X has updated its Under the Hood transparency feature to show users when their posts or accounts have had visibility limited due to legal requests from specific governments. The tool now identifies which country requested the restriction and which posts were affected, alongside existing data on account labels and algorithmic treatment. Access requires an account to be over a year old with at least ten posts in the previous month.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-21
Teatre Raval in Barcelona found its Instagram and Facebook ads for a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' rejected by Meta's automated moderation. Meta told the theatre that its system automatically flags any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform as a restricted 'social topic,' and suggested removing such keywords to get the ads approved. The company did not clarify whether Woolf's name, the word 'feminism,' or both triggered the block.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-21
Meta's Oversight Board issued decisions on two cases involving AI-generated videos of real people—one showing a Scottish politician making inflammatory remarks he never said, another mocking a menstrual health volunteer. In both instances, Meta failed to label the content as AI-generated and only acted after the Board intervened, despite user reports and appeals being automatically dismissed beforehand.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-17
The Trump administration has appealed a federal court ruling that blocked its policy allowing detention and deportation of noncitizen researchers who study harmful online content, arguing they pose national security risks. Separately, a judge dismissed a related lawsuit from Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, ruling that courts lack jurisdiction to stop deportation proceedings even though she criticized Secretary of State Marco Rubio's justification for targeting him.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-14
An investigation by Futurism found numerous Facebook accounts posting large volumes of AI-generated videos depicting graphic violence against babies and young children, including beatings, burning, starvation, and imprisonment. Despite the disturbing and clearly harmful nature of this content, Meta has done little to remove it, allowing the accounts and videos to persist and multiply across the platform.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-09
Australia is moving to mandate that social media platforms let users opt out of algorithm-curated feeds, giving people the ability to see content in a simpler, non-personalized order such as chronological posting. The requirement would apply to major platforms operating in the country.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-08
A Fine-Tuned Vision Transformer model built by Ras Al Khaimah-based Falcons AI to detect NSFW images has been downloaded over 50.8 million times in 28 days on Hugging Face, placing it sixth among more than 1,400 hosted models. That download count dwarfs the 3.7 million recorded by Deepseek over the same period. Falcons AI also runs a broader open-source program and offers AI tools for business and government automation.
middleeastainews.com
· 2026-09-08
House Select Committee on China Chair John Moolenaar says TikTok backed out of a planned public roundtable meant to address Chinese government access to US user data and its algorithm. Moolenaar said TikTok withdrew on August 27th, a day after Meta settled with state attorneys general over child safety claims, and cited concerns about facing child safety questions despite that not being the meeting's focus.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-03
Amazon has announced it will close Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its long-running marketplace connecting businesses with a distributed workforce for microtasks, effective September 30. The platform allowed companies to outsource work like data validation, content moderation, and survey collection to human workers worldwide, tasks often too subjective or complex for automation.
mturk.com
· 2026-08-26
Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 29 states, ending litigation that covered claims from 47 states and several territories over harms to young users. The company agreed to build an independently tested age-verification system, let teens disable personalized feeds, cap daily app usage at two hours, and pause notifications overnight and during school hours. Meta will pay $17.1 billion over a decade, with $5.3 billion contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar time limits and matching payments.
theverge.com
· 2026-08-26
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