Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives. Appearing on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about the launch of widescreen and long-form video for Instagram, Mosseri said he thinks there's a trend of "more anxiety and more frustration and more anger about AI," particularly in creative industries:
It's not only getting worse, it's going to continue to get worse. I think we're going to see more frustration and anger, some of it founded, some of it un …
As Meta was feeling public pressure over teen mental health, and facing an impending onslaught of kids safety trials, the company considered a campaign to discredit a key critic: social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
Newly filed court documents show that in March 2023, Meta discussed a "Whisper strategy" to "turn academics against Haidt," a thought leader who blamed social media for rising adolescent depression and anxiety. Haidt hadn't yet published his bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, but he testified about his conclusions before Congress in 2022, and in February 2023, he began posting more of his theories and research to Substack. …
Meta has launched a "tamagotchi-style" pet game called Waddle World, with virtual creatures that chat with users and create doodles to illustrate conversations.
According to its Apple and Play Store listings, the "16-bit pet care game" is not really a game, but "a daily journal disguised as a pet." Users should talk, not type, with their pets, the description says, as well as play "cozy games" like stacking groceries or word games. The Play store description says:
A little friend that listens. A cozy world that's yours. Waddle World is a cozy 16-bit world where your pixel pet lives. Hatch a virtual pet, visit whenever you like, and let it …
When attorneys general from across the US announced a $17 billion settlement with Meta this summer, the sum was unprecedented. But a ruling last week by a New Mexico judge blew that number out of the water. The judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to resolve claims that Meta misled users around the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal and related incidents. Similar claims were resolved by the settlement with most other states. The outcome raised an obvious question: Should these states have asked for more?
The answer depends on a mix of factors, including whether the $25 billion order stands up to Meta's legal challenges. Meta's chief legal of …
The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it's updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site.
The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal's item reserve system. On the retailer's website, an item goes "on hold" and is unavailable for other customers to buy for 20 minutes once it's placed in a user's shopping cart. Using Meta's Muse, The Verge was able to instruct the AI agent to continuously re-add The RealReal listings in a shopping cart as soon as the 20-minute hold had expired, effectively block …
Instagram is announcing a big push into longform horizontal video, which the platform is calling "Features."
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform "for a long time," he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here's the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, saying that "one of my concerns has been, how do we make sure that we keep Instagram not just about entertainment, but about connecting with friends. If you watch a longform video, that's "it's a lot of Reels, photos, and carousels that you might not have sent to a friend," meaning less likes and shares.
Instagram is continuing its expansion into living rooms with Instagram for TV, for Apple TV. The company first started testing a version of the platform focused on Reels, live streams, and other video content, blown up for a bigger screen in December of last year. Then, in June, it launched a slew of new features for the app, which is available for Amazon's Fire TV, Samsung Smart TVs, and Google TV.
Now Meta is bringing the app to Apple TV, though there's been little fanfare. MacRumors spotted an updated Instagram app in the App Store that added Apple TV to its list of compatible platforms on October 23rd. Archived versions of the app page …
Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on November 20th "to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not."
The business terms, which were originally supposed to go into effect on October 30th, appeared to give Meta permission to freely scrape the new sites that use its platforms, while using the material for AI training. Though Meta u …
Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites," James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab.
Initially, Meta's new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms, which go into effect October 30th, stated that Meta "may use any …
Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application.
Researchers at Claroc reported earlier this week that Muse the web addresses for shared conversations from Muse were named after a conversation's title and written into public DNS. Ars Technica said Tuesday that Meta paused the sharing feature after it reached out about what was going on.
In a post today on X, Meta's David Singleton says that "The underlying is …
Mark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives - shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people's AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily through bot proxies? Actually, don't answer that. The more urgent question coming off Meta's quarterly earnings call Wednesday night is more likely to be: "Is he?"
Zuckerberg is staking Meta's future on Muse, the personal AI agent it released to the general public last month. It's early days, but Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday's call that he s …
Meta says it's issuing a new class of shares to fund its AI initiatives. As part of its third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, the company says the non-voting stock will also go toward potential acquisitions and employee compensation, with trading beginning in 2027.
"The scale of investment required to compete, sustain growth, expand infrastructure, and pursue new strategic initiatives amidst the AI transformation taking place in the industry is significant," Meta says in the press release. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, added during an earnings call that the new class of shares will "expand our funding tools and gi …
Meta had to shell out $9.89 billion to pay for a chunk of the child safety settlement it reached with US attorneys general. That's according to the company's third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, which says Meta's income from operations would have been $22.89 billion without the settlement.
In August, Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion to settle a massive nationwide lawsuit that claimed the company harmed children by making its social media platforms "addictive" by design. It will also only pay $5.3 billion of this amount if YouTube and TikTok implement stricter settings and safeguards for kids, which Meta also agreed to as par …
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