#meta

#meta

Meta on Monday announced an update to Facebook Groups that will allow admins to make their previously private groups public, without compromising the privacy of their existing members. The company said that past content will remain private after the conversion, and member lists will remain protected. Often, admins start their groups as private, thinking they will remain small, but then realize they could reach a much broader audience if they were easier to find.

Apple Maps may soon feature advertisements, marking a significant shift in the app's user experience. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to roll out sponsored listings as early as next year, allowing physical businesses like restaurants and retail stores to pay for placement in search results. In an effort to stand out from rivals, Apple is expected to leverage artificial intelligence to deliver more relevant ad placements.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg privately met with Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice earlier this year, according to a new book. In "Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America," ABC reporter Jonathan Karl reports that Zuckerberg asked Bondi for "advice on how to effectively speak" with President Donald Trump about "Meta's concerns." The previously unreported meeting took place on March 12, during one of Zuckerberg's several trips to Washington, DC, in 2025.

With TikTok's fate up in the air, Meta has launched an aggressive campaign to attract TikTok creators with substantial cash bonuses and new tools designed to enhance content creation and distribution. Whether the effort will pan out remains unclear. Amid the ongoing uncertainty surrounding TikTok's future in the United States, Meta is seizing the opportunity to lure creators away from the embattled ByteDance-owned app.

Instead, Meta argued, available evidence "is plainly indicative" that the flagged adult content was torrented for "private personal use"-since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only "a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time." "The far more plausible inference to be drawn from such meager, uncoordinated activity is that disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use," Meta's filing said.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is spending untold billions on infrastructure and top talent for its AI ambitions. In fact, the CEO announced during the company's earnings call on Wednesday, Meta will be spending between $70 billion and $72 billion on AI this year - up from its previous estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion, as CNBC reports. Unsurprisingly, that cash bonfire isn't going over well with investors.

Meta signed three deals this week to procure nearly 1 gigawatt of solar power as it races to power its lofty AI ambitions. The trio of agreements brings Meta's total solar purchases to over 3 gigawatts of capacity this year. Solar is cheap and quick to build, and as a result, it has become a go-to power source for tech companies as their data center fleets multiply in size.

In late September, The Guardian reported that Meta used back-to-school photos of teenage girls to advertise the Threads app to fully grown men. Girls as young as 13. These photos were posted by regular moms on Facebook and Instagram, some of whom had their profiles set to private. The photos of girls in their school uniforms appeared in-feed as advertisements resembling organic "suggested" threads posts, or were outright cross-posted without consent. Their faces weren't hidden or blurred.

Meta is once again undergoing a major reorganization within its artificial intelligence department. Approximately 600 jobs will be lost in the company's AI division. The cuts will affect the FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) research group, the product-focused AI teams, and the infrastructure department, among others. At the same time, Meta will continue hiring staff for its new research department, the TBD Lab, which focuses on developing super-intelligent AI systems.

By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact," Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios. The layoffs will also affect roles within its AI product and infrastructure teams, though Meta will allow impacted employees to apply for other roles within the company, Axios reports.

Rather than a custom Arm CPU, like the ones that Microsoft, AWS, and Google designed, Meta tells us the partnership will focus on optimizing the Arm-based silicon that it's already deploying. Like most hyperscalers and cloud providers, Meta is rolling out large quantities of Arm Neoverse cores across its AI datacenters; they just happen to be part of Nvidia's GB200 or GB300 NVL72 rack systems. Each of these racks is equipped with 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 of Nvidia's Neoverse-V2-based Grace CPUs.

Meta is adding group chats to Threads, allowing users to message multiple friends in shared conversations instead of sending separate DMs. Threads users can create a group chat by starting a new message and adding up to 50 people who follow their Threads account.

"Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago," Bondi wrote in an X post. Bondi alleged that a "wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs." She added that the DOJ "will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement."

Meta has removed a Facebook page dedicated to tracking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action in Chicago after the Justice Department got involved. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X Tuesday that Facebook had taken down an unnamed "large group page that was being used to dox and target" ICE agents after outreach from the DOJ. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the group, which he did not identify, "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm." Its removal follows Apple and Google blocking ICE-tracking apps, also following government demands.

Meta is facing a court fight over documents and testimony in a landmark child safety case in New Mexico. In two recent motions, the New Mexico Attorney General's office alleged that Meta has refused to fully produce internal records about its AI chatbots, which reportedly engaged children and teenagers in sexualized conversations. The state also said Meta declined to consent to a subpoena for former company researcher Jason Sattizahn, who claimed that the company's legal team interfered with internal research on youth safety.

The glasses stole the show: When Meta held its annual Connect developer conference last month, the company's new Ray-Ban Display glasses got a lot of attention. Without new hardware to announce, VR took a bit of a backseat. Sure, there was James Cameron, who is helping the company bring 3D movies, shows, and sports events to Quest headsets. But what about that whole metaverse thing? How's that going? To get an update on Meta's efforts to make VR social, I talked to the company's metaverse VP, Vishal Shah.

Meta is ramping up the pressure for its employees to use AI. The Facebook parent company is tracking how extensively its teams are using AI through dashboards it rolled out earlier this year, and it created a game to boost employees' usage, Business Insider has learned. Expectations around AI usage vary by teams. Staff in some departments are encouraged to play with AI tools, while others are being pushed to meet specific targets, according to four current employees.