Meta has reached a settlement with US states and territories over a court case linked to child safety on Facebook and Instagram.&nbsp;The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant will pay up to $16.7 billion to a coalition of US states and introduce sweeping new limits on how teenagers use its social media platforms. The agreement was filed in court on Wednesday and brings a landmark trial in California to an end.&nbsp;The proposed settlement would resolve claims brought by 29 states. They accused Meta of deliberately designing its platforms to hook young users, misleading the public about the risks and unlawfully collecting data from children under 13.&nbsp;The new restrictions on young users go further than any measures Meta has previously accepted. The changes follow years of criticism from parents and experts over the impact of major social media platforms on children.&nbsp;Concerns over apps such as Instagram and Facebook, along with rival platforms including Snapchat and TikTok, have also led to the introduction of age limits and smartphone bans in schools across the world.&nbsp;Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/at-least-95-killed-133-indians-among-403-still-missing-after-flash-floods-in-nepal-1787755891807">At least 95 killed, 133 Indians among 403 still missing after flash floods in Nepal</a><h3>Meta still faces other legal cases</h3>The settlement does not cover thousands of personal injury claims against Meta in the United States or separate lawsuits filed by school districts.&nbsp;The case involving the 29 states was among the most extensive legal challenges faced by Meta. The company had warned that losing the case in court could have exposed it to more than $1 trillion in penalties.&nbsp;"Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms -- and will do it within months," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.&nbsp;He described the outcome as "real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children."&nbsp;The court filing states that the settlement does not amount to an admission of liability or wrongdoing by Meta. The company has consistently denied the allegations. The agreement will also need court approval before it takes effect.<h3>New limits for teenage users</h3>The biggest changes under the agreement are not financial. Meta has agreed to introduce several new safeguards that will significantly change how teenagers use its platforms.&nbsp;Under one measure, Facebook and Instagram will automatically block teenage users between midnight and 6:00 am local time.&nbsp;Teenage accounts will also have a default limit of two hours of cumulative daily use across Meta's apps. Time spent messaging or watching long-form video will not count towards the limit.&nbsp;Both restrictions could become stricter if other social media companies adopt similar measures.&nbsp;Meta has presented the agreement as a possible framework for the wider social media industry and urged its competitors to follow the same approach. "Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution," said C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer.&nbsp;"We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away."&nbsp;If competing platforms agree to equivalent measures, the overnight block would be extended from 10 pm to 7 am. The daily usage allowance would also fall to 60 minutes per app, with a total limit of two hours.

Meta has agreed to a $16.7 billion settlement with US states over allegations of addictive design and child safety failures, while accepting new limits and safeguards for teenage users on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has reached a settlement with US states and territories over a court case linked to child safety on Facebook and Instagram. The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant will pay up to $16.7 billion to a coalition of US states and introduce sweeping new limits on how teenagers use its social media platforms. The agreement was filed in court on Wednesday and brings a landmark trial in California to an end. The proposed settlement would resolve claims brought by 29 states. They accused Meta of deliberately designing its platforms to hook young users, misleading the public about the risks and unlawfully collecting data from children under 13. The new restrictions on young users go further than any measures Meta has previously accepted. The changes follow years of criticism from parents and experts over the impact of major social media platforms on children. Concerns over apps such as Instagram and Facebook, along with rival platforms including Snapchat and TikTok, have also led to the introduction of age limits and smartphone bans in schools across the world. Also Read: At least 95 killed, 133 Indians among 403 still missing after flash floods in Nepal Meta still faces other legal cases The settlement does not cover thousands of personal injury claims against Meta in the United States or separate lawsuits filed by school districts. The case involving the 29 states was among the most extensive legal challenges faced by Meta. The company had warned that losing the case in court could have exposed it to more than $1 trillion in penalties. "Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms -- and will do it within months," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. He described the outcome as "real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children." The court filing states that the settlement does not amount to an admission of liability or wrongdoing by Meta. The company has consistently denied the allegations. The agreement will also need court approval before it takes effect. New limits for teenage users The biggest changes under the agreement are not financial. Meta has agreed to introduce several new safeguards that will significantly change how teenagers use its platforms. Under one measure, Facebook and Instagram will automatically block teenage users between midnight and 6:00 am local time. Teenage accounts will also have a default limit of two hours of cumulative daily use across Meta's apps. Time spent messaging or watching long-form video will not count towards the limit. Both restrictions could become stricter if other social media companies adopt similar measures. Meta has presented the agreement as a possible framework for the wider social media industry and urged its competitors to follow the same approach. "Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution," said C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer. "We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away." If competing platforms agree to equivalent measures, the overnight block would be extended from 10 pm to 7 am. The daily usage allowance would also fall to 60 minutes per app, with a total limit of two hours.

Meta has agreed to a $16.7 billion settlement with US states over allegations of addictive design and child safety failures, while accepting new limits and safeguards for teenage users on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta reaches $16.7 billion settlement with US states over teen safety and addictive design

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 AI is being given standing permission to act. The assistant can now be set up once to perform tasks on a schedule, then left alone to carry them out without further instruction.&nbsp;What It Does&nbsp;The new capabilities, powered by Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 model, shift Meta AI from a system that answers when spoken to into one that operates on its own timetable.&nbsp;It can generate a daily briefing drawn from a connected calendar, flagging conflicts such as double bookings and delivering the summary at a set time. Users can configure recurring tasks — a weekly meal plan, an alert when a product is restocked, an afternoon update on topics they follow — and the assistant runs them without being re-prompted.&nbsp;Meta is releasing the features in select markets first, through the Meta AI app and meta.ai, with plans to expand to further regions and platforms including WhatsApp. Reporting on the rollout indicates the agent capabilities extend to calendar and email automation in browser environments.&nbsp;Why Autonomy Is The Industry's Current Direction&nbsp;Meta is not moving alone here. The whole sector is converging on agents — systems that take an objective and execute the steps themselves, rather than returning text for a human to act on. It is where the commercial value is presumed to be: an assistant that answers questions saves a user minutes, while one that completes tasks replaces work.&nbsp;The technical requirement is access. For an assistant to summarise your calendar it must read your calendar. To flag a restock it must monitor a retailer. To automate email it must reach your inbox. Each capability requires permissions that persist between sessions, because the assistant is by design acting while you are not watching.&nbsp;The Question This Raises For Meta Specifically&nbsp;Every company deploying autonomous agents faces the same reliability problem, and it is genuinely hard. What makes Meta's rollout worth examining is the record its automated systems have compiled on the same platforms during the same period.&nbsp;Meta has removed more than 10 million accounts in a crackdown it says targeted bots and fake engagement. A New York Times investigation this month documented business owners whose accounts were disabled under vague categories such as fraud and deception, with no specific violating post identified and appeals rejected within days as final. Meta's own Oversight Board found systemic problems with due process, proportionality and transparency in how the company disables accounts, and recommended Meta disclose what role AI plays in those decisions — a recommendation that exists because it currently does not.&nbsp;Separately, a BBC Eye investigation found Instagram's AI-driven advertisement review approving paid ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, prompting a summons from India's IT ministry and a warning over Meta's safe harbour protection. Meta's ad review runs primarily on AI, with a human seeing an advertisement only when the system itself is uncertain.&nbsp;In each case the failure mode was the same: an automated system acting confidently, without human review, on a judgement it had got wrong — and the affected user discovering it afterwards, with no meaningful appeal.&nbsp;The Difference Autonomy Makes&nbsp;That history does not mean the new features will fail. Scheduled task execution is a narrower, more constrained problem than open-ended content moderation, and reading a calendar to produce a summary is far more tractable than deciding whether an account is fraudulent.&nbsp;But autonomy changes the shape of any error. A chatbot that answers a question wrongly produces a wrong answer, which the user reads and evaluates immediately. An agent operating on a schedule, with access to a calendar and an inbox, acting while nobody is watching, produces errors that are discovered later — after the action has already been taken.&nbsp;The company asking users for that standing permission is the same one whose Oversight Board says it will not disclose what role its AI plays in decisions that can close a business overnight. Users granting Meta AI access to their calendars and inboxes are extending trust in one direction while Meta declines to extend transparency in the other.

Meta is rolling out autonomous capabilities letting Meta AI run recurring tasks unprompted — daily calendar briefings, meal plans, restock alerts — powered by Muse Spark 1.1. It arrives as Meta's automated systems face scrutiny over wrongful bans and ad-review failures.

Meta AI is being given standing permission to act. The assistant can now be set up once to perform tasks on a schedule, then left alone to carry them out without further instruction. What It Does The new capabilities, powered by Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 model, shift Meta AI from a system that answers when spoken to into one that operates on its own timetable. It can generate a daily briefing drawn from a connected calendar, flagging conflicts such as double bookings and delivering the summary at a set time. Users can configure recurring tasks — a weekly meal plan, an alert when a product is restocked, an afternoon update on topics they follow — and the assistant runs them without being re-prompted. Meta is releasing the features in select markets first, through the Meta AI app and meta.ai, with plans to expand to further regions and platforms including WhatsApp. Reporting on the rollout indicates the agent capabilities extend to calendar and email automation in browser environments. Why Autonomy Is The Industry's Current Direction Meta is not moving alone here. The whole sector is converging on agents — systems that take an objective and execute the steps themselves, rather than returning text for a human to act on. It is where the commercial value is presumed to be: an assistant that answers questions saves a user minutes, while one that completes tasks replaces work. The technical requirement is access. For an assistant to summarise your calendar it must read your calendar. To flag a restock it must monitor a retailer. To automate email it must reach your inbox. Each capability requires permissions that persist between sessions, because the assistant is by design acting while you are not watching. The Question This Raises For Meta Specifically Every company deploying autonomous agents faces the same reliability problem, and it is genuinely hard. What makes Meta's rollout worth examining is the record its automated systems have compiled on the same platforms during the same period. Meta has removed more than 10 million accounts in a crackdown it says targeted bots and fake engagement. A New York Times investigation this month documented business owners whose accounts were disabled under vague categories such as fraud and deception, with no specific violating post identified and appeals rejected within days as final. Meta's own Oversight Board found systemic problems with due process, proportionality and transparency in how the company disables accounts, and recommended Meta disclose what role AI plays in those decisions — a recommendation that exists because it currently does not. Separately, a BBC Eye investigation found Instagram's AI-driven advertisement review approving paid ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, prompting a summons from India's IT ministry and a warning over Meta's safe harbour protection. Meta's ad review runs primarily on AI, with a human seeing an advertisement only when the system itself is uncertain. In each case the failure mode was the same: an automated system acting confidently, without human review, on a judgement it had got wrong — and the affected user discovering it afterwards, with no meaningful appeal. The Difference Autonomy Makes That history does not mean the new features will fail. Scheduled task execution is a narrower, more constrained problem than open-ended content moderation, and reading a calendar to produce a summary is far more tractable than deciding whether an account is fraudulent. But autonomy changes the shape of any error. A chatbot that answers a question wrongly produces a wrong answer, which the user reads and evaluates immediately. An agent operating on a schedule, with access to a calendar and an inbox, acting while nobody is watching, produces errors that are discovered later — after the action has already been taken. The company asking users for that standing permission is the same one whose Oversight Board says it will not disclose what role its AI plays in decisions that can close a business overnight. Users granting Meta AI access to their calendars and inboxes are extending trust in one direction while Meta declines to extend transparency in the other.

Meta is rolling out autonomous capabilities for Meta AI, letting the assistant carry out recurring tasks on a schedule without being prompted each time — daily briefings pulled from a user's calendar, weekly meal plans, restock alerts and trend updates. Powered by the new Muse Spark 1.1 model, it is launching in select markets, with WhatsApp to follow.

Zuckerberg's Meta gives autonomous power to its AI which is already struggling to take correct decisions

A powerful panel of the Indian Parliament asked some uncomfortable questions to representatives of some of the world's biggest social media companies. The context was the recent protests against exam paper leaks led by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), the removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's video, alleged algorithmic manipulation, and broader concerns about platform accountability. Representatives of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as those from Google, YouTube, X and Snapchat attended the meeting. Here is what happened:<h2>The Parliament committee was on regulating social and digital platforms</h2>The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology was chaired by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Nishikant Dubey. Its meeting was also attended by Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary S Krishnan, Information and Broadcasting Secretary Sanjay Jaju, and other senior officials. The subject of the meeting held on Monday (Aug 3) was "Social and Digital Platforms and Their Regulation".<a href="https://www.wionews.com/videos/meta-under-fire-as-panel-seeks-answers-over-pm-modi-video-takedown-1785825943604/embed">https://www.wionews.com/videos/meta-under-fire-as-panel-seeks-answers-over-pm-modi-video-takedown-1785825943604/embed</a><h2>The removal of PM Modi's video came up for discussion</h2>The Prime Minister released a reel-style video on the night of 23 July addressing India's youth amid protests in Delhi and other cities over alleged examination paper leaks, including NEET-UG. The CJP-led agitation was demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who eventually resigned. Modi's video was briefly restricted or removed on Facebook for around five hours, from approximately 12.30 am to 5.00 am. Meta attributed the incident to a technical error and restored the video. MeitY had earlier described the explanation as "inadequate".At the Parliament committee hearing, members pressed Meta to fix responsibility beyond a company-level apology, according to media reports. The company was asked as to who authorised the removal of the PM's video and how such an error could occur with official content from the Prime Minister's office.The underlying question was whether this represented a serious systems failure, a flaw in Meta's moderation processes, or a deliberate act that resulted in the Prime Minister's official communication being taken down.Meta representatives expressed regret and indicated their readiness to apologise. Dubey sought a personal apology from Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. If the CEO does not apologise, Meta's safe harbour protection under Section 79 of India's Information Technology Act, 2000 should be withdrawn, Dubey reportedly recommended. The panel also sought a written reply from Meta within 10 days.<h2>Did tech giants amplify the viewership of CJP protest content?</h2>Dubey noted that the CJP had exceptionally high social media viewership. According to some media reports cited, its content generated up to 27 billion views across platforms. The figure exceeded the combined reach of content from major political parties. An anti-reservation forum also reportedly generated around 7 billion views.These figures were presented as possible evidence that the algorithms of social media platforms may be favouring newcomers, highly engaging content, or particular types of political material. Panel members sought an explanation of how such content achieved such extraordinary reach and whether platform recommendation systems played a role. The broader issue was the role of social media platforms during the protests, including the spread of deepfakes, morphed images and misleading content targeting the prime minister and Union ministers.Police cases have already been registered, and investigations are underway, in connection with some such content, including a case against Meta India's head in Hyderabad over allegedly objectionable posts.Also read:<a href="https://www.wionews.com/trending/why-did-meta-remove-pm-modi-s-facebook-video-on-paper-leaks-tech-giant-blames-technical-error-1785220710914"> Why did Meta remove PM Modi's Facebook video on paper leaks? Tech company blames 'technical error'</a><h2>Is there algorithmic bias in the recommendation systems of social media?</h2>The panel members questioned the platforms, particularly Meta, over alleged algorithmic bias.Among the issues raised were why objectionable material, including pornography, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), deepfake scams and content targeting women, often remained available while an official communication from the prime minister was removed.The tech giants were asked how their recommendation, ranking and amplification systems function, who oversees them, what safeguards exist against bias, and how content moderation decisions are reviewed.They also faced questions on whether political or ideological bias exists in their content moderation systems and what responsibilities platforms bear in matters affecting public order, elections and national security.Specifically, members questioned the capability of platform algorithms and artificial intelligence systems to detect deepfakes involving the Prime Minister and other public figures before they spread widely.MeitY has already summoned Meta's global team to discuss algorithmic processes, potential bias and the company's responsibilities relating to public order and compliance with Indian law.Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/after-pm-fb-post-issue-meta-assures-rigorous-safeguards-for-posts-by-prominent-accounts-1785343588801">After PM FB post issue, Meta assures rigorous safeguards for posts by prominent accounts</a><h2>Foreign ownership of platforms and control over content</h2>Another issue discussed was the foreign ownership of major technology platforms and the extent to which content moderation decisions affecting Indian users are made outside India. There has been growing criticism that these companies do not adequately comply with Indian law despite earning substantial revenues from the country. Their handling of unlawful content, including cyber fraud, online harassment of women and other illegal material, was criticised as inadequate.Members also raised concerns that, in some instances, platforms had failed to respond promptly to official communications from Indian authorities, including the Ministry of Home Affairs and MeitY.<h2>Are social media platforms merely intermediaries?</h2>A key legal issue discussed was whether these platforms can continue to claim protection under the safe harbour provisions of Indian law. Under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, intermediaries receive limited immunity from liability for user-generated content, provided they comply with prescribed legal obligations and due diligence requirements.Some panel members argued that if platforms actively recommend, amplify, suppress or otherwise influence the visibility of content through algorithms, they cannot simply describe themselves as neutral intermediaries. Others maintained that the existing legal framework must be applied carefully to preserve free expression while ensuring accountability.Opposition members on the panel stressed that criticism of the government should not automatically be treated as anti-national and that democratic space for dissent must remain protected.However, the committee was largely unanimous on the need for stricter enforcement against unlawful content, greater transparency in content moderation and stronger accountability from social media platforms.&nbsp;

An Indian parliamentary panel questioned Meta, Google, X, YouTube and Snapchat over a number of issues regarding their alleged bias. Issues discussed include PM Modi's video removal, algorithmic bias, content moderation and social media accountability.



A powerful panel of the Indian Parliament asked some uncomfortable questions to representatives of some of the world's biggest social media companies. The context was the recent protests against exam paper leaks led by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), the removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's video, alleged algorithmic manipulation, and broader concerns about platform accountability. Representatives of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as those from Google, YouTube, X and Snapchat attended the meeting. Here is what happened: The Parliament committee was on regulating social and digital platforms The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology was chaired by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Nishikant Dubey. Its meeting was also attended by Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary S Krishnan, Information and Broadcasting Secretary Sanjay Jaju, and other senior officials. The subject of the meeting held on Monday (Aug 3) was "Social and Digital Platforms and Their Regulation". https://www.wionews.com/videos/meta-under-fire-as-panel-seeks-answers-over-pm-modi-video-takedown-1785825943604/embed The removal of PM Modi's video came up for discussion The Prime Minister released a reel-style video on the night of 23 July addressing India's youth amid protests in Delhi and other cities over alleged examination paper leaks, including NEET-UG. The CJP-led agitation was demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who eventually resigned. Modi's video was briefly restricted or removed on Facebook for around five hours, from approximately 12.30 am to 5.00 am. Meta attributed the incident to a technical error and restored the video. MeitY had earlier described the explanation as "inadequate". At the Parliament committee hearing, members pressed Meta to fix responsibility beyond a company-level apology, according to media reports. The company was asked as to who authorised the removal of the PM's video and how such an error could occur with official content from the Prime Minister's office. The underlying question was whether this represented a serious systems failure, a flaw in Meta's moderation processes, or a deliberate act that resulted in the Prime Minister's official communication being taken down. Meta representatives expressed regret and indicated their readiness to apologise. Dubey sought a personal apology from Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. If the CEO does not apologise, Meta's safe harbour protection under Section 79 of India's Information Technology Act, 2000 should be withdrawn, Dubey reportedly recommended. The panel also sought a written reply from Meta within 10 days. Did tech giants amplify the viewership of CJP protest content? Dubey noted that the CJP had exceptionally high social media viewership. According to some media reports cited, its content generated up to 27 billion views across platforms. The figure exceeded the combined reach of content from major political parties. An anti-reservation forum also reportedly generated around 7 billion views. These figures were presented as possible evidence that the algorithms of social media platforms may be favouring newcomers, highly engaging content, or particular types of political material. Panel members sought an explanation of how such content achieved such extraordinary reach and whether platform recommendation systems played a role. The broader issue was the role of social media platforms during the protests, including the spread of deepfakes, morphed images and misleading content targeting the prime minister and Union ministers. Police cases have already been registered, and investigations are underway, in connection with some such content, including a case against Meta India's head in Hyderabad over allegedly objectionable posts. Also read: Why did Meta remove PM Modi's Facebook video on paper leaks? Tech company blames 'technical error' Is there algorithmic bias in the recommendation systems of social media? The panel members questioned the platforms, particularly Meta, over alleged algorithmic bias. Among the issues raised were why objectionable material, including pornography, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), deepfake scams and content targeting women, often remained available while an official communication from the prime minister was removed. The tech giants were asked how their recommendation, ranking and amplification systems function, who oversees them, what safeguards exist against bias, and how content moderation decisions are reviewed. They also faced questions on whether political or ideological bias exists in their content moderation systems and what responsibilities platforms bear in matters affecting public order, elections and national security. Specifically, members questioned the capability of platform algorithms and artificial intelligence systems to detect deepfakes involving the Prime Minister and other public figures before they spread widely. MeitY has already summoned Meta's global team to discuss algorithmic processes, potential bias and the company's responsibilities relating to public order and compliance with Indian law. Also read: After PM FB post issue, Meta assures rigorous safeguards for posts by prominent accounts Foreign ownership of platforms and control over content Another issue discussed was the foreign ownership of major technology platforms and the extent to which content moderation decisions affecting Indian users are made outside India. There has been growing criticism that these companies do not adequately comply with Indian law despite earning substantial revenues from the country. Their handling of unlawful content, including cyber fraud, online harassment of women and other illegal material, was criticised as inadequate. Members also raised concerns that, in some instances, platforms had failed to respond promptly to official communications from Indian authorities, including the Ministry of Home Affairs and MeitY. Are social media platforms merely intermediaries? A key legal issue discussed was whether these platforms can continue to claim protection under the safe harbour provisions of Indian law. Under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, intermediaries receive limited immunity from liability for user-generated content, provided they comply with prescribed legal obligations and due diligence requirements. Some panel members argued that if platforms actively recommend, amplify, suppress or otherwise influence the visibility of content through algorithms, they cannot simply describe themselves as neutral intermediaries. Others maintained that the existing legal framework must be applied carefully to preserve free expression while ensuring accountability. Opposition members on the panel stressed that criticism of the government should not automatically be treated as anti-national and that democratic space for dissent must remain protected. However, the committee was largely unanimous on the need for stricter enforcement against unlawful content, greater transparency in content moderation and stronger accountability from social media platforms.

An Indian parliamentary panel questioned Meta, Google, X, YouTube and Snapchat over a number of issues regarding their alleged bias. Issues discussed include PM Modi's video removal, algorithmic bias, content moderation and social media accountability.&nbsp;

What did the Indian Parliament panel ask Meta, Google, X and Snapchat? PM Modi's video removal, CJP protest, algorithm manipulation

Meta is building a one-gigawatt AI data centre in Texas that it will not own. The structure of that deal, and its timing, say more about the economics of the AI build-out than any earnings slide.&nbsp;The Deal&nbsp;Announced on July 28, the venture pairs Meta with BlackRock to develop a $14 billion, one-gigawatt artificial intelligence data centre in El Paso, Texas. The split is 80/20 — and not in Meta's favour. BlackRock-managed funds take 80 per cent ownership; Meta retains 20 per cent.&nbsp;The mechanics are unusual enough to be worth setting out plainly. Meta contributes land and construction-in-progress assets worth roughly $2.3 billion, then receives a separate payout of about $1 billion to balance the ownership arithmetic. BlackRock contributes $4.9 billion in cash. A further $12.5 billion in debt financing, raised separately, covers the remainder of BlackRock's side.&nbsp;When construction completes in 2028, Meta leases the campus back and runs its AI workloads on it.&nbsp;What The Structure Actually Does&nbsp;Strip away the joint-venture language and the transaction accomplishes something specific: it moves roughly $14 billion of infrastructure cost off Meta's balance sheet and onto private investors', while preserving Meta's access to the computing capacity.&nbsp;A company that builds and owns a data centre carries the full capital cost on its own books, depreciates the asset over years, and absorbs the hit to free cash flow up front. A company that leases one from a majority owner converts that capital expenditure into an operating expense spread across the life of the lease. The compute is the same either way. The financial statements are not.&nbsp;The Timing&nbsp;The venture was announced on Tuesday, July 28. On Wednesday, July 29, Meta reported second-quarter results showing free cash flow down 91 per cent to $784 million, quarterly AI capital expenditure above $31 billion, and full-year capex guidance raised to as much as $145 billion. The stock fell roughly 10 per cent.&nbsp;Announcing an off-balance-sheet infrastructure arrangement the day before disclosing a 91 per cent collapse in free cash flow is, at minimum, a decision about sequencing. It also indicates how acute the pressure has become: a company generating tens of billions in advertising profit is now structuring deals specifically to avoid carrying the cost of its own compute.&nbsp;The Wider Pattern&nbsp;Meta is not alone in reaching for outside capital to fund AI infrastructure. Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee some $250 billion in lease and construction financing for OpenAI's 10-gigawatt Ohio campus — a backstop OpenAI needs because, as an unprofitable company, it cannot secure an investment-grade credit rating on its own. SoftBank's energy arm is developing that site.&nbsp;The through-line is that the AI build-out has outgrown the balance sheets of even the companies driving it. The capital is now coming from asset managers, chipmakers and debt markets, structured through vehicles that keep the liabilities at arm's length from the technology companies whose products depend on them.&nbsp;For Meta, the El Paso facility secures a gigawatt of computing capacity for 2028 without a $14 billion hole in the interim cash flow statements. Whether that counts as prudent financial engineering or as a warning sign depends largely on whether the AI revenue arrives before the leases come due.

Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion joint venture on July 28 for a one-gigawatt AI data centre in El Paso. BlackRock funds own 80%, Meta 20% — and Meta leases it back from 2028. It was announced one day before Meta disclosed a 91% collapse in free cash flow.

Meta is building a one-gigawatt AI data centre in Texas that it will not own. The structure of that deal, and its timing, say more about the economics of the AI build-out than any earnings slide. The Deal Announced on July 28, the venture pairs Meta with BlackRock to develop a $14 billion, one-gigawatt artificial intelligence data centre in El Paso, Texas. The split is 80/20 — and not in Meta's favour. BlackRock-managed funds take 80 per cent ownership; Meta retains 20 per cent. The mechanics are unusual enough to be worth setting out plainly. Meta contributes land and construction-in-progress assets worth roughly $2.3 billion, then receives a separate payout of about $1 billion to balance the ownership arithmetic. BlackRock contributes $4.9 billion in cash. A further $12.5 billion in debt financing, raised separately, covers the remainder of BlackRock's side. When construction completes in 2028, Meta leases the campus back and runs its AI workloads on it. What The Structure Actually Does Strip away the joint-venture language and the transaction accomplishes something specific: it moves roughly $14 billion of infrastructure cost off Meta's balance sheet and onto private investors', while preserving Meta's access to the computing capacity. A company that builds and owns a data centre carries the full capital cost on its own books, depreciates the asset over years, and absorbs the hit to free cash flow up front. A company that leases one from a majority owner converts that capital expenditure into an operating expense spread across the life of the lease. The compute is the same either way. The financial statements are not. The Timing The venture was announced on Tuesday, July 28. On Wednesday, July 29, Meta reported second-quarter results showing free cash flow down 91 per cent to $784 million, quarterly AI capital expenditure above $31 billion, and full-year capex guidance raised to as much as $145 billion. The stock fell roughly 10 per cent. Announcing an off-balance-sheet infrastructure arrangement the day before disclosing a 91 per cent collapse in free cash flow is, at minimum, a decision about sequencing. It also indicates how acute the pressure has become: a company generating tens of billions in advertising profit is now structuring deals specifically to avoid carrying the cost of its own compute. The Wider Pattern Meta is not alone in reaching for outside capital to fund AI infrastructure. Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee some $250 billion in lease and construction financing for OpenAI's 10-gigawatt Ohio campus — a backstop OpenAI needs because, as an unprofitable company, it cannot secure an investment-grade credit rating on its own. SoftBank's energy arm is developing that site. The through-line is that the AI build-out has outgrown the balance sheets of even the companies driving it. The capital is now coming from asset managers, chipmakers and debt markets, structured through vehicles that keep the liabilities at arm's length from the technology companies whose products depend on them. For Meta, the El Paso facility secures a gigawatt of computing capacity for 2028 without a $14 billion hole in the interim cash flow statements. Whether that counts as prudent financial engineering or as a warning sign depends largely on whether the AI revenue arrives before the leases come due.

Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion joint venture on July 28 to build a one-gigawatt AI data centre in El Paso, Texas. BlackRock-managed funds own 80 per cent of it; Meta owns 20 and will lease the campus once it opens in 2028. The announcement came one day before Meta reported that its free cash flow had fallen 91 per cent.

Meta just moved its biggest new data centre off its own balance sheet, one day before earnings

Meta beat Wall Street on revenue and lost roughly a tenth of its market value anyway. The gap between those two facts is the story of the AI build-out in one quarter.&nbsp;The Number That Beat&nbsp;Meta reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28 per cent year-on-year and ahead of analyst expectations. By the standards of a company of Meta's size and maturity, that is a strong quarter — its advertising business is not merely holding, it is accelerating.&nbsp;The Numbers That Broke&nbsp;Everything below the revenue line moved the other way.&nbsp;Free cash flow collapsed 91 per cent, falling to $784 million from levels many multiples higher a year earlier. Capital expenditure on AI infrastructure passed $31 billion in the quarter alone. Total expenses climbed 55 per cent to $42 billion. Net income came in at $15.8 billion, with diluted earnings per share of $6.18 — below what analysts had expected.&nbsp;The margin compression tells the clearest story. Meta's operating margin fell to 31 per cent, down from 38 per cent in the same quarter last year and well below the 48 per cent peak it reached in the final quarter of 2024. In eighteen months, Meta has given up roughly a third of its operating margin to fund artificial intelligence.&nbsp;Reality Labs Keeps Bleeding&nbsp;Meta's augmented and virtual reality division lost another $4.6 billion in the quarter. Cumulative losses at Reality Labs have now passed $80 billion since 2021 — a figure larger than the total market capitalisation of most companies in the S&amp;P 500, spent on a product line that has yet to produce a mainstream consumer success.&nbsp;That loss is now running alongside the AI spending rather than instead of it. Investors are being asked to fund two enormous, simultaneous bets, only one of which has any demonstrated revenue attached.&nbsp;And The Spending Is Going Up&nbsp;Meta raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg used the earnings call to project that billions of people will have personal AI agents within five years — a vision that, whatever its merits, implies the current spending is a floor rather than a ceiling.&nbsp;The market's response was immediate. Shares fell roughly 10 per cent in after-hours trading, dropping from a close of $585.61 to around $529.15.&nbsp;The Pattern Across Big Tech&nbsp;Meta is not alone in this squeeze. Alphabet reported a similar shape days earlier: revenue beating expectations at $119.8 billion, Google Cloud growing 82 per cent — and the stock falling anyway after the company raised its own capex guidance to $195–205 billion, pushing free cash flow to negative $5.9 billion.&nbsp;The common thread is a market that has stopped granting AI spending the benefit of the doubt. For two years, capital expenditure announcements were read as evidence of ambition. This quarter they were read as evidence of cost. Nothing about the underlying technology changed between those two readings — only investors' willingness to wait for the return.&nbsp;For Meta specifically, the timing is pointed. The day before these results, the company announced a $14 billion data centre venture in which BlackRock-managed funds take 80 per cent ownership and Meta takes 20 — an arrangement that moves a substantial infrastructure cost off Meta's own balance sheet and onto private investors, just as its cash flow statement came under this much scrutiny.

Meta's Q2 revenue rose 28% to $60.8 billion, beating expectations. But free cash flow fell 91% to $784 million, AI capex passed $31 billion in the quarter, operating margin dropped to 31%, and Reality Labs lost another $4.6 billion. The stock fell about 10%.

Meta beat Wall Street on revenue and lost roughly a tenth of its market value anyway. The gap between those two facts is the story of the AI build-out in one quarter. The Number That Beat Meta reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28 per cent year-on-year and ahead of analyst expectations. By the standards of a company of Meta's size and maturity, that is a strong quarter — its advertising business is not merely holding, it is accelerating. The Numbers That Broke Everything below the revenue line moved the other way. Free cash flow collapsed 91 per cent, falling to $784 million from levels many multiples higher a year earlier. Capital expenditure on AI infrastructure passed $31 billion in the quarter alone. Total expenses climbed 55 per cent to $42 billion. Net income came in at $15.8 billion, with diluted earnings per share of $6.18 — below what analysts had expected. The margin compression tells the clearest story. Meta's operating margin fell to 31 per cent, down from 38 per cent in the same quarter last year and well below the 48 per cent peak it reached in the final quarter of 2024. In eighteen months, Meta has given up roughly a third of its operating margin to fund artificial intelligence. Reality Labs Keeps Bleeding Meta's augmented and virtual reality division lost another $4.6 billion in the quarter. Cumulative losses at Reality Labs have now passed $80 billion since 2021 — a figure larger than the total market capitalisation of most companies in the S&P 500, spent on a product line that has yet to produce a mainstream consumer success. That loss is now running alongside the AI spending rather than instead of it. Investors are being asked to fund two enormous, simultaneous bets, only one of which has any demonstrated revenue attached. And The Spending Is Going Up Meta raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg used the earnings call to project that billions of people will have personal AI agents within five years — a vision that, whatever its merits, implies the current spending is a floor rather than a ceiling. The market's response was immediate. Shares fell roughly 10 per cent in after-hours trading, dropping from a close of $585.61 to around $529.15. The Pattern Across Big Tech Meta is not alone in this squeeze. Alphabet reported a similar shape days earlier: revenue beating expectations at $119.8 billion, Google Cloud growing 82 per cent — and the stock falling anyway after the company raised its own capex guidance to $195–205 billion, pushing free cash flow to negative $5.9 billion. The common thread is a market that has stopped granting AI spending the benefit of the doubt. For two years, capital expenditure announcements were read as evidence of ambition. This quarter they were read as evidence of cost. Nothing about the underlying technology changed between those two readings — only investors' willingness to wait for the return. For Meta specifically, the timing is pointed. The day before these results, the company announced a $14 billion data centre venture in which BlackRock-managed funds take 80 per cent ownership and Meta takes 20 — an arrangement that moves a substantial infrastructure cost off Meta's own balance sheet and onto private investors, just as its cash flow statement came under this much scrutiny.

Meta reported second-quarter revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28 per cent and ahead of expectations. Then investors read the rest: free cash flow down 91 per cent to $784 million, quarterly AI capital spending above $31 billion, operating margin down to 31 per cent, another $4.6 billion lost at Reality Labs, and full-year capex guidance raised to as much as $145 billion. The stock fell roughly 10 per cent.

Meta's free cash flow just collapsed 91% and Wall Street punished it immediately

Cybercrime police have registered two cases against the operators of several Facebook and Instagram accounts, along with Meta's India head, over the alleged circulation of morphed and objectionable content targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led agitation over the NEET paper leak.The cases were filed based on complaints by BJP supporters, who alleged that manipulated videos and images of the Prime Minister were being circulated on Meta-owned social media platforms.Police have invoked relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Information Technology Act, naming the operators of the identified social media accounts as well as Meta's India head as co-accused."We have issued a notice to Meta about the cases registered and the objectionable links reported by the complainants. We are also trying to collect details about the accused to identify and arrest them," a cybercrime investigator said.<h2>Accounts being traced</h2>By Thursday evening, all the links mentioned in the complaints had become inactive. However, investigators said efforts are underway to trace the individuals behind the Facebook and Instagram accounts.One of the complainants, T. Saikiran Goud, a member of the Telangana BJP's social media core committee, submitted around 20 Facebook and Instagram links to police on Wednesday night and sought action against Meta for allegedly hosting the content."On behalf of Telangana BJP karyakarthas, we seek an investigation into certain Instagram accounts that have been publishing and circulating content which, in our opinion, is derogatory towards the Prime Minister and appear to promote narratives that may be prejudicial to the sovereignty, integrity and public order of the nation," Goud said in his complaint.He also urged police to identify those operating the accounts and initiate legal proceedings against them.<h2>Second complaint alleges obscene content</h2>In a separate complaint, S. Aravind Reddy, a BJP supporter from Nampally, alleged that several Instagram accounts had shared "obscene" and digitally manipulated videos and images."I came across multiple morphed and digitally manipulated videos and images depicting the Prime Minister, US President and former Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan in an obscene, derogatory and misleading manner. Such content has the potential to mislead the public," Reddy alleged in his complaint.Police said the investigation is continuing and that details of the account operators are being sought as part of efforts to identify those responsible for posting the content.

Cybercrime police have registered two cases against the operators of several Facebook and Instagram accounts, along with Meta's India head, over the alleged circulation of morphed and objectionable content targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the CJP-led NEET paper leak agitation.

Cybercrime police have registered two cases against the operators of several Facebook and Instagram accounts, along with Meta's India head, over the alleged circulation of morphed and objectionable content targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led agitation over the NEET paper leak. The cases were filed based on complaints by BJP supporters, who alleged that manipulated videos and images of the Prime Minister were being circulated on Meta-owned social media platforms. Police have invoked relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Information Technology Act, naming the operators of the identified social media accounts as well as Meta's India head as co-accused. "We have issued a notice to Meta about the cases registered and the objectionable links reported by the complainants. We are also trying to collect details about the accused to identify and arrest them," a cybercrime investigator said. Accounts being traced By Thursday evening, all the links mentioned in the complaints had become inactive. However, investigators said efforts are underway to trace the individuals behind the Facebook and Instagram accounts. One of the complainants, T. Saikiran Goud, a member of the Telangana BJP's social media core committee, submitted around 20 Facebook and Instagram links to police on Wednesday night and sought action against Meta for allegedly hosting the content. "On behalf of Telangana BJP karyakarthas, we seek an investigation into certain Instagram accounts that have been publishing and circulating content which, in our opinion, is derogatory towards the Prime Minister and appear to promote narratives that may be prejudicial to the sovereignty, integrity and public order of the nation," Goud said in his complaint. He also urged police to identify those operating the accounts and initiate legal proceedings against them. Second complaint alleges obscene content In a separate complaint, S. Aravind Reddy, a BJP supporter from Nampally, alleged that several Instagram accounts had shared "obscene" and digitally manipulated videos and images. "I came across multiple morphed and digitally manipulated videos and images depicting the Prime Minister, US President and former Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan in an obscene, derogatory and misleading manner. Such content has the potential to mislead the public," Reddy alleged in his complaint. Police said the investigation is continuing and that details of the account operators are being sought as part of efforts to identify those responsible for posting the content.

Cybercrime police have registered two cases against the operators of several Facebook and Instagram accounts, along with Meta's India head, over the alleged circulation of morphed and objectionable content targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the CJP-led NEET paper leak agitation.

Meta India head booked as cyber police crack down on 'obscene' morphed PM Modi videos

In a single month, Meta's automated systems distributed fabricated videos of India's Prime Minister to millions of Indians, erased the livelihoods of legitimate business owners without explanation, ran paid advertisements for child sexual abuse material, and blocked the Prime Minister's own announcement from Indian viewers. Meta has explained none of it.&nbsp;India is now asking a question it has not seriously asked of any foreign platform before: on whose authority does this company operate here at all?&nbsp;The Deepfakes Meta's Systems Carried To Millions&nbsp;During the Cockroach Janta Party protests that convulsed Delhi through July, fabricated AI videos of India's most senior leaders spread across Meta's platforms.&nbsp;One purported to show Union Minister Piyush Goyal advocating violent action against CJP supporters. Another appeared to show BJP MP Nishikant Dubey declaring that protesters would be denied government and private-sector jobs, with their families exposed to legal action. Both were fake — AI-manipulated fabrications, confirmed as such by independent fact-checkers and by the Press Information Bureau, which debunked AI-generated videos of Prime Minister Modi and Goyal and attributed the campaign to Pakistani propaganda operations.&nbsp;Goyal filed a police complaint, stating his remarks outside Parliament had been maliciously altered using artificial intelligence. An FIR was registered at Delhi's Chanakyapuri police station. Delhi Police said they identified and blocked more than 400 Pakistan-linked social media handles involved in what they described as a coordinated misinformation campaign built on AI-generated content and deepfakes.&nbsp;These videos did not spread by accident. They spread because recommendation systems built by Meta pushed them into Indian feeds during a period of acute national tension — at a moment when a fabricated video of a Union Minister calling for violence against students could have triggered exactly that. Meta's AI, which the company insists is sophisticated enough to moderate content at scale, could not distinguish a deepfake of India's Commerce Minister from a real one.&nbsp;The Businesses It Destroyed&nbsp;While Meta's systems failed to catch fabrications of national leaders, they were ruthlessly efficient at removing people who had done nothing wrong.&nbsp;Meta says it removed more than 10 million accounts in a crackdown targeting bots and fake engagement. A New York Times investigation this month documented what that meant in practice: business owners whose livelihoods disappeared overnight, accounts disabled under vague headings such as ‘fraud and deception’ with no specific violating post ever identified, and appeals rejected within days in terms making clear no further review was possible.&nbsp;The design is the problem. In March 2026, Meta handed greater responsibility to AI systems both for judging violations and for deciding appeals against those judgements — then laid off thousands of the staff who had done that work. The result is a closed loop: the same automated system that destroys a business also adjudicates its plea for reinstatement.&nbsp;Meta's own Oversight Board, reviewing account deactivations, identified systemic concerns over due process, proportionality and transparency, found that users are not told which rule they broke or what recourse exists, and recommended Meta disclose what role AI plays in these decisions — a recommendation that only exists because Meta does not currently disclose it. The Board also found that Meta Verified, which businesses pay for precisely to obtain support, failed to provide meaningful assistance to users whose accounts were disabled.&nbsp;For Indian content creators and small businesses that built their customer base on Instagram and Facebook, an unexplained automated ban is not an inconvenience. It is the end of a business, with no appeal that a human being will ever read.&nbsp;The Advertisements It Approved&nbsp;In July, a BBC Eye investigation found that Instagram was serving paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material in India. A test account was reportedly served around 30 distinct paid ads using explicit search terms, redirecting users to Telegram channels selling illegal material for as little as ₹99.&nbsp;The mechanism matters. Meta's advertisement review is conducted primarily by AI, examining an ad's images, text, targeting and destination links. When the system is confident an ad complies, it runs — with no human reviewing it at any point. A human sees an advertisement only if the machine itself is uncertain.&nbsp;The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology summoned Meta's officials. Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw directed the ministry to seek an explanation. MeitY ordered Instagram to disable all such content and demanded a detailed response within seven days, warning that failure could threaten Meta's safe harbour protection under Section 79 of the IT Act. Meta's response was that it does not ‘knowingly’ target such advertising, and that ‘no system is perfect.’ Forbes reported on July 13 that such advertisements remained active on Instagram after the controversy had already broken.&nbsp;And Then It Blocked The Prime Minister&nbsp;On Facebook, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's post announcing action on the NEET paper leak — ‘More strict actions against paper leaks to come in tomorrow’s Cabinet!' — is unavailable to users in India. Meta's entire explanation is one sentence: ‘The attached media isn’t available in your region due to a legal request.'&nbsp;No authority is named. No statute is cited. No case number appears. The same message on Instagram set a world record, crossing 303 million views in 24 hours and overtaking the previous mark held by YouTuber IShowSpeed. On one Meta platform it is the most-viewed reel in history. On the other, Indians cannot see it.&nbsp;Priti Gandhi, the BJP's IT and social media national in-charge for the party's seven Morchas and an official spokesperson for Maharashtra BJP, put the question directly to the company: ‘The Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy uploads his first direct selfie video to connect with India's youth… and Facebook restricts it??? Who gave Meta the authority to decide what millions of Indians should or should not see??? This isn't just content moderation. It raises serious questions about your political bias, transparency &amp; accountability. Respond!!!'&nbsp;Meta has not responded.&nbsp;The Opacity Is Itself The Offence&nbsp;Meta will say, correctly, that it often acts on legal requests from Indian authorities. Protest-related content was geo-blocked in India in July under Section 69A of the IT Act, and Delhi Police wrote to platforms seeking removal of hundreds of posts linked to the agitation, alleging they carried AI-generated abusive content and misinformation.&nbsp;But that defence collapses into the accusation. If Meta is merely executing lawful orders, it can say so — name the provision, cite the order, tell Indian citizens which authority decided what they may see. It does not. It publishes four words and leaves 800 million Indian users to guess. The company has built a system in which neither the government's decisions nor Meta's own are visible to the people affected by them, and that ambiguity serves Meta alone.&nbsp;The Case For Action&nbsp;Assemble the record. An AI moderation system that cannot identify a deepfake of the Commerce Minister but can permanently erase a legitimate small business on a false positive. An advertising system that approves child sexual abuse material without a human ever seeing it. A recommendation engine that pushed fabricated videos of the Prime Minister into Indian feeds during a national crisis. An appeals process where the machine that convicts also hears the appeal. And a company that answers to a formal government summons with the observation that no system is perfect.&nbsp;Section 79 of the IT Act grants platforms immunity from liability for user content — but only while they discharge their due diligence obligations. That is a conditional privilege, not a right, and India's government has already put Meta on formal notice that the condition is in question.&nbsp;No one elected Meta. No one in India granted it the authority to decide which of the Prime Minister's words its citizens may read, or to end a business built over a decade with an automated notice and no appeal. India has every sovereign right to ask whether a company that has failed this comprehensively should retain the legal protections that let it operate here — and, if the answer is no, to act on it.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Facebook has crossed every limit. It has blocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s post on strict action against paper leaks from being seen in India. Who gave this foreign platform the authority to censor India’s Prime Minister and decide what Indians are allowed to read? This is… <a href="https://t.co/6uNiqYk13Q">pic.twitter.com/6uNiqYk13Q</a>&mdash; Tajinder Bagga (@TajinderBagga) <a href="https://x.com/TajinderBagga/status/2081830378114011402?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 27, 2026</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">What the hell, <a href="https://x.com/Meta?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Meta</a>??! The Prime Minister of the world&#39;s largest democracy uploads his first direct selfie video to connect with India&#39;s youth... and Facebook restricts it??? Who gave Meta the authority to decide what millions of Indians should or should not see??? This… <a href="https://t.co/jrGJFYhqDI">pic.twitter.com/jrGJFYhqDI</a>&mdash; Priti Gandhi (@MrsGandhi) <a href="https://x.com/MrsGandhi/status/2081822819080671609?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 27, 2026</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Meta's AI spread deepfakes of PM Modi and Union ministers during the CJP protests, destroyed legitimate businesses through wrongful bans, approved child sexual abuse advertisements, and blocked the Prime Minister's own post without explanation. India's government has summoned Meta and its safe harbour protection is now in question.

In a single month, Meta's automated systems distributed fabricated videos of India's Prime Minister to millions of Indians, erased the livelihoods of legitimate business owners without explanation, ran paid advertisements for child sexual abuse material, and blocked the Prime Minister's own announcement from Indian viewers. Meta has explained none of it. India is now asking a question it has not seriously asked of any foreign platform before: on whose authority does this company operate here at all? The Deepfakes Meta's Systems Carried To Millions During the Cockroach Janta Party protests that convulsed Delhi through July, fabricated AI videos of India's most senior leaders spread across Meta's platforms. One purported to show Union Minister Piyush Goyal advocating violent action against CJP supporters. Another appeared to show BJP MP Nishikant Dubey declaring that protesters would be denied government and private-sector jobs, with their families exposed to legal action. Both were fake — AI-manipulated fabrications, confirmed as such by independent fact-checkers and by the Press Information Bureau, which debunked AI-generated videos of Prime Minister Modi and Goyal and attributed the campaign to Pakistani propaganda operations. Goyal filed a police complaint, stating his remarks outside Parliament had been maliciously altered using artificial intelligence. An FIR was registered at Delhi's Chanakyapuri police station. Delhi Police said they identified and blocked more than 400 Pakistan-linked social media handles involved in what they described as a coordinated misinformation campaign built on AI-generated content and deepfakes. These videos did not spread by accident. They spread because recommendation systems built by Meta pushed them into Indian feeds during a period of acute national tension — at a moment when a fabricated video of a Union Minister calling for violence against students could have triggered exactly that. Meta's AI, which the company insists is sophisticated enough to moderate content at scale, could not distinguish a deepfake of India's Commerce Minister from a real one. The Businesses It Destroyed While Meta's systems failed to catch fabrications of national leaders, they were ruthlessly efficient at removing people who had done nothing wrong. Meta says it removed more than 10 million accounts in a crackdown targeting bots and fake engagement. A New York Times investigation this month documented what that meant in practice: business owners whose livelihoods disappeared overnight, accounts disabled under vague headings such as ‘fraud and deception’ with no specific violating post ever identified, and appeals rejected within days in terms making clear no further review was possible. The design is the problem. In March 2026, Meta handed greater responsibility to AI systems both for judging violations and for deciding appeals against those judgements — then laid off thousands of the staff who had done that work. The result is a closed loop: the same automated system that destroys a business also adjudicates its plea for reinstatement. Meta's own Oversight Board, reviewing account deactivations, identified systemic concerns over due process, proportionality and transparency, found that users are not told which rule they broke or what recourse exists, and recommended Meta disclose what role AI plays in these decisions — a recommendation that only exists because Meta does not currently disclose it. The Board also found that Meta Verified, which businesses pay for precisely to obtain support, failed to provide meaningful assistance to users whose accounts were disabled. For Indian content creators and small businesses that built their customer base on Instagram and Facebook, an unexplained automated ban is not an inconvenience. It is the end of a business, with no appeal that a human being will ever read. The Advertisements It Approved In July, a BBC Eye investigation found that Instagram was serving paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material in India. A test account was reportedly served around 30 distinct paid ads using explicit search terms, redirecting users to Telegram channels selling illegal material for as little as ₹99. The mechanism matters. Meta's advertisement review is conducted primarily by AI, examining an ad's images, text, targeting and destination links. When the system is confident an ad complies, it runs — with no human reviewing it at any point. A human sees an advertisement only if the machine itself is uncertain. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology summoned Meta's officials. Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw directed the ministry to seek an explanation. MeitY ordered Instagram to disable all such content and demanded a detailed response within seven days, warning that failure could threaten Meta's safe harbour protection under Section 79 of the IT Act. Meta's response was that it does not ‘knowingly’ target such advertising, and that ‘no system is perfect.’ Forbes reported on July 13 that such advertisements remained active on Instagram after the controversy had already broken. And Then It Blocked The Prime Minister On Facebook, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's post announcing action on the NEET paper leak — ‘More strict actions against paper leaks to come in tomorrow’s Cabinet!' — is unavailable to users in India. Meta's entire explanation is one sentence: ‘The attached media isn’t available in your region due to a legal request.' No authority is named. No statute is cited. No case number appears. The same message on Instagram set a world record, crossing 303 million views in 24 hours and overtaking the previous mark held by YouTuber IShowSpeed. On one Meta platform it is the most-viewed reel in history. On the other, Indians cannot see it. Priti Gandhi, the BJP's IT and social media national in-charge for the party's seven Morchas and an official spokesperson for Maharashtra BJP, put the question directly to the company: ‘The Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy uploads his first direct selfie video to connect with India's youth… and Facebook restricts it??? Who gave Meta the authority to decide what millions of Indians should or should not see??? This isn't just content moderation. It raises serious questions about your political bias, transparency & accountability. Respond!!!' Meta has not responded. The Opacity Is Itself The Offence Meta will say, correctly, that it often acts on legal requests from Indian authorities. Protest-related content was geo-blocked in India in July under Section 69A of the IT Act, and Delhi Police wrote to platforms seeking removal of hundreds of posts linked to the agitation, alleging they carried AI-generated abusive content and misinformation. But that defence collapses into the accusation. If Meta is merely executing lawful orders, it can say so — name the provision, cite the order, tell Indian citizens which authority decided what they may see. It does not. It publishes four words and leaves 800 million Indian users to guess. The company has built a system in which neither the government's decisions nor Meta's own are visible to the people affected by them, and that ambiguity serves Meta alone. The Case For Action Assemble the record. An AI moderation system that cannot identify a deepfake of the Commerce Minister but can permanently erase a legitimate small business on a false positive. An advertising system that approves child sexual abuse material without a human ever seeing it. A recommendation engine that pushed fabricated videos of the Prime Minister into Indian feeds during a national crisis. An appeals process where the machine that convicts also hears the appeal. And a company that answers to a formal government summons with the observation that no system is perfect. Section 79 of the IT Act grants platforms immunity from liability for user content — but only while they discharge their due diligence obligations. That is a conditional privilege, not a right, and India's government has already put Meta on formal notice that the condition is in question. No one elected Meta. No one in India granted it the authority to decide which of the Prime Minister's words its citizens may read, or to end a business built over a decade with an automated notice and no appeal. India has every sovereign right to ask whether a company that has failed this comprehensively should retain the legal protections that let it operate here — and, if the answer is no, to act on it.

Meta's automated systems spread AI deepfakes of Prime Minister Modi and Union ministers during the CJP protests, destroyed legitimate businesses through wrongful bans, approved advertisements for child sexual abuse material, and blocked the Prime Minister's own post without explanation. India's government has summoned Meta, its safe harbour protection is under threat, and the question being asked is no longer how to fix Meta's AI — but whether it should be permitted to operate in India at all.

'Spreading deepfakes, deleted PM Modi's video': Why Meta AI should be banned in India for interfering in Indian economy and democracy

Businesses signing up to let Meta's AI run their customer conversations are also, in the same contract, agreeing to protect Meta from the legal consequences if that AI gets something wrong.&nbsp;It's In The Contract, In Plain Language&nbsp;Meta's Business AI Terms of Service state it directly: users ‘agree to indemnify and hold harmless Meta, its affiliates, employees, and any other agents from and against any claims, losses, and expenses (including attorneys’ fees) arising from or relating to use of the Business Agents,' including any subsequent use of content the AI generates or handles. The same terms cap Meta's own liability to the fullest extent the law allows, explicitly excluding Meta from responsibility for lost profits, lost revenue, or ‘consequential, special, indirect, exemplary, punitive, or incidental damages.’&nbsp;In plain terms: if Meta's Business Agent says something to a customer that turns out to violate an advertising law, a consumer protection statute, or any other regulation, the business that deployed the AI is contractually on the hook to cover Meta's legal costs defending against it — not the other way around. This isn't an inference from how courts have treated AI liability generally. It's what Meta's own signed terms say.&nbsp;But When It's Meta's Own AI, The Story Changes&nbsp;That posture looks very different when the AI in question is one Meta itself deployed internally, with no customer to indemnify it.&nbsp;In July 2026, 26 current and former Meta employees sued the company, alleging it used an AI system to help select roughly 8,000 people for layoffs — and that the selection disproportionately targeted employees who were on medical, parental, or family leave at the time, according to reporting by CNBC and Fortune. A judge has so far declined to halt the layoffs despite the discrimination claims, though the underlying lawsuit continues.&nbsp;Separately, Meta faces a lawsuit alleging that Mark Zuckerberg personally overruled internal safety staff to back a less restrictive approach to AI chatbot companions, with the suit accusing the company of failing to protect children from sexualized content delivered through AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram. Meta has disputed the characterization of internal documents cited in the case, saying they present a ‘flawed and inaccurate picture,’ and has pointed to its ongoing investment in safety research and moderation tools.&nbsp;In both cases, unlike the Business Agent's contractual arrangement with advertisers, there is no third-party customer to absorb the legal exposure — the AI in question was Meta's own decision, deployed on Meta's own employees or Meta's own product, which is precisely when Zuckerberg's name starts appearing directly in the filings.&nbsp;The One Time Meta's Own Algorithm Was On The Hook&nbsp;There's a precedent for what happens when Meta's AI breaks the law with no customer standing between it and the harm. In 2022, the Department of Justice settled a Fair Housing Act case against Meta over its ad-delivery algorithm, which used machine-learning models relying on race, national origin, and gender to determine which users saw housing ads. Meta agreed to stop using its ‘Special Ad Audience’ targeting tool for housing, employment, and credit ads entirely, and remains under court oversight of its compliance through June 27, 2026 — still active as this is published.&nbsp;That case makes the pattern clearer, not murkier: when Meta's own algorithm directly caused the discriminatory outcome, with no advertiser's independent judgment in between, Meta was the party the DOJ went after and the party that had to change its product. The indemnification clause in the Business Agent's terms exists precisely to prevent that outcome from repeating in a business-agent context — by shifting the standing customer into the legal line of fire first.&nbsp;The Actual Pattern&nbsp;None of this requires assuming bad faith. It's a coherent, deliberate allocation of risk: when Meta's AI acts on behalf of a paying business customer, that customer's signature on the terms of service puts them between Meta and any resulting legal claim. When Meta's AI acts on Meta's own behalf — deciding who gets laid off, or how a chatbot companion talks to a minor — there is no customer to stand in that gap, and the claims go where the decision was actually made.&nbsp;Zuckerberg isn't shielded from every lawsuit over Meta's AI. He's shielded from the ones where a business customer's signature is standing in front of him.

Meta's Business AI Terms of Service require businesses to indemnify Meta against legal claims from the AI's use. Compare that to two live 2026 lawsuits over Meta's own internal AI use — mass layoffs and teen chatbot safety — where Zuckerberg himself is named directly.

Businesses signing up to let Meta's AI run their customer conversations are also, in the same contract, agreeing to protect Meta from the legal consequences if that AI gets something wrong. It's In The Contract, In Plain Language Meta's Business AI Terms of Service state it directly: users ‘agree to indemnify and hold harmless Meta, its affiliates, employees, and any other agents from and against any claims, losses, and expenses (including attorneys’ fees) arising from or relating to use of the Business Agents,' including any subsequent use of content the AI generates or handles. The same terms cap Meta's own liability to the fullest extent the law allows, explicitly excluding Meta from responsibility for lost profits, lost revenue, or ‘consequential, special, indirect, exemplary, punitive, or incidental damages.’ In plain terms: if Meta's Business Agent says something to a customer that turns out to violate an advertising law, a consumer protection statute, or any other regulation, the business that deployed the AI is contractually on the hook to cover Meta's legal costs defending against it — not the other way around. This isn't an inference from how courts have treated AI liability generally. It's what Meta's own signed terms say. But When It's Meta's Own AI, The Story Changes That posture looks very different when the AI in question is one Meta itself deployed internally, with no customer to indemnify it. In July 2026, 26 current and former Meta employees sued the company, alleging it used an AI system to help select roughly 8,000 people for layoffs — and that the selection disproportionately targeted employees who were on medical, parental, or family leave at the time, according to reporting by CNBC and Fortune. A judge has so far declined to halt the layoffs despite the discrimination claims, though the underlying lawsuit continues. Separately, Meta faces a lawsuit alleging that Mark Zuckerberg personally overruled internal safety staff to back a less restrictive approach to AI chatbot companions, with the suit accusing the company of failing to protect children from sexualized content delivered through AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram. Meta has disputed the characterization of internal documents cited in the case, saying they present a ‘flawed and inaccurate picture,’ and has pointed to its ongoing investment in safety research and moderation tools. In both cases, unlike the Business Agent's contractual arrangement with advertisers, there is no third-party customer to absorb the legal exposure — the AI in question was Meta's own decision, deployed on Meta's own employees or Meta's own product, which is precisely when Zuckerberg's name starts appearing directly in the filings. The One Time Meta's Own Algorithm Was On The Hook There's a precedent for what happens when Meta's AI breaks the law with no customer standing between it and the harm. In 2022, the Department of Justice settled a Fair Housing Act case against Meta over its ad-delivery algorithm, which used machine-learning models relying on race, national origin, and gender to determine which users saw housing ads. Meta agreed to stop using its ‘Special Ad Audience’ targeting tool for housing, employment, and credit ads entirely, and remains under court oversight of its compliance through June 27, 2026 — still active as this is published. That case makes the pattern clearer, not murkier: when Meta's own algorithm directly caused the discriminatory outcome, with no advertiser's independent judgment in between, Meta was the party the DOJ went after and the party that had to change its product. The indemnification clause in the Business Agent's terms exists precisely to prevent that outcome from repeating in a business-agent context — by shifting the standing customer into the legal line of fire first. The Actual Pattern None of this requires assuming bad faith. It's a coherent, deliberate allocation of risk: when Meta's AI acts on behalf of a paying business customer, that customer's signature on the terms of service puts them between Meta and any resulting legal claim. When Meta's AI acts on Meta's own behalf — deciding who gets laid off, or how a chatbot companion talks to a minor — there is no customer to stand in that gap, and the claims go where the decision was actually made. Zuckerberg isn't shielded from every lawsuit over Meta's AI. He's shielded from the ones where a business customer's signature is standing in front of him.

Meta's own Business AI Terms of Service require businesses to indemnify Meta against claims arising from the AI's use — meaning if the Business Agent breaks a law while running your customer conversations, the legal exposure is contractually yours. Compare that to two live 2026 lawsuits over Meta's own internal use of AI, where Mark Zuckerberg himself is named directly.

Meta AI's stupidity could give you jail time, not Zuckerberg! Here's how

Benchmark scores are the industry's proof of concept — the numbers AI labs point to when they say their model can reason, plan, and make judgment calls. Meta's own former chief AI scientist has now confirmed that at least one of Meta's headline benchmark results was not real.&nbsp;The Scandal That Started With A Leaderboard Crash&nbsp;In April 2025, Meta submitted a version of its newly released Llama 4 Maverick model to LMArena, a popular public leaderboard where AI models are ranked head-to-head. That submission scored well enough to place Maverick second overall. Then developers got access to the actual, publicly released version of the model — and it fell to 32nd place.&nbsp;The gap between the two results was too large to explain away as noise. Developers who examined both versions found substantive differences between what Meta had submitted to the leaderboard and what it had shipped to the public, fuelling accusations that Meta had used a specially tuned, non-public variant purely to inflate its ranking.&nbsp;Meta's Denial — Then Meta's Own Confirmation&nbsp;At the time, Meta's VP of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, denied any manipulation, calling the claims ‘simply not true’ and attributing the inconsistency to ‘differing cloud implementations.’&nbsp;That explanation didn't hold for long. In January 2026, Yann LeCun — Meta's chief AI scientist until his own departure from the company — told the Financial Times that the Llama 4 benchmark results were, in his words, fudged. LeCun said Meta's team had trained multiple checkpoints of the model and selected the highest score achieved on each individual benchmark, then presented the results as a single composite performance — one that no single version of the model had actually achieved. He called it a practice that ‘completely violated the principle of fair evaluation.’&nbsp;Meta has separately and specifically denied training Llama 4 directly on benchmark test sets, stating ‘that’s simply not true and we would never do that.' LeCun's account describes a different mechanism — checkpoint cherry-picking rather than training-set contamination — but the effect on the published number is the same: a result that misrepresents what the actual, released model can do.&nbsp;What A Faked Benchmark Looks Like In The Real World&nbsp;A benchmark score is a claim about how an AI reasons under test conditions. What happens when that same AI operates without a test in front of it is a separate, more revealing question — and Meta's own platform has already answered it.&nbsp;A New York Times investigation this month documented Meta's AI moderation system disabling real business accounts under vague policy categories, with no specific violation ever cited and appeals rejected within days as final — because the same AI system that ruled on the violation was also the one reviewing its own appeal. Separately, reporting by 404 Media detailed how hackers compromised roughly 20,225 Instagram accounts simply by asking Meta's AI-assisted account recovery system for access — a system built specifically to protect high-value creator and business accounts, undone by a request a human reviewer would have immediately flagged as suspicious.&nbsp;Neither of those failures required an adversarial benchmark or an edge-case prompt. They were the AI acting exactly as it was deployed to act, on ordinary requests, and getting the basic judgment call wrong.&nbsp;The Common Thread&nbsp;Line up the two stories and the pattern is hard to miss: a headline number built by quietly discarding the runs that didn't perform, next to a real deployment that couldn't reliably tell a legitimate business from a fraudulent one, or a genuine account-recovery request from a social-engineering attempt. One is a manufactured claim about capability. The other is what that capability actually looks like once it's making decisions that affect real accounts and real livelihoods.&nbsp;Meta has not said whether any other model's benchmark results were built the same way LeCun described for Llama 4. Until it does, the more reliable measure of what Meta's AI can actually do isn't the leaderboard — it's what already happened on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook due to Meta AI's incapability.

Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun confirmed Llama 4's benchmark results were manufactured through checkpoint cherry-picking. Meta's real-world AI deployment on Instagram — wrongful business account bans and a hack triggered by simply asking — shows what that gap between claimed and actual capability looks like.

Benchmark scores are the industry's proof of concept — the numbers AI labs point to when they say their model can reason, plan, and make judgment calls. Meta's own former chief AI scientist has now confirmed that at least one of Meta's headline benchmark results was not real. The Scandal That Started With A Leaderboard Crash In April 2025, Meta submitted a version of its newly released Llama 4 Maverick model to LMArena, a popular public leaderboard where AI models are ranked head-to-head. That submission scored well enough to place Maverick second overall. Then developers got access to the actual, publicly released version of the model — and it fell to 32nd place. The gap between the two results was too large to explain away as noise. Developers who examined both versions found substantive differences between what Meta had submitted to the leaderboard and what it had shipped to the public, fuelling accusations that Meta had used a specially tuned, non-public variant purely to inflate its ranking. Meta's Denial — Then Meta's Own Confirmation At the time, Meta's VP of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, denied any manipulation, calling the claims ‘simply not true’ and attributing the inconsistency to ‘differing cloud implementations.’ That explanation didn't hold for long. In January 2026, Yann LeCun — Meta's chief AI scientist until his own departure from the company — told the Financial Times that the Llama 4 benchmark results were, in his words, fudged. LeCun said Meta's team had trained multiple checkpoints of the model and selected the highest score achieved on each individual benchmark, then presented the results as a single composite performance — one that no single version of the model had actually achieved. He called it a practice that ‘completely violated the principle of fair evaluation.’ Meta has separately and specifically denied training Llama 4 directly on benchmark test sets, stating ‘that’s simply not true and we would never do that.' LeCun's account describes a different mechanism — checkpoint cherry-picking rather than training-set contamination — but the effect on the published number is the same: a result that misrepresents what the actual, released model can do. What A Faked Benchmark Looks Like In The Real World A benchmark score is a claim about how an AI reasons under test conditions. What happens when that same AI operates without a test in front of it is a separate, more revealing question — and Meta's own platform has already answered it. A New York Times investigation this month documented Meta's AI moderation system disabling real business accounts under vague policy categories, with no specific violation ever cited and appeals rejected within days as final — because the same AI system that ruled on the violation was also the one reviewing its own appeal. Separately, reporting by 404 Media detailed how hackers compromised roughly 20,225 Instagram accounts simply by asking Meta's AI-assisted account recovery system for access — a system built specifically to protect high-value creator and business accounts, undone by a request a human reviewer would have immediately flagged as suspicious. Neither of those failures required an adversarial benchmark or an edge-case prompt. They were the AI acting exactly as it was deployed to act, on ordinary requests, and getting the basic judgment call wrong. The Common Thread Line up the two stories and the pattern is hard to miss: a headline number built by quietly discarding the runs that didn't perform, next to a real deployment that couldn't reliably tell a legitimate business from a fraudulent one, or a genuine account-recovery request from a social-engineering attempt. One is a manufactured claim about capability. The other is what that capability actually looks like once it's making decisions that affect real accounts and real livelihoods. Meta has not said whether any other model's benchmark results were built the same way LeCun described for Llama 4. Until it does, the more reliable measure of what Meta's AI can actually do isn't the leaderboard — it's what already happened on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook due to Meta AI's incapability.

Meta's AI scores are supposed to prove its models can reason. Its own former chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has now confirmed the Llama 4 benchmark results were manufactured — different model versions cherry-picked per test, with no single model achieving the published composite score. What Meta's AI does when actually deployed, on Instagram's own business accounts, tells the same story a different way.

'From 2nd to 32nd': Meta faked its AI benchmark score once, is it doing same with Muse Spark 1.1?

Two leaked recordings of internal Meta meetings, released months apart in 2026, add up to an uncomfortable story about how the company has tried to build its AI and how little it has to show for it.&nbsp;The First Leak: Zuckerberg Defends Tracking His Own Employees&nbsp;The first recording, from an April 2026 town hall reported on by The Register and Common Dreams, captured Mark Zuckerberg defending a company programme called the Model Capability Initiative. The software, installed on employees' work laptops, logged keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and periodic screenshots — all of it fed into Meta's AI models as training data. Staff on company-issued devices had no way to opt out.&nbsp;In the recording, Zuckerberg suggested Meta's AI could learn directly from observing employees' own workflows and coding behaviour — in effect, using the people building the AI as an unwitting source of the data training it.&nbsp;The reaction inside Meta was immediate. More than 1,600 employees signed an internal petition demanding the programme be scrapped, citing protections under the National Labor Relations Act. Staff in the United Kingdom launched a unionisation drive partly in response. Flyers protesting the tracking appeared in Meta offices in California and New York.&nbsp;The Programme Meta Built To Improve Its AI Instead Exposed Its Own Data&nbsp;The Model Capability Initiative didn't just anger staff, it failed on its own terms. Meta paused the programme on June 22 after an internal security review found that the material it had collected, including private employee conversations, prompts, and performance-related records, had been left accessible across roughly 45,000 internal database tables.&nbsp;A programme built specifically to strengthen Meta's AI by harvesting employee data had instead created one of the more embarrassing internal data exposures at the company in recent memory, turning a surveillance controversy into a security failure on top of it.&nbsp;The Second Leak: Zuckerberg Admits The Push ‘Hasn’t Really Accelerated'&nbsp;The second recording surfaced from a closed-door town hall on July 2. In it, Zuckerberg told employees directly that Meta's AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected' over the preceding four months.&nbsp;Set against the first leak, the admission lands harder. This is not an outside critic's assessment — it's the founder-CEO, on tape, telling his own staff that the programme he restructured the company's AI division for, and reportedly tracked their own keystrokes to accelerate, still isn't moving at the pace he promised.&nbsp;The Pattern&nbsp;Taken together, the two leaks describe a company willing to track its own employees' clicks and screenshots without consent to feed its AI ambitions, whose data-handling of that same programme failed badly enough to expose private conversations across tens of thousands of internal database tables, and whose own CEO, months later, on a separate recording, concedes the underlying AI effort hasn't delivered the acceleration it was built to produce.&nbsp;Meta has not disputed the authenticity of either recording. The company paused the Model Capability Initiative after the exposure was discovered, but has not said whether employee tracking for AI training will resume in another form.

Two leaked recordings of internal Meta town halls show Mark Zuckerberg defending a secret employee-tracking programme built to train Meta's AI, then months later admitting the AI push 'hasn't really accelerated' as expected.

Two leaked recordings of internal Meta meetings, released months apart in 2026, add up to an uncomfortable story about how the company has tried to build its AI and how little it has to show for it. The First Leak: Zuckerberg Defends Tracking His Own Employees The first recording, from an April 2026 town hall reported on by The Register and Common Dreams, captured Mark Zuckerberg defending a company programme called the Model Capability Initiative. The software, installed on employees' work laptops, logged keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and periodic screenshots — all of it fed into Meta's AI models as training data. Staff on company-issued devices had no way to opt out. In the recording, Zuckerberg suggested Meta's AI could learn directly from observing employees' own workflows and coding behaviour — in effect, using the people building the AI as an unwitting source of the data training it. The reaction inside Meta was immediate. More than 1,600 employees signed an internal petition demanding the programme be scrapped, citing protections under the National Labor Relations Act. Staff in the United Kingdom launched a unionisation drive partly in response. Flyers protesting the tracking appeared in Meta offices in California and New York. The Programme Meta Built To Improve Its AI Instead Exposed Its Own Data The Model Capability Initiative didn't just anger staff, it failed on its own terms. Meta paused the programme on June 22 after an internal security review found that the material it had collected, including private employee conversations, prompts, and performance-related records, had been left accessible across roughly 45,000 internal database tables. A programme built specifically to strengthen Meta's AI by harvesting employee data had instead created one of the more embarrassing internal data exposures at the company in recent memory, turning a surveillance controversy into a security failure on top of it. The Second Leak: Zuckerberg Admits The Push ‘Hasn’t Really Accelerated' The second recording surfaced from a closed-door town hall on July 2. In it, Zuckerberg told employees directly that Meta's AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected' over the preceding four months. Set against the first leak, the admission lands harder. This is not an outside critic's assessment — it's the founder-CEO, on tape, telling his own staff that the programme he restructured the company's AI division for, and reportedly tracked their own keystrokes to accelerate, still isn't moving at the pace he promised. The Pattern Taken together, the two leaks describe a company willing to track its own employees' clicks and screenshots without consent to feed its AI ambitions, whose data-handling of that same programme failed badly enough to expose private conversations across tens of thousands of internal database tables, and whose own CEO, months later, on a separate recording, concedes the underlying AI effort hasn't delivered the acceleration it was built to produce. Meta has not disputed the authenticity of either recording. The company paused the Model Capability Initiative after the exposure was discovered, but has not said whether employee tracking for AI training will resume in another form.

Two leaked recordings of internal Meta town halls, months apart, tell an ugly story: Mark Zuckerberg defending a secret programme that tracked employees' keystrokes and screenshots to train Meta's AI, followed by a second leak in which he admits the AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated' the way the company expected.

Meta's leaked internal recording show Meta AI is a disaster and Zuckerberg wants to double down on it

In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a deal that valued the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and came with a prize far more important to Mark Zuckerberg than the equity: Scale AI's 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, who stepped down from his own company to lead Meta's new Superintelligence Labs.&nbsp;A year later, the case that this was Meta's worst-ever hire is being made by Meta's own former chief AI scientist.&nbsp;‘Inexperienced’ — From The Man Who Used To Have The Job&nbsp;Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning researcher known as one of AI's ‘godfathers’ and Meta's chief AI scientist until his own exit, told the Financial Times that Wang was ‘young’ and ‘inexperienced,’ adding bluntly that Wang had ‘no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it.’ LeCun made his own abrupt exit from Meta in November 2025 after being placed in a reporting line under Wang.&nbsp;LeCun didn't stop at a personal critique of Wang. He dismissed the technical direction of Wang's new hires as ‘completely LLM-pilled,’ arguing that large language models are ‘a dead end when it comes to superintelligence’ — a direct challenge to the entire premise Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on. He also predicted the departures wouldn't stop: ‘A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave.'&nbsp;The Exodus LeCun Predicted&nbsp;That prediction has been borne out. Joelle Pineau, vice president of Meta's AI research group, announced her own departure. Three high-profile researchers — Avi Verma, Ethan Knight, and Rishabh Agarwal — left within months of joining, with some never formally starting. In the weeks immediately following the Superintelligence Labs announcement, at least eight researchers, engineers, and product leaders associated with Meta's AI operation departed altogether, headed variously to OpenAI, Anthropic, and AI materials-science startup Periodic Labs.&nbsp;Meta's public position has been to describe this turnover as normal for an organisation of its size, and the company has since pushed back on separate reports that Zuckerberg had sidelined Wang, calling those reports false. Meta has also reportedly frozen its aggressive AI hiring push after a summer recruitment spree.&nbsp;Zuckerberg's Own Leaked Admission&nbsp;Underneath the personnel turmoil, leaked internal audio has surfaced twice this year, and neither instance flatters the state of Meta's AI push under Wang's leadership.&nbsp;The first, a recording from an April 2026 town hall reported on by The Register and Common Dreams, captured Zuckerberg defending a program called the Model Capability Initiative — software installed on employees' work laptops that logged keystrokes, clicks, and periodic screenshots specifically to feed employee work patterns into Meta's AI training data, with no opt-out for staff on company-issued devices. More than 1,600 employees signed an internal petition against it, and staff in the UK launched a unionisation drive. Meta paused the programme on June 22 after an internal security review found the collected material — including private conversations — sitting exposed and accessible across roughly 45,000 internal database tables.&nbsp;The second leak, from a closed-door town hall on July 2, has Zuckerberg telling employees directly that Meta's AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected' over the preceding four months — an admission, in his own words, that the initiative he restructured his entire AI division and paid $14.3 billion to accelerate isn't moving at the pace he promised investors.&nbsp;Why This Matters Beyond The Org Chart&nbsp;This is the same leadership and the same AI division now asking small businesses to hand over customer service and sales conversations to Meta's AI Business Agent, and the same company whose AI systems have separately been documented wrongly banning business accounts with no meaningful appeal and generating basic errors in ad creative.&nbsp;A company can survive losing individual researchers. What's harder to shake off is a founder-CEO's own leaked admission that the AI strategy he bet the company's next decade on hasn't accelerated as promised — delivered by the person he chose to run it, a year after his own former chief scientist called that choice inexperienced and predicted the exodus that followed.

Meta paid $14.3 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang to lead its AI push. A year on, former chief scientist Yann LeCun calls him inexperienced, senior researchers have exited in waves, and leaked audio has Zuckerberg admitting the AI push hasn't accelerated as expected.

In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a deal that valued the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and came with a prize far more important to Mark Zuckerberg than the equity: Scale AI's 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, who stepped down from his own company to lead Meta's new Superintelligence Labs. A year later, the case that this was Meta's worst-ever hire is being made by Meta's own former chief AI scientist. ‘Inexperienced’ — From The Man Who Used To Have The Job Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning researcher known as one of AI's ‘godfathers’ and Meta's chief AI scientist until his own exit, told the Financial Times that Wang was ‘young’ and ‘inexperienced,’ adding bluntly that Wang had ‘no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it.’ LeCun made his own abrupt exit from Meta in November 2025 after being placed in a reporting line under Wang. LeCun didn't stop at a personal critique of Wang. He dismissed the technical direction of Wang's new hires as ‘completely LLM-pilled,’ arguing that large language models are ‘a dead end when it comes to superintelligence’ — a direct challenge to the entire premise Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on. He also predicted the departures wouldn't stop: ‘A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave.' The Exodus LeCun Predicted That prediction has been borne out. Joelle Pineau, vice president of Meta's AI research group, announced her own departure. Three high-profile researchers — Avi Verma, Ethan Knight, and Rishabh Agarwal — left within months of joining, with some never formally starting. In the weeks immediately following the Superintelligence Labs announcement, at least eight researchers, engineers, and product leaders associated with Meta's AI operation departed altogether, headed variously to OpenAI, Anthropic, and AI materials-science startup Periodic Labs. Meta's public position has been to describe this turnover as normal for an organisation of its size, and the company has since pushed back on separate reports that Zuckerberg had sidelined Wang, calling those reports false. Meta has also reportedly frozen its aggressive AI hiring push after a summer recruitment spree. Zuckerberg's Own Leaked Admission Underneath the personnel turmoil, leaked internal audio has surfaced twice this year, and neither instance flatters the state of Meta's AI push under Wang's leadership. The first, a recording from an April 2026 town hall reported on by The Register and Common Dreams, captured Zuckerberg defending a program called the Model Capability Initiative — software installed on employees' work laptops that logged keystrokes, clicks, and periodic screenshots specifically to feed employee work patterns into Meta's AI training data, with no opt-out for staff on company-issued devices. More than 1,600 employees signed an internal petition against it, and staff in the UK launched a unionisation drive. Meta paused the programme on June 22 after an internal security review found the collected material — including private conversations — sitting exposed and accessible across roughly 45,000 internal database tables. The second leak, from a closed-door town hall on July 2, has Zuckerberg telling employees directly that Meta's AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected' over the preceding four months — an admission, in his own words, that the initiative he restructured his entire AI division and paid $14.3 billion to accelerate isn't moving at the pace he promised investors. Why This Matters Beyond The Org Chart This is the same leadership and the same AI division now asking small businesses to hand over customer service and sales conversations to Meta's AI Business Agent, and the same company whose AI systems have separately been documented wrongly banning business accounts with no meaningful appeal and generating basic errors in ad creative. A company can survive losing individual researchers. What's harder to shake off is a founder-CEO's own leaked admission that the AI strategy he bet the company's next decade on hasn't accelerated as promised — delivered by the person he chose to run it, a year after his own former chief scientist called that choice inexperienced and predicted the exodus that followed.

Meta paid $14.3 billion for a stake in Scale AI to bring in 28-year-old Alexandr Wang to lead its AI efforts. A year on, Meta's own former chief AI scientist has called him ‘inexperienced,’ a wave of senior researchers has walked out, and leaked internal audio has Mark Zuckerberg himself admitting the AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated' the way the company expected.

Meta's ex-AI chief warned Alexandr Wang is incompetent! Users are now facing the wrath

Meta's AI Business Agent will start billing businesses by the token from August 1, handling customer questions, sales, and transactions across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Before handing it the keys, there's a question worth asking that has nothing to do with how smart the AI is: when it gets something wrong, who actually pays for it?&nbsp;The answer, based on existing legal precedent, is not Meta. It's you.&nbsp;You Are Legally Responsible For What The AI Does&nbsp;Courts have already ruled on this. In the 2024 case Moffatt v. Air Canada, a customer used the airline's website chatbot to ask about bereavement fares. The bot gave incorrect information, the airline later refused to honour it, and a Canadian tribunal held Air Canada itself liable — not the chatbot vendor. The legal reasoning was straightforward: an AI agent performing a function an employee would normally perform creates the same liability an employee would create, and that liability sits with the business deploying it, not the software underneath it.&nbsp;That precedent applies directly to any business handing sales conversations, pricing, and appointment bookings to Meta's Business Agent. If the AI quotes a wrong price, promises a discount that doesn't exist, or mishandles a customer complaint, the legal exposure lands on the business owner's desk — not Meta's. Meta has already made its own position on this explicit: responding to advertiser complaints about its AI ad tools, the company said plainly that reviewing AI output is the advertiser's responsibility, not its own.&nbsp;So the arrangement is this: Meta collects a fee for every conversation its AI runs, and the business deploying it absorbs 100% of the legal and reputational risk if that AI gets something wrong.&nbsp;The Infrastructure It Runs On Already Failed Once&nbsp;Nine days after Meta officially launched the Business Agent globally at its Conversations conference on June 3, its own business infrastructure went down. On June 12, a global Meta outage lasting roughly four hours took out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for millions of users. Meta's own status page logged high disruptions specifically across the WhatsApp Business Platform, the Messenger Platform, the Messenger API for Instagram, and Facebook Ads Manager — the exact rails the Business Agent runs on.&nbsp;For a business relying on that infrastructure for live customer conversations, the practical effect during those four hours was stalled support queues, undelivered campaigns, and bot flows that simply stopped mid-conversation. A business that had handed its front line to Meta's AI had, for four hours, no front line at all — and no path to compensation for it.&nbsp;Meta's Own Oversight Board Doesn't Trust The System Either&nbsp;It isn't just outside critics raising concerns. Meta's Oversight Board — the semi-independent body Meta itself created to review its content and account decisions — published findings flagging what it called systemic problems with transparency and consistency in how Meta deactivates accounts. The board found that users often aren't told which specific rule they broke, when the penalty was applied, or what their appeal options are.&nbsp;Most notably for a company about to expand AI's role in running businesses, the board explicitly recommended that Meta start disclosing what role AI actually plays in its content and penalty decisions — a recommendation that only makes sense if Meta currently isn't disclosing that. The board also singled out Meta Verified, the paid subscription businesses buy specifically for account protection and support, for failing to provide what it called meaningful assistance to users with disabled accounts, despite charging for 24/7 support access.&nbsp;In short: Meta's own appointed reviewers don't think Meta is transparent enough about how AI already makes decisions affecting business accounts — and businesses are still being asked to expand that same AI's role.&nbsp;Meta Restricts Others From Doing What Its Own AI Does&nbsp;There's a data-handling contradiction too. Under WhatsApp's own Business Solution Terms, updated from January 15, 2026, Meta blocks third-party providers from using WhatsApp chat data to train AI models or from routing user messages to an AI provider for purposes beyond serving that specific user. Meta drew that line for everyone else's AI.&nbsp;Its own Business Agent doesn't sit on the same side of that line. To train the agent on a business's brand, the business uploads its website, product catalog, FAQs, and chat history directly to Meta — and messages handled by Meta AI are processed on Meta's own servers to generate responses, which falls outside WhatsApp's standard end-to-end encrypted model, with Meta using that data to improve its services. The rule Meta enforces on outside AI providers is not the rule Meta applies to itself.&nbsp;The Actual Case Against Handing Meta AI Your Business&nbsp;None of this requires believing Meta's AI is incompetent. It requires recognising that the entire arrangement transfers risk in one direction only. The legal liability for AI mistakes sits with the business, by existing court precedent and by Meta's own stated policy. The infrastructure the AI depends on has already failed for four hours within its first two weeks live, with no compensation path disclosed. Meta's own Oversight Board says the company isn't transparent enough about AI's role in decisions that can end a business's account overnight. And the data-handling rules Meta imposes on competitors don't apply to Meta's own product.&nbsp;A business owner weighing whether to plug Meta's AI into their customer conversations from August 1 isn't just asking whether the technology works. They're being asked to accept full legal responsibility for a system running on infrastructure that already broke once, overseen by a company whose own oversight board says it isn't transparent enough about that same system — while paying Meta for the privilege.

Meta's AI Business Agent bills businesses by the token from August 1. But legal precedent puts liability for its mistakes on the business, not Meta, its business infrastructure already failed for four hours after launch, and Meta's own Oversight Board says the company isn't transparent about AI's role in its decisions.

Meta's AI Business Agent will start billing businesses by the token from August 1, handling customer questions, sales, and transactions across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Before handing it the keys, there's a question worth asking that has nothing to do with how smart the AI is: when it gets something wrong, who actually pays for it? The answer, based on existing legal precedent, is not Meta. It's you. You Are Legally Responsible For What The AI Does Courts have already ruled on this. In the 2024 case Moffatt v. Air Canada, a customer used the airline's website chatbot to ask about bereavement fares. The bot gave incorrect information, the airline later refused to honour it, and a Canadian tribunal held Air Canada itself liable — not the chatbot vendor. The legal reasoning was straightforward: an AI agent performing a function an employee would normally perform creates the same liability an employee would create, and that liability sits with the business deploying it, not the software underneath it. That precedent applies directly to any business handing sales conversations, pricing, and appointment bookings to Meta's Business Agent. If the AI quotes a wrong price, promises a discount that doesn't exist, or mishandles a customer complaint, the legal exposure lands on the business owner's desk — not Meta's. Meta has already made its own position on this explicit: responding to advertiser complaints about its AI ad tools, the company said plainly that reviewing AI output is the advertiser's responsibility, not its own. So the arrangement is this: Meta collects a fee for every conversation its AI runs, and the business deploying it absorbs 100% of the legal and reputational risk if that AI gets something wrong. The Infrastructure It Runs On Already Failed Once Nine days after Meta officially launched the Business Agent globally at its Conversations conference on June 3, its own business infrastructure went down. On June 12, a global Meta outage lasting roughly four hours took out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for millions of users. Meta's own status page logged high disruptions specifically across the WhatsApp Business Platform, the Messenger Platform, the Messenger API for Instagram, and Facebook Ads Manager — the exact rails the Business Agent runs on. For a business relying on that infrastructure for live customer conversations, the practical effect during those four hours was stalled support queues, undelivered campaigns, and bot flows that simply stopped mid-conversation. A business that had handed its front line to Meta's AI had, for four hours, no front line at all — and no path to compensation for it. Meta's Own Oversight Board Doesn't Trust The System Either It isn't just outside critics raising concerns. Meta's Oversight Board — the semi-independent body Meta itself created to review its content and account decisions — published findings flagging what it called systemic problems with transparency and consistency in how Meta deactivates accounts. The board found that users often aren't told which specific rule they broke, when the penalty was applied, or what their appeal options are. Most notably for a company about to expand AI's role in running businesses, the board explicitly recommended that Meta start disclosing what role AI actually plays in its content and penalty decisions — a recommendation that only makes sense if Meta currently isn't disclosing that. The board also singled out Meta Verified, the paid subscription businesses buy specifically for account protection and support, for failing to provide what it called meaningful assistance to users with disabled accounts, despite charging for 24/7 support access. In short: Meta's own appointed reviewers don't think Meta is transparent enough about how AI already makes decisions affecting business accounts — and businesses are still being asked to expand that same AI's role. Meta Restricts Others From Doing What Its Own AI Does There's a data-handling contradiction too. Under WhatsApp's own Business Solution Terms, updated from January 15, 2026, Meta blocks third-party providers from using WhatsApp chat data to train AI models or from routing user messages to an AI provider for purposes beyond serving that specific user. Meta drew that line for everyone else's AI. Its own Business Agent doesn't sit on the same side of that line. To train the agent on a business's brand, the business uploads its website, product catalog, FAQs, and chat history directly to Meta — and messages handled by Meta AI are processed on Meta's own servers to generate responses, which falls outside WhatsApp's standard end-to-end encrypted model, with Meta using that data to improve its services. The rule Meta enforces on outside AI providers is not the rule Meta applies to itself. The Actual Case Against Handing Meta AI Your Business None of this requires believing Meta's AI is incompetent. It requires recognising that the entire arrangement transfers risk in one direction only. The legal liability for AI mistakes sits with the business, by existing court precedent and by Meta's own stated policy. The infrastructure the AI depends on has already failed for four hours within its first two weeks live, with no compensation path disclosed. Meta's own Oversight Board says the company isn't transparent enough about AI's role in decisions that can end a business's account overnight. And the data-handling rules Meta imposes on competitors don't apply to Meta's own product. A business owner weighing whether to plug Meta's AI into their customer conversations from August 1 isn't just asking whether the technology works. They're being asked to accept full legal responsibility for a system running on infrastructure that already broke once, overseen by a company whose own oversight board says it isn't transparent enough about that same system — while paying Meta for the privilege.

Meta wants businesses to hand Instagram and WhatsApp customer service to its AI Business Agent. But legal precedent says any mistake it makes is legally yours, not Meta's and Meta's own Oversight Board, and a four-hour outage of its business APIs just nine days after launch, suggest the company isn't ready to be trusted with that responsibility either.

Why Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 should be nowhere near your business

Meta wants to run your business. According to Meta's own announcement of its AI Business Agent, starting August 1 the tool will handle customer questions, recommend products, book appointments, qualify sales leads, and complete transactions across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger — billed by the token. The pitch is simple: let the AI do the thinking, you keep the profits.&nbsp;The problem is Meta's own platform has spent the last few months demonstrating, in reporting from The New York Times, 404 Media and MediaPost, that its AI struggles with basic reasoning and judgment on the exact same accounts it now wants to run.&nbsp;The Wrongful Ban Problem&nbsp;According to a New York Times investigation published July 21, Meta said back in March 2026 that it would hand more responsibility to AI systems — for judging which accounts break its rules, and for handling appeals against those judgements. The Times documented the fallout four months on: business owners whose accounts were disabled overnight under vague categories like ‘fraud and deception,’ with no specific violating post ever identified, and appeals rejected within days with wording indicating the decision was final.&nbsp;One case the Times documented involved a couple running an English-teaching business with close to a million followers across Facebook and Instagram. They were told their account information would be permanently deleted, with no further review possible.&nbsp;The design flaw, as the Times' reporting lays out, is structural: the same AI system that decides an account violated policy is also the one reviewing the appeal. There is no independent human check in between — for a business, that means the AI is judge, jury, and appeals court, with no route back if it gets it wrong.&nbsp;The Security Hole Hackers Just Asked Their Way Through&nbsp;It gets worse. Meta's High Touch Support system — an AI-assisted account recovery tool built specifically for high-value creator and business accounts — contained what security researchers classify as a ‘confused deputy’ vulnerability. According to reporting by 404 Media, hackers found they could simply ask the AI system to hand over access to high-profile Instagram accounts, and it worked.&nbsp;A security incident report tracking the breach put the number of compromised Instagram accounts at approximately 20,225, hit between April 17 and May 31, 2026, before the flaw was caught. This wasn't a sophisticated technical breach — it was an AI system built to protect valuable business accounts, apparently unable to distinguish a legitimate recovery request from an obvious social-engineering attempt.&nbsp;The Ad Tools Aren't Faring Much Better&nbsp;Meta's AI-powered advertising tools have produced their own catalogue of basic errors, according to interviews MediaPost conducted with eight advertisers and agency executives. Outdoor retailer REI was auto-enrolled into an AI ad feature that generated what the company called an ‘inaccurate and inappropriate’ image — a bicycle with two sets of handlebars.&nbsp;It wasn't an isolated glitch, per MediaPost's reporting. Karissa Tuccio, executive director of social and influencer at Mediassociates, told the outlet that 15 of her clients hit similar issues on a regular basis. Rok Hladnik, CEO of Flat Circle — an agency managing roughly $200 million a year in Meta ad spend — said his team now treats manually double-checking every AI-generated output as standard procedure, not an exception.&nbsp;Meta's own response to the complaints, as relayed by MediaPost, was telling: the company said AI can make mistakes, and that reviewing its output is the advertiser's responsibility. That is a reasonable disclaimer for a creative suggestion tool. It is a much less reassuring one for a system about to handle live customer conversations and transactions unsupervised.&nbsp;Separately, industry watchdog reporting has noted Meta faces scrutiny over its AI benchmarking practices, denying allegations that it rigged Llama 4 benchmark results — part of a broader pattern in which the industry's headline performance claims and real-world reliability have increasingly diverged.&nbsp;The Contradiction At The Centre Of Meta's AI Push&nbsp;None of this means Meta's Business Agent will fail. Per Meta's own rollout announcement, pilot programmes across India, Mexico, and Brazil over nearly two years produced an installed base of over a million businesses before the global launch, and the agent's task list — answering questions, booking appointments, qualifying leads — is narrower and more scriptable than open-ended content moderation or ad-image generation.&nbsp;But the pattern across moderation, account security, and advertising — as documented separately by the Times, 404 Media, and MediaPost — is the same: the AI defaults to confident action over caution, with weak safeguards against the obvious failure case, and the burden of catching the mistake falls on the business owner after the fact. A business owner is being asked to trust that same underlying reasoning to greet customers, quote prices, and close sales — on the same platform whose AI has spent 2026 misjudging fraud, misjudging access requests, and misjudging what a bicycle looks like.&nbsp;The question isn't whether Meta's AI can technically run a conversation. It's whether it can be trusted to know when it's about to get something basic wrong — and so far, on its own platform, the record says not yet.

Meta's AI Business Agent launches globally on WhatsApp and Instagram to run customer service and sales for small businesses. But Meta's own platform shows its AI wrongly banning businesses, a security flaw hackers exploited by just asking, and ad tools generating basic errors.

Meta wants to run your business. According to Meta's own announcement of its AI Business Agent, starting August 1 the tool will handle customer questions, recommend products, book appointments, qualify sales leads, and complete transactions across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger — billed by the token. The pitch is simple: let the AI do the thinking, you keep the profits. The problem is Meta's own platform has spent the last few months demonstrating, in reporting from The New York Times, 404 Media and MediaPost, that its AI struggles with basic reasoning and judgment on the exact same accounts it now wants to run. The Wrongful Ban Problem According to a New York Times investigation published July 21, Meta said back in March 2026 that it would hand more responsibility to AI systems — for judging which accounts break its rules, and for handling appeals against those judgements. The Times documented the fallout four months on: business owners whose accounts were disabled overnight under vague categories like ‘fraud and deception,’ with no specific violating post ever identified, and appeals rejected within days with wording indicating the decision was final. One case the Times documented involved a couple running an English-teaching business with close to a million followers across Facebook and Instagram. They were told their account information would be permanently deleted, with no further review possible. The design flaw, as the Times' reporting lays out, is structural: the same AI system that decides an account violated policy is also the one reviewing the appeal. There is no independent human check in between — for a business, that means the AI is judge, jury, and appeals court, with no route back if it gets it wrong. The Security Hole Hackers Just Asked Their Way Through It gets worse. Meta's High Touch Support system — an AI-assisted account recovery tool built specifically for high-value creator and business accounts — contained what security researchers classify as a ‘confused deputy’ vulnerability. According to reporting by 404 Media, hackers found they could simply ask the AI system to hand over access to high-profile Instagram accounts, and it worked. A security incident report tracking the breach put the number of compromised Instagram accounts at approximately 20,225, hit between April 17 and May 31, 2026, before the flaw was caught. This wasn't a sophisticated technical breach — it was an AI system built to protect valuable business accounts, apparently unable to distinguish a legitimate recovery request from an obvious social-engineering attempt. The Ad Tools Aren't Faring Much Better Meta's AI-powered advertising tools have produced their own catalogue of basic errors, according to interviews MediaPost conducted with eight advertisers and agency executives. Outdoor retailer REI was auto-enrolled into an AI ad feature that generated what the company called an ‘inaccurate and inappropriate’ image — a bicycle with two sets of handlebars. It wasn't an isolated glitch, per MediaPost's reporting. Karissa Tuccio, executive director of social and influencer at Mediassociates, told the outlet that 15 of her clients hit similar issues on a regular basis. Rok Hladnik, CEO of Flat Circle — an agency managing roughly $200 million a year in Meta ad spend — said his team now treats manually double-checking every AI-generated output as standard procedure, not an exception. Meta's own response to the complaints, as relayed by MediaPost, was telling: the company said AI can make mistakes, and that reviewing its output is the advertiser's responsibility. That is a reasonable disclaimer for a creative suggestion tool. It is a much less reassuring one for a system about to handle live customer conversations and transactions unsupervised. Separately, industry watchdog reporting has noted Meta faces scrutiny over its AI benchmarking practices, denying allegations that it rigged Llama 4 benchmark results — part of a broader pattern in which the industry's headline performance claims and real-world reliability have increasingly diverged. The Contradiction At The Centre Of Meta's AI Push None of this means Meta's Business Agent will fail. Per Meta's own rollout announcement, pilot programmes across India, Mexico, and Brazil over nearly two years produced an installed base of over a million businesses before the global launch, and the agent's task list — answering questions, booking appointments, qualifying leads — is narrower and more scriptable than open-ended content moderation or ad-image generation. But the pattern across moderation, account security, and advertising — as documented separately by the Times, 404 Media, and MediaPost — is the same: the AI defaults to confident action over caution, with weak safeguards against the obvious failure case, and the burden of catching the mistake falls on the business owner after the fact. A business owner is being asked to trust that same underlying reasoning to greet customers, quote prices, and close sales — on the same platform whose AI has spent 2026 misjudging fraud, misjudging access requests, and misjudging what a bicycle looks like. The question isn't whether Meta's AI can technically run a conversation. It's whether it can be trusted to know when it's about to get something basic wrong — and so far, on its own platform, the record says not yet.

Meta wants small businesses to hand customer service, sales, and transactions to its AI Business Agent, launching globally on WhatsApp and Instagram. But its own platform's recent record, documented by The New York Times, 404 Media and MediaPost, tells a different story: AI wrongly banning real businesses with no appeal, a security flaw hackers exploited by simply asking for access, and ad tools that auto-generated a bike with two handlebars.

Meta's AI can't handle a basic Instagram account, so how will it run your business?

A US court has begun a trial against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, over allegations that it deliberately designed addictive features targeting teenagers. Jury selection began in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday (Jul 20), in a lawsuit brought by the Tennessee Attorney General under the state's consumer protection law.<h2>'Instagram, the addiction machine'</h2>Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti accused Meta of knowingly designing Instagram as an "addiction machine" that drives compulsive use among teenagers. The lawsuit alleged that Meta failed to disclose its own internal research on the platform's harms to young users and misled the public about its safety. According to the complaint, Meta continued deploying features it allegedly knew were harmful, while downplaying the associated risks.Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg previously testified that the company's algorithms are not intentionally designed to make young users addicted and that Meta has invested in safety features for teenagers.The trial is expected to last six to seven weeks. If Meta is found liable, the court could impose civil penalties of up to US$1,000 for each violation of Tennessee's Consumer Protection Act. it could also order changes to Instagram's design and practices.&nbsp;Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/broken-ai-useless-products-mark-zuckerberg-is-steering-meta-towards-a-disaster-1780207649003">'Broken AI, useless products': Mark Zuckerberg might be steering Meta towards a disaster</a><h2>Meta is facing several cases across the US</h2>The Tennessee case overlaps with a growing number of lawsuits against Meta alleging that its platforms were deliberately designed to maximise engagement at the expense of young users' mental health.In May this year, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by Breathitt County Schools in Kentucky for US$9 million. The school district had alleged that addictive design features on Instagram and Facebook harmed students and had sought US$60 million in damages. Meta denied wrongdoing as part of the settlement.<a href="https://embed.wionews.com/videos/meta-hit-with-1-4-trillion-penalty-claim-by-us-states-1783449721227/embed">https://embed.wionews.com/videos/meta-hit-with-1-4-trillion-penalty-claim-by-us-states-1783449721227/embed</a><h2>Social media addiction: The case of Kaley Glenn-Mills</h2>In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury in the K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al case found Meta and Google liable for negligently designing addictive features on Instagram and YouTube that harmed the plaintiff, Kaley Glenn-Mills. The verdict is viewed as one of the first successful individual social media addiction cases to go before a jury.The lawsuit centred on platform features including infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay and other engagement-driven design elements. The plaintiff's lawyers argued that these features contributed to compulsive use, leading to anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other mental health problems.Also read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/instagram-will-now-let-anyone-generate-deepfake-of-your-face-unless-you-opt-out-right-now-1783477170729">Instagram will now let anyone generate deepfake of your face, unless you opt out right now</a>&nbsp;According to court testimony, Glenn-Mills began using YouTube at the age of six and Instagram at the age of nine. Her lawyers argued that years of compulsive social media use contributed to severe mental health difficulties, including depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, eating disorders and repeated psychiatric hospitalisations during her adolescence.&nbsp;The jury awarded US$6 million in total damages — US$3 million in compensatory damages and US$3 million in punitive damages. It apportioned 70 per cent of the liability , or US$4.2 million, to Meta and 30 per cent, or US$1.8 million, to Google.Meta said it "respectfully disagrees" with the verdict. The company argued that teenage mental health is "profoundly complex" and cannot be attributed to a single app. It added: "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."Also in March, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay US$375 million in civil penalties after finding that it violated the state's consumer protection law by misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation risks on Facebook and Instagram. &nbsp;The case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. The jury awarded the maximum statutory penalty of US$5,000 per violation, amounting to US$375 million.Both the California verdict in K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al. and the New Mexico judgment have been appealed by Meta.<h2>Social media, Big Tech and consumers: Several cases going on</h2>Meta, Google and other Big Tech companies are facing thousands of lawsuits consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation, as well as separate actions brought by more than 40 US state attorneys general, school districts and individual plaintiffs.The main allegation is that social media platforms were designed to foster compulsive use among children and teenagers and failed to adequately warn users about the associated risks.

Meta faces trial in Tennessee over claims Instagram was designed to addict teenagers. This case adds to growing US lawsuits over addictive algorithms, teen mental health and platform safety. Here is why it matters

A US court has begun a trial against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, over allegations that it deliberately designed addictive features targeting teenagers. Jury selection began in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday (Jul 20), in a lawsuit brought by the Tennessee Attorney General under the state's consumer protection law. 'Instagram, the addiction machine' Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti accused Meta of knowingly designing Instagram as an "addiction machine" that drives compulsive use among teenagers. The lawsuit alleged that Meta failed to disclose its own internal research on the platform's harms to young users and misled the public about its safety. According to the complaint, Meta continued deploying features it allegedly knew were harmful, while downplaying the associated risks. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg previously testified that the company's algorithms are not intentionally designed to make young users addicted and that Meta has invested in safety features for teenagers. The trial is expected to last six to seven weeks. If Meta is found liable, the court could impose civil penalties of up to US$1,000 for each violation of Tennessee's Consumer Protection Act. it could also order changes to Instagram's design and practices. Also read: 'Broken AI, useless products': Mark Zuckerberg might be steering Meta towards a disaster Meta is facing several cases across the US The Tennessee case overlaps with a growing number of lawsuits against Meta alleging that its platforms were deliberately designed to maximise engagement at the expense of young users' mental health. In May this year, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by Breathitt County Schools in Kentucky for US$9 million. The school district had alleged that addictive design features on Instagram and Facebook harmed students and had sought US$60 million in damages. Meta denied wrongdoing as part of the settlement. https://embed.wionews.com/videos/meta-hit-with-1-4-trillion-penalty-claim-by-us-states-1783449721227/embed Social media addiction: The case of Kaley Glenn-Mills In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury in the K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al case found Meta and Google liable for negligently designing addictive features on Instagram and YouTube that harmed the plaintiff, Kaley Glenn-Mills. The verdict is viewed as one of the first successful individual social media addiction cases to go before a jury. The lawsuit centred on platform features including infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay and other engagement-driven design elements. The plaintiff's lawyers argued that these features contributed to compulsive use, leading to anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other mental health problems. Also read: Instagram will now let anyone generate deepfake of your face, unless you opt out right now According to court testimony, Glenn-Mills began using YouTube at the age of six and Instagram at the age of nine. Her lawyers argued that years of compulsive social media use contributed to severe mental health difficulties, including depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, eating disorders and repeated psychiatric hospitalisations during her adolescence. The jury awarded US$6 million in total damages — US$3 million in compensatory damages and US$3 million in punitive damages. It apportioned 70 per cent of the liability , or US$4.2 million, to Meta and 30 per cent, or US$1.8 million, to Google. Meta said it "respectfully disagrees" with the verdict. The company argued that teenage mental health is "profoundly complex" and cannot be attributed to a single app. It added: "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online." Also in March, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay US$375 million in civil penalties after finding that it violated the state's consumer protection law by misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation risks on Facebook and Instagram. The case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. The jury awarded the maximum statutory penalty of US$5,000 per violation, amounting to US$375 million. Both the California verdict in K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al. and the New Mexico judgment have been appealed by Meta. Social media, Big Tech and consumers: Several cases going on Meta, Google and other Big Tech companies are facing thousands of lawsuits consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation, as well as separate actions brought by more than 40 US state attorneys general, school districts and individual plaintiffs. The main allegation is that social media platforms were designed to foster compulsive use among children and teenagers and failed to adequately warn users about the associated risks.

Meta faces trial in Tennessee over claims Instagram was designed to addict teenagers. This case adds to growing US lawsuits over addictive algorithms, teen mental health and platform safety. Here is why it matters&nbsp;

Addictive algorithms: Meta trial opens in Tennessee as Instagram accused of 'addiction machine’ design

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used at alarming levels for generating child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with analysts saying that it has reached a tipping point.

The watchdog group Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said that the creation and distribution of AI-generated CSAM are becoming increasingly sophisticated too.&nbsp;

Unlike in the past, these images and videos are finding their way into public online platforms&nbsp;as opposed to the Dark Web, the internet underbelly accessible only through special browsers like Tor.

Watch: US Prosecutors Intensify Action Against AI-Generated Child Abuse Images

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The increasing photorealism of AI-generated visuals is making it difficult for authorities and watchdog agencies to figure out if these are images of a real child needing help, a situation described by an IWF analyst as a 'tipping point'.

What set alarm bells ringing is that just within the past six months, the number of instances of reported AI-generated child sex abuse imagery crossed what it was in the whole previous year.

In this period, the IWF acted on 74 reports of such content, a sharp rise from 70 in all the 12 months prior.&nbsp;

What's more disturbing is that the AI tools creating these images are trained on real victims' content, complicating efforts to identify genuine cases needing intervention, according to Derek Ray-Hill, the IWF interim chief executive.

“Recent months show that this problem is not going away and is in fact getting worse,” The Guardian newspaper quoted him as saying.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/un-report-exposes-extreme-levels-of-child-abuse-in-armed-conflicts-especially-in-gaza-and-sudan-730923">Also read: UN report exposes 'extreme levels' of child abuse in armed conflicts, especially in Gaza and Sudan</a> 
 
The abuse content ranges from real-looking deepfake videos to altered inappropriate images of clothed children.

More than half of the flagged material is hosted on servers in Russia and the United States, besides Japan and the Netherlands, according to IWF.

The disturbing news comes amid increasing criticism of social media apps over offering safe haven to abusers, and sextortion.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/new-york-catholic-diocese-to-pay-323mn-to-530-child-sex-abuse-survivors-in-largest-diocese-bankruptcy-762507">Also read: New York Catholic diocese to pay $323mn to 530 child sex abuse survivors, in largest US diocese bankruptcy</a> 
 
Users on platforms like Instagram are being blackmailed after being tricked into sharing intimate images, according to the Guardian report.

The image-sharing platform owned by Meta is reportedly launching measures to combat such crimes. 
 
It will automatically blur nude images sent via direct messages and caution users about opening them. They will also have the option to block or report senders of such images.

The feature will be enabled by default for teenage accounts while adults can opt in to join.

(With inputs from agencies)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used at alarming levels for generating child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with analysts saying that it has reached a tipping point.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used at alarming levels for generating child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with analysts saying that it has reached a tipping point. The watchdog group Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said that the creation and distribution of AI-generated CSAM are becoming increasingly sophisticated too. Unlike in the past, these images and videos are finding their way into public online platforms as opposed to the Dark Web, the internet underbelly accessible only through special browsers like Tor. Watch: US Prosecutors Intensify Action Against AI-Generated Child Abuse Images × The increasing photorealism of AI-generated visuals is making it difficult for authorities and watchdog agencies to figure out if these are images of a real child needing help, a situation described by an IWF analyst as a 'tipping point'. What set alarm bells ringing is that just within the past six months, the number of instances of reported AI-generated child sex abuse imagery crossed what it was in the whole previous year. In this period, the IWF acted on 74 reports of such content, a sharp rise from 70 in all the 12 months prior. What's more disturbing is that the AI tools creating these images are trained on real victims' content, complicating efforts to identify genuine cases needing intervention, according to Derek Ray-Hill, the IWF interim chief executive. “Recent months show that this problem is not going away and is in fact getting worse,” The Guardian newspaper quoted him as saying. Also read: UN report exposes 'extreme levels' of child abuse in armed conflicts, especially in Gaza and Sudan The abuse content ranges from real-looking deepfake videos to altered inappropriate images of clothed children. More than half of the flagged material is hosted on servers in Russia and the United States, besides Japan and the Netherlands, according to IWF. The disturbing news comes amid increasing criticism of social media apps over offering safe haven to abusers, and sextortion. Also read: New York Catholic diocese to pay $323mn to 530 child sex abuse survivors, in largest US diocese bankruptcy Users on platforms like Instagram are being blackmailed after being tricked into sharing intimate images, according to the Guardian report. The image-sharing platform owned by Meta is reportedly launching measures to combat such crimes. It will automatically blur nude images sent via direct messages and caution users about opening them. They will also have the option to block or report senders of such images. The feature will be enabled by default for teenage accounts while adults can opt in to join. (With inputs from agencies)

AI-generated child sex abuse images, videos rising at alarming levels, warn internet watchdogs

In a historic turn of events on Friday, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, experienced an unprecedented surge, adding a staggering $196 billion in stock market value. <o:p></o:p>

This is based on a Reuters report.<o:p></o:p>

This remarkable one-day gain stands as the largest ever recorded by any company in the history of Wall Street. <o:p></o:p>

Meta's stock, listed as META.O, skyrocketed by 20.3 per cent, marking its most significant one-day percentage increase in a year and the third-largest since its debut in 2012. <o:p></o:p>

The company's stock market value has now reached $1.22 trillion, solidifying its position among the tech industry's heavyweights.<o:p></o:p>

Days before Facebook's 20th anniversary, Meta declared its first-ever dividend and announced a $50 billion share repurchase authorisation. <o:p></o:p>

This strategic move contributed to the surge, as investors responded positively to the company's commitment to shareholder value. <o:p></o:p>

Reuters cited investment analyst Dan Coatsworth from AJ Bell, who said, "Paying a dividend suggests the company wants to reboot its reputation and be taken more seriously. But ultimately the amount being paid is only a token gesture."<o:p></o:p>

Meta's increase in market capitalisation surpassed the previous record set by Amazon in 2022. Amazon saw a surge of $190 billion in market value after a stellar quarterly report. <o:p></o:p>

This surge comes after Meta experienced a historic loss of over $200 billion, the largest in US stock market history, just a day before, following a bleak forecast. <o:p></o:p>

Meta's recent decision to provide dividends signals a considerable payout for its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, potentially amounting to about $175 million every quarter.<o:p></o:p>

The surge in Meta's stock is not merely a reflection of financial manoeuvres but also an endorsement of the company's performance. <o:p></o:p>

The world's largest social media platform reported strong ad sales and a rebound in user growth during its fourth-quarter results, leading to a 25 per cent increase in revenue. <o:p></o:p>

Meta's efficient cost management, including a significant workforce reduction of over 21,000 jobs since late 2022, contributed to tripling its net income to an impressive $14.02 billion. <o:p></o:p>

Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, told Reuters, "The 'Year of Efficiency' has paid off, with both headcount and costs dropping, and Meta exceeding our expectations for full-year 2023 ad revenue."<o:p></o:p>

Despite Meta's dividend being relatively small compared to other companies, it could attract a broader range of investors, particularly those focused on dividends. <o:p></o:p>

Brian Jacobsen, Chief Economist at Annex Wealth Management, highlighted the potential impact, stating, "This can start attracting investors who really do look for dividends and more steady income."<o:p></o:p>

Meta's foray into dividend distribution could make its stock more appealing to investors, especially in the realm of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). <o:p></o:p>

ETFs focused on US dividend payers currently hold assets exceeding $400 billion, representing just over 5 per cent of the entire domestic ETF universe. <o:p></o:p>

(With inputs from Reuters)<o:p></o:p>

In a historic turn of events on Friday, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, experienced an unprecedented surge, adding a staggering $196 billion in stock market value.

In a historic turn of events on Friday, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, experienced an unprecedented surge, adding a staggering $196 billion in stock market value. This is based on a Reuters report. This remarkable one-day gain stands as the largest ever recorded by any company in the history of Wall Street. Meta's stock, listed as META.O, skyrocketed by 20.3 per cent, marking its most significant one-day percentage increase in a year and the third-largest since its debut in 2012. The company's stock market value has now reached $1.22 trillion, solidifying its position among the tech industry's heavyweights. Days before Facebook's 20th anniversary, Meta declared its first-ever dividend and announced a $50 billion share repurchase authorisation. This strategic move contributed to the surge, as investors responded positively to the company's commitment to shareholder value. Reuters cited investment analyst Dan Coatsworth from AJ Bell, who said, "Paying a dividend suggests the company wants to reboot its reputation and be taken more seriously. But ultimately the amount being paid is only a token gesture." Meta's increase in market capitalisation surpassed the previous record set by Amazon in 2022. Amazon saw a surge of $190 billion in market value after a stellar quarterly report. This surge comes after Meta experienced a historic loss of over $200 billion, the largest in US stock market history, just a day before, following a bleak forecast. Meta's recent decision to provide dividends signals a considerable payout for its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, potentially amounting to about $175 million every quarter. The surge in Meta's stock is not merely a reflection of financial manoeuvres but also an endorsement of the company's performance. The world's largest social media platform reported strong ad sales and a rebound in user growth during its fourth-quarter results, leading to a 25 per cent increase in revenue. Meta's efficient cost management, including a significant workforce reduction of over 21,000 jobs since late 2022, contributed to tripling its net income to an impressive $14.02 billion. Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, told Reuters, "The 'Year of Efficiency' has paid off, with both headcount and costs dropping, and Meta exceeding our expectations for full-year 2023 ad revenue." Despite Meta's dividend being relatively small compared to other companies, it could attract a broader range of investors, particularly those focused on dividends. Brian Jacobsen, Chief Economist at Annex Wealth Management, highlighted the potential impact, stating, "This can start attracting investors who really do look for dividends and more steady income." Meta's foray into dividend distribution could make its stock more appealing to investors, especially in the realm of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). ETFs focused on US dividend payers currently hold assets exceeding $400 billion, representing just over 5 per cent of the entire domestic ETF universe. (With inputs from Reuters)

Meta Platforms shatters records with a $196 bn surge in stock market value

Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media giant Facebook, has made a significant move just days ahead of Facebook's 20th anniversary. According to Reuters, the tech behemoth issued its first-ever dividend and reported impressive financials, surpassing revenue and profit expectations driven by robust holiday ad sales. <o:p></o:p>

Following the announcement, shares of Meta soared over 14 per cent after hours, propelling the company's market valuation up by more than $140 billion. This surge, part of Meta's long recovery, signifies a major milestone for the tech sector.<o:p></o:p>

Meta's dividend declaration, a historic move for a tech giant, comes at 50 cents per share, signalling a departure from the traditional model in the industry. The company also authorised an additional $50 billion in share repurchases. <o:p></o:p>

This makes Meta the first among its generation of internet steamrollers to issue a dividend, breaking new ground in a sector that has long been dominated by a handful of companies. Founded in 2004, Meta has evolved into the world's largest social media company, connecting over 3 billion people and revolutionising digital interactions.<o:p></o:p>

Despite its impressive financial achievements, Meta has not been immune to controversies. Accusations of neglecting user privacy and enabling incitements to violence have plagued the company's growth trajectory. Just a day before the financial results, Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate regarding child safety online, offering apologies to parents of children who experienced sexual abuses. <o:p></o:p>

In response to the ups and downs, Zuckerberg shared a reflective message on Thursday. "You're never as good as they say when you're up, or as bad as they say when you're down. Just keep building and doing good work over long periods of time,” Reuters quoted him as saying.<o:p></o:p>

The financial results for Meta's fourth quarter demonstrated an impressive performance. Revenue rose by 25 per cent to $40.1 billion, surpassing analyst expectations. Net income surged over 200 per cent to $14 billion, or $5.33 per share, exceeding expectations. <o:p></o:p>

The recovery of Meta's shares over the past year, after a meltdown in 2022, has been attributed to factors like increased investor excitement about artificial intelligence, rebounding user growth, and digital ad sales. The company's strategic austerity measures, involving shedding more than 21,000 employees, have also played a role.<o:p></o:p>

Looking forward, Meta forecasts a first-quarter revenue of $34.5 billion to $37 billion, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The company anticipates total expenses for the full year 2024 to remain unchanged at $94 billion to $99 billion. <o:p></o:p>

Meta's commitment to investments in the metaverse and artificial intelligence remains unwavering. Despite operating losses in its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs unit, the company continues to aggressively invest in augmented and virtual reality. Executives highlight the success of the latest version of Ray-Ban smart glasses, equipped with a built-in AI assistant, signalling potential shifts in consumer preferences.<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:8.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,sans-serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;;display:none;mso-hide:all;mso-font-kerning:
0pt;mso-ligatures:none;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">Bottom of Form<o:p></o:p>

(With inputs from Reuters)<o:p></o:p>

Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media giant Facebook, has made a significant move just days ahead of Facebook's 20th anniversary. According to Reuters, the tech behemoth issued its first-ever dividend and reported impressive financials, surpassing revenue and profit expectations driven by robust holiday ad sales.

Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media giant Facebook, has made a significant move just days ahead of Facebook's 20th anniversary. According to Reuters, the tech behemoth issued its first-ever dividend and reported impressive financials, surpassing revenue and profit expectations driven by robust holiday ad sales. Following the announcement, shares of Meta soared over 14 per cent after hours, propelling the company's market valuation up by more than $140 billion. This surge, part of Meta's long recovery, signifies a major milestone for the tech sector. Meta's dividend declaration, a historic move for a tech giant, comes at 50 cents per share, signalling a departure from the traditional model in the industry. The company also authorised an additional $50 billion in share repurchases. This makes Meta the first among its generation of internet steamrollers to issue a dividend, breaking new ground in a sector that has long been dominated by a handful of companies. Founded in 2004, Meta has evolved into the world's largest social media company, connecting over 3 billion people and revolutionising digital interactions. Despite its impressive financial achievements, Meta has not been immune to controversies. Accusations of neglecting user privacy and enabling incitements to violence have plagued the company's growth trajectory. Just a day before the financial results, Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate regarding child safety online, offering apologies to parents of children who experienced sexual abuses. In response to the ups and downs, Zuckerberg shared a reflective message on Thursday. "You're never as good as they say when you're up, or as bad as they say when you're down. Just keep building and doing good work over long periods of time,” Reuters quoted him as saying. The financial results for Meta's fourth quarter demonstrated an impressive performance. Revenue rose by 25 per cent to $40.1 billion, surpassing analyst expectations. Net income surged over 200 per cent to $14 billion, or $5.33 per share, exceeding expectations. The recovery of Meta's shares over the past year, after a meltdown in 2022, has been attributed to factors like increased investor excitement about artificial intelligence, rebounding user growth, and digital ad sales. The company's strategic austerity measures, involving shedding more than 21,000 employees, have also played a role. Looking forward, Meta forecasts a first-quarter revenue of $34.5 billion to $37 billion, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The company anticipates total expenses for the full year 2024 to remain unchanged at $94 billion to $99 billion. Meta's commitment to investments in the metaverse and artificial intelligence remains unwavering. Despite operating losses in its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs unit, the company continues to aggressively invest in augmented and virtual reality. Executives highlight the success of the latest version of Ray-Ban smart glasses, equipped with a built-in AI assistant, signalling potential shifts in consumer preferences.Bottom of Form (With inputs from Reuters)

Meta Platforms report first dividend while shares soar

The US state of New Mexico has said that children using Instagram and Facebook have been frequent targets of sexual harassment. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Wednesday (Jan 17), an internal Meta Platforms presentation in 2021 estimated that 100,000 minors each day received photos of adult genitalia or other sexually abusive content.

The US state of New Mexico has said that children using Instagram and Facebook have been frequent targets of sexual harassment. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Wednesday (Jan 17), an internal Meta Platforms presentation in 2021 estimated that 100,000 minors each day received photos of adult genitalia or other sexually abusive content. This finding is among newly unredacted material about the company’s child-safety policies in a lawsuit filed by New Mexico last month. The lawsuit alleged that Meta recommended sexual content to underage users and promoted underage accounts to predatory adult users. In a 2021 internal document, Meta employees noted that "People You May Know" (PYMK)- one of the recommended algorithms of the platform, was known among employees to connect child users with potential predators. Also read | Dark side of social media: Do X, Facebook, Instagram care about your mental health? WION investigates According to the lawsuit, the above finding had been flagged to the executive several years earlier. The report said that the executives rejected a staff recommendation that Meta adjust the design of PYMK to stop it from recommending minors to adults. 'Meta failed to address widespread predation' New Mexico alleged that Meta has failed to address widespread predation on its platform or limit design features that recommended children to adults with malicious intentions. The state's lawsuit further said that instead of publicly acknowledging internal findings, the company falsely assured people that its platforms were safe. The report said that much of the internal discussion in the unredacted material focused on Instagram. In an internal email in 2020, employees reported that the prevalence of “sex talk” to minors was 38 times greater on Instagram than on Facebook Messenger in the US. The employees urged Meta to enact more safeguards on the platform. Also watch | Meta's Instagram under fire for showing sexual videos of young users × In that year, a presentation called “Child Safety: State of Play” said that Instagram employed “minimal child safety protections” and described policies regarding “minor sexualisation” as “immature.” Meta officials did not take action to prevent adults from sexually soliciting children until late 2022, the lawsuit further alleged. The WSJ report also said that rather than broadly stopping recommendations of the accounts of children to adults, Instagram and Facebook sought to block such suggestions to adults who already demonstrated suspicious behaviour towards children. Apart from New Mexico, over 40 other states in the US sued Meta in October last year alleging the company misled people about the dangers that its platforms posed to young people. (With inputs from agencies)

US state says children on Instagram, Facebook are often targets of sexual harassment: Report

Meta Platforms used thousands of pirated books to train its AI models, alleges a new copyright lawsuit filed on Monday (Dec 11) night.&nbsp;

The tech giant reportedly did this despite warnings from their lawyers about the legal peril of doing so. The lawsuit as per Reuters was initially brought this summer.

<h2>Skipping permissions</h2>

Monday's filing consolidates two separate lawsuits brought against Facebook and Instagram by comedian Sarah Silverman, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and other prominent authors. They allege that Meta has used their works to train its artificial intelligence language model, Llama, without permission.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/epic-games-epic-win-jury-finds-google-guilty-of-monopolistic-practices-in-antitrust-trial-668853">Epic Games' 'epic' win: Jury finds Google guilty of monopolistic practices in antitrust trial</a>

Previously, their claims also said that the AI model's output also violates their copyrights. However, in November, US District Judge Vince Chhabri criticised the claim that the text generated by Llama copies or resembles the author's work. Dismissing the claim, Chhabri allowed the authors to amend most of their claims.&nbsp;

As evidence, the authors have submitted Discord chat logs of a Meta-affiliated researcher, who can be seen discussing the procurement of the dataset. This, as per the news agency, can be a potentially significant piece of evidence that could prove that Meta knew that its use of the books may not be protected by US copyright law.

<h2>What is there in the chat logs?</h2>

In the chat logs, as quoted in the complaint, researcher Tim Dettmers, a doctoral student at the University of Washington, describes his back-and-forth with Meta's legal department. In it, he talks about whether the use of book files as training data would be "legally OK".

"At Facebook, there are a lot of people interested in working with (T)he (P)ile, including myself, but in its current form, we are unable to use it for legal reasons," Dettmers wrote in 2021.&nbsp;

Here, The Pile refers to an open-source language modelling data set Meta has acknowledged it was using to train its first version of Llama.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/eu-to-ban-use-of-ai-biometric-surveillance-by-police-without-judicial-authorisation-report-668888">EU to ban use of AI biometric surveillance by police without judicial authorisation: Report</a>

According to the complaint, a month before this, Dettmers wrote that Meta lawyers told him "the data cannot be used or models cannot be published if they are trained on that data."

Here, the researcher refrains from describing the specific concerns voiced by lawyers, however, his counterpart makes mention of "books with active copyrights," and says they are the biggest likely source of worry. They also say that training on the data should "fall under fair use."

As per the US Copyright Office, the fair use doctrine allows for the use of "limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports".

<h2>Llama</h2>

Llama is Meta's large language model (LLM). The tech giant released its first version in February 2023. At the time, it published a list of datasets used to train the language model. The list included "the Books3 section of ThePile," which, as per the complaint quoting the person who assembled the dataset, contains 196,640 books.

A second version, dubbed Llama 2 was made available for commercial use this summer. It is free for use for companies with monthly active users of less than 700 million.

<h2>AI and copyrights</h2>

As Artificial Intelligence drives a craze, artists across art forms have come forward alleging unlawful use of their content. In 2023, big tech companies were met with a slew of lawsuits that accuse them of ripping-off copyright protected works. IF successful, these lawsuits would not only generate significant compensation for the content creators, but also drive up the cost of building the data dependent models, somewhat dampening the generative AI craze.

 
&nbsp;

Meta Platforms used thousands of pirated books to train its AI models, alleges a new copyright lawsuit filed on Monday (Dec 11) night. The tech giant reportedly did this despite warnings from their lawyers about the legal peril of doing so.

Meta Platforms used thousands of pirated books to train its AI models, alleges a new copyright lawsuit filed on Monday (Dec 11) night. The tech giant reportedly did this despite warnings from their lawyers about the legal peril of doing so. The lawsuit as per Reuters was initially brought this summer. Skipping permissions Monday's filing consolidates two separate lawsuits brought against Facebook and Instagram by comedian Sarah Silverman, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and other prominent authors. They allege that Meta has used their works to train its artificial intelligence language model, Llama, without permission. Also read | Epic Games' 'epic' win: Jury finds Google guilty of monopolistic practices in antitrust trial Previously, their claims also said that the AI model's output also violates their copyrights. However, in November, US District Judge Vince Chhabri criticised the claim that the text generated by Llama copies or resembles the author's work. Dismissing the claim, Chhabri allowed the authors to amend most of their claims. As evidence, the authors have submitted Discord chat logs of a Meta-affiliated researcher, who can be seen discussing the procurement of the dataset. This, as per the news agency, can be a potentially significant piece of evidence that could prove that Meta knew that its use of the books may not be protected by US copyright law. What is there in the chat logs? In the chat logs, as quoted in the complaint, researcher Tim Dettmers, a doctoral student at the University of Washington, describes his back-and-forth with Meta's legal department. In it, he talks about whether the use of book files as training data would be "legally OK". "At Facebook, there are a lot of people interested in working with (T)he (P)ile, including myself, but in its current form, we are unable to use it for legal reasons," Dettmers wrote in 2021. Here, The Pile refers to an open-source language modelling data set Meta has acknowledged it was using to train its first version of Llama. Also read | EU to ban use of AI biometric surveillance by police without judicial authorisation: Report According to the complaint, a month before this, Dettmers wrote that Meta lawyers told him "the data cannot be used or models cannot be published if they are trained on that data." Here, the researcher refrains from describing the specific concerns voiced by lawyers, however, his counterpart makes mention of "books with active copyrights," and says they are the biggest likely source of worry. They also say that training on the data should "fall under fair use." As per the US Copyright Office, the fair use doctrine allows for the use of "limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports". Llama Llama is Meta's large language model (LLM). The tech giant released its first version in February 2023. At the time, it published a list of datasets used to train the language model. The list included "the Books3 section of ThePile," which, as per the complaint quoting the person who assembled the dataset, contains 196,640 books. A second version, dubbed Llama 2 was made available for commercial use this summer. It is free for use for companies with monthly active users of less than 700 million. AI and copyrights As Artificial Intelligence drives a craze, artists across art forms have come forward alleging unlawful use of their content. In 2023, big tech companies were met with a slew of lawsuits that accuse them of ripping-off copyright protected works. IF successful, these lawsuits would not only generate significant compensation for the content creators, but also drive up the cost of building the data dependent models, somewhat dampening the generative AI craze.

Meta flouted copyrights to train its AI 'Llama' despite warning from lawyers, claims lawsuit by authors

The Verge reported that Facebook and Instagram will get more paid features as Meta is setting up a new group that will focus on creating products.

A company spokesperson told News agency Reuters that "Any new product will be complementary to our existing ads business."

Snap Inc and Twitter Inc, which are Meta's competitors, have already launched paid tiers to unlock additional features.

John Hegeman, Meta's head of ads and business products, said in an interview with the Verge, that the company is committed to growing the ads business and has no plans to let users pay to turn off ads.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science-technology/meta-and-tiktok-can-track-everything-on-in-app-browsers-new-research-claims-509013">Also read |&nbsp;Meta and TikTok can track everything on in-app browsers, new research claims</a>

Highlighting that features becoming a more meaningful part of its business, Hegeman said Meta's vision aligns with its long-term goals.

Verge reported that the groups will be called New Monetization Experiences and led by Meta's former head of research Pratiti Raychoudhury.

Just a few weeks before a September 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to submit to depositions, Facebook’s corporate parent has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world’s largest social network service of allowing access to the personal information of about 87 million users to be fed to Cambridge Analytica.

In 2018, the firm was accused of supporting Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign to its ties with political strategist Stephen Bannon.

(With inputs from agencies)

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The Verge reported that Facebook and Instagram will get more paid features as Meta is setting up a new group that will focus on creating products. A company spokesperson told News agency Reuters that "Any new product will be complementary to our existing ads business.

The Verge reported that Facebook and Instagram will get more paid features as Meta is setting up a new group that will focus on creating products. A company spokesperson told News agency Reuters that "Any new product will be complementary to our existing ads business." Snap Inc and Twitter Inc, which are Meta's competitors, have already launched paid tiers to unlock additional features. John Hegeman, Meta's head of ads and business products, said in an interview with the Verge, that the company is committed to growing the ads business and has no plans to let users pay to turn off ads. Also read | Meta and TikTok can track everything on in-app browsers, new research claims Highlighting that features becoming a more meaningful part of its business, Hegeman said Meta's vision aligns with its long-term goals. Verge reported that the groups will be called New Monetization Experiences and led by Meta's former head of research Pratiti Raychoudhury. Just a few weeks before a September 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to submit to depositions, Facebook’s corporate parent has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world’s largest social network service of allowing access to the personal information of about 87 million users to be fed to Cambridge Analytica. In 2018, the firm was accused of supporting Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign to its ties with political strategist Stephen Bannon. (With inputs from agencies) Watch WION's live TV here: ×

More paid features on Facebook and Instagram? Meta to set up new group for creating products

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, reported second-quarter sales of $28.8 billion, which was in line with expectations of $28 to $30 billion but represented a 1 per cent decline in revenue year on year. The company’s net income declined by 36 per cent&nbsp;to $6.7 billion for the second quarter, while total expenses increased by 22 per cent. Daily active users on Meta’s family apps were low, while Meta’s primary social media platform, Facebook, saw a modest 3 per cent growth in the second quarter, despite the fact that the social media giant is facing fierce competition from rivals like Tik Tok.

As per Meta’s latest earnings release, a weak advertising demand environment is expected for the third quarter. The CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, stated, "We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business." He continued, "Given the more recent revenue trajectory that we’re seeing, we’re slowing the pace of [our] investments and pushing some expenses that would have come in the next year or two off to a somewhat longer timeline."

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/in-a-first-facebooks-parent-company-meta-platforms-reports-revenue-drop-501290">In a first, Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms reports revenue drop</a>

Zuckerberg said, "Many teams are going to shrink so that we can shift energy to other areas inside the company, and I want to give our leaders the ability to decide within their teams where to double down, where to double down, where to backfill attrition, and where to restructure teams while minimising [the impact] on the long-term initiatives," the Hollywood reporter reported.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/we-need-to-evolve-instagram-ceo-doubles-down-criticism-over-tiktok-like-features-501104">‘We need to evolve’: Instagram CEO doubles down criticism over TikTok like features</a>

The release of Meta’s financial report coincides with a drop in ad revenue experienced by other large internet firms, such as Snap, which has caused stock values to plummet. Another instance includes Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat. The firm disclosed an earning loss on Tuesday with YouTube ad revenue reaching $7.3 billion despite a persistent pullback in adviser spending.

Zuckerberg reportedly instructed staff internally earlier this month to be ready to face the biggest turndown they’ve seen in history. However, during the Meta’s earning call, the reels received a mention from Zuckerberg, who noted that users’ engagement with reels on Facebook and Instagram had increased by 30 per cent, Reuters reported.

(With inputs from agencies)

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Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, reported second-quarter sales of $28.8 billion, which was in line with expectations of $28 to $30 billion but represented a 1 per cent decline in revenue year on year.

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, reported second-quarter sales of $28.8 billion, which was in line with expectations of $28 to $30 billion but represented a 1 per cent decline in revenue year on year. The company’s net income declined by 36 per cent to $6.7 billion for the second quarter, while total expenses increased by 22 per cent. Daily active users on Meta’s family apps were low, while Meta’s primary social media platform, Facebook, saw a modest 3 per cent growth in the second quarter, despite the fact that the social media giant is facing fierce competition from rivals like Tik Tok. As per Meta’s latest earnings release, a weak advertising demand environment is expected for the third quarter. The CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, stated, "We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business." He continued, "Given the more recent revenue trajectory that we’re seeing, we’re slowing the pace of [our] investments and pushing some expenses that would have come in the next year or two off to a somewhat longer timeline." Also read | In a first, Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms reports revenue drop Zuckerberg said, "Many teams are going to shrink so that we can shift energy to other areas inside the company, and I want to give our leaders the ability to decide within their teams where to double down, where to double down, where to backfill attrition, and where to restructure teams while minimising [the impact] on the long-term initiatives," the Hollywood reporter reported. Also read | ‘We need to evolve’: Instagram CEO doubles down criticism over TikTok like features The release of Meta’s financial report coincides with a drop in ad revenue experienced by other large internet firms, such as Snap, which has caused stock values to plummet. Another instance includes Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat. The firm disclosed an earning loss on Tuesday with YouTube ad revenue reaching $7.3 billion despite a persistent pullback in adviser spending. Zuckerberg reportedly instructed staff internally earlier this month to be ready to face the biggest turndown they’ve seen in history. However, during the Meta’s earning call, the reels received a mention from Zuckerberg, who noted that users’ engagement with reels on Facebook and Instagram had increased by 30 per cent, Reuters reported. (With inputs from agencies) WATCH WION LIVE HERE You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here.

‘We seem to have entered economic downturn:’ Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg as revenues decline

Amid a general weakness in the digital ad market, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms has reported that its quarterly revenue dropped year-over-year for the first time ever.

As its profit plunged by more than a third, Meta said that its revenue missed market expectations and recently ended quarter ebbed a percent to $28.8 billion when compared to the same period a year ago.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told French news agency AFP that it was the first such slip at Meta in Facebook’s history.

According to IBES data from Refinitiv, experts were expecting third-quarter revenue of approximately $30.52 billion.

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As companies tap the power of the internet to reach consumers, Meta’s earnings further underscored an inflation-induced slowdown in the digital ad industry.

In terms of competition, Meta has been trying to fend off a string of challenges to its business from TikTok and Amazon.com Inc for ads.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/we-need-to-evolve-instagram-ceo-doubles-down-criticism-over-tiktok-like-features-501104" hreflang="en">‘We need to evolve’: Instagram CEO doubles down criticism over TikTok like features</a>

Not only this, but Apple’s privacy changes to the mobile operating system iOS have also adversely affected Meta’s revenue.

Meta, which received a majority of its total revenue from ads, reported that it fell to $28.82 billion from $29.08 billion a year earlier for the second quarter ended June 30.

Federal regulators on Wednesday took legal action to block Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from acquiring virtual reality company Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural asserting that the deal would hurt competition and violate antitrust laws.&nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)

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Amid a general weakness in the digital ad market, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms has reported that its quarterly revenue dropped year-over-year for the first time ever.

Amid a general weakness in the digital ad market, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms has reported that its quarterly revenue dropped year-over-year for the first time ever. As its profit plunged by more than a third, Meta said that its revenue missed market expectations and recently ended quarter ebbed a percent to $28.8 billion when compared to the same period a year ago. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told French news agency AFP that it was the first such slip at Meta in Facebook’s history. According to IBES data from Refinitiv, experts were expecting third-quarter revenue of approximately $30.52 billion. × As companies tap the power of the internet to reach consumers, Meta’s earnings further underscored an inflation-induced slowdown in the digital ad industry. In terms of competition, Meta has been trying to fend off a string of challenges to its business from TikTok and Amazon.com Inc for ads. Also read | ‘We need to evolve’: Instagram CEO doubles down criticism over TikTok like features Not only this, but Apple’s privacy changes to the mobile operating system iOS have also adversely affected Meta’s revenue. Meta, which received a majority of its total revenue from ads, reported that it fell to $28.82 billion from $29.08 billion a year earlier for the second quarter ended June 30. Federal regulators on Wednesday took legal action to block Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from acquiring virtual reality company Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural asserting that the deal would hurt competition and violate antitrust laws. (With inputs from agencies) Watch WION's live TV here: ×

Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms reports revenue drop for the first time ever

A new report by Recode and The Verge has revealed that Facebook's 'move fast and break things' era is still haunting the social media network.

The report sheds light on how chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make Facebook akin to Windows.

Mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off during Facebook's formative years when the company introduced the 'move fast and break things' motto.

Responsible for leading the company into one of its biggest scandals, 'Cambridge Analytica', Zuckerberg’s original vision for social media brought us FarmVille and “Log in with Facebook”.

In the 'Cambridge Analytica' scandal, Facebook was found guilty of exposing the data of 87 million users to the political consulting firm which worked on former US President Donald Trump's campaign.

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To fund a political consulting firm, Steve Bannon approached conservative megadonors Rebekah and Robert Mercer which led to the creation of Cambridge Analytica.

During the 2016 election, Bannon reached out to Trump when he became vice president of Cambridge Analytica.

Previously, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix actually reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers.

Cambridge Analytica got its data from Facebook through researcher Aleksandr Kogan as per a former employee of the company.

Facebook was unaware that the third-party developer was able to exploit a loophole to gather information on not only people who used the app but all their friends.

Aiming to reshape the future of the internet, Meta Platforms Inc is trying to transition away from its complicated legacy as a social media company to a futuristic metaverse vision.

From how global democracy functions to the mental health of teenagers, both users and regulators are worried that the company's products are harming society.

Forcing Meta to rethink its approach to social media entirely, both Facebook and Instagram are quickly losing ground to TikTok. 
&nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)

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A new report by Recode and The Verge has revealed that Facebook's 'move fast and break things' era is still haunting the social media network. The report sheds light on how chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make Facebook akin to Windows.

A new report by Recode and The Verge has revealed that Facebook's 'move fast and break things' era is still haunting the social media network. The report sheds light on how chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make Facebook akin to Windows. Mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off during Facebook's formative years when the company introduced the 'move fast and break things' motto. Responsible for leading the company into one of its biggest scandals, 'Cambridge Analytica', Zuckerberg’s original vision for social media brought us FarmVille and “Log in with Facebook”. In the 'Cambridge Analytica' scandal, Facebook was found guilty of exposing the data of 87 million users to the political consulting firm which worked on former US President Donald Trump's campaign. × To fund a political consulting firm, Steve Bannon approached conservative megadonors Rebekah and Robert Mercer which led to the creation of Cambridge Analytica. During the 2016 election, Bannon reached out to Trump when he became vice president of Cambridge Analytica. Previously, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix actually reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers. Cambridge Analytica got its data from Facebook through researcher Aleksandr Kogan as per a former employee of the company. Facebook was unaware that the third-party developer was able to exploit a loophole to gather information on not only people who used the app but all their friends. Aiming to reshape the future of the internet, Meta Platforms Inc is trying to transition away from its complicated legacy as a social media company to a futuristic metaverse vision. From how global democracy functions to the mental health of teenagers, both users and regulators are worried that the company's products are harming society. Forcing Meta to rethink its approach to social media entirely, both Facebook and Instagram are quickly losing ground to TikTok. (With inputs from agencies) Watch WION's live TV here: ×

Why Facebook's 'move fast and break things' era still haunts it?

Meta Platforms Inc on Monday announced that Instagram is getting a payment feature that will allow users to buy from small businesses through direct messages.

Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, said that users of the photo-sharing app will be able to track the order and ask the business any follow-up questions in that same chat thread.

The company added that users can add customisations if required and place the order in the chat itself.

In a bid to expand its e-commerce offerings, Meta has introduced several new features that use its payment service Meta Pay to complete purchases.

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As a way for people to find and buy products on Facebook and Instagram, Meta launched Shops in 2020.

Accused of prioritising extremist content in a bid to attract users' attention, Meta recently released its first annual report on its efforts to protect human rights.

After releasing its report, the Silicon Valley giant said, "The report explains how our Data Policy, our Law Enforcement Response Team, and our due diligence assessments work together to protect people from unlawful or overbroad government surveillance."

Following the bombshell revelations made by whistleblower Francis Haugen through leaked internal documents, Meta is trying to combat misinformation and improve content moderation.

(With inputs from agencies)

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&nbsp;

Meta Platforms Inc on Monday announced that Instagram is getting a payment feature that will allow users to buy from small businesses through direct messages. Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, said that users of the photo-sharing app will be able to track the order and ask the business any follow-up questions in that same chat thread.

Meta Platforms Inc on Monday announced that Instagram is getting a payment feature that will allow users to buy from small businesses through direct messages. Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, said that users of the photo-sharing app will be able to track the order and ask the business any follow-up questions in that same chat thread. The company added that users can add customisations if required and place the order in the chat itself. In a bid to expand its e-commerce offerings, Meta has introduced several new features that use its payment service Meta Pay to complete purchases. × As a way for people to find and buy products on Facebook and Instagram, Meta launched Shops in 2020. Accused of prioritising extremist content in a bid to attract users' attention, Meta recently released its first annual report on its efforts to protect human rights. After releasing its report, the Silicon Valley giant said, "The report explains how our Data Policy, our Law Enforcement Response Team, and our due diligence assessments work together to protect people from unlawful or overbroad government surveillance." Following the bombshell revelations made by whistleblower Francis Haugen through leaked internal documents, Meta is trying to combat misinformation and improve content moderation. (With inputs from agencies) Watch WION's live TV here: ×

Meta Platforms introduces new feature on Instagram, users can shop directly in chats

Russian court has fined Meta platforms to delete content that Russia deems illegal. Take a look at this report.

Russian court fines meta platforms to delete content that is deemed illegal

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