5 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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The world’s largest social network has more than 2 billion daily users, and is expanding rapidly around the world. Led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook undergirds much of the world’s communication online, both through its flagship app and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Despite huge financial success, Facebook is also confronted with questions about data privacy, hate speech on the platform, and concerns that frequent social media use can lead to unhappiness. The Verge publishes a nightly newsletter about Facebook and democracy, subscribe here.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
The EU is preparing to investigate Meta’s handling of disinformation.

According to Financial Times, regulators are concerned that Meta isn’t doing enough to stifle disinformation being seeded by countries like Russia in order to undermine EU elections.

Officials reportedly also believe Meta’s process for flagging illegal content isn’t “user-friendly enough to comply with the EU Digital Services Act.” The probe would apparently begin today.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Charles Pulliam-Moore
Aaron Sorkin is working on a film about January 6th and Facebook.

Alex Garland isn’t the only filmmaker thinking about the current state the US’ political system. During a recent appearance on The Ringer’s The Town podcast, Aaron Sorkin shared that he’s in the early stages of writing a new The Social Network-esque movie about January 6th and Facebook’s role in galvanizing the attempted coup.

Owen Grove
Owen Grove
Surrounded by bots and AI Jesus on the “Dead Internet”

A series of bot-filled communities on Facebook keep popping up to praise AI-generated images of Jesus Christ. The Dead Internet Theory explains why the internet might feel lonely even when there are many voices crying out “Amen 🙏.”
Well... if you can’t beat ‘em, #scarlettjohansson

Allison Johnson
Allison Johnson
Meta’s AI apparently thinks it has a child.

404 Media reports that a parent soliciting advice in a Facebook group got something unexpected when Meta’s AI chatbot chimed in with some thoughts. The reply starts with “I have a child who is also 2e,” which refers to a child who is both academically advanced and has a disability. Let me stop you right there, AI chatbot.

The only appropriate response.
The only appropriate response.
Image: 404 Media / Meta
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Is Meta doing enough to tackle explicit AI-generated imagery?

That’s the question being raised by its Oversight Board, which today announced two new cases looking into how Meta handled explicit fakes of female public figures posted to Facebook and Instagram. One of which could concern the fake Taylor Swift images that circulated online earlier this year.

The board’s investigation will take a few weeks before reaching a final non-binding decision.

Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
I’ll see your Shrimp Jesus and raise you Spaghetti Jesus on a Lambo.

A bunch of places covered AI-generated images of an unholy Jesus/shrimp hybrid going viral on Facebook earlier this year, but the attention didn’t cause Zuck to take any action to slow the situation down. Here’s JC Noods laying back on a Lambo, a post which has 36,000 likes on Facebook right now. The AI internet is going great, y’all.

An AI generated image of Jesus made of spaghetti sitting on a Lambo made of green spaghetti. This description is accurate.
This image represents decades of innovation and you will respect it.
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Court documents reveal how Facebook’s Onavo VPN tracked Snapchat data for “Project Ghostbusters.”

Facebook’s “In App Panel” program ran from 2016 to 2019 using Onavo’s technology as a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt secured Snapchat traffic. Court documents unsealed as part of an ongoing class-action antitrust lawsuit show how the program came together.

A June 2016 email included in the documents from Mark Zuckerberg says:

Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . .

Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.

Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid
People are poking each other again on Facebook.

Is it 2004 all over again? There’s been a 13x spike in poking over the last month, Facebook announced on Threads. And the culprits behind The Great Poke Surge of 2024 may surprise you. Half of them come from the 18-29 year old demographic, the company told TechCrunch.

The social network attributes the spike to a few design changes, including adding the ability to poke in search results, as you can see below.

A screenshot of Facebook’s poke function in search results.
Meta
Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid
Donald Trump has even more to say about the TikTok ban.

Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump explained, again, why he no longer supports the push to ban TikTok. “...without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”

And as for his own unsuccessful push to ban the ByteDance-owned app, he now claims “I had it banned just about, I could have gotten it done. But I said, ‘You know what, but I’ll leave it up to you.”

Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid
Meta’s plan for AI recommendations goes way beyond battling TikTok.

Reels and longer videos will be included in a new AI recommendation model that Facebook plans to build by 2026, Facebook head Tom Alison tells CNBC. Eventually, Facebook’s core feed may be included in the model as well.

“If you see something that you’re into in Reels, and then you go back to the Feed, we can kind of show you more similar content,” says Allison.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
Facebook and Instagram account takeovers are skyrocketing and Meta needs to fix it, AGs say.

41 attorneys general sent a letter to Meta’s chief legal officer Tuesday demanding the company invest more in stopping scam account takeovers that threaten users’ privacy and “drain” AG resources.

The problem has gotten significantly worse over the past few years, the AGs said. In New York, Meta account takeover complaints spiked from 73 in 2019 to 783 by the end of 2023.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Google will face new antitrust allegations after a judge okays charges.

US District Judge Kevin Castel approved (PDF) a class action lawsuit by advertisers alleging that the company holds a monopoly in the ad market, Reuters reported yesterday.

Judge Castel dismissed some of the claims, though, including one that alleged that Google and Facebook conspired to give Facebook access to “enhanced proprietary data.”

Google is also preparing another advertising antitrust trial from the US DOJ.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Meta’s ‘consent or pay’ approach to privacy targeted by EU watchdogs.

Eight consumer rights groups from across the bloc filed GDPR complaints on Thursday, arguing that the ad-free subscriptions introduced for Facebook and Instagram in response to EU privacy regulations are a “consent masquerade that does not actually give consumers a free choice.”

Ursula Pachl, deputy director general of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), said in a statement:

“Meta’s offer to consumers is smoke and mirrors to cover up what is, at its core, the same old hoovering up of all kinds of sensitive information about people’s lives which it then monetises through its invasive advertising model.”

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Charles Pulliam-Moore
Meta’s Oversight Board will now oversee Threads as well as Facebook and Instagram.

For a few years now, Meta’s Oversight Board has had the power to (very slowly, it seems) issue decisions determining how Facebook and Instagram should be moderated, and soon, the body will also be responsible for overseeing Threads.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Meta is testing out Facebook cross-posts to Threads.

Meta is only rolling out the test to its Facebook iOS app, and not in the EU, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. Threads posts already show up on Facebook, provided you don’t opt out.

TechCrunch writes that when user whimchic tried the feature in the Facebook iOS app, the post went to both platforms, but without any indication on Threads that it was a cross-post.

Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
Is your Facebook... chirping? Here’s how to fix it.

“It’s not you, it’s us! And it’s an unfortunate technical error that we’re in the process of fixing,” writes Meta’s Andy Stone.

In the meanwhile, here’s a stopgap:

The fediverse, explained

The buzziest new thing in social networking is a big deal. It’s also very confusing. And it’s not actually new. Let’s talk about it.

David Pierce
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Facebook now offers a link history on mobile.

If you toggle link history to be on, Meta will be able to show you a list of links you’ve tapped and viewed in the in-app browser over the past 30 days.

Meta already tracks things you do in its in-app browsers — this feature seems more like a way to surface a list of links that you can refer back to later. (Meta also says that if you flip on link history, it may use that information for ad targeting.)

Gizmodo reported on the link history feature earlier today.

A screenshot of a prompt inside the Facebook app describing the link history feature.
I saw this prompt when I clicked a link inside Facebook’s iOS app today.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Fake podcast invites are one way for scammers to take over popular Facebook pages.

The Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel hack and takeover showed what an attacker could do after stealing session tokens with a fake sponsorship offer, but this report details how a podcast invite and Facebook Live connection is another angle.

The “podcast host” manipulated the hobbyist “guest” into exposing a unique “datasets” URL for their page. Once the scammer had it, they could invite themselves in as a new admin and lock the rightful owners out.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
The states suing Meta over youth mental health reveal more of their evidence.

The attorneys general of 33 states sued Meta in October, but many details of what executives allegedly knew about the impacts of Facebook and Instagram on youth mental health were redacted. The New York Times reports a version with more details has been unsealed, and you can read all 233 pages here.

Between the first quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2023, Meta received over 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram via its underage reporting webform and in-app underage reporting process. These processes were only a few of many ways that Meta acquired actual knowledge of under-13 users on its Social Media Platforms. Despite this actual knowledge, Meta disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children’s data without parental consent,

In a statement, Meta says the lawsuit “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Now Meta’s Messenger app has a Notes status update feature just like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Over the last year, Meta has added AIM status-like features to Instagram and WhatsApp and today announced it’s rolling out Notes (using the same name as Instagram’s feature) for Messenger globally.

You can’t post them from the desktop, but a support document explains how to add or remove Notes via iPhone, iPad, or Android device by clicking the thought bubble next to your profile picture. If you don’t remove them manually, the messages expire after 24 hours.

Screenshot of the Messenger app showing icons for online friends with message bubbles over their faces showing their current status posted as a note. One nmaed Ana is telling her friends “Best time of the Year!, while Alicia posts “wtw?” abd Michael’s note is an upside down smiley face emoji.
Notes in Messenger
Image: Meta