Facebook’s Problems Aren’t Only In Washington – Foreign Policy
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Facebook’s international reach is under scrutiny, a Xi-Biden virtual summit is confirmed for later this year, and German parties convene for “traffic light” talks.
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Facebook’s Global Problems
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Facebook’s international reach is under scrutiny, a Xi-Biden virtual summit is confirmed for later this year, and German parties convene for “traffic light” talks.
If you would like to receive Morning Brief in your inbox every weekday, please sign up here.
Facebook’s Global Problems
Facebook is again in the spotlight after the whistleblower testimony from former product manager Frances Haugen leads to fresh calls for deeper regulation and possible dismantling of the social media giant.
America first. The hearing—and the trove of data that led to the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files—showed that the company has improved its handling of disinformation and electoral interference for U.S. audiences, while the rest of the world got short shrift. According to Haugen’s testimony, the company spends 87 percent of its misinformation budget policing English-speaking audiences, despite those users only making up 9 percent of its user base.
As internal Facebook data reported by the Journal showed, the problems can mean Mexican drug cartel activity goes unsanctioned, human trafficking in the Middle East gets facilitated, and ethnic violence is incited in Ethiopia.
While some U.S. users have turned away from the platform, that option is unavailable to poorer countries where in many cases, Facebook is synonymous with the internet itself.
Small countries, big problems. It’s not the first time Facebook’s international shortcomings have been in the spotlight. Allegations against the company include its use as a platform to promote ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka as well as allowing misinformation to thrive on its subsidiary Whatsapp during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election campaign.
Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who blew the whistle on the company’s lax overseas moderation practices in September 2020, told Foreign Policy that while the social giant gives low priority to monitoring smaller countries it would rather stop bad behavior in them than take on more politically powerful actors: “If I had found Modi doing something, I guarantee you that it would have gotten an answer much quicker, but the answer would probably have been ‘we’ll think about it’ or ‘no’.”
And although the company has made efforts to address its failings (for example, by publishing regular reports on the networks it takes down) the problem of policing content on a global scale means some countries move further down the priority list.
Katie Harbath, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council saw that first hand when she was Facebook’s public policy director. “It becomes one of those impossible trade-offs that nobody wants to have to make, but if you’re trying to decide between India, who’s going into an election, and Honduras, you’re probably going to pick India,” Harbath told Foreign Policy.
Trouble on the horizon. The scale of the task isn’t getting any easier. Harbath points to 2024 as a key moment for Facebook and other social media companies as elections affecting roughly one third of the world’s population take place in India, the United States, Indonesia, and the European Union: “It’s an electoral tsunami that I worry people aren’t ready for. And I’m really keeping an eye on Facebook and other companies and all this stuff they built for [the 2020 U.S. elections]. How much of that are they going export to other countries?“
What We’re Following Today
The Biden-Xi summit. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will hold a virtual summit later this year, the White House announced late Wednesday. The announcement came after U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi met in Zurich for talks the same day. A U.S. official described the Zurich talks as a “more meaningful and substantive engagement” than previous meetings.
Traffic light talks. The leaders of Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP), and Green Party meet together today for the first time since the country’s inconclusive election in September. While a coalition of the three parties is considered the most likely to form the next German government, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) have not yet given up hope and have conducted their own separate negotiations with the smaller FDP and Greens. A recent poll found that 74 percent of respondents would prefer that the Christian Democrats to go into opposition, while CDU/CSU voters were split on the issue.
Keep an Eye On
Kurz in trouble. Prosecutors in Austria accused Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz of bribery and embezzlement on Wednesday, prompting calls for his immediate resignation from the country’s opposition. Kurz and his associates are suspected of using public funds to secure favorable coverage in Austria’s Österreich tabloid while Kurz was foreign minister in 2017. Kurz has denied the allegations, describing them as “manufactured.”
Britain’s energy crisis. A fire affecting a key underwater cable further endangered the United Kingdom’s backup electricity supply, which has already been hit by shutdowns of gas plants and nuclear reactors. According to the Guardian, the excess capacity that could be drawn on if needed could fall to levels last seen in the challenging winter of 2015 if temperatures are very cold, wind speeds are low, and there are power plant outages.
Faced with such worries, business leaders and thinktanks did not find any solace in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speech at the Conservative Party conference. It was dismissed as “bombastic but vacuous and economically illiterate” by the free market Adam Smith Institute.
Odds and Ends
Netflix announced plans to edit scenes from its Korean-language smash hit Squid Game after a phone number used in the show has led to one woman being inundated with calls in real life. A key plot point centers around contestants calling a number to take part in life-or-death versions of children’s games in return for cash, creating problems for the unnamed woman from Seongju and prompting a return to the editing room for producers. “This is a number that I’ve been using for more than ten years, so I’m quite taken aback. There are more than 4,000 numbers that I’ve had to delete from my phone,” she said.
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
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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