Author: DA Gadgets

Meta blamed a “technical error” when, last week, it admitted wrongly suspending some Facebook Groups.

Since then, users of the world’s most popular social media platform have got in touch with the BBC to say how, for them, it is much more than a technical issue.

Some say they have been shut out of pages that are key to their working lives, while others highlight the digital connections to loved ones that have been cut.

As well as anger, there is frustration that – despite Meta saying it is fixing the problem – there is often no human to speak to about an issue they suspect is caused by moderation decisions powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

They have also described how Instagram accounts have been affected, despite Meta saying it does not have evidence of a problem on its platforms more widely.

However, more than 25,000 people have signed a petition in the last few weeks which says the problem is being experienced across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Reddit forums are dedicated to the subject, many users are posting on social media about being banned by Meta, and some say they plan on taking a class action lawsuit against the social media giant.

Here’s what people have told the BBC about what it means to them to be locked out of their social media accounts.

The online petition about this issue was started by Brittany Watson, a 32-year-old from Ontario, in Canada.

She decided to act after her Facebook account was disabled for nine days in May before it was reinstated. She claims her page was cancelled over “account integrity“, and Meta has not provided her with any answers as to why.

“Facebook wasn’t just an app for me,” she told BBC News. “It was where I kept years of memories, connected with family and friends, followed pages that brought me joy, and found support communities for mental health.”

When her account was banned, Brittany said she felt “ashamed, embarrassed and anxiety-stricken”.

“The weight of feeling exiled from everyone takes a pretty strong hold on you,” she added.

She quickly discovered she wasn’t the only one affected – thousands have signed the petition she started.

“There is a problem – it is personal accounts, it is business accounts, Facebook pages and Groups. I can’t believe they [Meta] are only saying it is just Groups.”

Meta has told BBC News that it takes action on accounts that violate our policies, and “people can appeal if they think we’ve made a mistake”.

It has also outlined in detail how it moderates accounts using a combination of people and technology to find and remove accounts that broke its rules.

It says it is not aware of a spike in erroneous account suspension.

Another user who recently lost access to his Facebook account is John Dale, a former journalist who runs a local news group in West London with over 5,000 members.

His account was first suspended on 30 May for breaking community standards, and the page he administers has briefly come back twice since then.

He has no idea why.

As he was the only administrator of the group, he currently cannot approve new posts. Additionally, his own posts have been removed from the group.

“It’s frozen in time, [while] quite a lot of material has been deleted,” he told BBC News.

Mr Dale is appealing his suspension, but if he loses his appeal his account will be permanently deleted. He says he has received limited information on why he was banned.

“There is no customer service,” he said.

Michelle DeMalo, who is also from Canada, says she has suffered financially since her Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended in the middle of June. They were reinstated on Wednesday, a day after the BBC contacted Meta about her case.

She runs several pages, with some associated with her businesses in digital marketing, and also uses Facebook Marketplace to buy and sell goods.

All her accounts are linked, so when her personal Instagram page was suspended for “violating the terms” of a Meta policy, it triggered all of her pages to be suspended.

“My income’s taken a huge hit in the past couple of weeks,” she told BBC News from her home in Niagara Falls.

“People think I blocked them or think something happened to me.”

Michelle can’t think of anything which triggered the suspension, and was worried about the reputational hit as some of her clients can no longer contact her.

She struggled to find a Meta employee to take up her case with.

“There’s no customer service. There’s no human being you can talk to.”

Another person left frustrated at Meta’s moderation policies and its appeal process is Sam Tall, a 21-year-old from Bournemouth.

He told BBC News that he discovered his Instagram page was suspended last week for breaching “community standards”.

He decided to appeal, and it was rejected two minutes later – making Sam suspect the process was entirely handled by AI.

“There is absolutely no way that was seen by a human,” he told BBC News.

“All the memories, all my friends who I can no longer talk to because I don’t have them on any other platform – gone”.

As his Facebook account was linked, that was removed too.

“No explanation. I’m a bit baffled, to be honest.”

Sam says it is time for some serious action from Meta – and not just for his sake.

“If I know it is quite a few people, then there is a chance of Meta waking up and realising ‘oh, this actually is an issue – let’s reinstate them all.'”

Millions of websites – including Sky News, The Associated Press and Buzzfeed – will now be able to block artificial intelligence (AI) bots from accessing their content without permission.

The new system is being rolled out by internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare, which hosts around a fifth of the internet.

Eventually, sites will be able to ask for payment from AI firms in return for having their content scraped.

Many prominent writers, artists, musicians and actors have accused AI firms of training systems on their work without permission or payment.

In the UK, it led to a furious row between the government and artists including Sir Elton John over how to protect copyright.

Cloudflare’s tech targets AI firm bots – also known as crawlers – programmes that explore the web, indexing and collecting data as they go. They are important to the way AI firms build, train and operate their systems.

So far, Cloudflare says its tech is active on a million websites.

Roger Lynch, chief executive of Condé Nast, whose print titles include GQ, Vogue, and The New Yorker, said the move was “a game-changer” for publishers.

“This is a critical step toward creating a fair value exchange on the Internet that protects creators, supports quality journalism and holds AI companies accountable”, he wrote in a statement.

However, other experts say stronger legal protections will still be needed.

Initially the system will apply by default to new users of Cloudflare services, plus sites that participated in an earlier effort to block crawlers.

Many publishers accuse AI firms of using their content without permission.

Recently the BBC threatened to take legal action against US based AI firm Perplexity, demanding it immediately stopped using BBC content, and paid compensation for material already used.

However publishers are generally happy to allow crawlers from search engines, like Google, to access their sites, so that the search companies can in return can direct people to their content.

Perplexity accused the BBC of seeking to preserve “Google’s monopoly”.

But Cloudflare argues AI breaks the unwritten agreement between publishers and crawlers. AI crawlers, it argues, collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source—depriving content creators of revenue.

“If the Internet is going to survive the age of AI, we need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model that works for everyone,” wrote the firm’s chief executive Matthew Prince.

To that end the company is developing a “Pay Per Crawl” system, which would give content creators the option to request payment from AI companies for utilising their original content.

According to Cloudflare there has been an explosion of AI bot activity.

“AI Crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to the Cloudflare network every day”, the company wrote in March.

And there is growing concern that some AI crawlers are disregarding existing protocols for excluding bots.

In an effort to counter the worst offenders Cloudflare previously developed a system where the worst miscreants would be sent to a “Labyrinth” of web pages filled with AI generated junk.

The new system attempts to use technology to protect the content of websites and to give sites the option to charge AI firms a fee to access it.

In the UK there is an intense legislative battle between government, creators and the AI firms over the extent to which the creative industries should be protected from AI firms using their works to train systems without permission or payment.

And, on both sides of the Atlantic, content creators, licensors and owners have gone to court in an effort to prevent what they see as AI firms encroachment on creative rights.

Ed Newton-Rex, the founder of Fairly Trained which certifies that AI companies have trained their systems on properly licensed data, said it was a welcome development – but there was “only so much” one company could do

“This is really only a sticking plaster when what’s required is major surgery,” he told the BBC.

“It will only offer protection for people on websites they control – it’s like having body armour that stops working when you leave your house,” he added.

“The only real way to protect people’s content from theft by AI companies is through the law.”

Filmmaker Baroness Beeban Kidron, who is campaigning for more protection for the creative industries, welcomed the news saying the company had shown leadership.

“Cloudflare sits at the heart of the digital world and it is exciting to see them take decisive action,” she told the BBC.

“If we want a vibrant public sphere we need AI companies to contribute to the communities in which they operate, that means paying their fair share of tax, settling with those whose work they have stolen to build their products, and, as Cloudflare has just shown, using tech creatively to ensure equity between digital and human creators on an ongoing basis.”

Most people are inclined to shoo flies away from food, and the thought of maggots in your bins is enough to make anyone’s stomach turn.

But a handful of city councils have embraced maggots – more formally known as fly larvae – and their taste for rotting food.

In Vilnius, capital of the Baltic state of Lithuania, fly larvae have officially been given the job of processing the 2,700 tonnes of food waste the city’s 607,000 residents put out for collection each year, alongside that of the six neighbouring councils.

Energesman, the waste management company that began relieving Vilnius of its food waste earlier this year, doesn’t actually charge the city for this service.

That is saving the city the city up to €2m (£1.7m; $2.3m) per year, based on a target of processing 12,000 tonnes in 2026 says the company’s chief executive, Algirda Blazgys.

Energesman has rolled out new orange food waste bags to residents, alongside an influencer marketing campaign to encourage more Vilniečiai to separate their food waste, as the 2,700 tonnes collected is only a fraction of the 40,000 tonnes of household waste the city is thought to generate.

Last year it become mandatory for councils to collect food waste, so the city needs to find ways to deal with it.

Energesman, meanwhile, has plans to turn the fattened fly larvae into a new income stream.

It houses around six million flies in a special zone within its Vilnius plant, who mate around every six hours, according to CEO Algirdas Blazgys.

A female fly can lay around 500 eggs in her average 21-day lifespan, so Mr Blazgys and his team are dealing with more than three million larvae a month, who can consume more than 11 tonnes of food waste in the first, hungriest days of their lives.

It’s the huge appetites of these tiny creatures that make them such excellent candidates for food waste processing. This study shows a swarm of them demolishing a 16 inch pizza in just two hours.

The trick is to cull them before they transform into mature flies. That way the protein rich fly larvae can be converted into protein products for use in animal feed or industrial use, for example as an ingredient in paint, glue, lamp shades and furniture covers.

Also, their manure, known as frass, can be used as fertiliser.

Energesman has already set up supply trials with partners in the paint, glue and furniture industries, but Mr Blazgys acknowledges it’s proving more complicated than he anticipated.

The sample paint produced using Energesman-reared fly larvae didn’t quite come out in the right colour, but the lamp shades created look promising.

He also has university partnerships in place to supply fly larvae for research purposes and for feeding bacteria. And of course, the larvae are in demand from the local fishing industry to use as bait.

But EU health and safety regulations mean fly larvae fed with kitchen waste can’t be used in edible insect products for human consumption, as there could be cross contamination from meat and fish scraps.

“We came up with some crazy ideas, then we started looking for other people that could also come with some crazy ideas about what we could do,” says Mr Blazgys.

“As it’s still very new, some people are still looking to see if we’re going to fail, so they don’t want to brag about it yet. But I think we’re going to come up with something good.”

While there are numerous cases around the world of fly larvae being used in food waste management, and being harvested as a protein ingredient, it’s largely on a commercial basis, for example, a private contract between a hotel or apartment building owner and a fly larvae rearer.

In Kenya, Project Mila is a social enterprise using fly larvae to tackle Mombasa’s mounting food waste problem, while also supplying frass as fertiliser to local farmers.

Yet there are just a handful of city councils that have adopted this way of processing food waste.

Goterra in Australia has used fly larvae to help Sydney get through its food waste, as part of a limited trial which began this year.

For the past three years, Goterra has also been working with three townships that are part of the neighbouring Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council, recycling around 10 tonnes of food waste.

Whether we will see UK councils start shipping in millions of flies, so their larvae can munch through the 6.4 million tonnes of household food waste produced here yearly, is only a matter of time.

That’s the optimistic view of Larry Kotch. He’s the CEO and co-founder of insect waste management company Flybox, which he says operates more insect waste processing sites than any other company in the UK, working largely with private food manufacturers and supermarkets.

Flybox is also a founding member of the Insect Bioconversion Association, an industry body representing companies in the space.

UK councils are interested, Mr Kotch believes, especially because weekly household food waste collections will become mandatory in England from March 2026.

Around 148 of England’s 317 local authorities still don’t offer this, according to the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee.

But regulations set by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) are currently barring councils from using fly larvae to process food waste.

If regulation could move in line with science, Mr Kotch argues that “the UK could see its first council-contracted insect plant within two years”.

“Unfortunately, with government it’s always safer to say no… Everyone we’ve spoken to in UK councils are very excited about insect protein and would much rather work with insect farms than alternative technologies.”

DEFRA confirmed to the BBC that the Animal By-Product Regulations restrict insects from being used to process organic waste streams.

It says there are currently no plans to review these regulations. “Our waste management regulations play a crucial role in protecting UK biosecurity and reducing the risk of disease,” the spokesperson said.

The current alternative for sending food waste to landfill is anaerobic digestion (AD), a breakdown process which creates biogas.

However, Mr Kotch says current AD plants aren’t enough to cope with the anticipated influx of household food waste.

“Globally, over 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year. We believe up to 40% of that could be upcycled using insect waste management. And not only does it avoid disposal costs and methane emissions, but it also produces valuable protein and organic fertiliser,” says Mr Kotch.

Demand for so-called “fast tech” – cheap electronic items often quickly binned or abandoned in drawers – is growing, a not-for-profit that works to reduce electronic waste has warned.

Material Focus singled out heatwave-fuelled demand for battery powered mini-fans as an example of the problem, suggesting over seven million were purchased last year.

Nearly £8m was spent on light-up toilet seats, mini karaoke machines and LED balloons, the group’s calculations also suggested.

Overall, consumer spending on fast tech has quadrupled to £11.6bn since 2023, surveys carried out for Material Focus suggested.

The boom could be as rapid as the growth in fast fashion with a “similar negative impact”, Professor Cathrine Jansson-Boyd wrote in the announcement of the findings.

Although fast tech can cost less than a pound, valuable materials can still be locked up in the cut-price gadgets.

A previous report by Material Focus looking at tech lurking in so-called “drawers of doom” suggested in total the junk could contain over 38,000 tonnes of copper.

The mining of materials used by tech gadgets can be environmentally damaging, and yet, experts say, such elements will be crucial as nations seek to transition to low carbon technologies.

Material Focus, whose board includes trade bodies representing manufacturers of domestic appliances, and lighting manufactures, argued that consumers needed to be more thoughtful,

“We had fast food, then fast fashion, now fast tech”, Scott Butler, the group’s executive director wrote.

He urged consumers to “think before you buy your latest fast tech item, and if you do really need it”.

Unwanted tech should always be recycled, Mr Butler argued. However, surveys carried out for the group suggest that over half of fast tech ends up in the bin or unused.

Joe Iles of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which promotes the idea of a “circular economy” based on reuse and recycling said the charity believed the problem of fast tech could be fixed.

“It’s easy to think of these patterns of rapid use, disposal as inevitable, but they’re a recent symptom that has accelerated in the past 50 years or so”, he told the BBC.

There was already a booming market for some durable, reused, and refurbished electronics, he added.

And policy tools such as Right to Repair and Extended Producer Responsibility could encourage better design, as well as new practices in collection, repair, and resale, he said.

Others highlight how goods need to be manufactured in a way that helps consumers make sustainable choices.

Laura Burley, plastics campaign lead at Greenpeace UK told the BBC that the combination of plastic and electrical components made fast tech “a toxic cocktail that is very hard to recycle”.

The fact that so much cheap tech is not built to be repaired or to last exacerbated the problem she said.

When plastic and electronic waste is thrown away it often ends up being dumped on poorer countries.

The solution was “a circular economy where producers are responsible for the full life cycle of their products, and incentivised to make them easier to repair”.

Consumers could help by not buying fast tech – “manual fans or an open window work just as well” she noted.