January 4, 2023 | The Quebec Court of Appeal has approved a class-action lawsuit launched on behalf of Facebook users who claim they were discriminated against because the social media giant allowed advertisers to target job and housing ads based on factors like age, gender or race.
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Published on: 12 Jan 2023
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told British lawmakers that the social media giant stokes online hate and extremism, fails to protect children from harmful content and lacks any incentive to fix the problems, providing strong momentum for efforts by European governments working on stricter regulation of tech giants. While her testimony echoed much of what she told the U.S. Senate earlier this month, her appearance drew intense interest from a British parliamentary committee that is much further along in drawing up legislation to crack down on social platforms.
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Published on: 27 Oct 2021
October 18, 2021 | Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's damning revelations about the harms caused by Facebook and its suite of other social media platforms have spurred American policymakers to action. Listen to Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen's thoughts on the implications of the latest Facebook revelations on Canada's policy efforts to fight online harms.
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Published on: 21 Oct 2021
October 9, 2021 | It seems like reining in the power of Big Tech is one of the few bipartisan issues these days. In the coming weeks, American lawmakers representing both major parties will be tabling a series of antitrust bills aimed at squarely at the tech world's biggest players. Should Canada follow suit? Taylor Owen weighs in on the regulation of Big Tech in this episode of The House.
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Published on: 21 Oct 2021
October 14, 2021 | In this opinion piece, Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen, former Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin, and chair of the Canadian Citizens' Assembly on Democratic Expression, Peter MacLeod argue that the latest Facebook controversy surrounding the testimony by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen has the potential to change the debate about regulating social media. They also explain why the
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Published on: 15 Oct 2021
October 6, 2021 | In this episode of the Globe and Mail'sThe Decibel podcast, Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen speaks about harmful effects of Facebook's addictive nature and what we can do about it.
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Published on: 6 Oct 2021
Facebook and Facebook-owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp were up and running again late Monday after being hit by an outage that affected users around the world. The social media giant said the disruption to network traffic "had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt." It said there is no evidence that user data was comprised. It was the largest such outage ever tracked by the web monitoring group Downdetector, which collates complaints about web outages.
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Published on: 6 Oct 2021
Former U.S. President Donald Trump won't return to Facebook – at least not yet. Four months after Facebook suspended Trump's accounts for inciting violence that led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the company's quasi-independent oversight board upheld the bans. But it told Facebook to specify how long they would last, saying that its "indefinite" ban on the former president was unreasonable. The ruling, which gives Facebook six months to comply, effectively postpones any possible Trump reinstatement and puts the onus for that decision squarely back on the company.
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Published on: 10 May 2021
Apple rolled out a software update for its mobile devices that gives users the option of stopping apps from tracking their location and sharing other identifying information with third parties. Services such as Facebook and others currently have the ability to track users on mobile devices in order to learn more about them to target advertisements and other location-based services to them. In some instances, the tracking is in place even if the user is not actively using the app in question.
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Published on: 29 Apr 2021
Facebook is opening a new Artificial Intelligence Research Lab in Montreal — FAIR Montreal. This is the company’s first research and development investment in Canada, and only its fourth AI research lab in all. Prof. Joelle Pineau, from the School of Computer Science and co-director of McGill’s Reasoning & Learning Lab, will head the new Montreal AI lab while maintaining her academic position at the university.
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Published on: 15 Sep 2017
The end of September saw the formation of a new team of rivals: the Partnership on AI, whose motto is "to benefit people and society". The partnership includes tech giants Amazon, Google and its subsidiary Deepmind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.
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Published on: 3 Oct 2016
By Katherine Gombay, McGill Newsroom
Research uncovers the inherently hierarchical nature of social media
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Published on: 18 May 2016
