After Meta faces allegations for ‘bias in its handling of content related to the war in Gaza,’ Italy’s competition regulator AGCM has fined Facebook and Instagram owner Meta. News comes in that Meta was caught of unfair commercial practices, the watchdog AGCM said today.
From what it is understood, AGCM said it found that Instagram users were not properly informed about the use of their personal data for commercial purposes.
What went wrong!
It looks like “Meta has already addressed the problems,” the regulator said. Contradictory to this, “We disagree with the Italian competition authority’s decision and are assessing our options,” a Meta spokesperson explained in a statement.
Furthermore, the spokesperson added that since August 2023 Meta seems to have implemented several changes for Italian users that address the authority’s concerns. These also include increased transparency on how the company uses data to show advertising on Instagram.
Early complaints!
Early reports suggest that an ex-Meta engineer on Tuesday accused the company of bias for content related to the war in Gaza. The former Meta engineer claimed in a lawsuit that Meta fired him for trying to ‘help fix bugs causing the suppression of Palestinian Instagram posts.’ However, Meta did not provide any clear explanation on this.
“ Meta was following a pattern of bias against Palestinians and the company deleted internal employee communications that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and conducted investigations into their use of the Palestinian flag emoji,” Hamad explained in the complaint.
It looks like Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who had been on Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, sued the social media giant in a California state court for discrimination, wrongful termination and other wrongdoing over his February dismissal.
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