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Adult-managed accounts that primarily post pictures of children will no longer be recommended to adult users “who have shown potentially suspicious behavior,” according to Meta, and vice versa — making them harder to find in Search. This was announced today alongside new features for teen accounts that make it easier to report and block unwanted contact in DMs.

Reportedly in testing since June, I’ve now been served three of these unskippable “Ad break” ads over the last two days. It’s jarring, and has accelerated my desire to quit the platform that’s increasingly less fun and flooded with AI slop.

YouTube is a hit on TVs, and Meta and TikTok are looking to get in on that battleground, The Information reports. What will launch first: Instagram for TV or Instagram for iPad?

The recently-launched CapCut clone is also adding more text effects and will let you apply voice enhancement to voiceovers. Check out all of the new updates in a post from Instagram’s Creators account.

to readers of Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings. The Financial Times makes a compelling case that loser-bro Zuck is who he has always been. Also, his feelings were very hurt when we all had a good laugh about Meta’s avatars (“Legs coming soon!”). No wonder he wants AI friends, who’ll never mock him like that.

The platform began working on reposts in 2022, and now some users are seeing a new “repost” button that will let them share other content that they see on the platform, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch.

In the coming weeks, Instagram will show creators weekly and monthly reports with stats about post views and their follower count. It’s also launching shareable “celebrations” notifications that appear when creators reach certain milestones, such as hitting 10,000 followers.

The company is paying a group of creators to refer people to Instagram, Business Insider reports. Influencers can earn $100 for every new user or 1,000 visits to the Instagram app, with a $20,000 limit.

During redirect, Hemphill testifies that some of the points Hansen made about his analysis weren’t relevant to his findings of Meta’s alleged anticompetitive behavior. He counter’s Hansen’s charge that he thinks he knows better than the business people at Meta. “They’ve got their expertise and I’ve got mine,” he says.

Hemphill clarifies that he did disclose to Meta during his deposition over a year ago that he and former Biden official Tim Wu had a “conversation” with the FTC in 2019 about investigating Meta, but the company never asked him for a copy of the presentation. He says he wasn’t compensated for it, and wasn’t retained by the FTC for another two and a half years — during which he also didn’t lobby the regulator to bring a case. He says that public reporting of Meta’s conduct “seemed like the kind of thing that we’d been worried about in our academic work,” but that he hadn’t formed a view at the time that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive.

Back to friendlier-questioning from the FTC, Hemphill says that while ad quality might be improving, Meta is behaving like a monopolist in what it chooses to do with those quality gains. In a more competitive environment, Hemphill says, Meta would pass on those gains to consumers by letting them enjoy the same amount of ads, but at a higher quality. Instead, he says, Meta dials up the knob to show them more ads.

This is how Hansen closes what’s been a tense cross-examination of Hemphill. Meta has used the exam to try to discredit the FTC’s key economic expert, and Hansen reiterates that Hemphill had “preconceived” notions about the case, calling back to the 2019 “roadshow” he participated in to convince regulators to investigate Meta. Hemphill has been on the stand since Monday afternoon, and the FTC attorney Krisha Cerilli is back for redirect questioning.

This is what Hansen asks the FTC expert after showing a chart that shows younger cohorts spend a higher percentage of time on the platform engaging with friends than older cohorts, yet they get served fewer ads — seemingly contrary to Hemphill’s claim that Meta taxes users who enjoy friend sharing more. Hemphill says the point is “apples and oranges” and that the older cohort makes up 60 to 70 percent of the user base getting higher ad loads. That prompts Hansen to ask whether he thinks Meta discriminates against such a large portion of its users, and Hemphill says it’s “a standard understanding of price discrimination.”

Hemphill doesn’t cite any documents or testimony that directly say Meta engages in this kind of behavior by showing these users more ads. Hansen says. Hemphill responds that his conclusion comes from the evidence of price discrimination in how Meta chooses to serve ads to different users, recognizing which are more or less engaged with their services. But, he acknowledges, “I’m not aware of a single document that connects the dots in that exact way.”

Hansen accuses Hemphill of altering the axis on charts showing user sentiment about Meta, calling it “misleading to crop the axis to magnify changes that aren’t changes.” When Hemphill describes the sentiment metrics as in “clear decline,” Hansen shoots back, “there’s no decline. It’s flat. Flat as a pancake.”

If users don’t want to see an ad, they can scroll past it in “a second or less,” Meta’s Hansen says. Hemphill agrees that “not every ad is burdensome” and users can gain value from some of them, but on the whole they are a burdensome part of the social media experience for users. Hemphill adds that he hasn’t “made a study of scroll time, though I agree that scrolling past an ad does not take long.”

Hansen charges that Hemphill’s conclusions would mean Meta would need to pay consumers to use its services in order to make it any cheaper than it already is — free. Hemphill has testified that under a more competitive social media market, there would be a greater “surplus” for consumers. Hemphill says Meta wouldn’t necessarily have to pay users in cold hard cash. Alternatively, it could offer them some other kind of reward they’d consider valuable.

Meta’s lead attorney Mark Hansen is continuing cross-examination of the FTC’s economic expert Scott Hemphill this morning. Hansen brings up this incident that Meta has repeatedly come back to at trial to show that TikTok users see Facebook and Instagram as reasonable alternatives, even though the government says they don’t compete for the same market Meta dominates. He says Facebook saw 20 percent of diverted usage from TikTok during its January 2025 outage, and Instagram, 17 percent.

During cross-examination, we’ve been looking at a 2019 deck the former Biden official, Facebook co-founder, and the FTC’s now-expert Scott Hemphill pitched to regulators, describing why they should investigate the company on antitrust grounds, based on public reporting and data. Meta attorney Mark Hansen says the FTC nor Hemphill produced the slides to them, so it’s not clear where they came from, and when they change slides, we can see they’re from a photo of a phone, where someone’s finger is visible.

Presented with a side-by-side screenshot of the three short-form video products on the same Saturday Night Live video, Hemphill takes a long pause to identify the apps before he’s saying he’s not sure which is which.

Meta’s lead attorney Mark Hansen is using cross-examination to attack Hemphill’s credibility. Hansen calls him the “very definition” of a witness with preconceived notions about Meta’s liability and brings up what a press report called a “roadshow” he embarked on in 2019 with former Biden administration official Tim Wu and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to encourage state and federal enforcers to look into Meta’s potentially anticompetitive behavior. Hansen charges that Hemphill hasn’t adequately disclosed this activity, which the Meta attorney characterizes as advocacy for a cause. Hemphill says he wasn’t advocating that they bring a case, but to probe and find out if a valid case existed.

After Hemphill describes how Meta’s increased rate of showing users ads is negative for consumers, Boasberg asks him to square that notion with his claim that WhatsApp and Instagram would have had to make money eventually, whether or not they were part of Meta. Hemphill says that even if both served ads to users as independent apps, it might have been to a lesser degree than they do now, or they might have offered users other benefits in exchange.

This is the message Boasberg says he’s received throughout trial, and he’s trying to square it with Hemphill’s assertion that users still want to see posts from their friends, even as they spend more and more time watching videos from people they’re not connected with. “Shouldn’t we assume that’s what they want, and therefore, what you’re terming underinvestment is just a shift that follows where users want to be?” Boasberg asks. Hemphill says Meta, not its users, determine the makeup of posts they see in their feeds, and even if friends content is declining as a percentage of the app, it’s still very large in absolute terms. And even if Meta makes less money from ads in Reels, a lot of content from people users don’t know now shows up in their feeds, too.

Boasberg pushes back on Hemphill’s framing of the Instagram acquisition as an effort to maintain a competitive moat. Hemphill references a 2012 email where Zuckerberg discussed the importance of keeping Instagram running after buying it to prevent another app from filling the vacuum. But Boasberg says this seems contrary to what actually played out: Meta invested in the app and it experienced massive growth. “This competitive moat seems a minor factor in its decision making,” he says. Hemphill says the moat was Meta’s intent at the time, even if the app ultimately exceeded expectations.

Boasberg brings up Meta CMO Alex Schultz’s testimony of “explosive growth” for Instagram and says that it would be “pretty hard” for Instagram to grow much larger than it already has in the US, since it already has most eligible US users on its platform. Hemphill says there’s other measures on which this whole slice of the social media market might have been better for consumers if Meta never bought Instagram, like consumer welfare and the quality of apps.

Meta paid a $6.5 billion to $10.9 billion premium on its acquisition of WhatsApp, depending on which valuation you look at, Hemphill says. This can’t be explained away with standard business reasons for paying more for an acquisition, like synergies that would be particularly beneficial, because he says there’s no evidence Meta analyzed this. Instead, he says, the premium “reinforces the conclusion that the project was an anticompetitive project.”

And the most likely way it would have done this without Meta would be building its own personal social networking service that competed with Facebook and Instagram, Hemphill says, since this is how messaging apps in other countries monetized. Boasberg brought up testimony we’ve heard that WhatsApp’s founders were resistant to this kind of pivot, but Hemphill says that they still had investors and employees to answer to who would eventually want a payout. Plus, he says, Meta eventually was able to convince them to monetize the app somehow.

Hemphill compares Meta’s claims that it’s power is constrained by newer apps like TikTok to Microsoft’s claims of being constrained by the PalmPilot and AOL at the time it was found to be an illegal monopolist. He says Microsoft sustained its dominance even in the face of competition “more or less on the margins.” He also says that what Meta calls “headwinds” from TikTok didn’t stop the company from beating its own revenue projection in 2024, which already forecast 78 percent growth from 2020.

Meta has argued that users’ reports about how much they think the company cares about them is mostly a reflection of media reporting, rather than actual changes to Meta’s products. Boasberg asks Hemphill whether changes in user sentiment really are about the actual products or perceptions of them, and whether that matters. Hemphill says that even in the case of Cambridge Analytica, where reporting came out long after the privacy incident at the heart of the story, “it’s not that the Facebook business in fact changed with the revelation, but what did happen was a sort of scales falling from your eyes effect, where users became aware of this possibility.” He adds that Meta pays attention to user sentiment “in a way that is not just managing their reputation.”

Meta shows fewer ads to what they call “needy users” whose engagement drops more significantly when they’re shown more ads. Hemphill calls this a “discount” for those users — and a sign of price discrimination by an illegal monopolist.

Creating a social graph of users’ friends, likes, and interests isn’t as meaningful for social apps as it used to be, Schultz says. That’s thanks to advances in AI, which has made it easier to predict and serve content to users they might not have even known they’d like. The FTC says Meta’s network effects and extensive mapping of users’ connections makes it difficult for upstarts to dislodge it.

Had Meta never bought the app, Schultz says Instagram would have continued to copy Twitter. “I think Twitter had a less effective growth team than us,” he says.

After a brief dip in Instagram’s growth rate in 2018 due to changes in how Facebook promoted it, the app’s growth rate recovered and continued to go up and to the right, a chart shown in court shows. Schultz says the results mean the change wasn’t as dire as Systrom might have believed.

For all the tension that came from Facebook’s decision to promote Instagram less from its app, it wasn’t all that consequential for Instagram’s growth in the end, Schultz testifies. Instagram’s growth rate dipped 14 percent, but it was still growing users overall. Ultimately, Schultz says, it was a “blip.”