Even Meta's Oversight Board thinks its rules for banning accounts are baffling, Apple began requiring age verification for App Store use in Texas, and NASA's Mars MAVEN probe is dead

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Even Meta's Oversight Board thinks its rules for banning accounts are baffling.
Apple began requiring age verification for App Store use in Texas.
And NASA's Mars MAVEN probe is dead.
It's Thursday, June 4th, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in and around tech this morning from Engadget.
Over the last five years, Meta's Oversight Board has weighed in on everything from Donald Trump's Facebook suspension to AI deepfakes. Now, the board is waiting into another thorny issue, Meta's rules for disabling users' accounts. The board announced earlier this year that it would look into improving transparency around the process, which is often frustratingly opaque. The Oversight Group dug into the issue following a referral from Meta regarding an Instagram account with 70,000 followers that was banned after making threatening posts targeting a journalist. In its decision, the Oversight Board says that Meta was correct to ban the account, but the case raised serious questions about the company's handling of such behavior and due process concerns around how it disables accounts. Because this is something of a test case, the board is not making formal recommendations to Meta, so it does highlight a number of potential improvements. Its analysis also highlights the confusing patchwork of rules and penalties that lead to bans on Meta's platform and the vast amount of frustration it's caused for users. For example, the board noted that Meta has strikingly different processes for Facebook and Instagram. While both platforms penalize accounts with strikes, repeated strikes can have different outcomes. On Facebook, accounts may receive temporary suspensions for repeated violations before an outright ban, but no such penalty exists on Instagram. Instead, Meta restricts accounts from Instagram's live streaming feature, or will remove their account from recommendations, which Instagram users often refer to as a shadow ban. The Oversight Board pointed out how bizarre it is that restricting live streaming is one of the main intermediate penalties on Instagram when the feature is not even available to all accounts. It requires a minimum of 1,000 followers. The board also touched on the long simmering frustration among Facebook and Instagram users who have accounts disabled. The group says, it received more than 750 public comments in the case. In addition to the innumerable complaints, individual board members regularly get from people who have had their accounts disabled. In its guidance to Meta, the board suggested that the company should provide users with a better appeals process that allows them to provide written explanations, and that users should be notified when AI is used to penalize their account.
Well, we are continuing to see the impact of the wave of age verification laws being passed by US state governments over the last year. Apple announced this week that apps distributed in Texas will need to conform to the requirements set out under state law SB2420. MacRumors first noticed the change, which is taking effect for any apps distributed in the state. New Apple accounts in Texas will be subject to SB2420 and will need to verify their ages. A parent or guardian will need to provide consent when miners download apps or significant updates to apps and when they make in-app purchases. Developers will also need to support parents or guardians revoking that consent to access at any time. The Texas measure was signed into law last May, although legal challenges delayed its planned effective date on January 1st. Apple had already laid some groundwork for how it will handle geographically tied requirements, and the company began adopting age verification for iCloud accounts in the UK in March.
The last time NASA heard from MAVEN was back on December 6th, before it suddenly lost signal after passing behind Mars. But the agency did not quickly give up on the probe and examined its options first. It formed an anomaly review board in February to assess MAVEN's probable state and to figure out if there were any viable ways to recover it. Unfortunately, the board ultimately determined that the spacecraft is no longer able to perform science missions and to relay data back to Earth. NASA says the probe was working properly before it passed behind Mars, but the Deep Space Network, the agency's global array of international ground antennas, could not observe a signal after it had reappeared. Based on the data provided by the network, MAVEN was in safe mode and rotating at an unusually high rate after emerging from behind the planet. That drained its batteries and caused its communications system to lose power. The agency is still reviewing data to figure out the root cause of the anomaly and will publish a report later on this year. MAVEN's observations allowed NASA to determine that solar winds and solar storms continue to strip away the Martian atmosphere, and were the main reasons why the planet's climate went from potentially habitable to cold and arid. They showed that protons can create new kinds of auroras on Mars, and that they could occur anywhere on the planet, whereas they can only occur near the poles here on Earth. MAVEN also helped scientists understand how a series of dust storms that enveloped the whole planet led it to lose water molecules to space.