The penalty for non-compliance with the DSA, regarding the failure to curb the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), can scale up to 6 per cent of the social media company’s global annual turnover…reports Asian Lite News
The European Union (EU) has warned Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take immediate action on protecting kids on Instagram or face “heavy sanctions”.
The warning came after reports emailed that Instagram’s recommendation algorithms are allegedly promoting networks of pedophiles who commission and sell child sexual abuse content on the popular image sharing platform.
The Wall Street Journal worked with researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst to undercover and expose such a network of Instagram accounts.
In a tweet, the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, said the company’s “voluntary code on child protection seems not to work”.
“Mark Zuckerberg must now explain and take immediate action. I will discuss with him at Meta’s HQ in Menlo Park on June 23,a he said in the tweet.
After August 25, under the Digital Services Act (DSA), “Meta has to demonstrate measures to us or face heavy sanctions,” he added.
The penalty for non-compliance with the DSA, regarding the failure to curb the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), can scale up to 6 per cent of the social media company’s global annual turnover.
According to the WSJ report, Instagram “helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content”.
The investigators found “128 accounts offering to sell child-sex-abuse material on Twitter, less than a third the number they found on Instagram”.
Meta told the Journal that it had failed to act on these reports and that “it was reviewing its internal processes”.
‘Apple Vision Pro headset not the one I want’
In a meeting with employees, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed Apple’s Vision Pro headset launch and said it “could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want”.
During the companywide meeting, Zuckerberg said that Apple’s device didn’t introduce any major advancements in technology that Meta hadn’t “already explored”, reported The Verge on Friday.
He also stated how Meta will be able to reach a larger user base due to the Quest 3 headset’s lower pricing of $499 as compared to the Vision Pro’s $3,499 selling price.
“I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important,” Meta CEO mentioned.
According to Zuckerberg, the Quest headset is about “people interacting in new ways and feeling closer” in addition to “about being active and doing things”.
“By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” he said about Apple’s ‘Worldwide Developers Conference’ keynote event which was held earlier this week.
“I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want,” he added.
The iPhone maker had unveiled the ‘Vision Pro’ headset earlier this week, which seamlessly blends the digital world with the real one around us.
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