Enlarge / Screenshot from the documentary Who Is Bobby Kennedy?
In a lawsuit that seems determined to ignore that Section 230 exists, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sued Meta for allegedly shadowbanning his million-dollar documentary, Who Is Bobby Kennedy? and preventing his supporters from advocating for his presidential campaign.
According to Kennedy, Meta is colluding with the Biden administration to sway the 2024 presidential election by suppressing Kennedy’s documentary and making it harder to support Kennedy’s candidacy. This allegedly has caused “substantial donation losses,” while also violating the free speech rights of Kennedy, his supporters, and his film’s production company, AV24.
Meta had initially restricted the documentary on Facebook and Instagram but later fixed the issue after discovering that the film was mistakenly flagged by the platforms’ automated spam filters.
But Kennedy’s complaint claimed that Meta is still “brazenly censoring speech” by “continuing to throttle, de-boost, demote, and shadowban the film.” In an exhibit, Kennedy’s lawyers attached screenshots representing “hundreds” of Facebook and Instagram users whom Meta allegedly sent threats, intimidated, and sanctioned after they shared the documentary.
Some of these users remain suspended on Meta platforms, the complaint alleged. Others whose temporary suspensions have been lifted claimed that their posts are still being throttled, though, and Kennedy’s lawyers earnestly insisted that an exchange with Meta’s chatbot proves it.
Two days after the documentary’s release, Kennedy’s team apparently asked the Meta AI assistant, “When users post the link whoisbobbykennedy.com, can their followers see the post in their feeds?”
“I can tell you that the link is currently restricted by Meta,” the chatbot answered.
Chatbots, of course, are notoriously inaccurate sources of information, and Meta AI’s terms of service note this. In a section labeled “accuracy,” Meta warns that chatbot responses “may not reflect accurate, complete, or current information” and should always be verified.
Perhaps more significantly, there is little reason to think that Meta’s chatbot would have access to information about internal content moderation decisions.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick mocked Kennedy’s reliance on the chatbot in the case. He noted that Kennedy seemed to have no evidence of the alleged shadow-banning, while there’s plenty of evidence that Meta’s spam filters accidentally remove non-violative content all the time.
Meta’s chatbot is “just a probabilistic stochastic parrot, repeating a probable sounding answer to users’ questions,” Masnick wrote. “And these idiots think it’s meaningful evidence. This is beyond embarrassing.”
Neither Meta nor Kennedy’s lawyer, Jed Rubenfeld, responded to Ars’ request to comment.
Enlarge/ The Meta Quest Pro at a Best Buy demo station in October 2022.
Meta will open up the operating system that runs on its Quest mixed reality headsets to other technology companies, it announced today.
What was previously simply called Quest software will be called Horizon OS, and the goal will be to move beyond the general-use Quest devices to more purpose-specific devices, according to an Instagram video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
There will be headsets focused purely on watching TV and movies on virtual screens, with the emphasis on high-end OLED displays. There will also be headsets that are designed to be as light as possible at the expense of performance for productivity and exercise uses. And there will be gaming-oriented ones.
The announcement named three partners to start. Asus will produce a gaming headset under its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, Lenovo will make general purpose headsets with an emphasize on “productivity, learning, and entertainment,” and Xbox and Meta will team up to deliver a special edition of the Meta Quest that will come bundled with an Xbox controller and Xbox Cloud Gaming and Game Pass.
Users running Horizon OS devices from different manufacturers will be able to stay connected in the operating system’s social layer of “identities, avatars, social graphs, and friend groups” and will be able to enjoy shared virtual spaces together across devices.
The announcement comes after Meta became an early leader in the relatively small but interesting consumer mixed reality space but with diminishing returns on new devices as the market saturates.
Further, Apple recently entered the fray with its Vision Pro headset. The Vision Pro is not really a direct competitor to Meta’s Quest devices today—it’s far more expensive and loaded with higher-end tech—but it may only be the opening volley in a long competition between the companies.
Meta’s decision to make Horizon OS a more open platform for partner OEMs in the face of Apple’s usual focus on owning and integrating as much of the software, hardware, and services in its device as it can mirrors the smartphone market. There, Google’s Android (on which Horizon OS is based) runs on a variety of devices from a wide range of companies, while Apple’s iOS runs only on Apple’s own iPhones.
Meta also says it is working on a new spatial app framework to make it easier for developers with experience on mobile to start making mixed reality apps for Horizon OS and that it will start “removing the barriers between the Meta Horizon Store and App Lab, which lets any developer who meets basic technical and content requirements release software on the platform.”
Pricing, specs, and release dates have not been announced for any of the new devices. Zuckerberg admitted it’s “probably going to take a couple of years” for this ecosystem of hardware devices to roll out.
Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called “Ghostbusters,” designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.
The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.
“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them,” Zuckerberg continued. “Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”
At the time, Olivan was Facebook’s head of growth, but now he’s Meta’s chief operating officer. He responded to Zuckerberg’s email saying that he would have the team from Onavo—a controversial traffic-analysis app acquired by Facebook in 2013—look into it.
Olivan told the Onavo team that he needed “out of the box thinking” to satisfy Zuckerberg’s request. He “suggested potentially paying users to ‘let us install a really heavy piece of software'” to intercept users’ Snapchat data, a court document shows.
What the Onavo team eventually came up with was a project internally known as “Ghostbusters,” an obvious reference to Snapchat’s logo featuring a white ghost. Later, as the project grew to include other Facebook rivals, including YouTube and Amazon, the project was called the “In-App Action Panel” (IAAP).
The IAAP program’s purpose was to gather granular insights into users’ engagement with rival apps to help Facebook develop products as needed to stay ahead of competitors. For example, two months after Zuckerberg’s 2016 email, Meta launched Stories, a Snapchat copycat feature, on Instagram, which the Motley Fool noted rapidly became a key ad revenue source for Meta.
In an email to Olivan, the Onavo team described the “technical solution” devised to help Zuckerberg figure out how to get reliable analytics about Snapchat users. It worked by “develop[ing] ‘kits’ that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” the Onavo team said.
Olivan was told that these so-called “kits” used a “man-in-the-middle” attack typically employed by hackers to secretly intercept data passed between two parties. Users were recruited by third parties who distributed the kits “under their own branding” so that they wouldn’t connect the kits to Onavo unless they used a specialized tool like Wireshark to analyze the kits. TechCrunch reported in 2019 that sometimes teens were paid to install these kits. After that report, Facebook promptly shut down the project.
This “man-in-the-middle” tactic, consumers and advertisers suing Meta have alleged, “was not merely anticompetitive, but criminal,” seemingly violating the Wiretap Act. It was used to snoop on Snapchat starting in 2016, on YouTube from 2017 to 2018, and on Amazon in 2018, relying on creating “fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis.”
Ars could not reach Snapchat, Google, or Amazon for comment.
Facebook allegedly sought to confuse advertisers
Not everyone at Facebook supported the IAAP program. “The company’s highest-level engineering executives thought the IAAP Program was a legal, technical, and security nightmare,” another court document said.
Pedro Canahuati, then-head of security engineering, warned that incentivizing users to install the kits did not necessarily mean that users understood what they were consenting to.
“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay,” Canahuati said. “No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works.”
Mike Schroepfer, then-chief technology officer, argued that Facebook wouldn’t want rivals to employ a similar program analyzing their encrypted user data.
“If we ever found out that someone had figured out a way to break encryption on [WhatsApp] we would be really upset,” Schroepfer said.
While the unsealed emails detailing the project have recently raised eyebrows, Meta’s spokesperson told Ars that “there is nothing new here—this issue was reported on years ago. The plaintiffs’ claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.”
According to Business Insider, advertisers suing said that Meta never disclosed its use of Onavo “kits” to “intercept rivals’ analytics traffic.” This is seemingly relevant to their case alleging anticompetitive behavior in the social media ads market, because Facebook’s conduct, allegedly breaking wiretapping laws, afforded Facebook an opportunity to raise its ad rates “beyond what it could have charged in a competitive market.”
Since the documents were unsealed, Meta has responded with a court filing that said: “Snapchat’s own witness on advertising confirmed that Snap cannot ‘identify a single ad sale that [it] lost from Meta’s use of user research products,’ does not know whether other competitors collected similar information, and does not know whether any of Meta’s research provided Meta with a competitive advantage.”
This conflicts with testimony from a Snapchat executive, who alleged that the project “hamper[ed] Snap’s ability to sell ads” by causing “advertisers to not have a clear narrative differentiating Snapchat from Facebook and Instagram.” Both internally and externally, “the intelligence Meta gleaned from this project was described” as “devastating to Snapchat’s ads business,” a court filing said.
Enlarge/ No way would Zuckerberg be photographed wearing a Vision Pro, but let’s just imagine he’s looking at a picture of one in his headset here…
@zuck Instagram | Aurich Lawson
Since the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, it’s not been hard to find countless thoughts and impressions on the headset from professionalreviewers and random purchasers. But among all those hot takes, the opinions of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand out for a few reasons—not least of which is that he and his company have spent years of development time and lost tens of billions of dollars creating the competing Quest headset line.
For that reason alone, Zuckerberg’s Instagram-posted thoughts on the Vision Pro can’t be considered an impartial take on the device’s pros and cons. Still, Zuckerberg’s short review included its fair share of fair points, alongside some careful turns of phrase that obscure the Quest’s relative deficiencies.
To figure out which is which, we thought we’d go through Zuckerberg’s review and give a quick review of the points he makes. In doing so, we get a good viewpoint on the very different angles with which Meta and Apple are approaching mixed-reality headset design.
There’s “high-quality” and then there’s “high-quality”
Near the start of his analysis, Zuckerberg says that the “Quest 3 does high-quality passthrough with big screens, just like Vision Pro.” This is only true in the most technical sense. Saying both headsets have “high-quality passthrough” is like saying an old 720p LCD TV and a new 4K OLED both have “high-quality screens.”
Compared side by side, Apple’s array of cameras and higher-resolution displays combine for a much sharper and more dynamic view of the “real world” than the Quest 3, which barely limps over the “good enough” passthrough threshold, in my experience. That display quality extends to the “big screens” Zuckerberg mentions, too, which are noticeably clearer and easier to read on the Vision Pro.
Enlarge/ A view of my mixed reality “office” in the Quest 3 app Immersed.
Speaking of those “big screens,” the experience with 2D virtual displays is quite different in both headsets. The Vision Pro seems built from the ground up with the ability to place and resize thousands of flat iOS apps anywhere around your virtual space. Those virtual windows react to the light in the room, cast gentle shadows in your virtual view, and get occluded by objects in the real world, adding to the sense that they are really “there” with you.
The Quest, on the other hand, was built more with immersive VR experiences in mind. Yes, recent Quest OS upgrades added the ability to snap selected flat apps and system tools (e.g., the store) into place in your Quest “home environment.” But the system-level “huge floating screens” experience is still much more limited than that on the Vision Pro, which offers easy free positioning and resizing of all sorts of apps. Quest users looking for something similar need to rely on a third-party tool like Virtual Desktop, which also has its own quirks and limitations.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy about addressing the elephant in the room: with Apple Vision Pro, the Cupertino tech giant is officially entering a market that, up until now, Meta has basically owned. In a meeting with Meta employees, Zuckerberg thinks that while Apple Vision Pro “could be the vision of the future of computing […] it’s not the one that I want”
As reported by The Verge, Zuckerberg seems very confident in the company’s XR offerings, and is less impressed with Apple’s design tradeoffs. During a companywide meeting, Zuckerberg said that with Vision Pro, Appe has “no kind of magical solutions” and that they haven’t bypassed “any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of.” He calls that “the good news.”
Largely, Zuckerberg says Apple is making some telling design tradeoffs, as its higher resolution displays, advanced software, and external battery comes alongside a $3,500 price tag—or seven times more than Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 mixed reality standalone.
Photo by Road to VR
But it’s also about ethos. Zuckerberg says the companies’ respective headsets represent a divide in company philosophy, as Apple products are typically developed to appeal to high income consumers. “We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests,” he said.
“More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways,” Zuckerberg continued. “Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.”
The Meta chief echoed some of these statements on the Lex Fridman podcast where he spoke about his opinions on Apple Vision Pro, noting that Apple’s mixed reality headset offers a “certain level of validation for the category.” Because Vision Pro will cost so much though, Zuckerberg maintains Quest 3 will overall benefit as people inevitably gravitate to towards the cheaper, more consumer-friendly option.
Here’s Zuckerberg’s full statement, sourced from the companywide address:
Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.
But look, 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. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.
