504 – 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.

The tech backlash is now in theaters

Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk, and Artificial, filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Facebook will let you customize your feed algorithm using AI

Meta’s bringing Instagram’s “Your Algorithm” feature to Facebook, and using LLMs more to rank content.

Stevie Bonifield

Latest In Facebook

Can you trust Meta’s Muse or OpenAI’s Dots to run your life?
Play

The future of computing might be always-on, autonomous agents, but should we hand Meta or OpenAI this much personal data?

Nilay Patel
The Social Reckoning is a tepid thriller that reminds us of how we got here

Aaron Sorkin’s follow up to The Social Network puts the Facebook Files scandal on the timeline.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
It’s about ethics in journalism, with Ben Smith
Play

Semafor’s editor-in-chief on billionaire owners, news influencers, and the anti-scale era of media.

Nilay Patel
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Facebook is rolling out its ‘reimagined’ Creator Studio.

After initially being tested by “select creators,” Creator Studio is now available for iOS users in the US and Canada. The original Creator Studio page manager experience was shut down in 2023, but Meta describes this revived version as an “AI-powered companion app” that helps creators to grow and engage with their audience.

How creators are using Creator Studio to experiment and grow

[How creators are using Creator Studio to experiment and grow]

The vertical video takeover is here

How TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube copied their way to victory.

David Pierce
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Meta’s AI can now dub your voice in more languages on Instagram and Facebook.

The AI translations are expanding to Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Italian on Instagram and Bahasa, Indonesian, Arabic, French, Vietnamese, and Thai on Facebook, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Meta remembers the Portal exists and turns it into an AI dev kit.

The company’s new agentic developer tools are giving the discontinued smart displays a second life as a smart home controller, family message board, art display, or anything you can dream up. The move comes shortly after Microsoft announced Project Solara. Meta says the tools are hardware-agnostic and work with many existing devices. Still, anything that breathes new life into a defunct gadget is a good thing.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Meta’s Marketplace evades the EU’s Big Tech crackdown.

The EU’s General Court said the European Commission’s decision to designate Facebook Marketplace as a gatekeeper service under Digital Markets Act rules “lacks sufficient reasoning,” and that it should be exempt from the regulation. Meta also tried to appeal Messenger’s designation, but that decision stands firm.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Meta’s new app, Forum, is focused on Facebook groups.

The app, available on iOS, lets you browse groups that you’re a part of, make posts to groups, and ask questions to a chatbot to get information sourced from groups. Saw this one thanks to Matt Navarra.

Screenshots from the App Store listing for Forum.
Screenshots from the App Store listing for Forum.
Image: Meta
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
With mass layoffs plannned, Meta reassigns thousands of employees to AI initiatives.

The New York Times and Reuters report that a memo was sent to Meta employees on Monday reassigning 7,000 of them, and said that “As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles ⁠into their new org structures.”

The memo told employees to work remotely on Wednesday, when it will lay off about 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, with emails sent at 4AM local time.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Meta removes ads from lawyers seeking plaintiffs for social media addiction cases.

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.

A jury says Meta and Google hurt a kid. What now?
Play

Why nuclear options like age limits and repealing Section 230 won’t make social media safer.

Nilay Patel
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Meta says its AI moderation systems will replace contractors over the next few years.

Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.

While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drugs sales or scams.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Facebook was reportedly having some issues earlier.

At around 5:30PM ET, Downdetector showed a recent peak of more than 11,000 user reports of problems, but reports of issues have fallen dramatically. At 5:48PM ET, NetBlocks said the platform was experiencing “international outages.” A Meta status page was showing “high disruptions” for Facebook Ads Manager, including ads creation and delivery, but that has been “resolved.”

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
The kids are offline.

Following Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 taking effect last month, Meta says it has now removed almost 550,000 Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts that it believes were run by kids under that age threshold. Despite its compliance, Meta is still voicing opposition to the law.

A screenshot breaking down the figures of almost 550,000 accounts removed by Meta for under 16s in Australia.
I’m frankly shocked that so many youngsters had a Facebook account to begin with.
Image: Meta