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Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.

At around 5:30PM ET, Downdetector showed a recent peak of more than 11,000 user reports of problems, but reports of issues have fallen dramatically. At 5:48PM ET, NetBlocks said the platform was experiencing “international outages.” A Meta status page was showing “high disruptions” for Facebook Ads Manager, including ads creation and delivery, but that has been “resolved.”

Following Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 taking effect last month, Meta says it has now removed almost 550,000 Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts that it believes were run by kids under that age threshold. Despite its compliance, Meta is still voicing opposition to the law.

Members can now post under a nickname, along with a custom avatar, though admins have to approve them first. It’s a small step towards Discordification for Facebook, which has otherwise always insisted on posting under real names.

So are external comment buttons, according to Meta. They’ll be discontinued on February 10th, 2026, and starting on that date, they’ll render instead as a 0 x 0 pixel to prevent causing errors.

So says France’s equality watchdog, ruling Meta needs to improve its job listings, where mechanic roles are mostly being shown to men, with preschool teacher ads going to women. We’ve been talking about sexism in job algorithms for a decade now, including at Facebook, but apparently some things never change.

Meta’s AI translation feature initially worked with English and Spanish.

The platform has added a new “poke” button directly to users’ profiles, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. You can track all your pokes and build up a “poke count” on a dedicated page that just reminded me of everyone who poked me in 2010.

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.”

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.

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.

That’s the message from Meta’s next witness, Catherine Tucker, an MIT management and marketing professor with expertise in digital monetization strategies. Tucker argues it’s important to account for this kind of competition because it’s the crux of how Meta makes money.

Government attorney Mitchell London points out that List’s “natural experiment” about how consumers behaved when India banned TikTok leaves out some potentially important context. He notes that 58 other apps, including popular messaging and social app WeChat, were banned alongside TikTok — meaning there were fewer alternative apps for consumers to turn to. List says TikTok made up the vast majority of usage prior to the app bans. But London also points to a Meta document that says, “In emerging markets, especially India, Facebook often serves a completely different purpose.”

On cross examination, the FTC interrogates List’s finding that Google Chrome is the top app users go to when they’re incentivized to spend less time on Facebook. List says he didn’t focus on the app as much as YouTube and TikTok since “it’s a little like off-device time has an infinite number of things you can do.” The FTC seems to be suggesting that this is exactly the point — and why evaluating Facebook’s relevant competitors based on where users shift their time is an imperfect measure.

Had the two never merged, List testifies that each company would have likely given in more to advertiser demand for more ads, not less, as the FTC has claimed. He says that over the long run, advertiser-side incentives would win out over incentivizing user engagement if the two remained separate, since one platform couldn’t recoup lower revenue from the other. He claims this is “the direct opposite result” from what the FTC’s expert found.

List uses the “natural experiment” that booted 200 million TikTok users from the app to argue that consumers see it as a fitting substitute for Meta’s apps. Within about two weeks of the ban, he says, Facebook and Instagram saw 20 percent increases in time spent on their apps. This means, according to his analysis, that TikTok should be considered a relevant competitor to Meta.

In List’s experiment, Instagram users who were incentivized to reduce their usage of the app diverted their time to YouTube more than other apps he tracked. The video app saw an 18.9 percent diversion rate, while Snapchat, which the FTC says Instagram directly competes with, sees a 2.2 percent diversion rate. Facebook users incentivized to lower their usage diverted the greatest share of their time to Google Chrome at a rate of 9.3 percent.