cannot, with a wave of the wand, make everyone’s life perfect. What we can do is improve our products, so that our products are as safe and as enjoyable to use."

Clegg said that Facebook has invested $13 billion over the past few years in making sure to keep the platform safe and that the company has 40,000 people working on these issues.

The flurry of interviews came after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former data scientist with Facebook, went before Congress last week to accuse the social media platform of failing to make changes to Instagram after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and of being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation.

Haugen’s accusations were supported by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit.

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a watchdog for the children and media marketing industry, said that he doesn't think introducing controls to help parents supervise teens would be effective since many teens set up secret accounts anyway. He was also dubious about how effective nudging teens to take a break or move away from harmful content would be. He noted Facebook needs to show exactly how they would implement it and offer research that shows these tools are effective.

“There is tremendous reason to be skeptical," he said. He added that regulators need to restrict what Facebook does with its algorithms.

He said he also believes that Facebook should cancel its Instagram project for kids.

When Clegg was grilled by both Bash and Stephanopoulos in separate interviews about the use of algorithms in amplifying misinformation ahead of Jan. 6 riots, he responded that if Facebook removed the algorithms people would see more, not less hate speech, and more, not less, misinformation.

Clegg told both hosts that the algorithms serve as “giant spam filters."

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, told Bash in a separate interview Sunday that it's time to update children's privacy laws and offer more transparency in the use of algorithms.

“I appreciate that he is willing to talk about things, but I believe the time for conversation is done," said Klobuchar, referring to Clegg's plan. “The time for action is now.”

Facebook is having a rough week.

For the second time this week, Facebook and Instagram are down again.

Facebook said they were aware of the issue and were working to resolve it.

"We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook said in a tweet.

According to Down Detector, the social media outlets began having issues Friday afternoon, with more than 28,000 reports of a problem reported at approximately 1:30 p.m.

43% reported problems with the app, while 33% had issues with the website.

Facebook and Facebook Messenger also appeared to be down for users, with more than 2,800 reports reported for the app and more than 900 reports for the messenger.

56% of the Facebook-related issues were reported for the website.

Video above: Facebook exec responds to whistleblower testimony

Facebook has recently taken a harsher tone toward whistleblower Frances Haugen, suggesting that the social network could be considering legal retaliation after Haugen went public with internal research that she copied before leaving her job earlier this year.

U.S. law protects whistleblowers who disclose information about potential misconduct to the government. But that protection doesn't necessarily cover taking corporate secrets to the media.

Facebook still has to walk a fine line. The company has to weigh whether suing Haugen, which could dissuade other employees who might otherwise speak out, is worth casting itself as a legal Godzilla willing to stomp on a woman who says she's just doing the right thing.

Haugen may face other consequences. Whistleblowers often put themselves at risk of professional damage — other firms may be reluctant to hire them in the future — and personal attacks from being in the public eye.

Facebook did not respond to emailed questions.

WHAT DID HAUGEN DO?

Haugen secretly copied a trove of internal Facebook documents before leaving the company and subsequently had her lawyers file complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that Facebook hides what it knows about the negative effects of its platform.

John Tye, her lawyer, said the team gave redacted documents to Congress, where Haugen testified on Tuesday, and also informed officials in California. Haugen also shared documents with the Wall Street Journal, which she started talking to in December, leading to a series of explosive stories that began in mid-September.

WHAT WAS FACEBOOK'S RESPONSE?

The company says it has been mischaracterized. "I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote to employees on Tuesday.

Some company officials have also begun using harsher language to describe Haugen's actions that could be interpreted as threatening.

In an Associated Press interview Thursday, Facebook executive Monika Bickert repeatedly referred to the documents Haugen copied as "stolen," a word she has also used in other media interviews. David Colapinto, a lawyer for Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto who specializes in whistleblower cases, said that language was threatening.

In the same interview, asked if Facebook would sue or retaliate against the whistleblower, Bickert said only, "I can't answer that."

A week earlier, Antigone Davis, Facebook's head of global safety, testified in the Senate that Facebook "would never retaliate against someone for speaking to Congress," which left open the possibility that the company might go after her for giving documents to the Journal.

IS HAUGEN PROTECTED?

Various laws offer whistleblower protection at both the state and federal levels. The federal laws applicable to Haugen are the Dodd-Frank Act, a 2010 Wall Street reform law, and the Sarbanes Oxley Act, a 2002 law that followed the collapse of Enron and other accounting scandals.

Dodd-Frank expanded protections for whistleblowers and empowered the SEC to take action against a company that threatens a whistleblower. Protections exist for both employees and former employees, experts say.

Asked about her risk because she went to the media, Haugen's lawyer, Tye, maintains that because Haugen went to the SEC, Congress and state authorities, she's entitled to whistleblower protections. He said any suit from Facebook would be "frivolous" and that Facebook has not been in touch.

WHAT ABOUT HER LEAKS TO THE MEDIA?

Courts haven't tested whether leaking to the media is protected under Dodd-Frank, but Colapinto said the U.S. Secretary of Labor determined decades ago that environmental and nuclear-safety whistleblowers' communications with the media were protected. He argues that the language of Sarbanes-Oxley is modeled on those earlier statutes, and Haugen should have the same protections for any of her communications with reporters.

Facebook could allege that Haugen broke her nondisclosure agreement by sharing company documents with the press, leaking trade secrets or just by making comments Facebook considers defamatory, said Lisa Banks of Katz, Marshall and Banks, who has worked on whistleblower cases for decades. "Like many whistleblowers, she's extraordinarily brave and puts herself at personal and professional risk in shining a light on these practices," she said.

Haugen effectively used leaks to the media to turn up the pressure on Congress and government regulators. Colapinto said her disclosures had a public-interest purpose that could complicate enforcing the NDA if Facebook chose to do so.

COULD FACEBOOK FACE BLOWBACK?

Facebook probably wants its veiled threats to unnerve other employees or former employees who might be tempted to speak out. "If they go after her, it won't be because they necessarily think they have a strong case legally, but sending a message to other would-be whistleblowers that they intend to play hardball," Banks said.

But she said it would be a "disaster" for Facebook to go after Haugen. Regardless of potential legal vulnerabilities, Facebook might look like a bully if it pursued a legal case against her.

"The last thing Facebook needs is to rouse the ire of governmental authorities and the public at large by playing the role of the big bad giant company against the courageous individual whistleblower," said Neil Getnick, whose firm, Getnick and Getnick, represents whistleblowers.

If you happened to have lost 770 pounds of high-grade marijuana, a sheriff's office in Florida is trying to do the right thing and reunite you with your lost possessions.

"I mean, trying to identify the rightful owner of the property is the very least we can do, especially since it has a street value of roughly two million dollars!!" the Brevard County Sheriff's Office posted on Facebook.

FULL VIDEO: Florida man captures gator using trash bin before releasing it into pond

If the marijuana belongs to you, you could even get an all-expense-paid "staycation" to reflect on how much the lost property means to you and so that you don't get ripped off.

"All of us at one point or another in our lives have lost or misplaced something important and are always hopeful that a good and kind person will find our lost item and do the right thing by returning it to its rightful owner," Sheriff Wayne Ivey said on Facebook.

If you are looking to have your property returned, you can reach out to the Narcotics Agents at the Brevard County Sheriff's Office.

'You have to come home!': Florida teen finds iguana in their toilet

WASHINGTON —

A former Facebook data scientist has stunned lawmakers and the public with revelations of the company's awareness of apparent harm to some teens from Instagram and her accusations of dishonesty in its fight against hate and misinformation. Now she is coming before Congress.

Frances Haugen has come forward with a wide-ranging condemnation of Facebook, buttressed with tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in Facebook's civic integrity unit. Haugen also has filed complaints with federal authorities alleging that Facebook's own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides what it knows.

After recent reports in The Wall Street Journal based on documents she leaked to the newspaper raised a public outcry, Haugen revealed her identity in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview aired Sunday night. She insisted that "Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety."

The ex-employee challenging the social network giant with 2.8 billion users worldwide and nearly $1 trillion in market value is a 37-year-old data expert from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a master's degree in business from Harvard. She worked for 15 years prior to being recruited by Facebook in 2019 at companies including Google and Pinterest.

Haugen is set to testify to the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection at a hearing Tuesday.

The panel is examining Facebook's use of information from its own researchers on Instagram that could indicate potential harm for some of its young users, especially girls, while it publicly downplayed the negative impacts. For some of the teens devoted to Facebook's popular photo-sharing platform, the peer pressure generated by the visually focused Instagram led to mental health and body-image problems, and in some cases, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, the research leaked by Haugen showed.

One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

"And what's super tragic is Facebook's own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed," Haugen said in the televised interview. "And it actually makes them use the app more. And so, they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more."

As the public relations debacle over the Instagram research grew last week, Facebook put on hold its work on a kids' version of Instagram, which the company says is meant mainly for tweens aged 10 to 12.

The senators are eager to hear from Haugen.

"I look forward to asking her follow-up questions about why Facebook hasn't taken action to fix problems on its platforms, even when its own internal research reflects massive problems," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a member of the subcommittee, told The Associated Press on Monday. "I want to discuss how Facebook's algorithms promote harmful and divisive content, and how much Facebook really profits off of our children."

At issue are algorithms that govern what shows up on users' news feeds, and how they favor hateful content. Haugen said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together. Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the social media giant sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its revenue.

Haugen's criticisms range beyond the Instagram situation. She said in the interview that Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and incitement to violence after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump last year, alleging that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

After the November election, Facebook dissolved the civic integrity union where Haugen had been working. That, she said, was the moment she realized "I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous."

Haugen says she told Facebook executives when they recruited her that she had asked to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.

Antigone Davis, Facebook's head of global safety, faced a barrage of criticism from senators on the Commerce panel at a hearing last Thursday. They accused Facebook of concealing the negative findings about Instagram and demanded a commitment from the company to make changes.

Davis defended Instagram's efforts to protect young people using its platform. She disputed the way The Wall Street Journal story describes what the research shows.

Facebook maintains that Haugen's allegations are misleading and insists there is no evidence to support the premise that it is the primary cause of social polarization.

"Even with the most sophisticated technology, which I believe we deploy, even with the tens of thousands of people that we employ to try and maintain safety and integrity on our platform, we're never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time," Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of policy and public affairs, said Sunday on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

That's because of the "instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication" on Facebook, Clegg said, adding, "I think we do more than any reasonable person can expect to."

By coming forward, Haugen says she hopes it will help spur the government to put regulations in place for Facebook's activities. Like fellow tech giants Google, Amazon and Apple, Facebook has for years enjoyed minimal regulation in Washington.

Separately Monday, a massive global outage plunged Facebook, Instagram and the company's WhatsApp messaging platform into chaos, only gradually dissipating by late Monday Eastern time. For some users, WhatsApp was working for a time, then not. For others, Instagram was working but not Facebook, and so on.

Facebook didn't say what might have caused the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. EDT and was still not fixed more than six hours later.

A massive global outage plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services — including Facebook's own workforce — into chaos Monday.

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET and was still unfixed more than six hours later, although scattered users have reported partial restoration of one service or another. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.

For hours, Facebook's only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and that it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's outgoing chief technology officer, later tweeted “sincere apologies" to everyone impacted by the outage. He blamed “networking issues” and said teams are "working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."

There was no evidence as of Monday afternoon that malicious activity was involved. Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.” Prince said the most likely explanation was that Facebook mistakenly knocked itself off the internet during maintenance.

Facebook did not respond to messages for comment about the attack or the possibility of malicious activity.

While much of Facebook's workforce is still working remotely, there were reports that employees at work on the company's Menlo Park, California, campus had trouble entering buildings because the outage had rendered their security badges useless.

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook's nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with online communities, log on to multiple other websites and even order food.

It also showed that despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can easily replace the social network that over the past 17 years has effectively evolved into critical infrastructure. The outage came the same day Facebook asked a federal judge that that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services.

There are certainly online services for posting selfies, connecting with fans or reaching out to elected officials, But those who rely on Facebook to run their business or communicate with friends and family in far-flung places saw this as little consolation.

Kendall Ross, owner of a knitwear brand called Knit That in Oklahoma City, said he has 32,000 followers on his Instagram business page @id.knit.that. Almost all of his website traffic comes directly from Instagram. He posted a product photo about an hour before Instagram went out. He said he tends to sell about two hand-knit pieces after posting a product photo for about $300 to $400.

“The outage today is frustrating financially,” he said. “It’s also a huge awakening that social media controls so much of my success in business.”

The cause of the outage remains unclear. Madory said it appears Facebook appears to have deleted basic data that tells the rest of the internet how to communicate with its properties. Such data is part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its location on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.

So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as primary modes of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.

“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said. “They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate.” Tobac said during previous outages, some people have received emails promising to restore their social media account by clicking on a malicious link that can expose their personal data.

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.

“What it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by Internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,” tweeted Columbia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin.

Facebook was already in the throes of a separate major crisis after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company's awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions. Haugen went public on CBS's “60 Minutes" program Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

Haugen had also anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement alleging Facebook's own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation and leads to increased polarization. It also showed that the company was aware that Instagram can harm teenage girls' mental health.

The Journal's stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests over the public good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”

Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main Twitter account, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform. Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “how much?”

___

AP business writer Mae Anderson in New York and AP technology writer Matt O'Brien in Providence, R.I. contributed to this report.