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The European Union is investigating Meta’s election policies

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The EU has officially opened a significant investigation into Meta for its alleged failures to remove election disinformation. While the European Commission’s statement doesn’t explicitly mention Russia, Meta confirmed to Engadget the EU probe targets the country’s Doppelganger campaign, an online disinformation operation pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Bloomberg’s sources also said the probe was focused on the Russian disinformation operation, describing it as a series of “attempts to replicate the appearance of traditional news sources while churning out content that is favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policies.”

The investigation comes a day after France said 27 of the EU’s 29 member states had been targeted by pro-Russian online propaganda ahead of European parliamentary elections in June. On Monday, France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot urged social platforms to block websites “participating in a foreign interference operation.”

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget that the company had been at the forefront of exposing Russia’s Doppelganger campaign, first spotlighting it in 2022. The company said it has since investigated, disrupted and blocked tens of thousands of the network’s assets. The Facebook and Instagram owner says it remains on high alerts to monitor the network while claiming Doppelganger has struggled to successfully build organic audiences for the pro-Putin fake news.

Mark Zuckerberg onstage during a company keynote presentation. Profile view from his left side.Mark Zuckerberg onstage during a company keynote presentation. Profile view from his left side.

Meta

The European Commission’s President said Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram, may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), the landmark legislation passed in 2022 that empowers the EU to regulate social platforms. The law allows the EC to, if necessary, impose heavy fines on violating companies — up to six percent of a company’s global annual turnover, potentially changing how social companies operate.

In a statement to Engadget, Meta said, “We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms. We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.”

The EC probe will cover “Meta’s policies and practices relating to deceptive advertising and political content on its services.” It also addresses “the non-availability of an effective third-party real-time civic discourse and election-monitoring tool ahead of the elections to the European Parliament.”

The latter refers to Meta’s deprecation of its CrowdTangle tool, which researchers and fact-checkers used for years to study how content spreads across Facebook and Instagram. Dozens of groups signed an open letter last month, saying Meta’s planned shutdown during the crucial 2024 global elections poses a “direct threat” to global election integrity.

Meta told Engadget that CrowdTangle only provides a fraction of the publicly available data and would be lacking as a full-fledged election monitoring tool. The company says it’s building new tools on its platform to provide more comprehensive data to researchers and other outside parties. It says it’s currently onboarding key third-party fact-checking partners to help identify misinformation.

However, with Europe’s elections in June and the critical US elections in November, Meta had better get moving on its new API if it wants the tools to work when it matters most.

The EC gave Meta five working days to respond to its concerns before it would consider further escalating the matter. “This Commission has created means to protect European citizens from targeted disinformation and manipulation by third countries,” EC President von der Leyen wrote. “If we suspect a violation of the rules, we act.”

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Life Style

how harsh visa-application policies are hobbling global research

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In February, I was meant to speak at the European Conference of Tropical Ecology in Lisbon, providing evidence of extinction risks to some frog species used as bushmeat in West Africa, and highlighting the need for policies that regulate hunting pressures.

In January, I duly applied at the Dutch embassy in Accra for a business visa to the European Union Schengen area. My application included the invitation from the conference organizers, a letter from my sponsors — the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry, and the UK Global Challenges Research Fund’s Trade, Development and the Environment Hub — and an introductory letter from the dean of graduate studies at the University of Ghana, confirming my status as a final-year PhD candidate. It also included current and old passports that showed my extensive travels, mostly to the United Kingdom.

Almost three weeks later, my passport was returned with a rejection note, stating that I had not provided justification for the purpose and conditions of my intended stay, and that there were reasonable doubts about my intention to leave the EU before the visa expired.

I wasn’t the only one. Of the ten speakers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) invited to present at the conference’s “Wildmeat: opportunities and risks” session, only four got visas. Another person withdrew voluntarily.

The participation of researchers from LMICs at international conferences on biodiversity is of the utmost importance. Earth’s biodiversity is richest in these nations, and includes ecosystems that provide important services, such as carbon sequestration, that benefit people globally. Our participation is not a matter of simply ticking the inclusivity boxes, but a deliberate effort to ensure that the voices of people for whom some of these conservation policies are formulated are heard, and their opinions sought.

However, whereas colleagues from wealthy nations, even as undergraduate students, can easily go to LMICs to participate in conferences and do research, the same cannot be said for those going the other way. The same documentation that scientists from high-income countries present at embassies — sponsorship, invitation and introductory letters — are apparently inadequate when submitted by people from LMICs. According to a global survey in 2018 by the research organization RAND, African and Asian researchers are the most likely to have visa-related challenges for short-term visits (see go.nature.com/2z9dabp). A 2023 analysis by the Royal Society in London showed that in 2022, of the 30 territories for which the United Kingdom refused visitor visas most often, 22 were in Africa (see go.nature.com/3vxruba).

These refusals come at a huge cost to individual researchers. Visa applications require scientists to be studious with paperwork, commit often large sums of money and make several trips to embassies that are sometimes outside their home country. My experience left me feeling demoralized, embarrassed and insulted by the implication that I and people like me couldn’t be trusted to attend a conference without outstaying our welcome.

This broken situation also comes at a cost to institutions. My sponsor spent approximately US$1,500 on my visa fee, return flight, insurance and conference registration (all non-refundable). Conference organizers and host institutions in wealthy countries spend a lot of time and effort searching for and inviting credible and accomplished researchers from LMICs to be part of the global conservation effort — time and money that is often wasted, which then discourages meeting organizers from prioritizing speakers from those nations.

Moreover, it comes at a cost to global efforts to prevent further biodiversity loss. Many high-income countries say that they are committed to global biodiversity conservation, and governments are pledging billions of dollars in support. Their visa policies for researchers should reflect this priority.

I am not suggesting that embassies should operate without caution and issue visas without due diligence. But they should ensure that eligible candidates who meet the criteria are not prevented from participating in international discourse. This requires a distinct form of short-term visa review for scientists attending conferences, seminars, workshops and research programmes, and a commitment to improve communication channels between visa-issuing authorities, conference organizers and academic institutions, both in the countries hosting the events and in those that researchers are travelling from.

Part of this is ensuring that entry-clearance officers do not fixate on a scientist’s financial worth as a measure of the credibility of their intent to return to their home countries. Bank statements are often required to support visa applications. Mine show the grants I have received from the Rufford Foundation, Synchronicity Earth and the BaNGA-Africa/Carnegie Corporation of New York. Others are not so fortunate, and this approach risks allowing only well-off, established scientists to obtain short-stay visas — automatically preventing many early-career researchers from participating in global research conversations.

Conferences are where research collaborations are formed and where decisions on funding, publishing and policymaking are made. It is imperative that visa issues do not block scientists from LMICs benefiting from the opportunities they provide.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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The EU is already investigating Apple, Meta and Google over fees and defensive policies

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We had the first wave of changes and tweaks to Apple, Google and other big tech companies’ policies and services just before the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act (DMA) took a harder line against monopolistic behaviors and practices. See: third-party app stores with Apple, the option to pay for Facebook (haha!), the ability to choose your own default browser, search engine, and more.

But the EU isn’t quite satisfied. Alphabet and Apple, says the European Commission, have not sufficiently allowed “app developers to ‘steer’ consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers’ app stores, free of charge.”

The EC says Alphabet might still be leading users to Google-owned services like Google Flights. Apple may not be allowing users meaningful choice in selecting alternatives to default iOS services or preferences, such as the ability to uninstall any preloaded app.

In January, Apple announced changes to the App Store to comply with the DMA, including the ability to use alternative app marketplaces on iOS in the EU. Included in Apple’s updates was a new “core technology fee” of €0.50 developers will have to pay per user per year after the first million installs of an app — even if a user downloads the software from a third-party marketplace. Many of Apple’s rivals about the App Store changes. Some criticized the company’s fees for third-party payments in the US too.

— Mat Smith

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Under-14s are completely banned.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just signed a bill into law with far stricter rules on how kids under 16 can use and access social media. The bill requires a parent or guardian’s consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to make an account or use a pre-existing account on a social media platform. The companies behind these platforms must also abide by requests to delete these accounts within five business days. Failing to do so could rack up major fines, as much as $10,000 for each violation. The bill doesn’t name any specific social media platforms but suggests any service that promotes “infinite scrolling” will have to follow the new rules. So yeah, the usual suspects.

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You will still have to pay for them.

Spotify has teamed up with content partners BBC Maestro, PLAYvirtuoso, Thinkific Labs Inc. and Skillshare to offer content in making music, getting creative, learning business and living healthily. The test courses are available only to UK users, with free and premium subscribers receiving at least two free lessons per course. The series will range from £20 ($25) to £80 ($101), regardless of a person’s subscription tier. The course content seems to be somewhere between Masterclass and LinkedIn Learning — make of that what you will.

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15 teens will advise the company.

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Last summer, TikTok said it planned to form a “youth council” of teens to advise the company as part of a broader push to beef up safety features for the app’s youngest users. That group is now official, just as TikTok contends with a bill that would force parent-company ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in the United States. While it’s unclear how much influence TikTok’s youth council will ultimately wield over the company’s policies, it underscores just how important teens are to the platform. The company has tried to mobilize its users, many of them teens, to oppose the bill being discussed by the US government.

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