PR Director At Chinese Twitter Analogue Weibo Detained On Bribery And Fraud Charges

AlgorithmWatch, a non-profit group based in Germany, said it has been forced to end its efforts to monitor Instagram's newsfeed after parent company Facebook intervened.

In July, the advocacy organization shuttered its Instagram transparency project, launched in March, 2020, because of alleged veiled legal threats after Facebook claimed the group's data-collecting browser extension violated its Terms of Service and Europe's GDPR.

"On 13 July, we took the decision to terminate the project and delete any collected data (media partners still have fully anonymized versions of the data)," said Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a data journalist with AlgorithmWatch, in a blog post published on Friday. "Ultimately, an organization the size of AlgorithmWatch cannot risk going to court against a company valued at one trillion dollars."