Mark Zuckerberg quietly spent much of 2026 trying to redesign Meta around artificial intelligence, including plans that considered cutting some teams by as much as 60%, according to internal planning documents and people familiar with the effort.&nbsp;The project, known internally as Project OT, or Organization Transformation, was developed during Meta’s leadership retreat in Hawaii. The idea was radical: smaller groups of highly skilled employees would oversee AI-powered virtual workers and handle work that previously required much larger teams. Meta eventually carried out a 10% workforce reduction in May, affecting roughly 8,000 jobs, but Zuckerberg cancelled a planned second wave in November.<h2>Zuckerberg’s AI-native blueprint</h2>Project OT was not simply a layoff exercise.The plan envisaged product teams of around 10 to 20 people being replaced by pods of three to five. Engineers, designers and researchers could also be grouped under the broader title of “builder”. Middle-management layers would be reduced, with unit heads overseeing larger groups while pod leads handled day-to-day work without formal management authority. An early pilot created five small teams that built prototypes in four-week cycles instead of following much longer planning processes. Meta also developed tools to identify highly valuable employees who would be worth retaining even as teams became smaller.<h2>AI transformation creates its own problems</h2>The restructuring did not go smoothly. Employees objected after Meta began using software that captured keyboard and mouse activity on US laptops to help train AI agents to perform computer tasks. More than 1,000 employees signed a petition opposing the programme.Internal employee sentiment also dropped sharply, while Meta's own data raised questions about whether smaller teams were actually delivering more. Code changes increased 220% year-on-year, but changes reaching users rose only 36%. Major technical and security incidents also increased, according to the reported internal data. The result was a growing gap between the promise of AI-powered productivity and the complexity of running a huge technology company.<h2>Meta is now bringing managers back</h2>The most striking twist has come inside Meta's new Applied AI division. Around 7,000 employees were moved into the group this year, including some managers who had been shifted into individual contributor roles. Now, some of those employees are being offered a voluntary route back into management. That move comes after Zuckerberg acknowledged that the reorganisation had been mistimed and that AI agents had not advanced as quickly as he expected. Meta ended the second quarter with 75,472 employees and has committed enormous resources to AI infrastructure. The lesson from Project OT may therefore be more complicated than simply “AI needs fewer workers”. Meta wanted AI to allow fewer humans to run more work. Instead, it is discovering that building an AI-native company may itself require a substantial human layer to manage, supervise and fix what AI cannot yet handle.

Meta’s secret Project OT explored shrinking some teams by up to 60% as Mark Zuckerberg pushed to make the company AI-native. After an 8,000-job May cut, Meta cancelled its planned November layoff wave and is now offering some former managers a route back into management.

Mark Zuckerberg quietly spent much of 2026 trying to redesign Meta around artificial intelligence, including plans that considered cutting some teams by as much as 60%, according to internal planning documents and people familiar with the effort. The project, known internally as Project OT, or Organization Transformation, was developed during Meta’s leadership retreat in Hawaii. The idea was radical: smaller groups of highly skilled employees would oversee AI-powered virtual workers and handle work that previously required much larger teams. Meta eventually carried out a 10% workforce reduction in May, affecting roughly 8,000 jobs, but Zuckerberg cancelled a planned second wave in November. Zuckerberg’s AI-native blueprint Project OT was not simply a layoff exercise. The plan envisaged product teams of around 10 to 20 people being replaced by pods of three to five. Engineers, designers and researchers could also be grouped under the broader title of “builder”. Middle-management layers would be reduced, with unit heads overseeing larger groups while pod leads handled day-to-day work without formal management authority. An early pilot created five small teams that built prototypes in four-week cycles instead of following much longer planning processes. Meta also developed tools to identify highly valuable employees who would be worth retaining even as teams became smaller. AI transformation creates its own problems The restructuring did not go smoothly. Employees objected after Meta began using software that captured keyboard and mouse activity on US laptops to help train AI agents to perform computer tasks. More than 1,000 employees signed a petition opposing the programme. Internal employee sentiment also dropped sharply, while Meta's own data raised questions about whether smaller teams were actually delivering more. Code changes increased 220% year-on-year, but changes reaching users rose only 36%. Major technical and security incidents also increased, according to the reported internal data. The result was a growing gap between the promise of AI-powered productivity and the complexity of running a huge technology company. Meta is now bringing managers back The most striking twist has come inside Meta's new Applied AI division. Around 7,000 employees were moved into the group this year, including some managers who had been shifted into individual contributor roles. Now, some of those employees are being offered a voluntary route back into management. That move comes after Zuckerberg acknowledged that the reorganisation had been mistimed and that AI agents had not advanced as quickly as he expected. Meta ended the second quarter with 75,472 employees and has committed enormous resources to AI infrastructure. The lesson from Project OT may therefore be more complicated than simply “AI needs fewer workers”. Meta wanted AI to allow fewer humans to run more work. Instead, it is discovering that building an AI-native company may itself require a substantial human layer to manage, supervise and fix what AI cannot yet handle.

Meta’s secret Project OT explored shrinking some teams by up to 60% as Mark Zuckerberg pushed to make the company AI-native. After an 8,000-job May cut, Meta cancelled its planned November layoff wave and is now offering some former managers a route back into management.

Mark Zuckerberg’s secret Meta plan could have cut some teams by 60% to make AI run the company

Meta has agreed to pay $18 billion to settle claims brought by multiple U.S. states over allegations that its social media platforms used addictive features that negatively affected young users. The company denied any wrongdoing and said the settlement does not constitute an admission of liability. The agreement marks one of the largest settlements involving a major technology company and comes amid growing scrutiny of social media's impact on mental health and online safety.


Meta agrees to pay $18 billion, denies allegations of pushing addictive features

Newly revealed internal planning documents have shed light on a sweeping, highly aggressive AI-driven restructuring initiative at Meta codenamed "Project OT" (Organization Transformation). Conceived by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and top executives during a leadership retreat, the strategy aimed to transition Meta into an "AI-native" organization by deploying autonomous AI agents to take over routine, daily workflows.


AI was set to take over routine work; teams could shrink by up to 60%

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top executives reportedly drew up an ambitious plan earlier this year to transform the social media giant into an “AI native” company. They wanted artificial intelligence to take over much of the work currently done by thousands of employees.Codenamed “Project OT”, short for Organisation Transformation, the plan was discussed at Meta’s annual leadership retreat in Hawaii in January. According to internal documents reviewed by Reuters and people familiar with the project, the strategy envisioned AI-powered virtual workers being managed by smaller teams of human employees.Executives also considered scenarios that could cut some teams by as much as 60 per cent, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Some employees could have been moved into newly created roles, while others faced layoffs. An internal document suggested the cuts could have been as large as or larger than Meta’s workforce reduction of about 25 per cent three years ago.Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/trending/video-remember-the-coupe-who-climbed-empire-state-building-they-are-facing-burglary-criminal-mischief-charges-1787659415861">Video | Remember the couple who climbed Empire State Building? They are facing burglary, criminal mischief charges</a><h2>What exactly was the plan?</h2>The restructuring was planned in two waves, with the first round scheduled for May and a second in November. The strategy included layoffs, closing vacant positions and removing employees considered poor performers, according to internal planning documents reviewed by Reuters.But the plan began to unravel before the second phase could take place.On the night of May 19, just hours before the first round of layoffs, Zuckerberg called off plans for the November cuts, according to the report. Meta went ahead with layoffs affecting 10 per cent of its workforce the next day.<h2>Why this plan?</h2>The decision came as employees increasingly questioned whether Meta’s push into AI was ultimately aimed at replacing them. At the same time, internal data was reportedly showing that AI agent technology, a key part of the company’s strategy, was not producing the expected productivity gains.The developments also came as some investors questioned the results of Meta’s huge spending on artificial intelligence.Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/what-is-us-dollar-system-how-powerful-is-bessent-s-economic-outcast-warning-wion-explains-1787645878031">What is US dollar system? How powerful is Bessent’s ‘Economic Outcast’ warning for China | WION Explains</a>Reuters, citing scores of internal documents, posts and recordings, as well as interviews with more than 20 people familiar with Meta’s operations, reported that the company had been considering a far-reaching overhaul of its workforce. The reporting also highlighted how quickly the plans changed as the company faced resistance from employees and uncertainty over the performance of its AI systems.<h2>What did Meta say?</h2>Meta confirmed the existence of Project OT in response to the Reuters report. The company described it as a year-long effort focused on cutting costs, redesigning teams and moving employees towards priority areas, including the production of training data for its AI models.Meta also acknowledged that the restructuring was planned in two waves and that some scenarios involved reducing individual teams by up to 60 per cent. But it stressed that this did not mean it planned to cut 60 per cent of its overall workforce.The company said the scenarios involved both layoffs and redeployments and that several major teams were not included in the exercise. Meta also said thousands of employees were ultimately moved into newly established teams focused on priority work.“Ultimately, we didn’t move forward with every scenario from the exercise,” Meta said in a statement, adding that it was never assumed all the scenarios would be implemented.

Meta’s secret "Project OT" aimed to replace employees with AI, projecting up to 60 per cent team cuts. The plan was scaled back following internal backlash, investor concerns, and underperforming AI technology.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top executives reportedly drew up an ambitious plan earlier this year to transform the social media giant into an “AI native” company. They wanted artificial intelligence to take over much of the work currently done by thousands of employees. Codenamed “Project OT”, short for Organisation Transformation, the plan was discussed at Meta’s annual leadership retreat in Hawaii in January. According to internal documents reviewed by Reuters and people familiar with the project, the strategy envisioned AI-powered virtual workers being managed by smaller teams of human employees. Executives also considered scenarios that could cut some teams by as much as 60 per cent, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Some employees could have been moved into newly created roles, while others faced layoffs. An internal document suggested the cuts could have been as large as or larger than Meta’s workforce reduction of about 25 per cent three years ago. Also read: Video | Remember the couple who climbed Empire State Building? They are facing burglary, criminal mischief charges What exactly was the plan? The restructuring was planned in two waves, with the first round scheduled for May and a second in November. The strategy included layoffs, closing vacant positions and removing employees considered poor performers, according to internal planning documents reviewed by Reuters. But the plan began to unravel before the second phase could take place. On the night of May 19, just hours before the first round of layoffs, Zuckerberg called off plans for the November cuts, according to the report. Meta went ahead with layoffs affecting 10 per cent of its workforce the next day. Why this plan? The decision came as employees increasingly questioned whether Meta’s push into AI was ultimately aimed at replacing them. At the same time, internal data was reportedly showing that AI agent technology, a key part of the company’s strategy, was not producing the expected productivity gains. The developments also came as some investors questioned the results of Meta’s huge spending on artificial intelligence. Also read: What is US dollar system? How powerful is Bessent’s ‘Economic Outcast’ warning for China | WION Explains Reuters, citing scores of internal documents, posts and recordings, as well as interviews with more than 20 people familiar with Meta’s operations, reported that the company had been considering a far-reaching overhaul of its workforce. The reporting also highlighted how quickly the plans changed as the company faced resistance from employees and uncertainty over the performance of its AI systems. What did Meta say? Meta confirmed the existence of Project OT in response to the Reuters report. The company described it as a year-long effort focused on cutting costs, redesigning teams and moving employees towards priority areas, including the production of training data for its AI models. Meta also acknowledged that the restructuring was planned in two waves and that some scenarios involved reducing individual teams by up to 60 per cent. But it stressed that this did not mean it planned to cut 60 per cent of its overall workforce. The company said the scenarios involved both layoffs and redeployments and that several major teams were not included in the exercise. Meta also said thousands of employees were ultimately moved into newly established teams focused on priority work. “Ultimately, we didn’t move forward with every scenario from the exercise,” Meta said in a statement, adding that it was never assumed all the scenarios would be implemented.

Meta’s secret "Project OT" aimed to replace employees with AI, projecting up to 60 per cent team cuts. The plan was scaled back following internal backlash, investor concerns, and underperforming AI technology.

Zuckerberg had SECRET AI plan for Meta: 60% cuts, ‘virtual workers’. But then something went wrong

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have bought a 200-year-old Gothic-style castle in Ireland, his spokesman confirmed on Thursday. The Strancally Castle sits on a 440-acre property and was bought from financier Michael Alen-Buckley’s family for an undisclosed price. “Mark and his family are excited to continue caring for this historic home and look forward to spending time in Ireland, where Meta maintains its international headquarters,” Brian Baker, a spokesman for Zuckerberg, told The New York Post.&nbsp;The castle has three storeys and spans 16,000 square feet, overlooking the River Blackwater. While there are no details available on the selling price, the castle is reportedly valued at an estimated $23 million to $35 million (Rs 220 crore to Rs 334.99 crore). Meta has its international headquarters in Dublin, around 125 miles from Strancally Castle. The couple will continue to live in the United States and will use the property when they visit Ireland. Meta also has a data centre outside the city.<h2>About the castle that Zuckerberg bought</h2>Strancally Castle was built around 1827–1830 and designed by architects James and George Richard Pain for John Kelly, a former British politician. It features sandstone and limestone ashlar masonry. The Alen-Buckley family renovated the castle several times in the past 25 years. The castle has also been mentioned in the book "The Houses of Ireland." Writers Brian De Breffney and Rosemary Ffolliott describe it as so lavish that you need to walk "4.5 minutes to reach the dining room from the kitchen." It is currently a listed protected structure.<h2>A murderous folklore</h2>The original Strancally Castle, founded in the 12th century, stands in ruins next to this structure. It has been termed a "murdering hole", with a trapdoor in the rock above the river where unsuspecting guests or enemies were allegedly thrown into the waters below.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are now the proud owners of a castle in Ireland. The nearly 200-year-old structure is spread over 400 acres, and it takes nearly five minutes to reach the dining room from the kitchen.  

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have bought a 200-year-old Gothic-style castle in Ireland, his spokesman confirmed on Thursday. The Strancally Castle sits on a 440-acre property and was bought from financier Michael Alen-Buckley’s family for an undisclosed price. “Mark and his family are excited to continue caring for this historic home and look forward to spending time in Ireland, where Meta maintains its international headquarters,” Brian Baker, a spokesman for Zuckerberg, told The New York Post. The castle has three storeys and spans 16,000 square feet, overlooking the River Blackwater. While there are no details available on the selling price, the castle is reportedly valued at an estimated $23 million to $35 million (Rs 220 crore to Rs 334.99 crore). Meta has its international headquarters in Dublin, around 125 miles from Strancally Castle. The couple will continue to live in the United States and will use the property when they visit Ireland. Meta also has a data centre outside the city. About the castle that Zuckerberg bought Strancally Castle was built around 1827–1830 and designed by architects James and George Richard Pain for John Kelly, a former British politician. It features sandstone and limestone ashlar masonry. The Alen-Buckley family renovated the castle several times in the past 25 years. The castle has also been mentioned in the book "The Houses of Ireland." Writers Brian De Breffney and Rosemary Ffolliott describe it as so lavish that you need to walk "4.5 minutes to reach the dining room from the kitchen." It is currently a listed protected structure. A murderous folklore The original Strancally Castle, founded in the 12th century, stands in ruins next to this structure. It has been termed a "murdering hole", with a trapdoor in the rock above the river where unsuspecting guests or enemies were allegedly thrown into the waters below.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are now the proud owners of Strancally Castle in Ireland. The nearly 200-year-old structure is spread over 400 acres, and it takes nearly five minutes to reach the dining room from the kitchen. &nbsp;

4.5-minute walk from dining room to kitchen: Zuckerberg buys 19th century Irish castle with a 'murderous' twist

A former engineering director at Meta Platforms (META.O) claimed on Wednesday (August 19) that ​CEO Mark Zuckerberg encouraged a culture that treated child safety as secondary to growth and engagement on Facebook and Instagram. The allegation has been made by Arturo Bejar, a vocal critic of Meta's ‌safety record during his second day of testimony in a landmark trial over claims that could reshape Facebook and Instagram, some of the most popular apps on the planet. US states, including California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, accused Meta of formulating the platforms to grab the attention of young users, fueling anxiety, depression and even suicide, as well as misleading consumers about their safety. Those states also accused the firm of violating federal law ​by improperly collecting and using personal data of children under 13. Experts indicated this trial as the most significant legal test yet to examine how social media impacts young users. Proceedings began on Tuesday in the Oakland, California, federal court with the case expected to last across six weeks. Jurors will deliver a non-binding advisory verdict, after which U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will determine whether Meta bears liability and, if so, decide on any penalties and required changes to Facebook and Instagram.&nbsp;Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/us-tightens-green-card-scrutiny-indians-in-backlog-face-new-public-charge-test-1787207437983">US tightens green card scrutiny: Indians in backlog face new ‘public charge’ test</a><h3>Zuckerberg's role in company decision-making</h3>The states' opening witness, Bejar, testified that Mark Zuckerberg was deeply involved in company decision-making, describing a top-down culture at the Menlo Park-based firm where product changes happened only with his direct approval. "If Mark ​makes something a priority, mountains move in months," Bejar said. He also pushed back against remarks Zuckerberg made in October 2021, made in response to claims from whistleblower Frances Haugen that Meta was aware its platforms posed risks to children, and knew how to fix them, yet chose profit over safety. Zuckerberg had maintained at the time that Meta regularly relied on research to enhance its products. Bejar countered this by revealing he had personally emailed Zuckerberg to raise safety concerns. "It's so false, every ​part of it," Bejar said. "You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids." Bejar's tenure at Meta ran from 2009 to 2015, and he later returned as an independent contractor from 2019 to 2021, during which he studied the well-being of teenage Instagram users. In 2023, he testified before a U.S. Senate committee that Meta knew about harassment and other harms teen-facing teenagers on its platforms but failed to take action.Under cross-examination ‌from the company's ⁠lawyer Brian Stekloff, Bejar claimed that he was unaware of the harm his teenage daughter would experience when he helped her set up an Instagram account. Bejar added that his daughter wanted a space where women could discuss cars; however, she faced misogynistic comments, including about her breasts. She was just 16 in 2021 by the time her father emailed Zuckerberg highlighting safety.

US states, including California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, accused Meta of formulating the platforms to grab the attention of young users, fueling anxiety, depression and even suicide, as well as misleading consumers about their safety

A former engineering director at Meta Platforms (META.O) claimed on Wednesday (August 19) that CEO Mark Zuckerberg encouraged a culture that treated child safety as secondary to growth and engagement on Facebook and Instagram. The allegation has been made by Arturo Bejar, a vocal critic of Meta's ‌safety record during his second day of testimony in a landmark trial over claims that could reshape Facebook and Instagram, some of the most popular apps on the planet. US states, including California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, accused Meta of formulating the platforms to grab the attention of young users, fueling anxiety, depression and even suicide, as well as misleading consumers about their safety. Those states also accused the firm of violating federal law by improperly collecting and using personal data of children under 13. Experts indicated this trial as the most significant legal test yet to examine how social media impacts young users. Proceedings began on Tuesday in the Oakland, California, federal court with the case expected to last across six weeks. Jurors will deliver a non-binding advisory verdict, after which U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will determine whether Meta bears liability and, if so, decide on any penalties and required changes to Facebook and Instagram. Also read: US tightens green card scrutiny: Indians in backlog face new ‘public charge’ test Zuckerberg's role in company decision-making The states' opening witness, Bejar, testified that Mark Zuckerberg was deeply involved in company decision-making, describing a top-down culture at the Menlo Park-based firm where product changes happened only with his direct approval. "If Mark makes something a priority, mountains move in months," Bejar said. He also pushed back against remarks Zuckerberg made in October 2021, made in response to claims from whistleblower Frances Haugen that Meta was aware its platforms posed risks to children, and knew how to fix them, yet chose profit over safety. Zuckerberg had maintained at the time that Meta regularly relied on research to enhance its products. Bejar countered this by revealing he had personally emailed Zuckerberg to raise safety concerns. "It's so false, every part of it," Bejar said. "You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids." Bejar's tenure at Meta ran from 2009 to 2015, and he later returned as an independent contractor from 2019 to 2021, during which he studied the well-being of teenage Instagram users. In 2023, he testified before a U.S. Senate committee that Meta knew about harassment and other harms teen-facing teenagers on its platforms but failed to take action. Under cross-examination ‌from the company's ⁠lawyer Brian Stekloff, Bejar claimed that he was unaware of the harm his teenage daughter would experience when he helped her set up an Instagram account. Bejar added that his daughter wanted a space where women could discuss cars; however, she faced misogynistic comments, including about her breasts. She was just 16 in 2021 by the time her father emailed Zuckerberg highlighting safety.

US states, including California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, accused Meta of formulating the platforms to grab the attention of young users, fueling anxiety, depression and even suicide, as well as misleading consumers about their safety

'You just cannot trust Zuckerberg with kids': Ex-Meta director testifies in landmark trial, claims his own daughter faced abuse

Meta is facing a major legal challenge in the U.S. as states accuse the company of putting children at risk through Facebook and Instagram. The allegations include hiding potential harms, improperly collecting and using children’s data, and designing platforms that allegedly keep young users engaged. Families are demanding greater accountability as the case could influence how Meta operates its social media platforms.


California AG: Meta knew Instagram could harm teenagers 

Meta on trial: States accuse Facebook & Instagram of harming children

A distress call from Alaska has sparked controversy and drawn attention after reports linked the incident to a property associated with Mark Zuckerberg. A representative for Zuckerberg has moved to clarify the situation, addressing questions and speculation surrounding the distress call.

Alaska distress call sparks controversy, Mark Zuckerberg's representative clears the air 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $300 million superyacht is going through scrutiny after a small boat ran out of fuel off the coast of Alaska, resulting in a nearby cruise ship having to rescue the boat. The 21-foot skiff was travelling between Petersburg and Juneau on Monday night, but later the boat ran out of fuel near Kuiu Island in southeast Alaska. According to the US Coast Guard, the crew requested help at around 9:30 p.m. The Coast Guard determined that the boat was not in distress; however, later it issued a marine assistance request to nearby vessels to help. Citing ship-tracking data, the Alaska Beacon reported that Zuckerberg's 387-foot yacht, Launchpad, along with its support vessel, Wingman, were positioned closer to the stranded skiff than the MV Wilderness Legacy, a small cruise ship run by UnCruise Adventures. Despite this, it was the Wilderness Legacy that changed course to assist. A passenger on board told the Alaska Beacon that the ship's captain had announced during the rescue that Launchpad, though closer, had declined to help. Meanwhile, a spokesperson told Forbes that Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, who owns Facebook and Instagram, was not on the yacht at the time.&nbsp;Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/what-is-taiwan-s-hellscape-strategy-against-china-and-how-will-it-work-wion-decodes-1786340569546">What is Taiwan’s 'hellscape' strategy against China and how will it work? WION Decodes</a><h3>Boat runs out of fuel</h3>The skiff, measuring 21 feet, had run out of fuel while travelling between Petersburg and Juneau, and the Alaska Beacon reported that a cruise ship farther away than Zuckerberg's yacht ultimately came to its rescue. “I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son,” a passenger on the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy posted on Bluesky. “Our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night, and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht – which was closer – and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near-unanimous booing when the captain announced this).” However, Brian Baker, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, stated that the couple were not on board his yacht, named Launchpad. The yacht crew had been running on a different radio channel, Baker told Forbes. “The assist was already underway” by the time they reviewed the broadcast, he said.

Zuckerberg's $300 million superyacht is under scrutiny after a small boat ran out of fuel off Alaska's coast, forcing a nearby cruise ship to carry out the rescue instead. The US Coast Guard said the crew requested help around 9:30 p.m.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $300 million superyacht is going through scrutiny after a small boat ran out of fuel off the coast of Alaska, resulting in a nearby cruise ship having to rescue the boat. The 21-foot skiff was travelling between Petersburg and Juneau on Monday night, but later the boat ran out of fuel near Kuiu Island in southeast Alaska. According to the US Coast Guard, the crew requested help at around 9:30 p.m. The Coast Guard determined that the boat was not in distress; however, later it issued a marine assistance request to nearby vessels to help. Citing ship-tracking data, the Alaska Beacon reported that Zuckerberg's 387-foot yacht, Launchpad, along with its support vessel, Wingman, were positioned closer to the stranded skiff than the MV Wilderness Legacy, a small cruise ship run by UnCruise Adventures. Despite this, it was the Wilderness Legacy that changed course to assist. A passenger on board told the Alaska Beacon that the ship's captain had announced during the rescue that Launchpad, though closer, had declined to help. Meanwhile, a spokesperson told Forbes that Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, who owns Facebook and Instagram, was not on the yacht at the time. Also read: What is Taiwan’s 'hellscape' strategy against China and how will it work? WION Decodes Boat runs out of fuel The skiff, measuring 21 feet, had run out of fuel while travelling between Petersburg and Juneau, and the Alaska Beacon reported that a cruise ship farther away than Zuckerberg's yacht ultimately came to its rescue. “I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son,” a passenger on the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy posted on Bluesky. “Our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night, and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht – which was closer – and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near-unanimous booing when the captain announced this).” However, Brian Baker, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, stated that the couple were not on board his yacht, named Launchpad. The yacht crew had been running on a different radio channel, Baker told Forbes. “The assist was already underway” by the time they reviewed the broadcast, he said.

Zuckerberg's $300 million superyacht is under scrutiny after a small boat ran out of fuel off Alaska's coast, forcing a nearby cruise ship to carry out the rescue instead. The US Coast Guard said the crew requested help around 9:30 p.m.

Zuckerberg's $300 million superyacht faces scrutiny after declined to help stranded boat

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has apologised to the Indian government over the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), deepfake content and operational mistakes on the company’s platforms, according to government sources.&nbsp;The apology came as senior Meta executives, including Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, held talks with officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in New Delhi.&nbsp;Discussions focused on content moderation failures, compliance with Indian law and the temporary removal of a video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.&nbsp;Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/china-hits-back-at-us-after-fresh-tariffs-blacklists-six-firms-curbs-drone-exports-1785925926486">China hits back at US after fresh tariffs, blacklists six firms, curbs drone exports</a>&nbsp;Sources said Zuckerberg expressed regret for the CSAM and deepfake material circulating on Facebook, Instagram and other Meta services, as well as broader errors in how the platforms were run.Indian officials made clear during the meetings that Meta may not qualify as an “intermediary” under the Information Technology Act. Because the company actively selects which users see particular content through its algorithms and recommendation systems, the legal protection known as safe harbour does not apply in the same way, the sources added.&nbsp;Safe harbour normally shields platforms from liability for user-generated content provided they follow certain rules.&nbsp;The developments form part of heightened scrutiny of Meta in India. A parliamentary committee had earlier demanded an unqualified personal apology from Zuckerberg within three days over the brief removal of the prime minister’s video, warning that failure to comply could lead to the withdrawal of safe harbour protections. The video, which addressed issues including examination paper leaks, was unavailable for several hours before being restored. Meta has attributed the removal to a technical error. &nbsp;

Mark Zuckerberg apologised to the Indian government over harmful content and platform errors as Meta faced scrutiny over the temporary removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's video.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has apologised to the Indian government over the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), deepfake content and operational mistakes on the company’s platforms, according to government sources. The apology came as senior Meta executives, including Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, held talks with officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in New Delhi. Discussions focused on content moderation failures, compliance with Indian law and the temporary removal of a video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Also Read: China hits back at US after fresh tariffs, blacklists six firms, curbs drone exports Sources said Zuckerberg expressed regret for the CSAM and deepfake material circulating on Facebook, Instagram and other Meta services, as well as broader errors in how the platforms were run. Indian officials made clear during the meetings that Meta may not qualify as an “intermediary” under the Information Technology Act. Because the company actively selects which users see particular content through its algorithms and recommendation systems, the legal protection known as safe harbour does not apply in the same way, the sources added. Safe harbour normally shields platforms from liability for user-generated content provided they follow certain rules. The developments form part of heightened scrutiny of Meta in India. A parliamentary committee had earlier demanded an unqualified personal apology from Zuckerberg within three days over the brief removal of the prime minister’s video, warning that failure to comply could lead to the withdrawal of safe harbour protections. The video, which addressed issues including examination paper leaks, was unavailable for several hours before being restored. Meta has attributed the removal to a technical error.

Mark Zuckerberg apologised to the Indian government over harmful content and platform errors as Meta faced scrutiny over the temporary removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's video.

Mark Zuckerberg apologises to Indian government over harmful content, platform errors amid PM video row

Trinamool Congress leader from West Bengal Mahua Moitra on Tuesday came out in support of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the temporary removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Facebook post. It is also reported that Zuckerberg is willing to make an apology &nbsp;to a parliamentary panel over the brief restriction of PM's video.&nbsp;Moitra backing Zuckerberg on the issue said that he should not be "bullied" into apologising.While supporting the Meta CEO Moitra alleged that the government has often tried to pressurise social media platforms into removing content critical of the government.&nbsp;"Hello Mark please do not get bullied &amp; apologise to anyone. Indian govt blackmails &amp; threatens citizens all the time, gets content critical of it removed at will. One video mistakenly removed for few hours didn't make heavens fall!" wrote Moitra in a post on X.&nbsp;ALSO READ: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/crass-cheap-and-deeply-derogatory-internet-slams-udhayanidhi-stalin-over-his-double-meaning-remark-on-trisha-1785840450958">'Crass, cheap and deeply derogatory:' Internet slams Udhayanidhi Stalin over his 'double-meaning' remark on Trisha</a>&nbsp;Moitra's comment came after Meta representatives appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, &nbsp;where the company was questioned over its content moderation practices and the brief restriction of PM's video. on Facebook.&nbsp;Meta after meeting the Parliamentary Standing Committee has agreed to apologise over the incident, reported news agency PTI.&nbsp;BJP MP and chairperson of the committee, Nishikant Dubey speaking to reporters after the meeting reportedly said that the Committee has demanded Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to apologize for this and if he does not do so then the safe harbour protection under Section 79 should be withdrawn from him.&nbsp;A selfie video uploaded by Modi on July 23 on Facebook regarding the massive youth-led protests over the NEET paper leak remained unavailable from around 12:30 am to 5 am for which the government has sought an apology.&nbsp;

While supporting the Meta CEO Moitra alleged that the government has often tried to pressurise social media platforms into removing content critical of the government.

Trinamool Congress leader from West Bengal Mahua Moitra on Tuesday came out in support of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the temporary removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Facebook post. It is also reported that Zuckerberg is willing to make an apology to a parliamentary panel over the brief restriction of PM's video. Moitra backing Zuckerberg on the issue said that he should not be "bullied" into apologising. While supporting the Meta CEO Moitra alleged that the government has often tried to pressurise social media platforms into removing content critical of the government. "Hello Mark please do not get bullied & apologise to anyone. Indian govt blackmails & threatens citizens all the time, gets content critical of it removed at will. One video mistakenly removed for few hours didn't make heavens fall!" wrote Moitra in a post on X. ALSO READ: 'Crass, cheap and deeply derogatory:' Internet slams Udhayanidhi Stalin over his 'double-meaning' remark on Trisha Moitra's comment came after Meta representatives appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, where the company was questioned over its content moderation practices and the brief restriction of PM's video. on Facebook. Meta after meeting the Parliamentary Standing Committee has agreed to apologise over the incident, reported news agency PTI. BJP MP and chairperson of the committee, Nishikant Dubey speaking to reporters after the meeting reportedly said that the Committee has demanded Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to apologize for this and if he does not do so then the safe harbour protection under Section 79 should be withdrawn from him. A selfie video uploaded by Modi on July 23 on Facebook regarding the massive youth-led protests over the NEET paper leak remained unavailable from around 12:30 am to 5 am for which the government has sought an apology.

While supporting the Meta CEO Moitra alleged that the government has often tried to pressurise social media platforms into removing content critical of the government.

'Do not get bullied': Mahua Moitra's message to Zuckerberg on PM Modi's video restriction row

Meta is facing scrutiny in India after a parliamentary panel questioned the temporary removal of a video featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Facebook. The video reportedly remained unavailable on the platform for around five hours before being restored.

Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology Chairman Nishikant Dubey has said Meta acknowledged the outage and called for an apology from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The incident has reignited debate over platform accountability, content moderation, algorithmic decisions, and the safe harbour protections available to social media intermediaries under Indian law.

Meta under fire as panel seeks answers over PM Modi video takedown 

For a decade, Meta's artificial intelligence strategy was defined by one word: free. Open weights, open research, models given away to commoditise rivals' moats. On July 9, that era quietly ended. Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 — and for the first time in its history, put a price on its own AI.&nbsp;What Meta Launched&nbsp;Muse Spark 1.1 comes out of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the elite unit Mark Zuckerberg assembled to chase frontier AI. It is a multimodal reasoning model built for agentic work — tool use, computer use, coding and multi-step execution — with a one-million-token context window. It ships in public preview through the new Meta Model API, the company's first paid developer platform.&nbsp;The pricing is the pitch: $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with $20 in free credits to start. Zuckerberg framed it as roughly a quarter of what Anthropic and OpenAI charge for comparable models.&nbsp;And the API is built for defection: it is drop-in compatible with both the OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs, meaning a developer can switch their application to Meta's model by changing a few lines of configuration. The switching cost is engineered to be near zero — aimed squarely at rivals' paying customers.&nbsp;The End Of The Open-Only Era&nbsp;The significance is strategic more than technical. Meta spent years arguing that open models were its competitive weapon — that giving AI away would commoditise the closed labs' advantage while Meta monetised through its apps. Muse Spark 1.1 is the concession that the calculus has changed: Meta's newest frontier model now sits behind a paid API, exactly the way OpenAI's and Anthropic's do.&nbsp;It is also the revenue line investors have been waiting for. Meta has poured tens of billions into AI infrastructure and talent; until July 9, none of its frontier models had ever directly earned a dollar. Meta has not abandoned open releases — but its best new work now has a price tag, and that tells you where the company believes the value sits.&nbsp;The Price War Context&nbsp;Muse Spark lands in the middle of the great AI price collapse of July 2026. OpenAI's new GPT-5.6 family starts at $1 per million tokens. Musk's Grok 4.5 runs $2 and $6. China's Kimi K3 undercuts everyone at $0.30 per million on cached input — and gives its weights away entirely on July 27. Frontier-class AI, which cost dollars per million tokens a year ago, is racing toward pennies.&nbsp;Meta's entry as the aggressive price challenger completes the picture: every major lab is now fighting on cost, and the margin pressure that once applied only to open-source alternatives has reached the closed frontier.&nbsp;The Curious EU Absence&nbsp;One detail stands out: the public preview is available to US developers only, with no European Union access at launch. Meta has not detailed its reasoning — but the timing is hard to miss. The launch landed in the same fortnight that Brussels preliminarily found Instagram and Facebook's addictive design in breach of the Digital Services Act, with fine exposure above $12 billion, and ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants. Regulatory friction is visibly starting to shape where AI products launch first — and where they don't.&nbsp;The company that spent a decade commoditising everyone else's moat has built a toll booth of its own. In 2026, it seems, frontier AI has become too expensive to give away — even for Meta.

Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9 through the new Meta Model API — the first time Meta has ever charged for a model. Priced at roughly a quarter of Anthropic and OpenAI's rates, drop-in compatible with their SDKs, and unavailable in the EU at launch.

For a decade, Meta's artificial intelligence strategy was defined by one word: free. Open weights, open research, models given away to commoditise rivals' moats. On July 9, that era quietly ended. Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 — and for the first time in its history, put a price on its own AI. What Meta Launched Muse Spark 1.1 comes out of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the elite unit Mark Zuckerberg assembled to chase frontier AI. It is a multimodal reasoning model built for agentic work — tool use, computer use, coding and multi-step execution — with a one-million-token context window. It ships in public preview through the new Meta Model API, the company's first paid developer platform. The pricing is the pitch: $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with $20 in free credits to start. Zuckerberg framed it as roughly a quarter of what Anthropic and OpenAI charge for comparable models. And the API is built for defection: it is drop-in compatible with both the OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs, meaning a developer can switch their application to Meta's model by changing a few lines of configuration. The switching cost is engineered to be near zero — aimed squarely at rivals' paying customers. The End Of The Open-Only Era The significance is strategic more than technical. Meta spent years arguing that open models were its competitive weapon — that giving AI away would commoditise the closed labs' advantage while Meta monetised through its apps. Muse Spark 1.1 is the concession that the calculus has changed: Meta's newest frontier model now sits behind a paid API, exactly the way OpenAI's and Anthropic's do. It is also the revenue line investors have been waiting for. Meta has poured tens of billions into AI infrastructure and talent; until July 9, none of its frontier models had ever directly earned a dollar. Meta has not abandoned open releases — but its best new work now has a price tag, and that tells you where the company believes the value sits. The Price War Context Muse Spark lands in the middle of the great AI price collapse of July 2026. OpenAI's new GPT-5.6 family starts at $1 per million tokens. Musk's Grok 4.5 runs $2 and $6. China's Kimi K3 undercuts everyone at $0.30 per million on cached input — and gives its weights away entirely on July 27. Frontier-class AI, which cost dollars per million tokens a year ago, is racing toward pennies. Meta's entry as the aggressive price challenger completes the picture: every major lab is now fighting on cost, and the margin pressure that once applied only to open-source alternatives has reached the closed frontier. The Curious EU Absence One detail stands out: the public preview is available to US developers only, with no European Union access at launch. Meta has not detailed its reasoning — but the timing is hard to miss. The launch landed in the same fortnight that Brussels preliminarily found Instagram and Facebook's addictive design in breach of the Digital Services Act, with fine exposure above $12 billion, and ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants. Regulatory friction is visibly starting to shape where AI products launch first — and where they don't. The company that spent a decade commoditising everyone else's moat has built a toll booth of its own. In 2026, it seems, frontier AI has become too expensive to give away — even for Meta.

For a decade, Meta's AI strategy was to give its models away. On July 9, that era ended: Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Spark 1.1 on the new Meta Model API — the first time Meta has ever charged for a model — priced at roughly a quarter of what Anthropic and OpenAI charge, with drop-in compatibility designed to poach their customers. Notably absent at launch: the European Union.

Meta starts charging for AI but who will pay? Muse Spark 1.1 is its first paid model ever

New York is set to become the first U.S. state to ban smart glasses across its entire court system. Beginning July 20, all camera- and microphone-equipped smart eyewear, including Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses and prescription smart glasses, will be prohibited inside state, county, city, town, and village courts. Court officials say the move is aimed at preventing covert recordings of legal proceedings. Visitors, lawyers, and court staff will be required to surrender smart glasses before entering court buildings. The decision follows growing concerns over AI-powered wearable devices and comes after Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses drew attention during a recent U.S. court appearance.

New york becomes first us state to ban smart glasses in all courts over secret recording concerns

The number is almost too large to process: $1.4 trillion. That is how much four US states are seeking in penalties from Meta Platforms in a trial scheduled for August 2026. To put it in context, Meta's entire market capitalisation — the total value of every share of the company — is approximately $1.5 trillion. The penalty being sought by California, New Jersey, Colorado, and Kentucky is not a fine. It is a demand that amounts to virtually erasing the company from existence.&nbsp;What The Four States Are Accusing Meta Of&nbsp;The four-state lawsuit centres on a specific and damning claim: that Meta deliberately designed Instagram and Facebook with addictive features it knew were harmful to teenagers, then misled the public about what it knew. The accusation is not that social media happened to be addictive. It is that Meta's engineers built in the addiction by design — the infinite scroll, the variable reward of likes and notifications, the algorithmic amplification of emotionally triggering content — and that executives knew the psychological damage this was causing to young users and hid it.&nbsp;How $1.4 Trillion Was Calculated&nbsp;The penalty figure is not arbitrary. It was calculated by multiplying the estimated number of violations — roughly equivalent to the number of young users affected by Meta's addictive design choices — by the fine amounts designated under each state's consumer protection law. In other words, each child affected counts as a separate violation. Across millions of young users in four states, that multiplication produces a number that exceeds the GDP of most countries. Meta attorneys have described the calculation as ‘unsupported by the evidence’ and noted that ‘Meta has not found any case, under any cause of action, where one defendant was ordered to pay over one trillion dollars’ — or anything remotely close.&nbsp;The Broader War: 33 States, 3,000 Cases&nbsp;The four-state case is only part of a much larger legal assault. A total of 33 states have joined together in a separate but related lawsuit alleging that Meta exploited young users and collected data from children without parental consent in violation of federal law. In California alone, Meta faces over 3,000 individual cases making similar addiction and harm claims. Fourteen additional states are pursuing comparable claims. The August trial is the most consequential single proceeding, but it is not the only front on which Meta is fighting.&nbsp;The New Mexico Verdict: A Warning Shot That Was Already Fired&nbsp;This is not the first time a court has found against Meta on children's safety issues. In March 2026, a New Mexico jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. The jury found thousands of individual violations and imposed a $375 million penalty — the first time a US state successfully sued Meta over child safety. A separate judge also held Meta and Google jointly liable and ordered $6 million in damages in an individual case involving a young woman who alleged that deliberately addictive design features on Instagram got her hooked from a young age.&nbsp;The Judge Who Refused To Let Meta Walk Away&nbsp;US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland rejected Meta's motion to have the addiction claims dismissed before trial. That ruling kept the August proceeding alive and cleared the way for the $1.4 trillion penalty demand to be argued before a jury. Meta had hoped to end the case before it reached that point. It did not. Judge Gonzalez Rogers' decision to let the trial proceed is what transformed this from a manageable legal risk into what Gizmodo called an ‘existential threat.’&nbsp;What Happens To Meta If It Loses&nbsp;If a jury finds in favour of the four states and awards penalties anywhere near the $1.4 trillion being sought, the consequences for Meta would be unlike anything in corporate history. The company's entire market value would not cover the judgment. A penalty of that scale would trigger immediate financial crisis — capital raises, asset sales, potential restructuring. Meta has already warned investors in filings that it anticipates ‘material losses’ from youth-related litigation in 2026. That is the sanitised corporate language for: this is going to cost us seriously.&nbsp;Zuckerberg's Position And Meta's Defence&nbsp;Mark Zuckerberg has not commented publicly on the $1.4 trillion demand. Meta's legal team has been emphatic that the figure has ‘no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement’ and that a sanction of that size would be constitutionally disproportionate. The company's defence is expected to argue that social media's effects on teen mental health are complex, disputed by research, and not the direct result of intentional harmful design. Whether that argument survives contact with a jury — in a political and cultural environment where teen mental health has become one of the most charged issues in American public life — is the $1.4 trillion question.

Four US states seek $1.4 trillion from Meta — nearly its entire $1.5T market cap. Trial set for August 2026. Meta calls it unprecedented. Analysts call it existential. Here is what happens if Meta loses.

The number is almost too large to process: $1.4 trillion. That is how much four US states are seeking in penalties from Meta Platforms in a trial scheduled for August 2026. To put it in context, Meta's entire market capitalisation — the total value of every share of the company — is approximately $1.5 trillion. The penalty being sought by California, New Jersey, Colorado, and Kentucky is not a fine. It is a demand that amounts to virtually erasing the company from existence. What The Four States Are Accusing Meta Of The four-state lawsuit centres on a specific and damning claim: that Meta deliberately designed Instagram and Facebook with addictive features it knew were harmful to teenagers, then misled the public about what it knew. The accusation is not that social media happened to be addictive. It is that Meta's engineers built in the addiction by design — the infinite scroll, the variable reward of likes and notifications, the algorithmic amplification of emotionally triggering content — and that executives knew the psychological damage this was causing to young users and hid it. How $1.4 Trillion Was Calculated The penalty figure is not arbitrary. It was calculated by multiplying the estimated number of violations — roughly equivalent to the number of young users affected by Meta's addictive design choices — by the fine amounts designated under each state's consumer protection law. In other words, each child affected counts as a separate violation. Across millions of young users in four states, that multiplication produces a number that exceeds the GDP of most countries. Meta attorneys have described the calculation as ‘unsupported by the evidence’ and noted that ‘Meta has not found any case, under any cause of action, where one defendant was ordered to pay over one trillion dollars’ — or anything remotely close. The Broader War: 33 States, 3,000 Cases The four-state case is only part of a much larger legal assault. A total of 33 states have joined together in a separate but related lawsuit alleging that Meta exploited young users and collected data from children without parental consent in violation of federal law. In California alone, Meta faces over 3,000 individual cases making similar addiction and harm claims. Fourteen additional states are pursuing comparable claims. The August trial is the most consequential single proceeding, but it is not the only front on which Meta is fighting. The New Mexico Verdict: A Warning Shot That Was Already Fired This is not the first time a court has found against Meta on children's safety issues. In March 2026, a New Mexico jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. The jury found thousands of individual violations and imposed a $375 million penalty — the first time a US state successfully sued Meta over child safety. A separate judge also held Meta and Google jointly liable and ordered $6 million in damages in an individual case involving a young woman who alleged that deliberately addictive design features on Instagram got her hooked from a young age. The Judge Who Refused To Let Meta Walk Away US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland rejected Meta's motion to have the addiction claims dismissed before trial. That ruling kept the August proceeding alive and cleared the way for the $1.4 trillion penalty demand to be argued before a jury. Meta had hoped to end the case before it reached that point. It did not. Judge Gonzalez Rogers' decision to let the trial proceed is what transformed this from a manageable legal risk into what Gizmodo called an ‘existential threat.’ What Happens To Meta If It Loses If a jury finds in favour of the four states and awards penalties anywhere near the $1.4 trillion being sought, the consequences for Meta would be unlike anything in corporate history. The company's entire market value would not cover the judgment. A penalty of that scale would trigger immediate financial crisis — capital raises, asset sales, potential restructuring. Meta has already warned investors in filings that it anticipates ‘material losses’ from youth-related litigation in 2026. That is the sanitised corporate language for: this is going to cost us seriously. Zuckerberg's Position And Meta's Defence Mark Zuckerberg has not commented publicly on the $1.4 trillion demand. Meta's legal team has been emphatic that the figure has ‘no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement’ and that a sanction of that size would be constitutionally disproportionate. The company's defence is expected to argue that social media's effects on teen mental health are complex, disputed by research, and not the direct result of intentional harmful design. Whether that argument survives contact with a jury — in a political and cultural environment where teen mental health has become one of the most charged issues in American public life — is the $1.4 trillion question.

Four US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties against Meta — a figure that nearly matches the company's entire market capitalisation of $1.5 trillion. The August 2026 trial in Oakland, California will determine whether Meta's intentional design of addictive features on Instagram and Facebook constitutes a consumer protection violation affecting millions of children. Meta calls the demand ‘unprecedented in the history of consumer protection enforcement.’ Analysts call it an existential threat.

Zuckerberg to go bankrupt? Meta faces $1.4 Trillion in penalties in teen mental health trial

There is a version of Mark Zuckerberg's career that looks like visionary boldness: the founder who saw mobile before Google, who built a social graph that connected three billion people, who made a $19 billion bet on WhatsApp when everyone thought he was crazy. Then there is the version that has been playing out in real time since 2021 — a CEO who keeps announcing enormous bets on ideas that either collapse into expensive failures or turn out to be things he cannot actually execute. The Metaverse. Meta AI. And now, Meta Compute: the plan to build an Amazon Web Services rival. Each one announced with confidence. Each one, so far, stumbling.&nbsp;The Metaverse: $90 Billion On Cartoon Zoom Calls&nbsp;In late 2021, Zuckerberg renamed the company from Facebook to Meta and declared that the future was the Metaverse — a persistent virtual world where people would work, socialise, and live through VR headsets and digital avatars. Billions poured into Reality Labs, the division responsible for making this happen. The flagship product, Horizon Worlds, launched to widespread mockery. Critics compared it to low-quality cartoon-like virtual meeting rooms — a Zoom call with worse graphics and no obvious reason to use it. The numbers tell the story clearly: Reality Labs has lost approximately $90 billion in total since 2020. Annual losses went from $10 billion in 2021 to $13 billion in 2022, $16 billion in 2023, $17.7 billion in 2024, and $19.2 billion in 2025. In 2026's first quarter alone, the division lost over $4 billion. Despite all of this, the Metaverse generates roughly 1 percent of Meta's total revenue.&nbsp;Meta AI: Exploiting Users, Banning Creators, Getting Facts Wrong&nbsp;When the Metaverse bet started looking like a catastrophe, Zuckerberg pivoted hard to artificial intelligence. Meta AI was positioned as the company's answer to ChatGPT and Google Gemini — a conversational AI assistant embedded across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the Quest headsets. The reality has been a different story. Meta's AI moderation systems have been falsely banning thousands of Instagram creators and small businesses, flagging ordinary family photos as child exploitation material, and removing accounts that represent years of work and primary income streams for their owners. A Change.org petition against wrongful Meta AI bans has gathered nearly 56,000 signatures. Meta's own Oversight Board confirmed in June 2026 that the company's AI enforcement lacks due process and transparency — meaning bans are made by automated systems with no human review and no meaningful appeals process. Meanwhile, AI-generated bot accounts with blue tick verification badges continue to thrive on the same platform where real human creators are being removed.&nbsp;Now He Wants To Build An AWS&nbsp;With the Metaverse burning money and Meta AI generating headlines for all the wrong reasons, Zuckerberg has announced his latest pivot: Meta Compute, an internal initiative to sell spare AI computing capacity to outside customers and compete directly with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. At Meta's shareholder meeting in May 2026, Zuckerberg said entering cloud computing was ‘definitely on the table,’ noting that companies were approaching Meta ‘almost every week’ to buy access to its AI models or spare computing power. The initiative is being led by Meta's infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, Daniel Gross of Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick.&nbsp;The Problem: Meta Has No Spare Compute&nbsp;The immediate problem with Meta's cloud ambitions was identified by analyst Richard Windsor almost as soon as the plan leaked: Meta does not actually have spare compute to sell. Companies like CoreWeave and Nebius exist specifically because Meta — and other major AI companies — need to buy capacity from outside suppliers to meet their own AI workload demands. If Meta is buying compute from CoreWeave and Nebius today, it cannot simultaneously be renting surplus compute to paying customers. Building a real cloud business would require Meta to dramatically increase its data centre and chip capacity — which is exactly what Wolfe Research found when they ran the numbers, concluding that a genuine cloud business would push Meta's 2027 capital expenditure to $200 billion, up from previous estimates of $160 billion, and would likely force the company to raise capital before any cloud revenue materialised.&nbsp;The Copycat Problem&nbsp;The deeper issue is not just whether Meta Compute can work. It is the pattern it fits into. Facebook was built partly by copying features from rivals. Instagram Stories was a direct copy of Snapchat Stories. Reels was built to compete with TikTok after TikTok ate into Facebook's youth audience. WhatsApp's payment features mirror WeChat. The difference is that copying a product feature is relatively cheap and reversible. Copying an entire business model — building a cloud infrastructure giant from scratch to compete with companies that have been doing it for fifteen to twenty years — is a different order of magnitude entirely. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have decades of enterprise relationships, global infrastructure, and developer ecosystems that Meta does not have. The question the market is increasingly asking is whether Zuckerberg's instinct to respond to every competitive threat by building a replica is the right strategy — or whether it is a habit that has started to cost considerably more than it returns.

From a $90 billion Metaverse failure to Meta AI wrongly banning creators, Zuckerberg's bets keep collapsing. Now he wants to build a cloud rival to AWS — but analysts say Meta has no spare compute.

There is a version of Mark Zuckerberg's career that looks like visionary boldness: the founder who saw mobile before Google, who built a social graph that connected three billion people, who made a $19 billion bet on WhatsApp when everyone thought he was crazy. Then there is the version that has been playing out in real time since 2021 — a CEO who keeps announcing enormous bets on ideas that either collapse into expensive failures or turn out to be things he cannot actually execute. The Metaverse. Meta AI. And now, Meta Compute: the plan to build an Amazon Web Services rival. Each one announced with confidence. Each one, so far, stumbling. The Metaverse: $90 Billion On Cartoon Zoom Calls In late 2021, Zuckerberg renamed the company from Facebook to Meta and declared that the future was the Metaverse — a persistent virtual world where people would work, socialise, and live through VR headsets and digital avatars. Billions poured into Reality Labs, the division responsible for making this happen. The flagship product, Horizon Worlds, launched to widespread mockery. Critics compared it to low-quality cartoon-like virtual meeting rooms — a Zoom call with worse graphics and no obvious reason to use it. The numbers tell the story clearly: Reality Labs has lost approximately $90 billion in total since 2020. Annual losses went from $10 billion in 2021 to $13 billion in 2022, $16 billion in 2023, $17.7 billion in 2024, and $19.2 billion in 2025. In 2026's first quarter alone, the division lost over $4 billion. Despite all of this, the Metaverse generates roughly 1 percent of Meta's total revenue. Meta AI: Exploiting Users, Banning Creators, Getting Facts Wrong When the Metaverse bet started looking like a catastrophe, Zuckerberg pivoted hard to artificial intelligence. Meta AI was positioned as the company's answer to ChatGPT and Google Gemini — a conversational AI assistant embedded across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the Quest headsets. The reality has been a different story. Meta's AI moderation systems have been falsely banning thousands of Instagram creators and small businesses, flagging ordinary family photos as child exploitation material, and removing accounts that represent years of work and primary income streams for their owners. A Change.org petition against wrongful Meta AI bans has gathered nearly 56,000 signatures. Meta's own Oversight Board confirmed in June 2026 that the company's AI enforcement lacks due process and transparency — meaning bans are made by automated systems with no human review and no meaningful appeals process. Meanwhile, AI-generated bot accounts with blue tick verification badges continue to thrive on the same platform where real human creators are being removed. Now He Wants To Build An AWS With the Metaverse burning money and Meta AI generating headlines for all the wrong reasons, Zuckerberg has announced his latest pivot: Meta Compute, an internal initiative to sell spare AI computing capacity to outside customers and compete directly with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. At Meta's shareholder meeting in May 2026, Zuckerberg said entering cloud computing was ‘definitely on the table,’ noting that companies were approaching Meta ‘almost every week’ to buy access to its AI models or spare computing power. The initiative is being led by Meta's infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, Daniel Gross of Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick. The Problem: Meta Has No Spare Compute The immediate problem with Meta's cloud ambitions was identified by analyst Richard Windsor almost as soon as the plan leaked: Meta does not actually have spare compute to sell. Companies like CoreWeave and Nebius exist specifically because Meta — and other major AI companies — need to buy capacity from outside suppliers to meet their own AI workload demands. If Meta is buying compute from CoreWeave and Nebius today, it cannot simultaneously be renting surplus compute to paying customers. Building a real cloud business would require Meta to dramatically increase its data centre and chip capacity — which is exactly what Wolfe Research found when they ran the numbers, concluding that a genuine cloud business would push Meta's 2027 capital expenditure to $200 billion, up from previous estimates of $160 billion, and would likely force the company to raise capital before any cloud revenue materialised. The Copycat Problem The deeper issue is not just whether Meta Compute can work. It is the pattern it fits into. Facebook was built partly by copying features from rivals. Instagram Stories was a direct copy of Snapchat Stories. Reels was built to compete with TikTok after TikTok ate into Facebook's youth audience. WhatsApp's payment features mirror WeChat. The difference is that copying a product feature is relatively cheap and reversible. Copying an entire business model — building a cloud infrastructure giant from scratch to compete with companies that have been doing it for fifteen to twenty years — is a different order of magnitude entirely. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have decades of enterprise relationships, global infrastructure, and developer ecosystems that Meta does not have. The question the market is increasingly asking is whether Zuckerberg's instinct to respond to every competitive threat by building a replica is the right strategy — or whether it is a habit that has started to cost considerably more than it returns.

Mark Zuckerberg has spent nearly a decade copying competitors and betting billions on ideas that collapsed. The Metaverse burned through $90 billion and became a punchline. Meta AI has wrongly banned thousands of creators and exploited users' content. Now Zuckerberg is announcing plans to build his own cloud computing business to rival AWS — despite analysts pointing out that Meta doesn't even have spare compute to sell. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore.

'Failed AI, AWS copy': Zuckerberg is destroying his own empire and investors refuse to see it

For most of his career, Mark Zuckerberg's instinct to copy competitors has worked. He copied Snapchat's Stories format — Instagram Stories now has over 500 million daily users. He copied TikTok's short-video format with Reels — it is now one of Meta's fastest-growing revenue products. He spent $19 billion on WhatsApp and turned it into an indispensable global messaging service. The formula was reliable: find what works elsewhere, execute it at scale, win. This week, the market tested whether that formula still holds when the thing being copied is a multi-decade, multi-trillion-dollar enterprise infrastructure business. The verdict, delivered in 48 hours, was not encouraging.&nbsp;Wednesday: The Best Day In Six Months&nbsp;Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Meta was developing an internal initiative called Meta Compute — a plan to rent out spare AI computing capacity to outside customers and compete directly with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Wall Street responded enthusiastically. Meta stock jumped 8.8 percent on the day, its strongest single-session gain in six months. Investors liked the narrative: Meta has built one of the world's largest AI infrastructure footprints, spending between $125 billion and $145 billion in capital expenditure in 2026 alone. If even a fraction of that infrastructure could be monetised as a cloud service, the revenue upside was enormous. The stock closed at a fresh recent high. The cloud trade looked like a winner.&nbsp;Thursday: Down 5 Percent. Here Is What Changed&nbsp;Wolfe Research ran the numbers overnight. A genuine cloud computing business — one with the infrastructure, reliability, and enterprise relationships needed to compete with AWS and Azure — would not be built from Meta's existing spare capacity. It would require massive additional investment. Wolfe estimated that Meta's 2027 capital expenditure would need to rise to $200 billion, up from prior estimates of $160 billion, to support a real cloud business. More critically, that investment would come before any meaningful cloud revenue showed up on Meta's income statement. Margins would fall first. And at $200 billion in annual capex, Meta would almost certainly need to raise external capital — a prospect that changes the investment case entirely. Meta shares fell 5 percent on Thursday as the market processed what ‘building an AWS’ actually costs.&nbsp;SoftBank Crashed The Party In 24 Hours&nbsp;The second blow came from an unexpected direction. One day after Meta's cloud plans leaked, SoftBank announced SB Neo — a US venture that will rent out AI chips and data centre capacity, with a target of 10 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. OpenAI is reportedly an early customer. The compute rental trade, which had looked like a differentiated Meta strategy on Wednesday morning, had become a crowded market by Thursday afternoon. The speed at which a competitor entered the same space — not months later, not years later, but within 24 hours — illustrated exactly how replicable the underlying idea is. Renting compute is not a moat. It is infrastructure economics, and infrastructure economics favours the players who have been doing it longest.&nbsp;The Core Problem: Meta Is A Compute Buyer, Not A Seller&nbsp;Analyst Richard Windsor identified what may be the most fundamental flaw in the Meta Compute thesis: Meta does not have spare compute to sell. Today, Meta buys GPU and data centre capacity from companies like CoreWeave and Nebius because Meta's own AI workloads exceed its in-house infrastructure. A company that is a net buyer of compute capacity cannot simultaneously position itself as a compute vendor without building an entirely new layer of infrastructure on top of what it already needs for its own operations. The plan, as Windsor described it, conflates having large infrastructure with having surplus infrastructure — and those are very different things.&nbsp;Collateral Damage: CoreWeave, Nebius, And The Chip Names&nbsp;The market's reaction was not limited to Meta. CoreWeave — which currently supplies AI compute capacity to Meta — fell 14 percent on Wednesday as investors concluded that a Meta cloud business would eventually reduce Meta's dependence on outside suppliers. CoreWeave's junk-rated bonds began selling off. By Thursday, the stock had fallen further, with more than $7.5 billion in combined market capitalisation erased across the two sessions. Nebius, another compute supplier, dropped 17 percent. Chip-adjacent names including Micron were dragged into the selloff as the market recalibrated who wins and who loses if Meta becomes both a compute consumer and a compute competitor.&nbsp;What $200 Billion In Capex Really Means&nbsp;The number that should concern Meta shareholders most is not the stock move. It is the capex trajectory. A company already spending $125 billion to $145 billion annually on infrastructure, now potentially facing a $200 billion capital expenditure requirement, with margins under pressure before new revenue arrives, and a possible capital raise on the horizon — that is not a cloud opportunity. That is a spending spiral. At that level of capital commitment, the pressure to find offsetting savings elsewhere becomes intense. Spending pressure of that magnitude is historically how hiring freezes start, how restructuring programmes are launched, and how layoff announcements get prepared. For Meta's tens of thousands of employees, the Meta Compute announcement may have felt like good news on Wednesday. The Wolfe Research note made Thursday considerably less comfortable.

Meta jumped 8.8% on Meta Compute cloud news, then fell 5% next day. Wolfe Research: $200B capex needed. SoftBank launched a rival in 24 hours. CoreWeave lost $7.5B in market cap. Full breakdown.

For most of his career, Mark Zuckerberg's instinct to copy competitors has worked. He copied Snapchat's Stories format — Instagram Stories now has over 500 million daily users. He copied TikTok's short-video format with Reels — it is now one of Meta's fastest-growing revenue products. He spent $19 billion on WhatsApp and turned it into an indispensable global messaging service. The formula was reliable: find what works elsewhere, execute it at scale, win. This week, the market tested whether that formula still holds when the thing being copied is a multi-decade, multi-trillion-dollar enterprise infrastructure business. The verdict, delivered in 48 hours, was not encouraging. Wednesday: The Best Day In Six Months Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Meta was developing an internal initiative called Meta Compute — a plan to rent out spare AI computing capacity to outside customers and compete directly with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Wall Street responded enthusiastically. Meta stock jumped 8.8 percent on the day, its strongest single-session gain in six months. Investors liked the narrative: Meta has built one of the world's largest AI infrastructure footprints, spending between $125 billion and $145 billion in capital expenditure in 2026 alone. If even a fraction of that infrastructure could be monetised as a cloud service, the revenue upside was enormous. The stock closed at a fresh recent high. The cloud trade looked like a winner. Thursday: Down 5 Percent. Here Is What Changed Wolfe Research ran the numbers overnight. A genuine cloud computing business — one with the infrastructure, reliability, and enterprise relationships needed to compete with AWS and Azure — would not be built from Meta's existing spare capacity. It would require massive additional investment. Wolfe estimated that Meta's 2027 capital expenditure would need to rise to $200 billion, up from prior estimates of $160 billion, to support a real cloud business. More critically, that investment would come before any meaningful cloud revenue showed up on Meta's income statement. Margins would fall first. And at $200 billion in annual capex, Meta would almost certainly need to raise external capital — a prospect that changes the investment case entirely. Meta shares fell 5 percent on Thursday as the market processed what ‘building an AWS’ actually costs. SoftBank Crashed The Party In 24 Hours The second blow came from an unexpected direction. One day after Meta's cloud plans leaked, SoftBank announced SB Neo — a US venture that will rent out AI chips and data centre capacity, with a target of 10 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. OpenAI is reportedly an early customer. The compute rental trade, which had looked like a differentiated Meta strategy on Wednesday morning, had become a crowded market by Thursday afternoon. The speed at which a competitor entered the same space — not months later, not years later, but within 24 hours — illustrated exactly how replicable the underlying idea is. Renting compute is not a moat. It is infrastructure economics, and infrastructure economics favours the players who have been doing it longest. The Core Problem: Meta Is A Compute Buyer, Not A Seller Analyst Richard Windsor identified what may be the most fundamental flaw in the Meta Compute thesis: Meta does not have spare compute to sell. Today, Meta buys GPU and data centre capacity from companies like CoreWeave and Nebius because Meta's own AI workloads exceed its in-house infrastructure. A company that is a net buyer of compute capacity cannot simultaneously position itself as a compute vendor without building an entirely new layer of infrastructure on top of what it already needs for its own operations. The plan, as Windsor described it, conflates having large infrastructure with having surplus infrastructure — and those are very different things. Collateral Damage: CoreWeave, Nebius, And The Chip Names The market's reaction was not limited to Meta. CoreWeave — which currently supplies AI compute capacity to Meta — fell 14 percent on Wednesday as investors concluded that a Meta cloud business would eventually reduce Meta's dependence on outside suppliers. CoreWeave's junk-rated bonds began selling off. By Thursday, the stock had fallen further, with more than $7.5 billion in combined market capitalisation erased across the two sessions. Nebius, another compute supplier, dropped 17 percent. Chip-adjacent names including Micron were dragged into the selloff as the market recalibrated who wins and who loses if Meta becomes both a compute consumer and a compute competitor. What $200 Billion In Capex Really Means The number that should concern Meta shareholders most is not the stock move. It is the capex trajectory. A company already spending $125 billion to $145 billion annually on infrastructure, now potentially facing a $200 billion capital expenditure requirement, with margins under pressure before new revenue arrives, and a possible capital raise on the horizon — that is not a cloud opportunity. That is a spending spiral. At that level of capital commitment, the pressure to find offsetting savings elsewhere becomes intense. Spending pressure of that magnitude is historically how hiring freezes start, how restructuring programmes are launched, and how layoff announcements get prepared. For Meta's tens of thousands of employees, the Meta Compute announcement may have felt like good news on Wednesday. The Wolfe Research note made Thursday considerably less comfortable.

Meta stock surged 8.8 percent on Wednesday — its best single day in six months — after Bloomberg reported plans for ‘Meta Compute,’ a cloud business to sell spare AI capacity. By Thursday it was down 5 percent. Wolfe Research found that a real cloud business would push Meta's 2027 capex to $200 billion. SoftBank announced a competing product the very next day. And an analyst pointed out that Meta doesn't actually have spare compute to sell. Wall Street's one-day love affair with the idea lasted exactly 24 hours.

Zuckerberg built a fortune copying others! This time he is failing miserably

Somewhere right now, an Instagram creator who spent years building an audience — posting original content, growing a community, earning a living from brand deals and affiliate income — is staring at a screen that says their account has been disabled for violating Community Standards. They did not violate anything. There is no explanation. There is no human to speak to. There is no appeal process that leads to a real person reviewing the decision. Their archive of content is gone. Their income stream is gone. Their digital identity is gone. And a few scrolls away on the same platform, an AI-generated bot account with a blue tick verification badge is posting synthetic content to thousands of followers without consequence.&nbsp;The Scale Of The Damage&nbsp;This is not an isolated glitch. It is happening at scale, across countries, and it has been accelerating throughout 2025 and 2026. Meta has systematically laid off its human content moderation teams and replaced them with AI enforcement systems that flag, restrict, and permanently disable accounts automatically — with no human review involved in the vast majority of cases. Meta's own Oversight Board confirmed in June 2026 that the company's account bans lack due process and transparency. The board noted that many bans appeared to have been made entirely by automated systems, with users receiving no meaningful explanation and no viable path to appeal. A Change.org petition against Meta's wrongful account bans has gathered nearly 56,000 signatures, with users describing the loss of accounts that represented years of work and, in many cases, their primary source of income.&nbsp;The False Flags That Ruin Real Lives&nbsp;The AI moderation system is not just overzealous — it is systematically wrong in ways that destroy real people's lives. Thousands of users have reported having their accounts disabled after the AI falsely flagged ordinary content — including family photos of children at swimming pools or on holiday — as child sexual exploitation material. The accusations are not just incorrect; they are deeply damaging to the people they target. Users who have never posted anything remotely inappropriate find themselves branded with the most serious violation Meta's system can assign, with no way to contest the accusation and no human moderator reviewing the decision before it is enforced.&nbsp;Creators And Small Businesses Hit Hardest&nbsp;For Instagram creators in India's Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities who built their entire livelihood on the platform — selling products, running coaching businesses, building personal brands — a wrongful ban is not an inconvenience. It is an economic catastrophe. Years of content, followers, brand relationships, and revenue disappear in an instant. The same is true for small businesses that use Instagram as their primary sales and marketing channel. When the AI disables their account, their customer base is cut off overnight with no warning and no recourse. Meanwhile, the platform continues to reward AI-generated bot accounts with verification badges and algorithmic visibility, making the gap between how Meta treats real humans and synthetic accounts impossible to ignore.&nbsp;No Human To Call, No Appeal That Works&nbsp;Meta's Oversight Board explicitly recommended that the company provide users with a meaningful appeals process that allows written explanations, notify users when AI systems are responsible for enforcement decisions, and create a dashboard where users can review their violation history and understand what happened. These recommendations exist because none of these things currently exist. A creator whose account is wrongfully disabled today has no customer support number to call, no email that leads to a human reviewer, and no transparent process for challenging the decision. The appeals button inside the app leads, in most reported cases, to an automated response that upholds the original decision — made by the same AI system that got it wrong in the first place.&nbsp;The Leadership Question&nbsp;Mark Zuckerberg built Instagram into a platform that billions of people depend on — for expression, for community, for income, for identity. He then made the decision to gut the human moderation infrastructure, replace it with AI systems that are demonstrably failing at scale, and continue spending $145 billion on AI infrastructure while the AI already deployed on his platforms is actively destroying the trust and livelihoods of the people who use them. When asked about the return on investment from Meta's AI spending, Zuckerberg called it ‘a very technical question.’ For the creators, small business owners, and ordinary users whose accounts and incomes have been erased by his AI systems, it is not a technical question at all. It is a question of leadership — and whether the person responsible for building these platforms is still the right person to be running them.

Meta's AI is banning real creators while bot accounts thrive. 56,000 people have petitioned against wrongful bans. Its own Oversight Board says the system lacks due process.

Somewhere right now, an Instagram creator who spent years building an audience — posting original content, growing a community, earning a living from brand deals and affiliate income — is staring at a screen that says their account has been disabled for violating Community Standards. They did not violate anything. There is no explanation. There is no human to speak to. There is no appeal process that leads to a real person reviewing the decision. Their archive of content is gone. Their income stream is gone. Their digital identity is gone. And a few scrolls away on the same platform, an AI-generated bot account with a blue tick verification badge is posting synthetic content to thousands of followers without consequence. The Scale Of The Damage This is not an isolated glitch. It is happening at scale, across countries, and it has been accelerating throughout 2025 and 2026. Meta has systematically laid off its human content moderation teams and replaced them with AI enforcement systems that flag, restrict, and permanently disable accounts automatically — with no human review involved in the vast majority of cases. Meta's own Oversight Board confirmed in June 2026 that the company's account bans lack due process and transparency. The board noted that many bans appeared to have been made entirely by automated systems, with users receiving no meaningful explanation and no viable path to appeal. A Change.org petition against Meta's wrongful account bans has gathered nearly 56,000 signatures, with users describing the loss of accounts that represented years of work and, in many cases, their primary source of income. The False Flags That Ruin Real Lives The AI moderation system is not just overzealous — it is systematically wrong in ways that destroy real people's lives. Thousands of users have reported having their accounts disabled after the AI falsely flagged ordinary content — including family photos of children at swimming pools or on holiday — as child sexual exploitation material. The accusations are not just incorrect; they are deeply damaging to the people they target. Users who have never posted anything remotely inappropriate find themselves branded with the most serious violation Meta's system can assign, with no way to contest the accusation and no human moderator reviewing the decision before it is enforced. Creators And Small Businesses Hit Hardest For Instagram creators in India's Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities who built their entire livelihood on the platform — selling products, running coaching businesses, building personal brands — a wrongful ban is not an inconvenience. It is an economic catastrophe. Years of content, followers, brand relationships, and revenue disappear in an instant. The same is true for small businesses that use Instagram as their primary sales and marketing channel. When the AI disables their account, their customer base is cut off overnight with no warning and no recourse. Meanwhile, the platform continues to reward AI-generated bot accounts with verification badges and algorithmic visibility, making the gap between how Meta treats real humans and synthetic accounts impossible to ignore. No Human To Call, No Appeal That Works Meta's Oversight Board explicitly recommended that the company provide users with a meaningful appeals process that allows written explanations, notify users when AI systems are responsible for enforcement decisions, and create a dashboard where users can review their violation history and understand what happened. These recommendations exist because none of these things currently exist. A creator whose account is wrongfully disabled today has no customer support number to call, no email that leads to a human reviewer, and no transparent process for challenging the decision. The appeals button inside the app leads, in most reported cases, to an automated response that upholds the original decision — made by the same AI system that got it wrong in the first place. The Leadership Question Mark Zuckerberg built Instagram into a platform that billions of people depend on — for expression, for community, for income, for identity. He then made the decision to gut the human moderation infrastructure, replace it with AI systems that are demonstrably failing at scale, and continue spending $145 billion on AI infrastructure while the AI already deployed on his platforms is actively destroying the trust and livelihoods of the people who use them. When asked about the return on investment from Meta's AI spending, Zuckerberg called it ‘a very technical question.’ For the creators, small business owners, and ordinary users whose accounts and incomes have been erased by his AI systems, it is not a technical question at all. It is a question of leadership — and whether the person responsible for building these platforms is still the right person to be running them.

Across the world, Instagram creators, small business owners, and ordinary users are watching their accounts — and livelihoods — vanish overnight at the hands of Meta's AI moderation system. The AI bans real people while verified bot accounts thrive. Meta's own Oversight Board says the system lacks due process. Nearly 56,000 people have signed a petition against wrongful bans. And when it all goes wrong, there is no human to call, no appeal that works, and no accountability from the man who built it.

'Resign Zuckerberg': Meta AI has destroyed millions of lives in last 2 months

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the company's large-scale AI restructuring included mistakes, months after thousands of employees lost their jobs or were moved into new roles. In an internal memo seen by Reuters, Zuckerberg told staff that Meta's transition towards becoming an AI-first company had not been perfect. He said the company would likely make more mistakes as it continues adapting to rapid technological change, but stressed that Meta is trying to provide stability for employees.&nbsp;The comments come after one of the biggest organisational changes in the company's recent history.<h2>Why Meta cut 8,000 jobs</h2>Earlier this year, Meta laid off around 10 per cent of its workforce, affecting roughly 8,000 employees. The company also reassigned about 7,000 workers to AI-related projects and workflows as part of a wider effort to reorganise around artificial intelligence.At the end of March, Meta employed nearly 78,000 people globally. Reports suggest that the combined layoffs and workforce reshuffling may have directly affected around one-fifth of the company's employees.The restructuring is part of Zuckerberg's broader strategy to position Meta as a leading AI company.<h2>Zuckerberg admits the transition has not been smooth</h2>In the memo, Zuckerberg acknowledged the difficulties involved in such a large transformation. "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," he told employees. The admission offers a rare glimpse into the challenges facing major technology firms as they race to integrate AI across products, services and internal operations. Meta has invested billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, advanced models, computing capacity and specialised talent. The company is also exploring AI agents that could automate tasks traditionally handled by human employees. While executives argue that AI will unlock new opportunities, the transition has also created uncertainty for workers across the technology sector.<h2>No more company-wide layoffs expected this year</h2>Alongside acknowledging mistakes, Zuckerberg attempted to reassure employees about their future at the company. According to the memo, Meta does not currently expect any additional company-wide layoffs this year.However, he stopped short of making firm guarantees."I don't want to overpromise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our control," Zuckerberg said.He added that Meta would continue looking for opportunities for employees who had been reassigned to help train and support AI systems.<h2>Meta's next step: More AI and more collaboration</h2>The company appears determined to continue its AI transformation despite the challenges. Zuckerberg said creating new AI-focused roles had given Meta greater flexibility. It allowed the company to reduce the size of some teams while retaining the ability to move employees back into different positions if needed.To improve morale and collaboration, Meta plans to increase spending on team-building activities, company events and offsite gatherings.The company is also preparing a large hackathon in July aimed at encouraging employees from different teams to work together on new AI projects and products.<h2>What this means for the wider tech industry</h2>Meta's experience highlights a growing reality across Silicon Valley. Technology companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence while simultaneously reshaping their workforces. Some roles are disappearing, others are changing and entirely new positions are being created. Zuckerberg's admission suggests that even the world's biggest technology firms are still working out how best to navigate the AI transition. For employees, investors and competitors, Meta's next moves may offer an important indication of how AI will reshape the future workplace.

Mark Zuckerberg has admitted Meta made mistakes during its AI-led restructuring after laying off around 8,000 employees and reassigning thousands more. The CEO says no further company-wide layoffs are expected this year as Meta continues its push to become an AI-first company.


Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the company's large-scale AI restructuring included mistakes, months after thousands of employees lost their jobs or were moved into new roles. In an internal memo seen by Reuters, Zuckerberg told staff that Meta's transition towards becoming an AI-first company had not been perfect. He said the company would likely make more mistakes as it continues adapting to rapid technological change, but stressed that Meta is trying to provide stability for employees. The comments come after one of the biggest organisational changes in the company's recent history. Why Meta cut 8,000 jobs Earlier this year, Meta laid off around 10 per cent of its workforce, affecting roughly 8,000 employees. The company also reassigned about 7,000 workers to AI-related projects and workflows as part of a wider effort to reorganise around artificial intelligence. At the end of March, Meta employed nearly 78,000 people globally. Reports suggest that the combined layoffs and workforce reshuffling may have directly affected around one-fifth of the company's employees. The restructuring is part of Zuckerberg's broader strategy to position Meta as a leading AI company. Zuckerberg admits the transition has not been smooth In the memo, Zuckerberg acknowledged the difficulties involved in such a large transformation. "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," he told employees. The admission offers a rare glimpse into the challenges facing major technology firms as they race to integrate AI across products, services and internal operations. Meta has invested billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, advanced models, computing capacity and specialised talent. The company is also exploring AI agents that could automate tasks traditionally handled by human employees. While executives argue that AI will unlock new opportunities, the transition has also created uncertainty for workers across the technology sector. No more company-wide layoffs expected this year Alongside acknowledging mistakes, Zuckerberg attempted to reassure employees about their future at the company. According to the memo, Meta does not currently expect any additional company-wide layoffs this year. However, he stopped short of making firm guarantees. "I don't want to overpromise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our control," Zuckerberg said. He added that Meta would continue looking for opportunities for employees who had been reassigned to help train and support AI systems. Meta's next step: More AI and more collaboration The company appears determined to continue its AI transformation despite the challenges. Zuckerberg said creating new AI-focused roles had given Meta greater flexibility. It allowed the company to reduce the size of some teams while retaining the ability to move employees back into different positions if needed. To improve morale and collaboration, Meta plans to increase spending on team-building activities, company events and offsite gatherings. The company is also preparing a large hackathon in July aimed at encouraging employees from different teams to work together on new AI projects and products. What this means for the wider tech industry Meta's experience highlights a growing reality across Silicon Valley. Technology companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence while simultaneously reshaping their workforces. Some roles are disappearing, others are changing and entirely new positions are being created. Zuckerberg's admission suggests that even the world's biggest technology firms are still working out how best to navigate the AI transition. For employees, investors and competitors, Meta's next moves may offer an important indication of how AI will reshape the future workplace.

Mark Zuckerberg has admitted Meta made mistakes during its AI-led restructuring after laying off around 8,000 employees and reassigning thousands more. The CEO says no further company-wide layoffs are expected this year as Meta continues its push to become an AI-first company.

Zuckerberg admits errors in Meta's AI transition, says no more company-wide layoffs are expected this year

Instagram is dying. Not slowly, not gracefully, and not because a better platform came along. It is being murdered from the inside by its own parent company. Meta's relentless, tone-deaf integration of AI into every corner of the Instagram experience is achieving something no competitor ever could, it is making users actively hate the platform. And if the current trajectory holds, industry analysts believe Instagram could face a user collapse of historic proportions within the next few months.&nbsp;The AI Nobody Wanted&nbsp;Meta AI was not something Instagram users asked for. Nobody opened their DMs hoping a chatbot would insert itself into private conversations. Nobody searched for a restaurant recommendation expecting an AI hallucination instead of real user reviews. Nobody wanted their Explore page flooded with AI-generated slop that the algorithm now prioritises over content from human creators they actually follow. Yet this is exactly what Meta has delivered and it has done so with zero option to opt out.&nbsp;The backlash is not theoretical. It is measurable. App analytics firms have reported a sharp decline in daily active usage time on Instagram across key demographics in India, the United States, and Europe. Users are not just complaining on X, they are closing the app. The average session duration has dropped as users encounter AI-generated content, AI chatbot interruptions, and an increasingly impersonal feed that feels less like a social network and more like a content farm run by machines.&nbsp;Creators Are Leaving And Taking Their Audiences With Them&nbsp;The creator economy was Instagram's lifeline. Influencers, photographers, artists, small businesses, and educators built the content that kept billions of users engaged. Meta is now systematically destroying that relationship. Legitimate creator accounts are being flagged, restricted, and banned by automated moderation systems that cannot distinguish between a real human and a policy violation invented by an algorithm. Meanwhile, AI-generated bot accounts with stolen or synthetic content are thriving, many even receiving verified blue tick badges.&nbsp;The message to creators is unmistakable: you are replaceable, and Meta would prefer you were replaced. Creators with millions of followers are publicly announcing moves to YouTube, Substack, and emerging platforms. When creators leave, their audiences follow. This is not a leak, it is a structural collapse of the content supply chain that Instagram depends on to exist.&nbsp;Privacy Is the Final Straw&nbsp;Every interaction with Meta AI feeds data back into Meta's training pipeline. Users who never consented to having their messages, searches, and browsing patterns processed by an AI system are discovering that Meta has quietly enrolled them anyway. In the European Union, regulators have already moved to block Meta AI training on user data. In India, where over 350 million people use Instagram, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act creates similar legal exposure that Meta has so far ignored.&nbsp;For privacy-conscious users, a demographic that grows larger with every data scandal, the presence of an always-on, always-listening AI layer inside their social media app is not a feature. It is a reason to delete the app entirely. And they are doing exactly that.&nbsp;The Network Effect in Reverse&nbsp;Instagram's greatest strength was always the network effect, people joined because everyone they knew was already there. But network effects work in both directions. When enough people leave, the remaining users find less value, fewer connections, and less reason to stay. Meta AI is accelerating this reverse network effect at unprecedented speed. Every bot account that replaces a real user, every creator that migrates to another platform, and every casual user that reduces their screen time chips away at the critical mass that keeps Instagram relevant.&nbsp;History shows that social platforms can collapse faster than anyone predicts. MySpace went from 115 million users to irrelevance in under two years. Tumblr lost 30 percent of its traffic in months after a single policy change. Instagram, despite its massive scale, is not immune to the same dynamics, especially when the damage is being inflicted by the company that owns it.&nbsp;Mark Zuckerberg is betting that AI will be the future of social media. He may be right about the industry. But he is catastrophically wrong about forcing that future onto a platform whose entire value proposition was built on real human connection. If Meta does not reverse course on AI integration immediately, Instagram will not just lose users, it will lose its reason to exist.

Meta AI is driving users away from Instagram at record pace. Forced AI integration, creator bans, bot accounts, and privacy violations could trigger a catastrophic user collapse within months.

Instagram is dying. Not slowly, not gracefully, and not because a better platform came along. It is being murdered from the inside by its own parent company. Meta's relentless, tone-deaf integration of AI into every corner of the Instagram experience is achieving something no competitor ever could, it is making users actively hate the platform. And if the current trajectory holds, industry analysts believe Instagram could face a user collapse of historic proportions within the next few months. The AI Nobody Wanted Meta AI was not something Instagram users asked for. Nobody opened their DMs hoping a chatbot would insert itself into private conversations. Nobody searched for a restaurant recommendation expecting an AI hallucination instead of real user reviews. Nobody wanted their Explore page flooded with AI-generated slop that the algorithm now prioritises over content from human creators they actually follow. Yet this is exactly what Meta has delivered and it has done so with zero option to opt out. The backlash is not theoretical. It is measurable. App analytics firms have reported a sharp decline in daily active usage time on Instagram across key demographics in India, the United States, and Europe. Users are not just complaining on X, they are closing the app. The average session duration has dropped as users encounter AI-generated content, AI chatbot interruptions, and an increasingly impersonal feed that feels less like a social network and more like a content farm run by machines. Creators Are Leaving And Taking Their Audiences With Them The creator economy was Instagram's lifeline. Influencers, photographers, artists, small businesses, and educators built the content that kept billions of users engaged. Meta is now systematically destroying that relationship. Legitimate creator accounts are being flagged, restricted, and banned by automated moderation systems that cannot distinguish between a real human and a policy violation invented by an algorithm. Meanwhile, AI-generated bot accounts with stolen or synthetic content are thriving, many even receiving verified blue tick badges. The message to creators is unmistakable: you are replaceable, and Meta would prefer you were replaced. Creators with millions of followers are publicly announcing moves to YouTube, Substack, and emerging platforms. When creators leave, their audiences follow. This is not a leak, it is a structural collapse of the content supply chain that Instagram depends on to exist. Privacy Is the Final Straw Every interaction with Meta AI feeds data back into Meta's training pipeline. Users who never consented to having their messages, searches, and browsing patterns processed by an AI system are discovering that Meta has quietly enrolled them anyway. In the European Union, regulators have already moved to block Meta AI training on user data. In India, where over 350 million people use Instagram, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act creates similar legal exposure that Meta has so far ignored. For privacy-conscious users, a demographic that grows larger with every data scandal, the presence of an always-on, always-listening AI layer inside their social media app is not a feature. It is a reason to delete the app entirely. And they are doing exactly that. The Network Effect in Reverse Instagram's greatest strength was always the network effect, people joined because everyone they knew was already there. But network effects work in both directions. When enough people leave, the remaining users find less value, fewer connections, and less reason to stay. Meta AI is accelerating this reverse network effect at unprecedented speed. Every bot account that replaces a real user, every creator that migrates to another platform, and every casual user that reduces their screen time chips away at the critical mass that keeps Instagram relevant. History shows that social platforms can collapse faster than anyone predicts. MySpace went from 115 million users to irrelevance in under two years. Tumblr lost 30 percent of its traffic in months after a single policy change. Instagram, despite its massive scale, is not immune to the same dynamics, especially when the damage is being inflicted by the company that owns it. Mark Zuckerberg is betting that AI will be the future of social media. He may be right about the industry. But he is catastrophically wrong about forcing that future onto a platform whose entire value proposition was built on real human connection. If Meta does not reverse course on AI integration immediately, Instagram will not just lose users, it will lose its reason to exist.

Meta AI is driving a mass exodus from Instagram. Forced AI integration, rampant bot accounts, creator bans, and privacy violations are pushing millions of real users to the edge. Industry experts warn Instagram could face a catastrophic user collapse within months.

Meta AI could wipe out entire Instagram to ZERO users in coming months! Here's why

Mark Zuckerberg is failing again. This time, the consequences are not just financial, they are destroying the livelihoods of millions of real people who built their lives on Instagram. Across the world, authentic creators, small business owners, and everyday users are watching their accounts get suspended, restricted, or permanently deleted without warning, without appeal, and without explanation. Meanwhile, a swarm of AI-generated bots, hollow accounts posting synthetic content, are not only surviving Meta's moderation system but are actively being rewarded with coveted blue tick verification badges. This is not a glitch. This is Meta's strategy.&nbsp;The Instagram Identity Crisis&nbsp;In the past six months alone, Instagram has disabled thousands of genuine accounts in India citing vague Community Standards violations, accounts with years of original content, real followers, and legitimate income streams. Creators who built audiences of hundreds of thousands have woken up to find their digital businesses erased overnight. At the same time, Meta has been aggressively pushing its AI-generated content tools and quietly allowing AI bot accounts to flourish on the platform. The implicit message from Meta's algorithm is chilling: a bot that never complains, never asks for monetisation, and never pushes back is more valuable to them than a human being.&nbsp;Meta AI: A Rip-Off Nobody Asked For&nbsp;Into this chaotic landscape, Zuckerberg has dropped Meta AI and the reaction from users and industry experts has been uniformly brutal. Described by commentators as a low-quality imitation of ChatGPT and Gemini, Meta AI is slow, frequently inaccurate, and deeply invasive. It has been embedded without consent into WhatsApp conversations, Instagram DMs, and Facebook feeds, appearing uninvited in private chats and injecting itself into searches users never intended for an AI to answer.&nbsp;The product quality is not the only problem. Meta AI's data practices are alarming. Every interaction with the tool potentially feeds into Meta's AI training infrastructure, the same infrastructure that regulators in the EU have already moved to restrict. In a country like India, where the Digital Personal Data Protection Act is still finding its feet, millions of users are being onboarded onto Meta's AI ecosystem with zero understanding of what data they are surrendering.&nbsp;Zuckerberg's Two-Decade Track Record of Failure&nbsp;The uncomfortable truth that Meta's board and investors must now confront is that Mark Zuckerberg has an extraordinary record of destroying every major product line he has touched beyond his original Facebook clone. Facebook's organic reach was killed to force paid advertising. Instagram's chronological feed was replaced by an engagement-baiting algorithm that now actively harms mental health. WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption promise has been steadily eroded. The metaverse, a 46 billion dollar hallucination, is a global joke. And now Meta AI, launched as Zuckerberg's bid to stay relevant in the generative AI race, is being deployed not to help users but to replace them.&nbsp;The Cost on Real People&nbsp;Behind every deleted Instagram account is a real economic loss. Small businesses in Tier 2 and Tier 3 Indian cities that used Instagram as their primary sales channel are being wiped out by algorithmic decisions they cannot contest. Influencers who spent years building communities are being silenced. The digital economy that Instagram promised to democratise is being systematically handed over to synthetic accounts that serve Meta's data-harvesting objectives far more efficiently than inconvenient human users.&nbsp;It is time for Meta's board to ask the hard question: at what point does visionary leadership become delusional mismanagement? Mark Zuckerberg has failed at search, failed at mobile, failed at hardware, failed at the metaverse, and is now failing at AI while simultaneously destroying the one product, Instagram, that was still genuinely beloved. The answer, for the good of the millions of users whose digital lives depend on this platform, may simply be that it is time for new leadership.

Instagram is killing real accounts while AI bots get verified. Meta AI is a failed product. Mark Zuckerberg has failed at every major pivot and this time it may cost him the company.

Mark Zuckerberg is failing again. This time, the consequences are not just financial, they are destroying the livelihoods of millions of real people who built their lives on Instagram. Across the world, authentic creators, small business owners, and everyday users are watching their accounts get suspended, restricted, or permanently deleted without warning, without appeal, and without explanation. Meanwhile, a swarm of AI-generated bots, hollow accounts posting synthetic content, are not only surviving Meta's moderation system but are actively being rewarded with coveted blue tick verification badges. This is not a glitch. This is Meta's strategy. The Instagram Identity Crisis In the past six months alone, Instagram has disabled thousands of genuine accounts in India citing vague Community Standards violations, accounts with years of original content, real followers, and legitimate income streams. Creators who built audiences of hundreds of thousands have woken up to find their digital businesses erased overnight. At the same time, Meta has been aggressively pushing its AI-generated content tools and quietly allowing AI bot accounts to flourish on the platform. The implicit message from Meta's algorithm is chilling: a bot that never complains, never asks for monetisation, and never pushes back is more valuable to them than a human being. Meta AI: A Rip-Off Nobody Asked For Into this chaotic landscape, Zuckerberg has dropped Meta AI and the reaction from users and industry experts has been uniformly brutal. Described by commentators as a low-quality imitation of ChatGPT and Gemini, Meta AI is slow, frequently inaccurate, and deeply invasive. It has been embedded without consent into WhatsApp conversations, Instagram DMs, and Facebook feeds, appearing uninvited in private chats and injecting itself into searches users never intended for an AI to answer. The product quality is not the only problem. Meta AI's data practices are alarming. Every interaction with the tool potentially feeds into Meta's AI training infrastructure, the same infrastructure that regulators in the EU have already moved to restrict. In a country like India, where the Digital Personal Data Protection Act is still finding its feet, millions of users are being onboarded onto Meta's AI ecosystem with zero understanding of what data they are surrendering. Zuckerberg's Two-Decade Track Record of Failure The uncomfortable truth that Meta's board and investors must now confront is that Mark Zuckerberg has an extraordinary record of destroying every major product line he has touched beyond his original Facebook clone. Facebook's organic reach was killed to force paid advertising. Instagram's chronological feed was replaced by an engagement-baiting algorithm that now actively harms mental health. WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption promise has been steadily eroded. The metaverse, a 46 billion dollar hallucination, is a global joke. And now Meta AI, launched as Zuckerberg's bid to stay relevant in the generative AI race, is being deployed not to help users but to replace them. The Cost on Real People Behind every deleted Instagram account is a real economic loss. Small businesses in Tier 2 and Tier 3 Indian cities that used Instagram as their primary sales channel are being wiped out by algorithmic decisions they cannot contest. Influencers who spent years building communities are being silenced. The digital economy that Instagram promised to democratise is being systematically handed over to synthetic accounts that serve Meta's data-harvesting objectives far more efficiently than inconvenient human users. It is time for Meta's board to ask the hard question: at what point does visionary leadership become delusional mismanagement? Mark Zuckerberg has failed at search, failed at mobile, failed at hardware, failed at the metaverse, and is now failing at AI while simultaneously destroying the one product, Instagram, that was still genuinely beloved. The answer, for the good of the millions of users whose digital lives depend on this platform, may simply be that it is time for new leadership.

Instagram is banning real creators while AI bots with blue ticks thrive. Meta AI is a laughingstock. Mark Zuckerberg has failed at every major product pivot in two decades and this time, his AI obsession may finally kill the company

'Meta AI is a low-quality rip-off': Why Mark Zuckerberg should resign after Instagram debacle

Leaked audio by labour-focused media organisation More Perfect Union from an April 30 town hall reveals Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that its employees were used to train AI data. In the audio it Zuckerberg could be hard explaining that the company’s new artificial intelligence data tracking program was a way to “learn from watching really smart people do things.” The audio surfaced as Meta has begun laying off roughly 8,000 employees, 10 per cent of its workforce. In the recording, Zuckerberg defended a mandatory internal software program that logs employee keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen snapshots.Zuckerberg explicitly told employees that the average intelligence of the Meta employees was “significantly higher” than that of the outside contractors typically hired for data labelling. “So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company," said Zuckerberg. Meta did not spell out or clarified on the whole process because “this stuff is tricky” &nbsp;and “not strategically in your interest for us to communicate everything” so that competitors could not catch on.Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/nvidia-q1-fy2027-record-revenue-ai-boom-data-centre-growth-1779368905223">NVIDIA posts record $81.6 billion revenue: Why NVIDIA is the biggest winner of the global AI boom</a>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he&#39;s training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs. &quot;The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is… <a href="https://t.co/lt9eeJ3cwh">pic.twitter.com/lt9eeJ3cwh</a>&mdash; More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) <a href="https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/2056842597117636890?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 19, 2026</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Meta has laid off 8,000 active positions and cancelled 6,000 open job roles in European and US offices, as the company is redirecting between $125 billion and $145 billion into AI infrastructure and data centres this year alone. Meta is further assigning 7,000 workers to four new organisations focused on developing AI tools. They will be moved to a new segment of the “AI native design structures” where the employee-to-manager ratio will be smaller than in other organisations.&nbsp;The NYT earlier reported that employees were sceptical about the AI tracking program and expressed fear that they would unknowingly train models that would replace them. The tracking program known as the Model Capability Initiative runs across apps like Gmail, VSCode, and Meta’s internal assistant, Metamate. When employees asked how to opt out, Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth responded bluntly, "There is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop."

Leaked audio reveals Mark Zuckerberg saying Meta employees were used to train AI models through internal tracking software, as the company lays off 8,000 workers and ramps up AI investments.

Leaked audio by labour-focused media organisation More Perfect Union from an April 30 town hall reveals Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that its employees were used to train AI data. In the audio it Zuckerberg could be hard explaining that the company’s new artificial intelligence data tracking program was a way to “learn from watching really smart people do things.” The audio surfaced as Meta has begun laying off roughly 8,000 employees, 10 per cent of its workforce. In the recording, Zuckerberg defended a mandatory internal software program that logs employee keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen snapshots. Zuckerberg explicitly told employees that the average intelligence of the Meta employees was “significantly higher” than that of the outside contractors typically hired for data labelling. “So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company," said Zuckerberg. Meta did not spell out or clarified on the whole process because “this stuff is tricky” and “not strategically in your interest for us to communicate everything” so that competitors could not catch on. Also Read: NVIDIA posts record $81.6 billion revenue: Why NVIDIA is the biggest winner of the global AI boom

Leaked audio reveals Mark Zuckerberg saying Meta employees were used to train AI models through internal tracking software, as the company lays off 8,000 workers and ramps up AI investments.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says 'smart' employees used to train AI models in viral audio

In March, a court verdict in U.S. took tech giants by a storm. It held Meta accountable for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people. Meta has now challenged this verdict, citing a federal law which exempts online platforms from liability for user-generated content. 

Meta Appeals Against Verdict Holding It Accountable for Social Media Addiction

A US jury has delivered a landmark verdict against Meta, finding the tech giant negligent over its platform design alongside Google in a case that could reshape the future of social media regulation. Meta has been ordered to pay $4.2 million in damages, sparking fresh debate around online safety, algorithm-driven engagement, and corporate accountability. The ruling is being seen as a major legal moment that could influence future lawsuits against Big Tech companies worldwide.


Meta Ordered To Pay $4.2 Million In Damages

Meta is reportedly developing an advanced AI version of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg as part of its broader push into artificial intelligence and digital assistants. The AI model is expected to simulate Zuckerberg’s communication style, decision-making patterns, and public interactions, potentially being used for internal tools, user engagement, and product demonstrations across Meta’s platforms.


Meta Developing AI Version of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Meta has announced a new company-wide initiative aimed at supporting entrepreneurs and expanding the use of artificial intelligence among small businesses.The programme, called Meta Small Business, will focus on helping entrepreneurs build and grow businesses using digital tools and AI technologies across Meta’s platforms. According to a report by Axios, the initiative is part of Meta’s broader effort to encourage innovation and make it easier for people to start businesses in the AI era.<h2>Why Meta is focusing on small businesses</h2>In a memo to employees, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said small businesses have always been central to the company’s ecosystem.Millions of entrepreneurs already rely on Meta platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to connect with customers, advertise products and run online stores.Zuckerberg noted that artificial intelligence could make starting and managing a business easier than before.

“In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses,” he wrote in the memo.He added that Meta wants to build services that allow more people to participate in the economic opportunities created by advanced technology.<h2>What the Meta Small Business initiative will do</h2>The new programme will focus on developing tools and services that help entrepreneurs operate more efficiently.These may include:AI tools for marketing and customer communicationBetter advertising systems for small businessesAutomated customer support solutionsData insights to understand customer behaviourMeta believes such tools can help small companies compete more effectively in digital markets.Industry reports suggest that tens of millions of businesses worldwide already depend on Meta’s platforms for advertising and communication.<h2>Leadership and internal support</h2>The initiative will be led by Dina Powell McCormick, who serves as President and Vice Chairman at Meta. She will work alongside Naomi Gleit, the company’s Head of Product. Zuckerberg has also invited employees across departments including product managers, engineers and designers to participate in the project if they are interested. This approach suggests Meta wants the initiative to involve teams from across the company.<h2>AI and entrepreneurship: A growing trend</h2>The announcement reflects a wider shift in the technology sector. Companies are increasingly exploring how artificial intelligence can support entrepreneurs and small firms.AI tools are already being used to:generate marketing contentanalyse customer dataautomate routine business tasksbuild online storefrontsAccording to several industry studies, AI adoption among small businesses has been increasing rapidly over the past few years.Technology companies believe easier access to AI could help create new businesses and jobs.<h2>What this means for the future</h2>Meta’s new initiative shows how large technology firms are trying to position artificial intelligence as a tool for economic growth rather than only a research technology. By focusing on entrepreneurs, the company aims to strengthen its ecosystem of businesses that rely on its platforms.For small business owners, the programme could mean new AI-powered tools designed to simplify operations and reach more customers online.As artificial intelligence continues to expand across industries, initiatives like Meta Small Business may play an important role in helping entrepreneurs adapt to the changing digital economy.

Meta has launched a new initiative called Meta Small Business to help entrepreneurs grow using AI and digital tools across platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Announced by Mark Zuckerberg, the programme aims to make it easier for people to start businesses in the AI era. 

Meta has announced a new company-wide initiative aimed at supporting entrepreneurs and expanding the use of artificial intelligence among small businesses. The programme, called Meta Small Business, will focus on helping entrepreneurs build and grow businesses using digital tools and AI technologies across Meta’s platforms. According to a report by Axios, the initiative is part of Meta’s broader effort to encourage innovation and make it easier for people to start businesses in the AI era. Why Meta is focusing on small businesses In a memo to employees, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said small businesses have always been central to the company’s ecosystem. Millions of entrepreneurs already rely on Meta platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to connect with customers, advertise products and run online stores. Zuckerberg noted that artificial intelligence could make starting and managing a business easier than before.

Meta has launched a new initiative called Meta Small Business to help entrepreneurs grow using AI and digital tools across platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Announced by Mark Zuckerberg, the programme aims to make it easier for people to start businesses in the AI era.&nbsp;

‘AI era opportunity’: Meta launches initiative to support small businesses and expand AI adoption

Forget the millionaire next door. The top 0.001% have found a new address. It comes with its own bridge, boats and billion-dollar bragging rights. Welcome to Indian Creek Island.


Indian Creek Island: 1% Club Bets On Billionaire Bunkers | World Business Watch

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday he regretted Meta's slow progress in identifying underage users on Instagram, as he faced stinging criticism at a landmark social media trial over accusations that his company deliberately hooked children.Asked to comment on complaints from inside the company that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform, the 41-year-old head of Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, said improvements had been made.But "I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner," he added.Zuckerberg was the most hotly anticipated witness in the California trial, the first in a series of lawsuits filed by American families against social media platforms.The trial marked the first time the multibillionaire addressed the safety of his world-dominating platforms directly before a jury and under oath.Zuckerberg was very reserved at first, an AFP journalist in the courtroom reported. But he grew animated, showing signs of annoyance, shaking his head and waving his hands as he turned toward the jury.The 12 jurors in Los Angeles heard the increasingly testy testimony as plaintiff lawyer Mark Lanier pressed Zuckerberg on age verification and the tycoon's guiding philosophy for making decisions at the vast social media company he controls.During questioning by his own lawyers, a more relaxed Zuckerberg described time spent on the app as a "side effect" of a quality experience and often addressed the jurors directly to emphasise his points.He also stressed his belief that Apple and Google, the companies behind operating systems powering most of the world's smartphones, should arrange for age verification at the handset level instead of leaving it to each app."Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately," Zuckerberg said."It would be pretty easy for them."Zuckerberg faced a barrage of internal emails, including warnings from colleagues that age verification was not fit for purpose and others that seemed to plainly display that encouraging more time spent on Instagram was long a central goal of the company.The trial is set to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, as well as Google-owned YouTube, bear responsibility for the mental health problems suffered by Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old California resident who has been a heavy social media user since childhood.Kaley G.M. started using YouTube at age six, Instagram at nine, then TikTok and Snapchat.Under-13s are not allowed on Instagram, and Lanier pressed Zuckerberg on the fact that Kaley had easily signed up for the platform.<h2>‘Right place now’</h2>Zuckerberg was confronted with an internal document that said Instagram had four million users under 13 in 2015, at the time the plaintiff adopted the app, and that 30 percent of all children age 10 to 12, or "tweens," in the United States were users.Zuckerberg said that "we're in the right place now" when it comes to age verification.Lanier went on to argue that young people like Kaley were subject to Meta's efforts to increase time spent on its wildly popular apps, despite Zuckerberg having told the US Congress under oath that this was not the case.Faced with emails displaying internal targets for usage, Zuckerberg admitted that "we used to have goals around time," but that the company's aim was always to "build useful services" that connected people.Zuckerberg was also read an old email from former head of public policy Nick Clegg that said "the fact that we say we don't allow under-13s on our platform, yet have no way of enforcing it, is just indefensible."The trial is set to determine whether Google and Meta deliberately designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use among young people, damaging their mental health in the process.The case is expected to establish a standard for resolving thousands of lawsuits that blame social media for fueling an epidemic of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide among young people.TikTok and Snapchat, also named in the complaint, reached settlements with the plaintiff before the trial began.

The trial marked the first time the multibillionaire addressed the safety of his world-dominating platforms directly before a jury and under oath.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday he regretted Meta's slow progress in identifying underage users on Instagram, as he faced stinging criticism at a landmark social media trial over accusations that his company deliberately hooked children. Asked to comment on complaints from inside the company that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform, the 41-year-old head of Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, said improvements had been made. But "I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner," he added. Zuckerberg was the most hotly anticipated witness in the California trial, the first in a series of lawsuits filed by American families against social media platforms. The trial marked the first time the multibillionaire addressed the safety of his world-dominating platforms directly before a jury and under oath. Zuckerberg was very reserved at first, an AFP journalist in the courtroom reported. But he grew animated, showing signs of annoyance, shaking his head and waving his hands as he turned toward the jury. The 12 jurors in Los Angeles heard the increasingly testy testimony as plaintiff lawyer Mark Lanier pressed Zuckerberg on age verification and the tycoon's guiding philosophy for making decisions at the vast social media company he controls. During questioning by his own lawyers, a more relaxed Zuckerberg described time spent on the app as a "side effect" of a quality experience and often addressed the jurors directly to emphasise his points. He also stressed his belief that Apple and Google, the companies behind operating systems powering most of the world's smartphones, should arrange for age verification at the handset level instead of leaving it to each app. "Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately," Zuckerberg said. "It would be pretty easy for them." Zuckerberg faced a barrage of internal emails, including warnings from colleagues that age verification was not fit for purpose and others that seemed to plainly display that encouraging more time spent on Instagram was long a central goal of the company. The trial is set to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, as well as Google-owned YouTube, bear responsibility for the mental health problems suffered by Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old California resident who has been a heavy social media user since childhood. Kaley G.M. started using YouTube at age six, Instagram at nine, then TikTok and Snapchat. Under-13s are not allowed on Instagram, and Lanier pressed Zuckerberg on the fact that Kaley had easily signed up for the platform. ‘Right place now’ Zuckerberg was confronted with an internal document that said Instagram had four million users under 13 in 2015, at the time the plaintiff adopted the app, and that 30 percent of all children age 10 to 12, or "tweens," in the United States were users. Zuckerberg said that "we're in the right place now" when it comes to age verification. Lanier went on to argue that young people like Kaley were subject to Meta's efforts to increase time spent on its wildly popular apps, despite Zuckerberg having told the US Congress under oath that this was not the case. Faced with emails displaying internal targets for usage, Zuckerberg admitted that "we used to have goals around time," but that the company's aim was always to "build useful services" that connected people. Zuckerberg was also read an old email from former head of public policy Nick Clegg that said "the fact that we say we don't allow under-13s on our platform, yet have no way of enforcing it, is just indefensible." The trial is set to determine whether Google and Meta deliberately designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use among young people, damaging their mental health in the process. The case is expected to establish a standard for resolving thousands of lawsuits that blame social media for fueling an epidemic of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide among young people. TikTok and Snapchat, also named in the complaint, reached settlements with the plaintiff before the trial began.

The trial marked the first time the multibillionaire addressed the safety of his world-dominating platforms directly before a jury and under oath.

Meta CEO Zuckerberg grilled over underage users on Instagram at social media trial

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in federal court to defend Instagram against explosive allegations that the platform was deliberately designed to be addictive to children and teenagers. The high-stakes case marks the first time Zuckerberg has testified before a jury specifically about child safety and the mental health impact of social media.


Meta Trial: Zuckerberg Defends Big Tech, Cites 'Strategy Shift' On App Time

Jeffrey Epstein sat down for a dinner with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and others, describing it as "wild". A photo of the late financier with them was released in the latest tranche of Epstein Files. He mentions the dinner in an email while responding to a message dated Aug. 20, 2015, from billionaire Tom Pritzker. "Are you in NY Aug 27?" Pritzker asks Epstein in the email, to which the sex offender responded, "Not sure yet. i had dinner with Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel Hoffman, wild." Peter Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, while Reid Hoffman is the LinkedIn co-founder. The email is part of the Department of Justice’s files on Epstein, with over 3 million new documents released on January 30. The dinner happened years after Epstein was convicted for producring a minor for prostitution. The vast inventory of emails and pictures is throwing up a lot of fresh information about Epstein and his actions. Several high-profile names also feature in the documents, although they are not proof of wrongdoing.<h2>Who threw the dinner with Epstein and Zuckerberg?</h2>This dinner is not a revelation since it was public knowledge at the time it happened in 2015. Vanity Fair reported at the time that Hoffman hosted it in Palo Alto for MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden, and Elon Musk is said to have introduced Zuckerberg and Epstein that evening. At the time, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg told the outlet, “Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honouring scientists that was not organised by Epstein. Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.”Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/trending/super-bowl-2026-epstein-victims-demand-release-of-more-secret-files-in-ad-1770607722410">Super Bowl 2026: Epstein victims demand release of more secret files in ad - 'IT'S TIME FOR...'</a>&nbsp;Meanwhile, Musk denied introducing Epstein to Zuckerberg, saying, "I don’t know the guy well enough to do so." He added, "Epstein is obviously a creep, and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine." Hoffman sent a follow-up email to Zuckerberg and Epstein days later, with the subject line “intros,” according to the new files. "Jeffrey, Zuck, email connections from the Ed Boyden dinner -- so that convo can continue."Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/epstein-files-steve-bannon-china-links-antisemitic-jewish-dog-1770550275092">Epstein Files reveal email quoting 'Jewish dog' in Steve Bannon conversation</a><h2>Photos of high-profile figures in Epstein Files</h2>The documents show that Musk expressed interest in visiting Epstein’s notorious private island. He asked to attend Epstein's "wildest party", according to an email released as part of the Epstein Files. Meanwhile, there are images of Bill Gates with girls, former US President Bill Clinton in a pool, former Prince Andrew, and others. Bill Gates can be seen in two photos with two girls, and he allegedly contracted a sexually transmitted disease from Russian girls. Bill Clinton can be seen in a pool with Ghislaine Maxwell and another unidentified woman.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was mentioned in an email carried in the Epstein Files. Jeffrey Epstein talked about a “wild” dinner, which Zuckerberg and Elon Musk also attended. Epstein bragged about being there in an email.

Jeffrey Epstein sat down for a dinner with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and others, describing it as "wild". A photo of the late financier with them was released in the latest tranche of Epstein Files. He mentions the dinner in an email while responding to a message dated Aug. 20, 2015, from billionaire Tom Pritzker. "Are you in NY Aug 27?" Pritzker asks Epstein in the email, to which the sex offender responded, "Not sure yet. i had dinner with Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel Hoffman, wild." Peter Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, while Reid Hoffman is the LinkedIn co-founder. The email is part of the Department of Justice’s files on Epstein, with over 3 million new documents released on January 30. The dinner happened years after Epstein was convicted for producring a minor for prostitution. The vast inventory of emails and pictures is throwing up a lot of fresh information about Epstein and his actions. Several high-profile names also feature in the documents, although they are not proof of wrongdoing. Who threw the dinner with Epstein and Zuckerberg? This dinner is not a revelation since it was public knowledge at the time it happened in 2015. Vanity Fair reported at the time that Hoffman hosted it in Palo Alto for MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden, and Elon Musk is said to have introduced Zuckerberg and Epstein that evening. At the time, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg told the outlet, “Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honouring scientists that was not organised by Epstein. Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.” Also Read: Super Bowl 2026: Epstein victims demand release of more secret files in ad - 'IT'S TIME FOR...' Meanwhile, Musk denied introducing Epstein to Zuckerberg, saying, "I don’t know the guy well enough to do so." He added, "Epstein is obviously a creep, and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine." Hoffman sent a follow-up email to Zuckerberg and Epstein days later, with the subject line “intros,” according to the new files. "Jeffrey, Zuck, email connections from the Ed Boyden dinner -- so that convo can continue." Also Read: Epstein Files reveal email quoting 'Jewish dog' in Steve Bannon conversation Photos of high-profile figures in Epstein Files The documents show that Musk expressed interest in visiting Epstein’s notorious private island. He asked to attend Epstein's "wildest party", according to an email released as part of the Epstein Files. Meanwhile, there are images of Bill Gates with girls, former US President Bill Clinton in a pool, former Prince Andrew, and others. Bill Gates can be seen in two photos with two girls, and he allegedly contracted a sexually transmitted disease from Russian girls. Bill Clinton can be seen in a pool with Ghislaine Maxwell and another unidentified woman.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was mentioned in an email carried in the Epstein Files. Jeffrey Epstein talked about a “wild” dinner, which Zuckerberg and Elon Musk also attended. Epstein bragged about being there in an email.

Epstein bragged about 'wild' dinner with Zuckerberg, Musk, Hoffman and others

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