Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was slapped with another fine on Monday for violating European privacy laws. The tech giant was given a $275 million fine by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for a data leak discovered last year that saw the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users posted online.
The commission has imposed a total of more than $900 million worth of fines on Meta since last year for various data privacy breaches, reports New York Times.
The UK is also ramping up its online content watchdog duties with changes to the online safety bill, which was announced on Monday. Under the new guidelines, social media sites must give users the right to avoid harmful content that does not constitute a criminal offence. This will include racist and sexist content.
Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, will have the power to fine companies up to 10% of global turnover for any breaches of the act.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has accused Apple of censorship and said the tech behemoth was threatening to pull Twitter from the App Store.
Apple takes around 30% of the fees generated from apps on the App Store, which would be a blow to Musk’s new business plan for Twitter as he seeks to move away from an ad revenue-dominant model to a subscription service.
Apple also has issues with Musk’s lack of content moderation and his penchant for allowing unfettered free speech on the app, which leads to much racism, bigotry, sexism, and hate speech.
Concerns over content moderation on Twitter are not unfounded after a post on the company’s website said it would no longer be regulating covid-19 misinformation spread on the app.
