December 2nd: news roundup

The year was tough for Meta, former Facebook, even the change of the name didn’t bring relief.

The troubles started after a whistleblower and former employee, Frances Haugen, took to the stage to reveal the questionable Facebook operation methods, such as allowing hate speech on the platform.

“Meta’s horrible year continued unabated this week with news that it has been told by the UK competition watchdog to sell popular animated images platform Giphy, which it acquired for a reported $400 million in May 2020.”

Nearly 3 billion people, more than a third of the global population, haven’t been connected to the internet, despite the worldwide increase of internet use during the pandemic.

The UN’s International Communications Unit (ITU) found that “the estimated number of people who have gone online rose from 4.1 billion in 2019 to 4.9 billion this year, partially due to a “Covid connectivity boost”. But even among those internet users, hundreds of millions might only go online infrequently, using shared devices or facing connection speeds that hamper their internet use.”

While the internet users number grew exponentially, with a ten per cent increase during the first year of Covid, the growth has been uneven, with internet access almost unaffordable in poorer nations.

The ITU task is to create possibilities to connect the remaining 2.9 billion people.