Meta

When you’re in a Threads Community’s live chat, you can talk with real time with other users about what’s going on. For the NBA playoffs, the NBA Threads Community will be hosting some live chats to follow games. Live chats will come to other Community feeds in the coming months, Meta says.

The job cuts could affect around 10 percent of Meta’s workforce, or around 8,000 employees, according to Reuters. This is reportedly the first of two waves of layoffs planned for this year, and follows an earlier report from Reuters that suggests Meta could cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce.

A new “Messages” tab appears in this preview of its redesigned web layout that head of Threads, Connor Hayes, posted on Thursday, as Engadget reports.

The European Commission says it will order Meta to roll back its policy to only allow rival AI assistants on WhatsApp for a year if they pay an access fee, which appears to violate EU competition rules. Meta’s conduct “risks blocking competitors from entering or expanding in the rapidly growing market for AI assistants,” according to the Commission.

In a podcast with David Senra, Spiegel says, “I think Meta needed to partner with [Essilor]Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something people want anywhere near their face.” He’s not wrong. I hear that all the time from y’all in my smart glasses coverage — and the facial recognition controversy hasn’t helped.

The Meta CEO has always had a bit of an image problem, but surely reported plans to replace him with an AI clone will help?

The civil rights organization and 75 other groups published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to “immediately halt and publicly disavow” plans for a reported facial recognition feature on its Ray-Ban smart glasses. It’s unsurprising that privacy advocates are wary, especially since documents show Meta originally planned to launch the feature during public unrest.

Now that a jury has ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark trial, the sharks are circling, and what better place to find potential clients than on those social media platforms? The only problem is that Axios reports Meta pulled “more than a dozen” such ads from firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law on Thursday.

Unity already powers the “majority” of the top-selling VR games on Meta’s platform, according to a statement from Unity’s COO.

The latest beta update for WhatsApp on Android and iOS includes the “phased rollout” of usernames, which have been in the works for years and allow users to keep their phone number private.

Meta will “eventually” offer open source versions of its new AI models Alexandr Wang is in charge of, but first, the company “wants to keep some pieces proprietary and to ensure they don’t add new levels of safety risk,” Axios reports.

Meta has paused work with the company, Mercor (which The Verge has profiled), while OpenAI is investigating the security incident, Wired reports.

A proposed class action lawsuit claims Perplexity “effectively planted a bug” on users’ computers by embedding trackers from Meta and Google inside its AI search engine, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. It also alleges that Perplexity’s incognito mode “does nothing” to protect user privacy:

The abrupt closure of a tuition-free private school founded by Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, will dump extra students into a local school district, increasing expected enrollment by 20 percent.

The company has already reduced funding to the Oversight Board this year and “has signaled that it will do so again in 2027 and 2028,” according to Platformer’s Casey Newton. The two sides are still in talks.

Twenty-four days after lying his face off to Joe Rogan and whining about government censorship, Zuckerberg “proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.“ Siri, play my leitmotif.

The native app is currently in beta for iOS users, according to WABetaInfo. It lets users access their recent chat list, view contact details, manage calls, and send messages from their car’s infotainment display. Meta’s devs are on a roll having recently brought WhatsApp to both Apple and Garmin watches.

Duh. The quasi-independent board says that expanding Community Notes outside the US — where it launched in lieu of fact checkers in early 2025 — could “pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy,” according to Niemen Lab.

It’s still using Meta’s Private Processing AI setup to avoid sharing the content of your messages to anyone, even Meta. Other new features announced Thursday include AI image editing directly in chats, improved cross-platform chat transfers, and the option to have two WhatsApp accounts logged in on the same device on iOS.

There could be a sticky situation if jurors don’t reach a verdict today on day nine of deliberations, independent journalist Meghann Cuniff reports. One juror is set to leave on a prepaid vacation tomorrow, and the judge hasn’t yet said what would happen if they go before a verdict.

The Information reports that the job cuts will affect “a few hundred” employees across the company, including in its Reality Labs division, which experienced a round of layoffs in January as Meta pulls back on the metaverse. The layoffs also reportedly impact workers on its social media, recruiting, and sales teams.

Alongside supply constraints and AI regulations, requirements for devices in the European Union to have removable batteries by 2027 are holding back plans to launch Ray-Ban Display smart glasses in the region. Meta is reportedly discussing possible workarounds with the EU.