LONDON — Meta said it is blocking Russia’s state media organizations from its social media platforms, claiming that the outlets employed misleading strategies to spread Moscow’s misinformation. The Kremlin condemned the news on Tuesday.

The business, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, announced late Monday that it will implement the restriction over the following few days as part of its attempts to counter Russia’s covert influence operations.

“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta stated in a written statement.

Facebook Owner Meta Bans Russia State Media Outlets Over ‘Foreign Interference’

Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, reacted, stating that “such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” and that “Meta with these actions are discrediting themselves.”

“We have a really negative view about this. And this, of course, hinders our chances of normalising relations with Meta,” Peskov told reporters during his regular conference call.

RT, formerly known as Russia Today, and Russia Segodnya both condemned the move.

“It’s cute how there’s a competition in the West — who can try to spank RT the hardest, in order to make themselves look better,” said RT in a statement.

Rossiya Segodnya, the parent corporation of state news agency RIA Novosti and news brands such as Sputnik, stated that Meta’s decision “was not unexpected for us.”

“Meta is a highly politicised organisation. We will continue to work in the countries where we are now present, and this decision will have no impact on our activity,” Rossiya Segodnya stated in a statement.

Meta’s moves came just days after the US announced new sanctions against RT, citing the Kremlin news outlet as being a significant component of Russia’s war machine and efforts to destabilize its democratic enemies.

Last week, US officials said that RT was collaborating with the Russian military and organizing fundraising drives to buy sniper rifles, body armor, and other equipment for soldiers fighting in Ukraine. They further said that RT websites pretended to be credible news sites but were used to promote disinformation and propaganda throughout Europe, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration seized Kremlin-run websites and charged two RT workers with sending millions of dollars in covert funding to a Tennessee-based content development company to generate English-language social media videos promoting Kremlin policies.

Moscow has denied the allegations.

Facebook Owner Meta Bans Russia State Media Outlets Over ‘Foreign Interference’

Meta had already taken steps to curb Moscow’s online presence. Since 2020, it has labeled postings and content from state-run media. Two years later, it prohibited Russian state media from running ads and lowering their content in people’s feeds, and the company, along with other social media sites such as YouTube and TikTok, barred European Union users from accessing RT and Sputnik channels after they were sanctioned by Brussels. In 2022, Meta also shut down a vast Russia-based disinformation network that propagated Kremlin talking points about the invasion of Ukraine.

Meta and Facebook “already blocked RT in Europe two years ago, and now they’re censoring information flow to the rest of the world,” RT stated.

Moscow responded by branding Meta as an extremist group in March 2022, shortly after sending soldiers into Ukraine and restricting Facebook and Instagram. Both sites, as well as Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, which is also restricted, were popular among Russians before to the invasion and the accompanying crackdown on independent media and other kinds of critical discourse. The social media services are now only available over virtual private networks.

SOURCE | AP

Instagram is making teen accounts private by default in an effort to make the platform safer for minors, amid mounting criticism of how social media affects young people’s lives.

Beginning Tuesday, anybody under the age of 18 who signs up for Instagram in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will be assigned to restricting teen accounts, and those with existing accounts will be transferred over the next 60 days. Teenagers in the European Union will have their accounts updated later this year.

Meta agrees that teens may lie about their age and says they will be required to verify their ages in additional situations, such as when they attempt to register a new account with an adult birthday. The Menlo Park, California company also stated that it is developing technology to detect teen accounts that appear to be adults and immediately place them in limited teen accounts.

Instagram Makes Teen Accounts Private As Pressure Mounts On The App To Protect Children

Teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages are controlled, so teenagers can only receive them from persons they follow or are already linked with. “Sensitive content,” such as footage of individuals fighting or advertisements for cosmetic procedures, will be limited, Meta stated. Teens will also receive notifications if they spend more than 60 minutes on Instagram, and a “sleep mode” will be enabled, which disables notifications and sends auto-replies to direct messages between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

These settings will be enabled for all teens, but 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to disable them. Children under the age of 16 must obtain permission from their parents.

“The three concerns we’re hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content that they don’t want to see or that they’re getting contacted by people they don’t want to be contacted by or that they’re spending too much on the app,” according to Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. “So teen accounts is really focused on addressing those three concerns.”

The announcement comes as the firm faces lawsuits from dozens of US states accusing it of endangering young people and contributing to the juvenile mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately developing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

Letitia James, New York Attorney General, called Meta’s statement “an important first step, but much more needs to be done to ensure our kids are protected from the harms of social media.” James’ office is collaborating with other New York officials on how to enforce a new state law aimed at limiting children’s access to what critics call addictive social media feeds.

Meta’s previous efforts to address teen safety and mental health on its platforms have been received with criticism that the adjustments are insufficient. For example, children will receive a notification when they have spent 60 minutes on the app, but they will be free to ignore it and continue scrolling.

That is, unless the child’s parents use “parental supervision” mode, which allows parents to limit kids’ Instagram usage to a set length of time, such as 15 minutes.

Meta’s most recent changes provide parents with more options for managing their children’s accounts. To modify their settings to less restrictive ones, those under the age of 16 will require permission from their parent or guardian. They can accomplish this by enabling “parental supervision” on their accounts and linking them with a parent or guardian.

Meta’s president of worldwide affairs, Nick Clegg, stated this week that parents do not use the parental controls that the business has implemented in recent years.

Gleit believes that teen accounts will generate a “big incentive for parents and teens to set up parental supervision.”

“Parents will be able to see, via the family centre, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen,” she told me. “If there is bullying or harassment happening, parents will have visibility into who their teen’s following, who’s following their teen, who their teen has messaged in the past seven days and hopefully have some of these conversations and help them navigate these really difficult situations online.”

Instagram Makes Teen Accounts Private As Pressure Mounts On The App To Protect Children

Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated that digital corporations place too much responsibility on parents to keep their children safe on social networking platforms.

“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Murthy told CNN in May 2023.

SOURCE | AP

(VOR News) – BlackRock Inc. is now in the midst of restructuring its private credit business in an effort to maintain a competitive advantage over its competitors in the rapidly expanding industry.

In the area of asset management, BlackRock is the most prominent company.

The corporation is in the process of developing a number of new divisions, one of which is going to be dubbed Global Direct Lending. Stephan Caron, who is presently in charge of the European middle-market private lending business, will be in charge of this new division.

Jim Keenan, who has worked with BlackRock for twenty years and is currently the global head of the company’s private debt business, and Raj Vig, who is the co-head of US private capital, will both depart the company in the next year. Both of these individuals will be leaving with the intention of leaving the company.

Even though BlackRock manages $10.6 trillion.

The company does not take the top spot in the private credit markets, which are currently seeing unprecedented growth.

Additionally, it lags behind smaller companies such as Apollo Global Management Inc. and Ares Management Corp., which have been the most influential participants in the market throughout this time period.

In a document that was distributed on Monday, Rich Kushel, who is the chairman of the portfolio management group at BlackRock, declared that “private credit is one of the firm’s top priorities.” Kushel’s statement was included in the memo.

By implementing this new structure, we will be able to continue to expand and enhance our capabilities while simultaneously preserving the confidentiality of the investment procedures that serve as the basis for each franchise. By doing so, there will be an increase in the amount of collaboration and alignment.

Furthermore, Kushel added that the development of the direct-lending unit is being done in order to “help accelerate our ambition to be a leader in direct lending and growth debt globally.”

This is the reason for the establishment of the unit for direct lending. This is a response to the increasing number of orders that have been placed by investors.

This is the most recent step that BlackRock has done in order to reinvigorate a company that has become one of the most famous investments on Wall Street.

BlackRock has taken this measure in order to revitalise the company.

As a result of their utilisation of private loans in recent years, Ares., HPS Investment Partners, and Sixth Street have all achieved enormous levels of financial success.

After beginning their careers in leveraged buyouts and private equity, Apollo, Blackstone Inc., and KKR & Co. have expanded their business operations to encompass direct lending and asset-based finance. This is a considerable divergence from their initial focus on these areas.

The Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, Larry Fink, referred to private credit as a “primary growth driver.” On the other hand, the company’s own estimates show that direct lending will experience a considerable increase in the years to come.

According to Amanda Lynam, who is the head of macro credit research for the organisation, the global private debt market is expected to increase to around $3.5 trillion by the year 2028.

This prediction was made by Amanda Lynam. One of the more positive forecasts regarding the growth of the industry is this prognosis, which is one of the predictions.

About $35 billion in direct loan assets are under BlackRock’s management; this amounts to roughly 0.3% of the 10.6 trillion that the company manages overall.

It oversees debt that is valued at 86 billion dollars in the private sector. As of June 30th, Ares and Apollo both had creditable assets exceeding $500 billion and $320 billion, respectively. These two numbers are approximations.

SOURCE: YN

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