James McAvoy and Tom Brady fall for 'Goodbye Meta AI' hoax | BBC News

More than 600,000 people, including many celebrities, have fallen for a hoax claiming to deny Facebook and Instagram owner Meta the right to use their images for training artificial intelligence (AI).

Film stars James McAvoy and Ashley Tisdale, as well as former NFL player Tom Brady, are among those who re-shared the fake "Goodbye Meta AI" message on Instagram stories.

The hoax claims that by sharing the message, Meta would no longer be able to use their information.

In reality, Facebook and Instagram users who want to opt out of AI training can do so in their account settings - and posting about it does nothing.



#Facebook #Instagram #BBCNews

[christiepatterson]

A person sharing a post like this is a sign they don’t use Facebook much. And these posts have gone around for years.

[Censortubes]

This is posted every year in some way and people line up each time.

[tiredgardener]

Anyone falling for one of those scams is broadcasting how easy they are to fool.

[europeanunion]

By sharing stories like that is a sign to hacker that you are gullible enough to fall for their schemes.

[nigelgunn_WIFF]

No different from the post that's been going around for many years claiming that if you follow some proceedure then the algorithm will reset and you'll see posts from all of your long lost friends.

[ScarlitWidow]

I can't believe so many people fell for this 🤦🏻‍♀️ this is why I left FB, too many things like this clogging it up.

[GMtuazon]

FB settings is temporary, everytime it updates it goes back to previous settings

[cdgt]

The annoying thing about Facebook is that once you have set up an account it is then impossible to cancel or delete.

[_ArsNova]

How dystopian it is that you have to “opt out” of major corporations stealing your information for AI tools.

[andrewjones-productions]

I cannot believe that people are still falling for this nonsense of sharing a message that will somehow prevent ads and cleanup the 'newsfeed' or in this instance, prevent Meta from training their AI by using photographs posted on the site. It is akin to people falling for the old chain-mail rubbish of years ago.

[CuttinBlade]

If anyone other than local law enforcement tells you to do something, don't do it.

[EricLatios]

This is reminiscent of "share this post to get Facebook black" back in the day

[omicronflux]

This is a scam, but all the emails that you receive from the Nigerian prince are true. Swear.

[lightingbolt]

You hate to see when Celebs fall for a hoax lol

[robertjamesonmusic]

Brady not the sharpest tool in the shed

[sixdonuts]

People still use Facebook and Instagram?

[CarlWicker]

Imagine how poisonous your AI will become trained on social media posts.

[andyhughes]

Massive pair. Surprised they were allowed on.

[BsERoss]

You could call it a hoax but it also brought a very important topic to the headlines, about Meta scraping personal data. Pretty effective way to tell Meta what the people think.

[rob-nz]

The key piece of information from this story was that you can opt out of Meta using your data in your privacy settings but the reporter did not show how this is done or direct the audience to a BBC page that shows how it can be done across the various mobile platforms.

Poor work BBC. This was a missed opportunity to pass along important information to the public remember that used to be the purpose of a news organization back before they became revenue machines.