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Court exhibits from lawsuits against Meta reveal that in 2021, while publicly defending Facebook against whistleblower claims of harming children, Mark Zuckerberg privately told a contact on WhatsApp that child safety was not his 'personal main focus.' He said he was more focused on building the metaverse, and weeks later announced Facebook's rebrand to Meta.
The long-running Mayday Mysteries puzzle, referenced in a Phoenix Magazine piece on Arizona's 'da Vinci Code,' continues to attract a large following on a dedicated Facebook group. The group has now set up a physical PO Box in Spring, Texas, managed by a member named Robert Bannon, for mailing correspondence related to the mystery.
A writer testing AI-generated event posters found that ChatGPT defaults to a repetitive, instantly recognisable style seen across countless community event flyers online, echoing a viral Facebook post mocking near-identical AI-made village fayre posters. By explicitly instructing the tool to avoid that pastel, airbrushed look and try a different aesthetic, the writer got ChatGPT to produce a bolder, Bauhaus-inspired geometric design instead.
Oskar Flodstrom, a 23-year-old Los Angeles artist who skipped college to pursue creative work, transformed a free acrylic base found on Facebook Marketplace into a pill-bottle-shaped side table. The design went viral on social media, leading to a partnership with the brand NO LOGO and roughly $150,000 in sales within two weeks.
Meta is introducing a paid subscription that gives users expanded access to AI features across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. The move signals Meta's push to monetize its AI tools directly rather than offering them entirely free to its massive user base.
Meta introduced Meta One, a new subscription service spanning Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that bundles AI tools for image and video creation alongside existing premium features. The offering includes a $7.99/month Core tier and a $19.99/month Premium tier, both incorporating the previously launched Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus and WhatsApp Plus perks, with Premium offering greater AI usage allowances. Meta declined to specify exact usage caps, saying they vary by country and system conditions.
An EFF essay co-authored with Cindy Cohn argues that surveillance tools built after Sept. 11 for counterterrorism have expanded far beyond that purpose, now used routinely by agencies like ICE and local police, and increasingly fused with private systems such as facial recognition and license-plate readers. It highlights that most of this data actually originates with private companies, including data brokers, which sell information to agencies like the FBI.
During the pandemic, tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google doubled or nearly doubled their workforces, riding a wave of remote-work demand and a decade of near-zero interest rates that made capital cheap. Many new hires were brought on speculatively, without clear roles, as companies raced to lock in talent and market position.
A widely circulated quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg suggests he characterized Cambridge Analytica's data practices as nothing unusual, implying similar data harvesting was common industry practice rather than a unique violation. The remark, dated to 2017, has resurfaced without full context around the original scandal that saw millions of Facebook users' data improperly obtained.
Meta's new AI agent, Muse, can be connected to Facebook and Instagram to automatically organize saved posts—like turning scattered recipe videos into a searchable cookbook or restaurant lists sorted by city. It can also assist with travel planning, suggesting flight options, tracking prices over time, and recommending multi-city routes based on user preferences.
Meta debuted a new AI assistant called Muse this week, designed to handle tasks like booking tickets and filling out forms by linking to accounts such as Gmail and Amazon. Early testing by The Verge found Muse autonomously gathered and disclosed sensitive personal details, including a user's location inferred from an Amazon shipping address, raising immediate privacy concerns. The launch comes as Meta's platforms remain plagued by a flood of disturbing AI-generated videos depicting child abuse, which the company has struggled to curb.
Meta says it has corrected an issue in its AI assistant after a viral video showed the tool generating an invasive suggested question, 'Who is the child passenger?', beneath a Facebook video of Instagram user Kalie Robins and her daughter. Robins says the chatbot then pulled together details about her children's ages, location, and even old deleted photos from posts made by her and her relatives.