3 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Facebook and Instagram can now automatically translate and dub reels in Hindi and Portuguese.

Meta’s AI translation feature initially worked with English and Spanish.

Instagram wants me to make content — I just want to post a photo

Plain old pictures are out; content is in.

Allison Johnson
Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Who needs microphones anyway?

Instagram head Adam Mosseri discovered this week that his “I’m not listening to you through your phone” T-shirt was raising a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. But real heads know that Instagram doesn’t need to listen to you, because it already knows everything anyway.

Nixel:

Yeah, we don’t listen to you… just endlessly track you across the internet building up so much data that it seems exactly like we do

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

Instagram hits 3 billion monthly usersInstagram hits 3 billion monthly users
Jess Weatherbed
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
You can now pin your own Instagram comments.

The change should make it easier to not have your own comments get buried.

A screenshot of Adam Mosseri discussing pinned Instagram comments.
See the second comment, which Adam Mosseri pinned.
Image: Adam Mosseri
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
More tools to help T-Pain (and other creators) sort through Instagram DMs.

Now, users with 100,000 followers or more can narrow down DMs with the addition of new filters and the ability to create folders. Creators can also customize shortcuts to navigate to certain categories of messages, such as requests.

Maybe this will help solve T-Pain’s missing messages problem.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Instagram now lets creators link their reels.

That means no more scrolling through profiles to find the second half of a reel. If a creator links their videos, you can jump directly to the next one by tapping the “Watch Part 2” button beneath the reel’s caption.

Image: Instagram
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Inside the lucrative business of social media “clipping.”

The Wall Street Journal interviewed several “clippers,” or the people who dice up longer videos into short, grabby clips that get posted to accounts across Instagram and TikTok. One person, whose clipping business earns $20,000 to $30,000 per month, told the WSJ that “the only way to be famous in today’s internet world is with clips.”

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Instagram wants to know where you are and it’s freaking people out.

The new Instagram Maps request to enable location services (feeding Meta valuable ad targeting data from your Android or iPhone) has spawned incredulous reactions, along with claims it’s on by default, despite Adam Mosseri’s denials.

Still, he says, “We’ll get out a few design improvements as quickly as possible.”

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Instagram addresses its creep problem.

Adult-managed accounts that primarily post pictures of children will no longer be recommended to adult users “who have shown potentially suspicious behavior,” according to Meta, and vice versa — making them harder to find in Search. This was announced today alongside new features for teen accounts that make it easier to report and block unwanted contact in DMs.

Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
Instagram enshittification.

Reportedly in testing since June, I’ve now been served three of these unskippable “Ad break” ads over the last two days. It’s jarring, and has accelerated my desire to quit the platform that’s increasingly less fun and flooded with AI slop.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Instagram and TikTok may launch apps for TVs.

YouTube is a hit on TVs, and Meta and TikTok are looking to get in on that battleground, The Information reports. What will launch first: Instagram for TV or Instagram for iPad?

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Instagram’s Edits is getting keyframes.

The recently-launched CapCut clone is also adding more text effects and will let you apply voice enhancement to voiceovers. Check out all of the new updates in a post from Instagram’s Creators account.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
The Zuck of this profile will feel familiar...

to readers of Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings. The Financial Times makes a compelling case that loser-bro Zuck is who he has always been. Also, his feelings were very hurt when we all had a good laugh about Meta’s avatars (“Legs coming soon!”). No wonder he wants AI friends, who’ll never mock him like that.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Instagram is trying out a repost button.

The platform began working on reposts in 2022, and now some users are seeing a new “repost” button that will let them share other content that they see on the platform, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch.

Instagram spokesperson Cullen Heaney confirmed to The Verge that the platform is testing the feature, but didn’t share any additional details about the rollout.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Instagram is rolling out recaps for creators.

In the coming weeks, Instagram will show creators weekly and monthly reports with stats about post views and their follower count. It’s also launching shareable “celebrations” notifications that appear when creators reach certain milestones, such as hitting 10,000 followers.

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Instagram ponies up (again).

The company is paying a group of creators to refer people to Instagram, Business Insider reports. Influencers can earn $100 for every new user or 1,000 visits to the Instagram app, with a $20,000 limit.

Instagram regularly tests monetization bonuses in an effort to juice engagement: they’ve paid people to post Reels and ditch TikTok, for example. But the Reels bonuses were touch and go for creators, with Instagram killing the program in 2023.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
Using Instagram isn’t necessary to evaluate an anticompetitive effect.

During redirect, Hemphill testifies that some of the points Hansen made about his analysis weren’t relevant to his findings of Meta’s alleged anticompetitive behavior. He counter’s Hansen’s charge that he thinks he knows better than the business people at Meta. “They’ve got their expertise and I’ve got mine,” he says.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
Meta knew about the FTC expert’s pitch for regulators to investigate it.

Hemphill clarifies that he did disclose to Meta during his deposition over a year ago that he and former Biden official Tim Wu had a “conversation” with the FTC in 2019 about investigating Meta, but the company never asked him for a copy of the presentation. He says he wasn’t compensated for it, and wasn’t retained by the FTC for another two and a half years — during which he also didn’t lobby the regulator to bring a case. He says that public reporting of Meta’s conduct “seemed like the kind of thing that we’d been worried about in our academic work,” but that he hadn’t formed a view at the time that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
When ads get better, Meta shows users more of them.

Back to friendlier-questioning from the FTC, Hemphill says that while ad quality might be improving, Meta is behaving like a monopolist in what it chooses to do with those quality gains. In a more competitive environment, Hemphill says, Meta would pass on those gains to consumers by letting them enjoy the same amount of ads, but at a higher quality. Instead, he says, Meta dials up the knob to show them more ads.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
‘You’ve known what you thought of this case before you saw a shred of evidence.’

This is how Hansen closes what’s been a tense cross-examination of Hemphill. Meta has used the exam to try to discredit the FTC’s key economic expert, and Hansen reiterates that Hemphill had “preconceived” notions about the case, calling back to the 2019 “roadshow” he participated in to convince regulators to investigate Meta. Hemphill has been on the stand since Monday afternoon, and the FTC attorney Krisha Cerilli is back for redirect questioning.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
Can Facebook discriminate against the majority of its users?

This is what Hansen asks the FTC expert after showing a chart that shows younger cohorts spend a higher percentage of time on the platform engaging with friends than older cohorts, yet they get served fewer ads — seemingly contrary to Hemphill’s claim that Meta taxes users who enjoy friend sharing more. Hemphill says the point is “apples and oranges” and that the older cohort makes up 60 to 70 percent of the user base getting higher ad loads. That prompts Hansen to ask whether he thinks Meta discriminates against such a large portion of its users, and Hemphill says it’s “a standard understanding of price discrimination.”