Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, counts more than 3 billion monthly users across its family of apps. Now, it’s trying to build the next generation of services in virtual reality and the metaverse through Meta Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds — all while dealing with antitrust pressures, privacy concerns, and younger users shifting to other platforms.
Adam Schiff joins Sen. Marsha Blackburn in expressing concern, urging Meta to “compensate creators and publishers for their work” after the company’s updated terms seemingly gave itself permission to train its AI on news sites. Those changes have since been tweaked and pushed back until November 20th, but Schiff says “a delay isn’t enough.”
Axios has the story. The company, Sundial, was founded by two former Meta employees, and they and others from Sundial will join Meta. One of the co-founders, Chandra Narayanan, will lead Meta’s “data analytics tooling and agents work,” according to Alex Shultz, Meta’s chief data officer.
Blackburn (R-TN) said the updated terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts,” according to Reuters.
Following publisher pushback, Meta delayed the enforcement of these new policies until November 20th.
“Tomorrow we’re bringing a new Threads layout to the foldable on iOS, with more of the conversation in view,” says Christopher Clare, Threads’ head of design. Sounds like things are getting better for Android foldables, too: “We’ve also been improving the Android experience, refining buttons and other elements so they fit the wider screen rather than simply stretching the experience.”
Clare also laid out a few other design tweaks, like links “in a new blue.”
The state’s Attorney General Peter Neronha filed the suit in Providence Superior Court, accusing Meta of making billions in profits from scam ads, while simultaneously telling users it was working hard to protect them. The suit cites reporting on leaked Meta documents from Reuters that said:
… it was earning far more from high-risk scam ads than it expected to pay in fines for allowing them.
According to those documents, Meta displays around 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads to users every day, and earned roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue from fraudulent e-commerce, dubious health products and other banned marketing.
AI agents are getting blocked left and right — but even when they work, it suggests a more annoying future for humans.
It said in a filing that Zuckerberg “was evaluating relocating his primary residence” if California’s Proposition 40 passes. As Bloomberg reports, Meta’s board issued special shares so that he wouldn’t have to leave:
Zuckerberg gets non-voting shares he can sell for liquidity without reducing his voting control. In return, he has committed to remain in California — or wherever Meta is headquartered — for eight years while he remains in a full-time leadership role.
That’s according to Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s earnings call today. He also says that “About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get.”
This week, Sensor Tower reported that the Muse app had hit 10 million US downloads.
After 15 years at Meta, the George W. Bush White House alum is exiting, Axios reports, amid a midterm election where Democrats are expected to win back more control in Washington. Kaplan will stay through 2027 to help with the transition, though, which will include bipartisan external affairs executives.
The AI assistant, which launched in September, is only the 12th app to have reached this milestone within 40 days, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Part of its success is likely down to what Sensor Tower describes as a sizable “advertising push by Meta.”
It’s not just celebrity deepfakes that are plaguing social media. AI hot girl accounts are stealing comedians’ jokes, and painters are seeing AI versions of their process videos rack up millions of views. Mosseri says it’s “not practical” to ban AI, but it’s not sure how to handle content that isn’t copyrighted, like jokes.
During an interview with Bloomberg, Charles Schwab Corp. CEO Rick Wurster called out Meta’s AI agent, Muse, saying:
We don’t want someone just giving their password to Muse, and letting Muse come in and take action on that client’s behalf. We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s liable? For the protection of the client and for the protection of us, we’re not allowing it.
JPMorgan Chase has also confirmed that it’s keeping AI agents out.
Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk, and Artificial, filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.
In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.
You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.
Meta’s Muse app has topped the iOS App Store chart in the US since it launched in early September, but now it’s lost that position to an unexpected tender contender: Dave’s Hot Chicken. It presumably has little to do with AI capabilities, and more the extremely popular free slider promotional offer than ran yesterday, but lets see how long Dave’s can keep the top spot.
Even if Russian or other bots continue to post on social media unabated, the head of Threads, Connor Hayes, mentioned that “We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those you follow. For creators, this should mean you see on average more reach to your followers.”
He didn’t specify when the algorithm change took effect, but I have an idea.
SecurityWeek reports that Meta says “99% of the data the hackers took was business data, in the form of software code related to some of its products. The remaining 1% was personal data,” some of which was “synthetic or anonymized.” Most of that personal data reportedly belonged to Meta employees in the US.
7
Verge Score
It’s harder to be a perv in these audio-only glasses, but removing the ick does make them less ‘useful.’
