Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, counts more than 3 billion monthly users across its family of apps. Now, it’s trying to build the next generation of services in virtual reality and the metaverse through Meta Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds — all while dealing with antitrust pressures, privacy concerns, and younger users shifting to other platforms.
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.
The original source of the report, Cybernews, says that since the start of the year, its researchers have “discovered 30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each. In total, the researchers uncovered an unimaginable 16 billion records.”
This isn’t a breach of one company or another’s systems, but compiled records, with some believed to be from “infostealer” malware, as well as previous leaks. As Bleeping Computer points out, what you should be doing hasn’t changed -- using unique passwords with a password manager, enabling two-factor authentication, and adding other forms of security like passkeys and security keys that can replace passwords altogether.
[bleepingcomputer.com]
The US District Court in Washington, DC, was the home of two of the most important tech trials in decades — plus so much more.
While Meta said ads will be globally introduced to WhatsApp’s updates tab “slowly over the next several months,” the company has now clarified to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DCP) that they won’t arrive in the European Union market until 2026. That gives EU privacy regulators time to discuss data-sharing concerns about the ad model.
[politico.eu]
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.
WhatsApp announced yesterday that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like feature, months after adding an unnecessary floating AI button to the main chat interface. In response, Signal president Meredith Whittaker has promised “no AI clutter, no surveillance ads — whatever the rest of the industry does” for the independent nonprofit messaging app.
“The next evolution is coming on June 20,” reads the caption to a teaser video republished by Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. The Oakley x Meta tie-up was first reported back in January as the sporty alternative to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, meant to appeal to cyclists and other outdoor athletes.
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.
Instagram spokesperson Cullen Heaney confirmed to The Verge that the platform is testing the feature, but didn’t share any additional details about the rollout.
[techcrunch.com]
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.
On Thursday, the Oversight Board overturned Meta’s decision to leave up a Facebook post showing an AI deepfake of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo Nazário in an ad for a gambling app. The ad was viewed more than 600,000 times and received more than 50 reports.
The Oversight Board points to a larger problem at Meta, saying it is “likely allowing significant amounts of scam content on its platforms” and that reviewers aren’t “empowered” to enforce the platform’s policy against deepfake scams.
That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which says fully automated AI ads are on the roadmap for 2026. Zuckerberg has already hinted at the plans, which will see advertisers provide an image of a product and set a budget, getting a full ad campaign in return. The AI will decide which Facebook and Instagram users to target, and offer personalization like changing the setting of an ad to match where the prospective customer lives.
The WhatsApp for iOS 25.16.81 update that’s rolling out over the coming weeks allows users to hold down on a message to select and copy specific sections, instead of being forced to copy the entire message text. Android users are still stuck with this limitation for now, but WABetaInfo reports that a similar update is in the works.
Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey have buried the hatchet after Zuckerberg fired Luckey in 2017, so they can build virtual and augmented reality gear for the military. Oculus made, of course, the most successful VR headset and was also a tremendous flop for Meta. Anyway, here’s the WSJ story about their new team-up. Time and money heal all wounds, I guess?
The WSJ reported earlier this month that unnamed senior Meta execs were “frustrated” over a delayed rollout for the largest version of its Llama 4 AI model, dubbed Behemoth, and said management changes could follow.
Now, Axios reports there have been changes. Connor Hayes is leading the AI products team responsible for AI features in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as the Meta AI Assistant and AI Studio, while Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel co-lead the AGI Foundations unit working on Llama models and other AI tech.
“The line between professional and personal is increasingly blurred,” says a LinkedIn document shown in a video deposition. Then-LinkedIn product executive Kumaresh Pattabiraman explains in the video that in the wake of the pandemic, “we observe that people are bringing their personal and their professional lives a lot closer together,” with people posting about everything from completing a marathon to their views on politics on LinkedIn. This seems to undermine the FTC’s claim that LinkedIn does not compete with Facebook and Instagram for personal social networking. He says friends and family have always been part of the LinkedIn experience, but even more so now.
In a video deposition Judge Boasberg watched a few weeks ago and the media is now being shown, former Morgan Stanley investment banker Ali Esfahani describes the whirlwind few days in which the $19 billion deal came together. The deal followed none of the usual steps Morgan Stanley would typically take contacting buyers and negotiating price on the company’s behalf, he says. Instead, after being called on a Saturday night, he showed up to a meeting to hammer out the deal, but “when we arrived, we realized the price had already been negotiated, the buyer had already been selected.” Esfahani says he felt like he was basically “being thrown a bone because of all the preemptive work that we had done.”
“They didn’t really require an advisor because there was no negotiation involved,” he testifies. “I don’t know of any other deal that has been done from soup to nuts in four days.”
