The UK government is asking for feedback on how the BBC should be funded in future. Best guess? The licence fee continues. CC-licensed photo by John Keogh on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Free at the point of demand. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Scam ads on Meta in UK likely worth more than all online news advertising • Press Gazette
Dominic Ponsford:
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Meta likely made more money from fraudulent advertising in the UK last year than the entire news industry made from legitimate online marketing.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram has revealed in internal documents (exposed by Reuters) that around 10% of its annual revenue comes from advertising placed by fraudsters.
This equates to $16bn a year in annual revenue from enabling the fraud industry and at least $790m (£600m) in the UK alone. Press Gazette has estimated that Meta made at least £6bn in UK advertising revenue in 2024.
Online advertising across the entire UK national and regional news industry was just under £600m in 2024 (according to Advertising Association data).
Meta is the largest online publisher in the UK, with the average Briton spending more than an hour a day on its platforms.
Press Gazette has repeatedly highlighted scam investment ads running on Facebook which steal the identities of high-profile business journalists and others in order to lure users to join Whatsapp investment groups which are purportedly run by the likes of FT commentator Martin Wolf, Martin Lewis or CNN’s Richard Guest.
These may be so-called pig-butchering scams whereby people are fed real investment advice over a weeks or months to win trust, before they are then lured into making a fraudulent investment and losing their money.
Press Gazette joined the “Richard Quest” investment group and began receiving investment tips and daily messages from a fake persona called Alyssa Mendez.
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Just to be clear, the Reuters investigation linked above is a totally different one from that linked below. Facebook, and Instagram to a lesser extent, offers colossal potential to scammers.
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Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue • Reuters
Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham:
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Last year, Meta had to reckon with an ugly conclusion about its Chinese advertising customers: They were defrauding Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users worldwide.
Though China’s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta’s advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company’s global revenue.
But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.
The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta’s efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company’s reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues.
The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta’s platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. “We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm,” Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations.
To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 – from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China.
Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. “As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was “asked to pause” its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO’s involvement or what the so-called “Integrity Strategy pivot” entailed.
But after Zuckerberg’s input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team.
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Windows 11 bug causes password sign-in icon to turn invisible – but don’t worry, says Microsoft • TechRadar
Darren Allan:
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Windows 11 has had its fair share of odd bugs, particularly since version 24H2 landed, and a very peculiar glitch recently appeared – and what’s equally odd is Microsoft’s workaround here.
Windows Latest noticed the problem, which pertains to the Windows Hello sign-in options on the lock screen for Windows 11 devices.
This screen allows you to log in via biometric means (facial recognition or fingerprint), or by using a PIN, although if you can’t recall that PIN, then there’s a backup facility to use your Microsoft account password instead.
However, on some Windows 11 PCs that have installed the August preview update, or the full September update – or later – this password option has gone missing (as per this thread on Reddit).
Microsoft explains in the known issues for the August preview update: “You might notice that the password icon is not visible in the sign-in options on the lock screen. If you hover over the space where the icon should appear, you’ll see that the password button is still available. Select this placeholder to open the password text box and enter your password. After entering your password, you can sign in normally.”
In other words, the password icon has somehow turned invisible, but it’s still there and functioning – sort of, as the icon itself isn’t there, but you’ll see a blank box where it normally lives, which, when clicked on, works to trigger the password field.
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Why runners get lightheaded when they stand up • Outside Online
Alex Hutchinson:
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“Whoa, headrush!” Over the years, I’ve gotten very familiar with that sensation: a sudden lightheadedness if I get up suddenly after, say, chilling on the sofa. It’s called “orthostatic intolerance,” and it’s a relatively common phenomenon among runners, which I’ve always assumed had something to do with being really fit and having a low resting heart rate. But a new study suggests there’s something entirely different going on.
A team of researchers at Penn State and Florida State universities, led by Chester Ray, tested the hypothesis that the up-and-down motion of running causes the motion sensors in your inner ear to become less sensitive—which in turn means they’re slower to detect when you suddenly stand up. Their study, which appears in the Journal of Applied Physiology, had sedentary volunteers complete eight weeks of either running, cycling, or no exercise. Sure enough, running had a unique impact on their inner motion sensors.
…The conclusion of the study is that it’s not fitness alone that alters your response to standing suddenly. Instead, there’s something specific to running’s up-and-down motion that seems to make your brain pay less attention to motion signals from your otoliths [tiny crystals in the ear’s vestibular system]. This doesn’t mean it’s the only reason for headrushes, but it suggests that it’s one of them. It’s worth noting that the cyclists in this study were on stationary bikes, so it’s possible that real-world cycling might have a little more side-to-side motion that might have a similar effect—though you’d still expect it to be much less than from running.
As an aside, another situation where runners sometimes feel lightheaded and collapse is at the end of long races. This is also a situation where the heart is having trouble getting enough oxygen to the brain, and it used to be blamed on dehydration. But it generally seems to happen right after people stop running, which suggests that it’s actually a problem of blood distribution.
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Doesn’t quite explain why ordinary people get a headrush, but suggests that runners get them more than cyclists.
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Tech whistleblowers face job losses and isolation • The Washington Post
Naomi Nix:
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Yaël Eisenstat didn’t expect her career to completely unravel after she publicly accused her former employer of profiting off propaganda.
Eisenstat, Facebook’s former head of election integrity, alleged in a 2019 op-ed that the social media platform allowed political operatives to mislead the public with sophisticated ad-targeting tools. Meta has argued that these ad policies were intended to prevent censorship of political speech.
Soon, she said, former colleagues started gossiping about her. It was hard to find a new job. Eisenstat said she would routinely interview with senior managers who would later ghost her. One institution courted her for months for a leadership role but then told her it wouldn’t hire her. That day, the institution announced a major donation from the philanthropic organization of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Eisenstat never thought Meta’s CEO was purposely torpedoing her job prospects, but the timing made her feel discouraged.
“I knew it, like, in my gut … I had been blacklisted,” said Eisenstat, now the director of policy and impact at the Cybersecurity for Democracy research center. “You just start to feel paranoid because no one will say to you, ‘This is why we will absolutely never interview you or call you or speak with you.’”
She lived off consulting projects while she waited for a full-time job. It took her four years to land something that matched the rigor of her role at Facebook, the company now known as Meta.
Eisenstat is part of a growing group of former tech workers who have alleged that their Silicon Valley employers harmed the public and compromised users’ safety.
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I spoke to Eisenstat for Social Warming: she had left the company after six months. Her problems getting hired subsequently are peculiar, given her CV: ten years working for the CIA and the White House.
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Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot • The Register
Thomas Claburn:
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Mozilla Corporation on Tuesday said it has appointed Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as chief executive officer, replacing Laura Chambers, who served as interim CEO for the past two years.
Enzor-DeMeo has been the general manager of Firefox since August 2025. He joined Mozilla in December 2024 from Roofstock, a platform for real estate investors focused on the single-family rental market.
His appointment came with a commitment to expand Mozilla’s involvement with AI services. According to the public benefit company, Enzor-DeMeo’s browser stewardship has accelerated improvements in Firefox and has shown how Mozilla can responsibly integrate AI with the browsing experience. Firefox, the company claims, has enjoyed double-digit growth on mobile devices each of the past two years, and its market share has stabilized on the desktop.
…With the appointment of a new CEO, [Mozilla president Mark] Surman told The Register in an interview on Monday, “You’re gonna see, I think, an even deeper investment in reviving the browser as a really vibrant space.”
Surman said we’re in what some people describe as the third browser war, “a period where, because of AI, people are launching new browsers and looking at what the technology can do,” he said. “In general, you’ll see more fundamental innovation happening around the browser to give developers more capabilities.”
The renewed focus on Firefox within Mozilla Corporation, Surman said, has internal and external explanations. “Internally, I think we haven’t had the leadership for the last few years to really drive us technically on what’s possible with the tech stack we have,” he said.
“The external reason is really that the market for browsers and the space for innovation over browsers is really in motion again. And people have written browsers off as a commodity. Other people are innovating, and it creates a really good context for us to do the same again and to reinvest there.”
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Nice idea, but how is Mozilla/Firefox going to push to the front in browsers when a ton of AI companies are making their own browser? Unless it somehow partners with one of them, as the builder of their browser – which wouldn’t be a bad idea.
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How might the BBC be funded if the licence fee is scrapped? • The Guardian
Michael Savage:
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Advertising. Subscriptions. A household levy. The government claims to be considering all options for funding the BBC. In reality, however, many industry insiders believe radical reforms will be dodged in favour of sticking to the licence fee model – perhaps for the last time.
Advocates for the licence fee have long argued it is the only model that allows the corporation to stick to its guiding “universality” principle – producing programming for everyone.
Months of wrangling await before any decision is reached. The government’s green paper on the BBC’s charter renewal, launched on Tuesday, is an early part of a process that will run into 2027.
So what are the options for funding the BBC, and how likely are they?
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They are: a tax (already ruled out), subscription (won’t be able to replace licence fee because won’t get enough subscribers), advertising (absolutely reviled by the BBC chair and not a popular idea), paywalling some popular shows (but which, and would they remain popular?), per-house levy (basically what happens now but rolled into council tax), some sort of fudge (almost certainly what will happen).
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Five things that changed the media in 2025 • The New Yorker
Jay Caspian Kang lists four other things, and this is his fifth:
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Twitter is no longer the media’s village square… Twitter no longer feels essential or expansive; the platform has become balkanized, fracturing into a hodgepodge of esoteric and oftentimes anachronistic conversations about housing policy, candidate polling, Marxism, and whatever else. It’s true that many people have left the platform, but I don’t think that’s why the discourse on X feels so stale. Rather, it’s more likely the product of online herding effects: everyone eventually finds a tribe and conforms to its norms.
Pew, which is on the short list of polling and survey outlets that I trust, recently put out a report on social-media use showing that women, in particular, have been leaving X. In 2018, Twitter had about equal participation between men and women; since then—and especially in the years following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk—the platform has steeply tilted toward men. (Reddit, for what it’s worth, has had the opposite trajectory, going from a mostly male-dominated space a decade ago to something much closer to gender balance today.) I imagine there’s a feedback loop at work: X’s algorithms amplify shouting men, which, in turn, causes women to leave the platform and leads to more shouting men who believe their tribal concerns are more important than everyone else’s. X, in 2025, feels deeply self-referential and largely irrelevant.
I am not one of these traditionalists who say that we don’t need unruly public-discussion sites, because I would rather have some unpleasant chaos than a return to fully centralized media gatekeeping. Streaming, which is undeniably the ascendant form in media and commentary, is not as democratic as peak Twitter; it doesn’t allow previously unknown posters to turn themselves into the stars of an argument or a news story. Peak media Twitter was terrible, sure, but I imagine we will miss it more than we think.
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Hotel California, but with fire and brimstone, but also you could leave.
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Microsoft scales back AI goals because almost nobody is using Copilot • Extremetech
Jon Martindale:
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Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft’s substantial AI investment.
Microsoft was an early investor in many of the latest AI companies. It ended up with a serious stake in OpenAI and benefited from early access to its models, creating Bing Chat and Copilot when Google, Meta, and Anthropic were just getting started. But now its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it’s not making much money from its AI products. That’s because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful, The Information reports.
“The Information’s story inaccurately combines the concepts of growth and sales quotas,” Microsoft said in a very defensive statement (via Futurism), adding that “aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered.”
Petulance aside, tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool. At best, they’re a way for skilled employees to be more productive and save time on low-level tasks, but those tasks were already being handed off to lower-level employees.
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Imagining the scenes inside Microsoft being like Glengarry Glenn Ross, but for agentic AI.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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