Meta

Meta’s latest attempt to comply with age verification requirements in Europe, Brazil and the US is to roll out AI-powered tech to analyse the faces of teenage users of Facebook and Instagram.

The company says AI analysis will be used to estimate the ages of faces but that it does not amount to face recognition. Update: It doesn’t appear to be working too well – a 12yo kid fooled it by using an eyebrow pencil to draw a fake mustache …

Anecdotally, I’ve been hearing for a very long time that Facebook and Instagram users are growing ever more dissatisfied with their social media feeds, and there now appears to be some hard data to support this.

Meta has admitted that its daily active users declined by 20 million this quarter, and the company is taking steps to try to improve the quality of both Facebook and Instagram feeds …

Llama is out; Muse Spark is in. Meta has unveiled its rebooted AI efforts with a new model it calls Muse Spark.

Unlike Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview announcement yesterday, Muse Spark is actually available publicly today.

Meta is also taking on the top Gemini and ChatGPT models with a new Contemplating mode that it says will roll out gradually.

Meta revealed in January that it plans to test paid versions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Now, in select markets, the first of those premium services is available.

A court ruling with potentially massive implications has found that social media apps are intentionally designed to be addictive, and are harmful to teenage mental health.

A now 20-year-old woman sued Meta and YouTube owner Google for damaging her mental health as a child, with a jury awarding her $6 million in damages – and this is likely to be only the start …

A VPN company has put together AI chatbot privacy ratings based on the data collection practices of the ten most popular AI chatbots in the App Store.

The iPhone chatbots are ranked worst to best, and there are no prizes for guessing which of the competing apps collects the most personal data …

Meta claimed for years that it was technically challenging to implement end-to-end encryption across Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, but back in 2023 said that it had resolved those issues.

Unfortunately, the company has now made a U-turn on Instagram direct messages, and that’s bad news for all of us …

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Meta quietly updated its Instagram Help Center recently announcing that end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging will no longer be supported on the platform after May 8, 2026. If you have encrypted chats, you will want to export them before the deadline.

The company’s official reasoning: low adoption. “Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months,” a Meta spokesperson said. “Anyone who wants to keep messaging with E2EE can easily do that on WhatsApp.”

That explanation could be technically true, but still a little hard to take seriously…

AI startup Manus has released its answer to OpenClaw and Perplexity’s Personal Computer. The similarly dubbed “My Computer” system runs on your Mac or PC, turning your machine into a personal AI agent.

Manus originally started as an independent AI firm before being acquired by Meta at the end of last year. (Meta also recently acquired another OpenClaw-adjacent project: MoltBook, the social media site for AI.)

Update, 6:39 p.m. ET: It looks like the issue has been resolved, as outage reports on X and Downdetector are now trending downward. The original post follows below.

As multiple users report that Facebook is currently down, Downdetector data suggests the outage may also be affecting other platforms owned by the company. Here are the details.

A new report says that video feeds from Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses are sent for review by human data annotators in Kenya, and that the footage includes sensitive content that is supposed to be excluded.

Whistleblowers says that the video seen by third-party contractors used by Meta includes everything from people having sex to bank cards …

Instagram has said that it will begin notifying parents if their teenage child “repeatedly” searches for content related to self-harm or suicide.

The announcement follows Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in court in response to claims that Instagram content had led to self-harm by children …

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified this week in what’s viewed as a landmark court case around the mental health impact of social media. As part of that testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook to talk about the “wellbeing of teens and kids.”

A new report suggests that a Meta smartwatch will launch at some point this year, but it likely won’t compete with the Apple Watch.

Based on previous comments by the company, it may serve as more of an accessory to a future Meta smart glasses product …

Meta has revealed that it plans to test paid subscriptions to Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook – with multiple options apparently on the cards.

The company has so far only provided specifics on the paywalled features for Instagram, with no details yet available about its other services …

Update, 7:11 p.m. ET: A Meta representative reached out to 9to5Mac and provided the following statement:

“We are grateful to the University of Vienna researchers for their responsible partnership and diligence under our Bug Bounty program. This collaboration successfully identified a novel enumeration technique that surpassed our intended limits, allowing the researchers to scrape basic publicly available information. We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems, and this study was instrumental in stress-testing and confirming the immediate efficacy of these new defenses. Importantly, the researchers have securely deleted the data collected as part of the study, and we have found no evidence of malicious actors abusing this vector. As a reminder, user messages remained private and secure thanks to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, and no non-public data was accessible to the researchers.” 

A massive WhatsApp security flaw exposed the phone number of almost every user on the planet – despite the fact that parent company Meta had been alerted to the vulnerability way back in 2017.

Security researchers were able to use what they described as a “simple” exploit to extract a total of 3.5 billion phone numbers from the messaging service …

The European Union has found that both Meta and TikTok failed to properly protect children, including making it difficult to report the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in their apps.

Separately, Meta has faced a setback in its defense of lawsuits filed by multiple US states, accusing the company of deliberately making its apps addictive despite knowing they were harmful to teenagers …