Journo’s Facebook post decrying CPM’s ‘witch-hunt’ goes viral
Facebook logo (File Photo | AP)
By Express News Service
KANNUR:”Finally, I want to say only one thing. If you have not been satisfied by hunting us down till now, we, including our children, would come to Caltex junction holding our heads high. Finish us off with a single chop.” This is the concluding part from a heart-rending Facebook post of media person Vineetha Venu, who and her husband Sumesh, a civil police officer, have allegedly been harassed and threatened by the CPM and its cyber warriors for more than three years.
What forced her to post the long note on FB is the latest organised cyber bullying which, she alleged, was by CPM and its well-oiled social media team. She says her husband has become a victim of moral policing by some CPM workers .
In the post, she described in detail about the latest incident. According to it, last Wednesday, Sumesh was on his way to visit his friend at Cheengakundam near Iritty. The friend is a military man and is posted in the Northeast India. As per the friend’s request to visit his parents. Sumesh, who works at Chombala police station, decided to visit them after his duty hours. On his way, he received a phone call and stopped his bike and got down from it. As he walked a few steps forward speaking with the friend, some people came and stopped him. That was the beginning. Though Sumesh tried to convince them about the purpose of his visit, they didn’t believe him and started harassing him. It was only when the police patrolling team from Iritty station reached the spot that they let him go.
At the police station, Sumesh gave his statement on the incident. Since nothing serious had taken place, Sumesh didn’t file any complaint against those were allegedly moral policing.
“What happened was a clean act of moral policing,” said Vineetha. But, things have taken an ugly turn from the next day as cyber soldiers of CPM started maligning Sumesh by spreading the videos of the moral policing incident through WhatsApp groups and FB.
To make matters worse, a baseless report appeared in the party mouthpiece, in which it was said that an investigation had been launched against a police officer who was caught by local residents in suspicious circumstances, she said.
The cyber bullying is part of a political vendetta, says Vineetha. “Everything started when I gave some reports against the party in connection with the murder of Youth Congress worker Shuhaib. My husband is a pro-UDF police association member and both of us have been harassed by the CPM for taking a stand against the party in connection with the Shuhaib murder.”
In the WhatsApp groups of police officers, Sumesh was being threatened, warning him that his limbs would be chopped off. Vineetha was stalked at many places and feared that their children would be attacked. “It was tough to survive those harrowing days,” she said.
When she lodged a complaint, it was investigated by the Crime Branch. The investigation was a farce as the officer in charge of investigation had acted rudely with her without even giving her the consideration of being a woman, she alleged. After she complained about it, the investigating officer explained that it was only a joke. “What kind of a joke it was?” she asked.
Sumesh was transferred seven times in the last three years. When Vineetha had reported about the leak of data from the Covid app of police on the TV news channel in which she was working, Akash Thillankeri, an accused in the Shuhaib murder case, campaigned that the news was leaked to her by her husband, she said. “I was not the first reporter to air that news,” she said. “My husband was transferred to Palakkad during the lockdown period due to this incident. Following continuous attack from the CPM and its cyber teams, I had to resign from my job as I was not able to cope up with the situation.”
“The mental trauma, we have been undergoing is beyond words,” said Vineetha. “Through this post, we don’t seek anybody’s support. Though I had tried to write about it many times before, I couldn’t do it out of fear. Many people would think this is silly, but I want to remind such people that if it is me today, it could be themtomorrow,” she said.
As Vineetha Venu’s Facebook post went viral, the CPM Iritty area committee denied the role of party members in the incident. “The FB post of the wife of the police officer was not based on facts and purely emotional. She says that CPM has been hunting them down unnecessarily. The local people and a few persons who were at the spot during the incident know what had taken place. The party refutes all allegations raised by the media person as they are baseless. Everybody knows about the politics of the CPM and the tactics he (the said officer) had used during the last LDF government’s term. The support of the people is the strength of CPM and the party will face these allegations also with the support of the people,” a statement issued by the area committee said.
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Every week over 1 billion people connect with businesses on our messaging apps. Many of these conversations are made possible by the thousands of developers who build innovative and engaging experiences on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Since opening access to our Llama family of large language models, we’ve seen lots of momentum and innovation with more than 30 million downloads to date. As our messaging services continue to evolve, we believe the technology from Llama and other generative AI models have the potential to enhance business messaging through more natural, conversational experiences.
At Connect Meta announced that developers will be able to build third-party AIs – a term we use to refer to our generative AI-powered assistants – for our messaging services.
We’re making it easy for any developer to get started, so we’re simplifying the developer onboarding process and providing access to APIs for AIs that make it possible to build new conversational experiences within our messaging apps.
All developers will be able to access the new onboarding experience and features on Messenger in the coming weeks. For WhatsApp, we’ll be opening a Beta program in November – if you’re interested in participating please sign up to the waitlist here to learn more.
We’ll keep everyone updated as we make these tools available to more developers later this year. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what you create.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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