Meta is encouraging more users to post to its X rival Threads. In its latest experiment, the company is providing an easy toggle for users to cross-post from Instagram to…
Meta adds its AI chatbot, powered by Llama 3, to the search bar across its apps
Meta’s making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest large language model, Llama 3, and…
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Ten years later, Facebook’s Oculus acquisition hasn’t changed the world as expected
Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of this job is that true, game-changing inventions rarely cross your desk. In fact, you’re extraordinarily lucky if you average one a year. Oculus’ Rift prototype…
For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, and to some extent, Messenger and Instagram, faced outages and intermittent issues. While it’s rare for services…
This gives Facebook a way to better compete against other popular video platforms that rely on algorithmic recommendations.
Meta (again) denies that Netflix read users’ private Facebook messages
The document alleges that Facebook even cut spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service so as not to compete with Netflix, a large Facebook advertiser.
Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior…
Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war? Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience…
Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down in massive Meta outage on Super Tuesday
Reports are coming in that a number of Meta’s top social apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, are all experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning. When loading the apps or…
Facebook plans to shut down its news tab in the US and Australia
Meta is trying to distance itself from news media-related regulations and payment complexities as it plans to remove the news tab on Facebook in the U.S. and Australia. The company…
Meta tests cross-posting from Facebook to its Twitter/X competitor, Threads
Threads may be about to get another big boost from parent company Meta…at least in terms of sources of new content. The company has been spotted testing a cross-posting feature…
Instagram and Threads will no longer ‘proactively’ recommend political content
Meta doesn’t want its new app Threads to become another Twitter, full of heated political debates and the resulting toxicity that entails. In an announcement today, the company detailed how…
Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups, leaving developers and customers in disarray
The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down its Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23, Meta announced…
Oversight Board calls on Meta to rewrite ‘incoherent’ rules against faked videos
The Oversight Board, the external advisory group that Meta created to review its moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, issued a decision on Monday concerning a doctored seven-second video of…
Mark Zuckerberg says Apple and Google should manage parental consent for apps, not Meta
In today’s congressional online safety hearing, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg again pushed back at the idea that businesses like his should be responsible for managing parental consent systems for kids’…
Court rules in favor of a web scraper, Bright Data, which Meta had used and then sued
Meta has lost a claim in its legal battle with an Israeli tech firm Bright Data, which it sued last year for scraping data from Facebook and Instagram via the…
Meta to restrict teen Instagram and Facebook accounts from seeing content about self-harm and eating disorders
Meta is going to automatically limit the type of content that teen Instagram and Facebook accounts can see on the platforms, the company announced on Tuesday. These accounts will automatically…
While today’s bigger news from the world of Meta’s messaging apps was the rollout of end-to-end encryption in Messenger, the company is also bringing another useful feature to its WhatsApp…
Used by only a few nerds, Facebook kills PGP-encrypted emails
In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive…
Meta set to discontinue cross-messaging between Instagram and Facebook
Meta has silently updated its support pages to indicate that the company won’t let users on Instagram message their Facebook contacts anymore. The company, as pointed out by 9to5Google, said…
Meta turned a blind eye to kids on its platforms for years, unredacted lawsuit alleges
A newly unredacted version of the multi-state lawsuit against Meta alleges a troubling pattern of deception and minimization in how the company handles kids under 13 on its platforms. Internal…
Meta and Amazon team up on new in-app shopping feature on Facebook & Instagram
Meta may have abandoned its efforts around live shopping on Facebook and Instagram, but the social networking company still believes in its apps’ potential as a shopping platform. That leads…
Meta pressed to compensate war victims amid claims Facebook inflamed Tigray conflict
Meta is facing growing calls to set up a restitution fund for victims of the Tigray War, which Facebook is alleged to have fueled leading to over 600,000 deaths and…
Meta taps Hugging Face for startup accelerator to spur adoption of open source AI models
Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris.…
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01 Advisors, founded by Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, just closed on $395M more
You might imagine that if two former Twitter chieftains and a longtime C-suite Facebook exec agreed to build a venture firm together, they would chase after nascent social networks. You’d be wrong. 01 Advisors, an outfit founded in 2018 by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter COO and president Adam Bain, tells TechCrunch…
Meta and Amazon settle UK antitrust probes over use of third-party data to benefit marketplaces
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today announced that it has accepted proposals from Facebook’s parent Meta and Amazon to limit how they use data gathered from their respective…
New Facebook Stories API helps creators share directly from third-party desktop or web apps
Meta is introducing a new API that makes it easier to create and share a Facebook Story directly from a third-party desktop or web app. The social networking ad titan…
Tech companies seek 12-18 month extension for India data-protection law compliance
The Asia Internet Coalition, a powerful industry group that represents Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and many other tech companies, has requested India’s IT Ministry for an extended deadline to comply…
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Why 42 states came together to sue Meta over kids’ mental health
Attorneys general from dozens of states sued Meta this week, accusing the company of deliberately designing its products to appeal to kids to the detriment of their mental health. In the lawsuit, filed in California federal court Tuesday, 33 states — including California, Colorado, New York, Arizona and Illinois — argue that Meta violated state…
While Meta is continuously introducing new features to Threads, the company is also deploying new tricks to ramp up engagement on the platform. In its latest move, the social media…