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Facebook’s own watchdog finds it favours business and celebrities when it comes to rights issues

Facebook does not treat all accounts equally when it comes to breaking the rules. If you’re a powerful public figure, a celebrity, or you do business with the company, you have a better chance of keeping your rule-breaking posts up.

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State issues record number of work permits as unemployment shrinks despite tech slowdown

The Department of Enterprise has issued a record number of work permits this year after clearing a backlog of applications built up during the pandemic.

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Beware of the fake Daniel O’Donnell lurking online, singer warns fans

Life may be imitating art for Daniel O’Donnell after the singer was forced to warn fans not to engage in any “live chat” with a “fake” Daniel.

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Ireland shedding ‘soft touch’ tag, with almost €1bn in fines for Mark Zuckerberg’s under-fire Meta

Does nearly €1bn in data fines mean Ireland is finally on top of regulating big tech?

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Richard Curran Opinion As the leaves fade on our corporate money tree, its clear we didn’t spend it wisely

All of the signs are pointing in one direction. Ireland is on the turn in a new economic cycle, having enjoyed extraordinary growth and wealth creation in the last seven years in particular.

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Sales recorded at Meta’s Irish arm topped €1bn a week in 2021

Pre-tax profits at the Irish arm of the social media giant that operates Facebook last year increased by 33pc to €1.184bn on the back of record revenues.

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Stephen Mihm Opinion Big companies’ habit of using mass layoffs to cut costs has history of backfiring badly

For years, fawning profiles have assured us that tech titans such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are 21st-century visionaries, not old-school corporate hacks, which is why news of mass layoffs at Twitter, Amazon.com and Meta platforms jars.

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Richard Curran Opinion Policy fixes for housing, skills and energy are better for the tech sector than subsidies

Tech redundancy announcements are staring to pile up. We have had Meta, Stripe, Twitter, Zendesk, Amazon, Wayflyer and there is still a possibility of something from Intel which is cutting costs globally.

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Tech job losses will have no impact on rental sector, as Dublin is ‘full’

Recent job layoffs at Twitter, Meta and Stripe will have no impact on the chronic shortage of rental properties in Dublin, according to one of the city’s biggest letting agents.

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Big tech’s advertising challenges remain the same with competition set to intensify

With Big Tech coming in for its fair share of scrutiny over the last few weeks, it seems likely that many of the challenges it faces are not going to go away any time soon.

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Young Irish shoppers increasingly turning to social platforms

TikTok and Instagram are “the new shopping centres” on the digital block, as Irish people turn away from traditional online platforms such as Google and Amazon, and also from old-fashioned bricks and mortar – according to a new analysis of the online retail sector by Dublin-based digital agency All Human.

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Letters to the Editor Opinion It’s time to ditch our over-reliance on the tech sector and concentrate on traditional industries

With the crises in health and housing, and in the wake of the job layoffs in the big tech sector, is it not high time Ireland put more emphasis on supporting the more traditional industries and trained more doctors, nurses, hospital consultants, blocklayers, plasters, carpenters, plumbers and electricians?

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Tánaiste Leo Varadkar criticises Elon Musk’s Twitter for alerting staff to sudden layoffs by email

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has criticised Twitter for sending an email to his department alerting him to hundreds of job losses in the social media giant’s Irish operation.

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Taoiseach calls for workers to be treated with ‘respect and dignity’ in accordance with the law amid tech job loses

All workers must be treated with respect and dignity in line with employment law, the Taoiseach has said, while speaking of the need to “keep perspective” on the job losses.

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Meta reiterates commitment to Ireland despite job losses as Michael McGrath admits recession risk in 2023

Meta have committed their long-term future to Ireland despite the news that close to 400 workers of the company will be let go in Ireland.

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Adrian Weckler Opinion As Meta cuts up to 400 Irish jobs, is this just a correction or a warning sign for a deeper tech recession to come?

So now we know: around 400 people from Meta will lose their jobs.

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Further tech job losses loom with Zendesk warning of fresh lay-offs

More multinational tech jobs are to be lost in Dublin, with US software firm Zendesk telling its 600 staff here that 5pc of global employees are to be laid off.

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Meta to axe 350 jobs in Ireland as it confirms 11,000 cuts worldwide

Meta has confirmed it is cutting 11,000 jobs across its 87,000-person strong global operation, with around 350 jobs to go in Ireland.

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Expected job losses at global tech firms here could blow a giant hole in income tax receipts

Concerns are growing that Irish job losses in technology companies, such as Facebook’s owner Meta, could take a big chunk out of State income-tax receipts due to high salaries in the sector .

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TDs want to grill Twitter and Stripe tech bosses over ‘worrying’ job cuts

Junior enterprise minister Damien English has called on Twitter to engage with its staff at the company’s Dublin headquarters, in an effort to try and save jobs — in accordance with Irish law.

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Tech firms face pressure from White House antitrust push

The White House is planning a post-midterms push for antitrust legislation that would rein in the power of the world’s largest tech companies, a last-ditch effort to get a stalled pair of bills through Congress before a predicted Republican takeover in January.

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Interview: ‘A steady drumbeat of progress’ – Square’s ambitious Irish growth plan set to pay off for boss Lalor

Big plans for the year ahead are being made at the European headquarters of payments software and hardware solutions giant Square in The Liberties in Dublin and European boss Jason Lalor is in the thick of them.

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I was paid to view the worst things on the internet

It’s several hours after I meet and interview Chris Gray, and a day and a half after starting his new book, The Moderator: Inside Facebook’s Dirty Work in Ireland – and I still can’t bring myself to read the final section.

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Big tech takes its ball and goes home. Maybe that’s good for the news organisations that have become so dependent on it

Back in 2017, long, long ago in internet terms, news organisations still mattered to tech giants. Meta (then Facebook) and Google decided back then that publishers needed a bit of help getting eyeballs onto their content, as users’ habits shifted to mobile. So both companies came up with similar ideas to improve speed and user experience on smaller screens.

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Social media giants and online marketplaces remove ads that offer academic cheating services to students

Social media giants and other online platforms are clamping down on contract cheating by removing ads from their sites which offer these services to students.

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Kanye West buying alternative social media platform Parler

Kanye West has begun the process of buying alternative messaging platform Parler after his Twitter and Instagram accounts were locked.

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Bob Hoffman’s new book targets Facebook, Google and Twitter as bad guys in an online world running amok

As a former CEO of two advertising agencies, Bob Hoffman knows a thing or two about the advertising world.

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Facebook parent Meta disables Russian propaganda network targeting Europe

A sprawling disinformation network originating in Russia sought to use hundreds of fake social media accounts and dozens of sham news websites to spread Kremlin talking points about the invasion of Ukraine, Meta has revealed.

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Adaire Fox-Martin: Relax, says Google’s Irish boss, we’re still hiring

For the first time in years, Dublin’s tech scene has the jitters.

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Adrian Weckler Opinion The time to get aggressive is right now – that’s the gospel according to Mark Zuckerberg

Amid growing nervousness in Dublin about big tech firms downsizing their operations, attention is starting to focus on one company in particular – Meta.