Facebook acknowledged that social media can have a negative impact on democracies, and that the company has more work to do in order to ensure that the good outweighs the bad, according to Bloomberg.
“From the Arab Spring to robust elections around the globe, social media seemed like a positive,“ Katie Harbath, who runs the Facebook team that builds relationships with governments around the world, wrote in a blog post. “The last U.S. presidential campaign changed that, with foreign interference that Facebook should have been quicker to identify, to the rise of ‘fake news’ and echo chambers.“
Following the 2016 election, Facebook has frequently promised to work harder and devote more resources to fixing such issues. But it also usually emphasized that bad actors made up a small percentage of activity and that, overall, the company was doing something good for society. Mentioned post is the most self-critical assessment of the company’s impact to date, complete with an admission that its efforts may not be successful.
“Even with the countermeasures, the battle will never end,“ Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager for civic engagement, wrote in a separate blog post. “Misinformation campaigns are not amateur operations. They are professionalized and constantly try to game the system. We will always have more work to do.“
Facebook’s admission that social media may not be good for democracy comes about a month after another reflective report from Facebook, which said “passively“ consuming social media can be bad for mental health.
Automated systems and bots now generate more than half of internet traffic, forcing hosting companies to manage performance, security, and infrastructure costs at the same time. Ivan Čačija argues that business users are no longer buying only storage and computing resources, but the availability and performance of their own operations. AI will reshape both data-centre management and infrastructure requirements, while regional providers can compete through local presence, predictable costs and hybrid models. Fastserver sees its partnership with Blackwall as part of a broader shift towards an integrated platform combining infrastructure, security, traffic protection and automation.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has unveiled comprehensive plans to restrict children’s access to social media platforms through the proposed EU Kids Act.
Ericsson Nikola Tesla no longer views artificial intelligence solely as a tool that helps developers write code, but as part of the entire software development lifecycle. At the upcoming ENT Technology Days, taking place from 21 to 25 September, artificial intelligence will also be among the central topics.
Siniša Krajnović, PhD, President of the Management Board of ENT, sees the transformation brought about by artificial intelligence through products, internal processes, and changes in the way work itself is performed, while Jelena Jurišić, Director of Technology of the ENT Group (CTO), explains how specialized AI agents are now part of analysis, design, implementation, testing, and verification. In such a model, autonomy increases gradually, with quality control and human decision-making at critical points. At the same time, the change does not diminish the importance of engineers, but increasingly shifts their role toward architecture, domain understanding, and the management of complex automated systems.
