#meta

#meta

Zuckerberg, Chen said, has personally "hand-cooked" and "hand-delivered" soup to researchers he wanted to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn't a joke, the executive insisted. "It was shocking to me at the time," Chen admitted. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you must respond in kind. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his own recruits as he hopes to poach talent from Meta.

The toxicity of his products is exceeded only by his gormless demeanour (let he who is without sin, cast the first stone). Yet, even those who consider him an enemy of humanity must admit that Zuckerberg possesses a talented grasp on the fundamentals of technology trends. Despite the clinical efficiency of his businesses in spreading misery, or perhaps proof of how well the product has been engineered underneath the hood - offerings like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, it is fair to acknowledge, are tightly-built products.

One company removed from the platform is C'est La Vie, which claimed to be a longstanding jewellery retailer run by Patrick and Eileen in Birmingham but had a returns address in China. Mabel & Daisy, which used AI generated pictures of a mother and daughter and claimed to sell "timeless clothing" from a shop in Bristol, has also been removed from the platform after it was exposed for selling cheap items from a base in Hong Kong.

A significant new court filing claims Facebook and Instagram owner Meta had a 17x policy allowing sex traffickers to post content related to sexual solicitation or prostitution 16 times before their accounts were suspended on the 17th strike. The allegation is one of many in the filing claiming Meta chose profit and user engagement over the safety and well-being of children.

The research, code-named "Project Mercury," took place in 2020. Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to see what impact deactivating Facebook had on people. According to internal documents, "people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison." According to the filings, instead of pursuing more research, Meta dropped the project, claiming that participants' feedback was biased by "the result of the existing media narrative around the company."

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.

Meta plans to spend up to $72 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and has said spending will climb higher next year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this year that he'd rather risk "misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars" than be late to the development of superintelligence. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and privately held AI companies like OpenAI are logging record-breaking capital expenditures on all things AI.

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.