Instagram is making a major update to teen accounts that will only allow them to view content similar to what you would see in a PG-13 movie. Under the new system, Instagram will continue to hide content containing nudity, sexual content, or suggestive poses from teens, but now it will also avoid recommending content with…
For five weeks, the Federal Trade Commission asked a federal judge to imagine a world where Instagram and WhatsApp flourished outside Meta’s control instead of being acquired by the tech giant. In the sixth and final week of trial, Meta asked Judge James Boasberg to consider that actually, these apps might be as good as…
When Adam Mosseri took over Meta-owned Instagram as CEO in 2018, the app was experiencing what he’d later call “concerning” drops and plateaus in user engagement, thanks partly to fierce competition from a new app: TikTok. Instagram estimated in 2019 that 23 percent of the decline in time spent on Instagram in the US was…
When Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012, co-founder Kevin Systrom believed that joining Facebook would help Instagram’s “skyrocketing growth” reach even greater heights. In some ways, it did. Instagram now has billions of users and has since “generated many multiples of that price and then some,” Systrom said on Tuesday from a Washington,…
“Your honor, the FTC calls Mark Zuckerberg.” Flanked by two bodyguards, Meta’s CEO solemnly strode into a Washington, DC courtroom. Despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his company from being broken up by the US government. Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commission’s…
Meta has confirmed that it’s restarting efforts to train its AI systems using public Facebook and Instagram posts from its U.K. userbase. The company claims it has “incorporated regulatory feedback” into a revised “opt-out” approach to ensure that it’s “even more transparent,” as its blog post spins it. It is also seeking to paint the move as…
Last month, Meta announced that it was going to expand its artificial intelligence services around the world, and the company let users in Europe know that it would use their public information to train its A.I. services starting on June 26. The notifications sent to users of Facebook and Instagram in Europe, letting them know…