The move comes as officials dial up scrutiny of social media companies’ at-times uneven enforcement against misleading health ads, which has prompted concern in Washington that platforms may be contributing to substance abuse.
The board, a collection of legal experts and human rights advocates that reviews high-profile disputes over the company’s moderation calls, announced Wednesday that it is overturning a decision to keep up material that trumpeted the use of ketamine, a controlled substance.
The psychedelic drug has a long history of being abused recreationally but more recently boomed in popularity as a controversial treatment for depression facing tight regulation.
In a decision shared first with The Technology 202, the panel wrote that the material, posted by a verified user with over 200,000 followers who was paid by a major ketamine provider, violated Meta’s rules for branded content, which set limits on posts promoting restricted or illicit drugs.
“This case indicates that Meta’s strong restrictions on branded content promoting drugs and attempts to buy, sell, or trade drugs may be inconsistently enforced,” the group wrote.
The post, which was viewed roughly 85,000 times, described using the drug to treat depression as a “medical entry into another dimension” but provided no “professional diagnosis” or information “showing the treatment took place under medical supervision,” the board wrote.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, said in a statement to The Technology 202 that it would remove the content within a week and review the board’s recommendations.
The reversal follows a December report by the Wall Street Journal finding that “telehealth companies are flooding TikTok, Instagram and other platforms with ads that don’t conform to longtime standards governing the marketing of prescription drugs and healthcare treatments.”
The report uncovered numerous instances of companies promoting the “psychiatric benefits of ketamine even though the FDA issued a warning in February that the drug isn’t approved for the treatment of any psychiatric disorder.” In total, the report found “at least 800 ads promoting controlled substances” on social media over a four-week period last year.
The findings sparked outrage on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have long called on tech companies to crack down more forcefully on material that could exacerbate drug abuse.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called on the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to work “in concert” to address concerns posed by deceptive telehealth ads, and other lawmakers have called for hearings in response to the revelations, the Journal reported.
Lawmakers have separately floated rolling back tech companies’ legal protections under Section 230 if they did not take added steps to curb drug sales or promotion on their sites, such as swiftly reporting potentially illicit activities to federal authorities.
As part of its ruling, the oversight board also urged the tech giant to change its policies to make its restrictions around branded content more clear.
Federal regulators have sought to crack down on social media influencers who do not fully disclose paid partnerships to users, which can violate rules against deceptive advertising.
Nonprofit fights GOP allegations that it pushed a ‘censorship regime’
The Center for Countering Digital Hate — a group that’s gained recent attention after X owner Elon Musk sued it for allegedly using its research to scare away advertisers on the platform — is pushing back against allegations that it’s part of a Biden administration-led “censorship regime,” our colleague Cat Zakrzewski reports.
Days after Musk sued, House Judiciary Committee leader Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said he would probe the nonprofit and demanded that it hand over documents concerning the group’s alleged censorship practices.
But related documents, which were exclusively viewed by The Washington Post, “show that the organization has worked with government officials from both parties” to fight hate speech online, Cat writes. One email from former Republican secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for instance, thanked CCDH for participating in a conference about online antisemitism.
A CCDH lawyer wrote a letter to the committee saying the documents seek to “set the record straight” about the organization, Cat’s report adds.
ChatGPT leans liberal, new research shows
U.K. researchers in a new study say that OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool has a liberal political bias, our colleague Gerrit De Vynck reports.
“The study, from researchers at the University of East Anglia, asked ChatGPT to answer a survey on political beliefs as it believed supporters of liberal parties in the U.S., U.K. and Brazil might answer them. They then asked ChatGPT to answer the same questions without any prompting, and compared the two sets of responses,” Gerrit writes.
The findings showed a “significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the U.S., Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the U.K.,” the researchers wrote, referring to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s Workers’ Party president.
The paper highlights the challenges artificial intelligence companies face when deploying their systems to millions while ensuring they are free of biases. Such chatbots are “still infused with assumptions, beliefs and stereotypes found in the reams of data scraped from the open internet that they are trained on,” Gerrit writes.
Amazon levies fee on sellers who self-ship products as FTC suit looms
Amazon is imposing a fee on sellers that don’t use its shipping and logistics services, a move that comes as the United States finalizes an antitrust lawsuit against the company, Spencer Soper and Leah Nylen report for Bloomberg News.
They write: “Thousands of third-party sellers who ship products themselves will start paying a 2% fee on each sale in October, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. That’s on top of the commission — usually 15% — that merchants already pay Amazon to sell products on the popular web store.”
Merchants view the decision as a way to pressure them to rely on the tech giant’s logistics service. A Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit against the company is expected soon, and the fee “shows Amazon is not scared at all,” Jason Boyce, CEO of online business sales advisory firm Avenue7Media, told Bloomberg.
“Amazon’s seller fees have been a focus of regulators and lawmakers since at least 2019, when a merchant accused Amazon of using its dominance in e-commerce to force sellers to use its logistics services,” the Bloomberg report adds. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)
- The FCC’s Technology Advisory Council meets at 10 a.m.
- The Tech Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum kicks off in Colorado on Sunday
that’s so funny you should extend the yellow line to greenbelt again
— Oriana González (@OrianaBeLike) August 16, 2023
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