Earlier this month, Reuters reported internal documents from late 2024 stated Meta expected to earn about 10% of its revenue that year, about $16 billion, from illicit advertising. One document noted Meta earns $3.5 billion in revenue from "higher risk" scam ads every six months. Other documents stated that Meta's anti-fraud rules didn't appear to apply to many ads that regulators and the company's own staff believed "violated the spirit" of its rules against scam advertising.
Meta allegedly gave accounts engaged in the "trafficking of humans for sex" 16 chances before suspending them, according to testimony from the company's former head of safety and wellbeing, Vaishnavi Jayakumar. The testimony - along with several other claims that Meta ignored problems if they increased engagement - surfaced in an unredacted court filing related to a social media child safety lawsuit filed by school districts across the country.
Meta's impressive, photorealistic digital replicas of real places built using its "Hyperscape" capture tech, which uses the cameras on a Quest 3 or Quest 3S VR headset to scan a room, have so far been solitary spaces. If you wanted to visit a virtual version of a room in your house (or of Gordon Ramsay's home kitchen), you could only do it on your own.
On February 10, the plugins will gracefully degrade by rendering as a 0x0 pixel (invisible element) rather than causing errors or breaking your website functionality. This change is intended to only remove the plugin content from your site, and should not otherwise impact your website's functionality." Meta says that the functions will stop rendering on websites after February 10, 2026.
It hurts to see bad people win, but Meta, the company that burned billions trying to make the metaverse a thing, remains eye-wateringly profitable, thanks almost entirely to its advertising business, which accounted for 98 percent of its total revenue in the second quarter of 2025. And soon, if Meta executives have their way, that advertising will be powered by so-called artificial intelligence-and shocking quantities of fossil fuels-all so they can convince you to buy more stuff.
The MPA has suggested that Meta's ratings can't be aligned at all if the company doesn't follow the MPA's 'curated process'; the cease-and-desist letter asserts that Meta's content restrictions instead 'appear to rely heavily on artificial intelligence or other automated technology measures.' While the organization said it hopes to resolve this dispute 'amicably without litigation,' it doesn't seem as though Instagram's parent company is backing down.
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.
Meta recorded a nearly $16 billion onetime charge in the third quarter related to President Donald Trump's so-called big beautiful bill, and said its capital expenditure next year would be "notably larger" than in 2025. Shares of the company fell around 6% after the bell. Excluding the charge, Meta said its third-quarter net income would have increased by $15.93 billion to $18.64 billion, compared to the reported net income of $2.71 billion.
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.
