Elon Musk says Twitter is still losing cash because advertising has dropped by half.In a reply to a tweet offering business advice, Musk tweeted Saturday, "We're still negative cash flow, due to (about a) 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.""Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else," he concluded.Video above: Meta's 'Threads' takes on TwitterEver since he took over Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, Musk has tried to reassure advertisers who were concerned about the ouster of top executives, widespread layoffs and a different approach to content moderation. Some high-profile users who had been banned were allowed back on the site.In April, Musk said most of the advertisers who left had returned and that the company might become cash-flow positive in the second quarter.In May, he hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal executive with deep ties to the advertising industry.But since then, Twitter has upset some users by imposing new limits on how many tweets they can view in a day, and some users complained that they were locked out of the site. Musk said the restrictions were needed to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data.Twitter got a new competitor this month when Facebook owner Meta launched a text-focused app, Threads, and gained tens of millions of sign-ups in a few days. Twitter responded by threatening legal action.Video below: Doctor discusses impact of social media on adults' mental health

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.

Meta is adding new safeguards and monitoring tools for teens across its social platforms: parental controls on Messenger, suggestions for teens to step away from Facebook after 20 minutes, and nudges urging young night-owl Instagrammers to stop scrolling.

The features announced Tuesday come as Meta and other social media platforms face heightened pressure from lawmakers over the impact that their platforms have on younger users, who can be just 13 when they sign up for Meta's apps.

Messenger, Meta’s instant-messaging app, is adding parental supervision tools for the first time that are similar to those that exist on Instagram already: Parents and guardians can see how much time their teens spend on the chat tool, view and receive updates on their contacts list, and get notified if their teen reports someone.

Another new feature is the ability for parents and teens to have discussions directly through notifications if their accounts are synced up.

“We heard from parents and teens about the value they’re seeing from how a two-way dialogue can foster and encourage discussions,” Diana Williams, who oversees product changes for youth and families at Meta, told CNN in an interview.

On Facebook, Meta will start to nudge teen users to take time away from the app after 20 minutes.

Instagram will add introduce a new nudge that suggests teens close Instagram if they’re scrolling Reels videos for too long during nighttime hours. The effort builds on existing Instagram features like Quiet Mode, which temporarily holds notifications and lets people know if you’re trying to focus.

In addition, Instagram is testing a feature that limits how people interact with non-followers. Users must now send an invite to connect with someone if they’re not a follower, and they cannot call the recipient or send photos, videos or voice messages or make calls until the user accepts their request. The feature aims to cut down on unwanted content from strangers, particularly for women, the company said.

It’s the latest in a series of new tools and guardrails for teens from Meta, following the release of leaked internal documents that found Instagram can negatively impact the mental health of its young users. Instagram, for example, has since introduced an educational hub for parents with resources, tips and articles from experts on user safety.

The company said it’s also taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens and will actively nudge them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been dwelling on any type of content for too long.

Few changes have been made to Facebook and Messenger until now. Facebook does, however, have a Safety Center that provides supervision tools and resources, such as articles and advice from leading experts.

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."

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.