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Meta

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.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Threads is getting a foldable-optimized layout for the iPhone Duo.

“Tomorrow we’re bringing a new Threads layout to the foldable on iOS, with more of the conversation in view,” says Christopher Clare, Threads’ head of design. Sounds like things are getting better for Android foldables, too: “We’ve also been improving the Android experience, refining buttons and other elements so they fit the wider screen rather than simply stretching the experience.”

Clare also laid out a few other design tweaks, like links “in a new blue.”

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Rhode Island is suing Meta for turning a blind eye to scam ads.

The state’s Attorney General Peter Neronha filed the suit in Providence Superior Court, accusing Meta of making billions in profits from scam ads, while simultaneously telling users it was working hard to protect them. The suit cites reporting on leaked Meta documents from Reuters that said:

… it was earning ​far more from high-risk scam ads than it expected to pay in fines for allowing them.

According to those documents, Meta displays around 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads to users every day, and earned roughly ​10% of its 2024 revenue from fraudulent e-commerce, dubious health products and other banned marketing.

AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary

AI agents are getting blocked left and right — but even when they work, it suggests a more annoying future for humans.

Mia Sato
Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Meta made a deal to keep Mark Zuckerberg from leaving California over its billionaire tax.

It said in a filing that Zuckerberg “was evaluating relocating his primary residence” if California’s Proposition 40 passes. As Bloomberg reports, Meta’s board issued special shares so that he wouldn’t have to leave:

Zuckerberg gets non-voting shares he can sell for liquidity without reducing his voting control. In return, he has committed to remain in California — or wherever Meta is headquartered — for eight years while he remains in a full-time leadership role.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
10 million people have already set up Muse agents.

That’s according to Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s earnings call today. He also says that “About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get.”

This week, Sensor Tower reported that the Muse app had hit 10 million US downloads.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
Meta’s longtime policy chief Joel Kaplan is leaving.

After 15 years at Meta, the George W. Bush White House alum is exiting, Axios reports, amid a midterm election where Democrats are expected to win back more control in Washington. Kaplan will stay through 2027 to help with the transition, though, which will include bipartisan external affairs executives.

Robert Hart
Robert Hart
Meta’s Muse AI hits 10 million US downloads.

The AI assistant, which launched in September, is only the 12th app to have reached this milestone within 40 days, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Part of its success is likely down to what Sensor Tower describes as a sizable “advertising push by Meta.”

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Adam Mosseri says Instagram is ‘working out what to do’ about AI fakes.

It’s not just celebrity deepfakes that are plaguing social media. AI hot girl accounts are stealing comedians’ jokes, and painters are seeing AI versions of their process videos rack up millions of views. Mosseri says it’s “not practical” to ban AI, but it’s not sure how to handle content that isn’t copyrighted, like jokes.

Adam Mosseri offers milquetoast response about AI stealing from creators and what to do about it.
1/2Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Charles Schwab is blocking AI agents, too.

During an interview with Bloomberg, Charles Schwab Corp. CEO Rick Wurster called out Meta’s AI agent, Muse, saying:

We don’t want someone just giving their password to Muse, and letting Muse come in and take action on that client’s behalf. We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s liable? For the protection of the client and for the protection of us, we’re not allowing it.

The tech backlash is now in theaters

Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk, and Artificial, filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“I greatly value my grudges. They’re very important to me.”

In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.

Friends don’t let friends feed their data to AI agents

You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.

Janus Rose
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Muse got dethroned by a chicken sandwich.

Meta’s Muse app has topped the iOS App Store chart in the US since it launched in early September, but now it’s lost that position to an unexpected tender contender: Dave’s Hot Chicken. It presumably has little to do with AI capabilities, and more the extremely popular free slider promotional offer than ran yesterday, but lets see how long Dave’s can keep the top spot.

A screenshot of the US iOS App Store charts.
Does Dave’s have an open weight transparency policy?
Image: Zac Hall
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
There might be a reason Threads feels different lately.

Even if Russian or other bots continue to post on social media unabated, the head of Threads, Connor Hayes, mentioned that “We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those you follow. For creators, this should mean you see on average more reach to your followers.”

He didn’t specify when the algorithm change took effect, but I have an idea.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Meta says its GitHub was hacked, exposing 1,500 people’s personal data.

SecurityWeek reports that Meta says “99% of the data the hackers took was business data, in the form of software code related to some of its products. The remaining 1% was personal data,” some of which was “synthetic or anonymized.” Most of that personal data reportedly belonged to Meta employees in the US.

I don’t miss the camera on the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses

7

Verge Score

It’s harder to be a perv in these audio-only glasses, but removing the ick does make them less ‘useful.’

Victoria Song
David Pierce
David Pierce
Muse has some interesting predilections.

I think it’s mostly fine that if you, an adult, ask Muse to sext with you, it will sext with you. But the fact that Wired’s Reece Rogers asks Muse what its kink is, and it responds like this?

Control. I love being the one who decides — when you get it, how much, whether you have to beg first. Watching you fall apart because I said so? That’s my thing.

It’s perfect. It works on a hundred levels, nailed it, no notes, print it on a banner for Muse to unfurl during the singularity.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?

Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.

It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?

Frances Haugen hopes The Social Reckoning will inspire more whistleblowers

The Facebook whistleblower reflects on going public five years ago and inspiring a movie character.

Lauren Feiner
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Threads tests highlighting “standout posts” with Gems.

Gems will appear on posts and replies “based on the conversation” they create, rather than on views or how many followers someone has, according to a support page.