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Facebook to hire 10,000 ‘right people’ in EU to realize
its vision of ‘metaverse’
18 Oct, 2021 08:25
Facebook has announced a massive recruitment drive in the EU, with plans to hire 10,000 people in the next five years to help build its ‘metaverse,’ an interconnected virtual world where people would play, work and shop.
“As we begin the journey of bringing the metaverse to life, the need for highly specialized engineers is one of Facebook’s most pressing priorities,” the US tech giant said in a blog post on Sunday. The EU is the perfect place to look for such skilled employees, as “European talent is world-leading,” it added.
“Europe is hugely important to Facebook,” the company insisted, saying that it’s going to work with governments within the bloc to “find the right people and the right markets to take this forward.”
The recruitment drive is going to focus on such countries as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland. Those hired will be tasked with developing what Facebook calls “a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences using technologies like virtual and augmented reality.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first shared his vision of the ‘metaverse’ in July. It is set to become a digital world where multiple people will be able to perform various interactions with each other in a fully 3D environment.
Shortly after that, the company unveiled its Horizon Workrooms virtual reality app for colleagues to hold work meetings in VR, describing it as the first step toward the ‘metaverse.’
Facebook isn’t the only major player in the tech market looking to create its version of a metaverse, with similar projects pursued by Microsoft, Roblox, Epic Games and other companies.
In its blogpost, Facebook also underlined the important role played by the EU in “shaping the new rules of the internet.”
In an apparent attempt to sweet-talk Brussels, the company praised the bloc for “leading the way in helping to embed European values like free expression, privacy, transparency and the rights of individuals into the day-to-day workings of the internet,” and insisted that it “shares these values.”
Facebook has been facing increasing criticism in the EU in recent years. Regulators claim it has a monopolistic business model and mishandles the private data of its users – and they are trying hard to make the tech giant abide by the bloc’s legislation. The US company even threatened to leave the EU altogether last year if restrictions were enforced against it.
The EU lawmakers have also been calling on Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen to appear before the European Parliament in November.
Earlier this month, Haugen, who used to be a product manager with the company, testified before a US Senate subcommittee, blaming Facebook for not doing enough to tackle harmful content and putting profit above the well-being of its users. Zuckerberg turned down those claims as a “false narrative.”
The Wall Street Journal has recently come up with a series of investigative reports about the platform’s practices, revealing that Facebook allegedly allowed high-profile users to violate the social network’s rules, and arguing that the company had done internal research that found Instagram to be damaging to the mental health of teenage girls.
The latest WSJ piece on Sunday claimed that Facebook’s own engineers doubted the ability of the platform’s artificial intelligence to police harmful content.
The first demographic that masters this new platform will be paedophiles. They will be waiting for our children to come to them.
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Miss Ukraine lashes out at critics angry at her for speaking Russian,
beauty queen explains that she hasn’t learned Ukrainian
19 Oct, 2021 15:21
The newly crowned winner of Ukraine’s ‘Miss Universe’ competition has weighed into a row after facing fierce backlash from nationalists for being a native Russian speaker, amid a wave of restrictions imposed on the language.
Anna Neplyakh, the 27-year-old model who scooped the title at a ceremony on Friday, as well as picking up the Miss Audience Choice award, took to social media to defend herself after becoming the target of furious criticism. The model says she has received a torrent of negative comments this week for writing in Russian on her social media channels.
“Over the past day, I have received a million accusations that I write posts and speak Russian on my blog, where 90% of the audience is Russian,” she said in a video posted to Instagram. According to her, she communicates in her native tongue “because I do not know Ukrainian.” She switched to Kiev’s official language for the statement in an effort to placate activists.
Neplyakh also stated that she was raised in a Russian-speaking family in Dnipropetrovsk, where a large share of the population speaks Russian, and added that she believes she has the right “to express herself in the most convenient language.”
Since 2014, Ukraine’s post-Maidan leaders have imposed a series of successive measures designed to push the Russian language out of daily life, despite the fact that it is spoken natively by at least one in three people and almost all Ukrainians are able to communicate in it. Russian-language news sites and television stations have been targeted, while public service workers are forbidden to greet customers in Russian and can only switch at their clients’ request.
Spanish mass poisoning survivors threaten suicide in Madrid museum
Survivors of one of the world’s worst food poisoning epidemics threatened suicide
in the El Prado museum, Madrid.
Furvah Shah
11 hours ago
Protestors arrived at the El Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain from 10am.
(REUTERS)
Survivors of a mass canola oil poisoning forty years ago have occupied a museum in Madrid and threatened suicide if the Spanish government did not respond to their demands.
The group of around six people began protesting inside the El Prado museum at roughly 10am Tuesday, with others protesting outside.
The protest group, titled ‘We Are Still Alive’ – ‘Seguimos Viviendo’ in Spanish – said in a statement on Twitter they were protesting against the “humiliation” and “abandonment” from the Spanish government following the mass oil poisoning in 1981.
“Six hours after the start of our presence here, we will start ingesting the pills,” the group warned.
The group were removed from the museum by police.
Their demands included a meeting with Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, and money to cover the medical expenses of remaining survivors.
In what is thought to be one of the world’s worst food poisoning epidemic, hundreds of people died and many more were left with chronic illnesses after batches of canola cooking oil sold in Madrid and nearby in 1981 were found to be altered with harmful chemicals.
In 1989 – after one of the longest trials in Spanish history – over half of the defendants in the investigation into the poisoning were fully acquitted, causing uproar.
In an interview with El HuffPost, a protestor outside said: “For forty years, we have passed through various political parties but we are in the same place. The most urgent this is that, at least, they [listen] to us.”
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