Mark Zuckerberg has been given the green light to train Meta’s new Artificial Inteligence (AI) technology using public posts made by British Facebook and ­Instagram users..

The practice is effectively outlawed under EU privacy laws

The UK’s data protection regulator has waved through plans from Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to harvest billions of public posts and images from UK citizens.

Following talks with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the US tech giant said it will begin the process within weeks.

The Mail Online reports: Meta had not launched its AI tools in the UK or EU due to regulator concerns. Discussions with the EU remain in deadlock. But Meta said the UK would now allow it to harvest billions of public posts and images.

There have been worries the public do not understand how their personal information will be used.

Meta said it would not use people’s private messages, or material from under-18s.

It said UK Instagram and Facebook users would start to get in-app notifications to explain the AI training scheme, and how to opt out.

It comes after Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration was ‘wrong’ to demand Facebook censor what they deemed ‘COVID misinformation’ during the pandemic.

The Meta CEO said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan that they’ll fight back against any attempts at censorship in the future and also admitted the company had ‘demoted’ stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

He wrote that the White House ‘repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree’.

He said that this pressure ‘was wrong’ and says he regrets ‘that we were not more outspoken about it’.

‘We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,’ he added.