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Meta employees ordered ‘attorney/client privilege’ hats while fighting child safety disclosures

2026-09-25T07:50:48-04:00

Meta's lawyers have argued that certain evidence should be withheld from public view on the grounds of attorney-client privilege in the ongoing lawsuits over alleged harm to teens' safety and mental health. Lawyers suing the company said this week that the label has been applied far too broadly, while pointing to a recently unsealed document showing that the team behind launching Instagram's Teen Accounts in 2024 put in an order for baseball caps that simply said "a/c priv."

The lawyers suing Meta argue the Project Nido (an internal name for the Teen Accounts team) swag is part of "culture of privilege abuse at Meta" aimed at keeping the re …

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San Francisco sues Trump Media for selling early access to Trump posts

2026-09-22T13:43:50-04:00

San Francisco is suing the Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company behind Truth Social, for selling early access to President Donald Trump's posts on the social media site. The lawsuit, filed today in California state court, alleges that the Truth API feed is a "corrupt business scheme" that violates both California's Unfair Competition Law and federal ethics and anti-corruption laws that prohibit insider trading.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle recently called Truth Social the "most powerful and popular social media platform in the world." While the latter part of that statement is objectively untrue based on any credible e …

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What if social media isn’t hurting kids?

2026-09-15T16:13:30-04:00

Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released his New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation. The book posits that the rise of social media and smartphone use is largely to blame for the prominent decline in teen mental health since 2010. It quickly became a central rallying cry of the social media backlash. Haidt has been credited with helping inspire Australia's nationwide teen social media ban. He has joined forces with bereaved parents who are fighting tech companies in court. His name comes up unprompted in conversations with people in power who say his book opened their eyes to an online crisis.

Haidt's theory has …

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Meta’s new One subscriptions put a price on social media and AI

2026-09-15T10:45:00-04:00

Shortly after launching its new do-everything AI assistant Muse, Meta's launching subscription bundles that pair its standalone app subscriptions with extra AI usage. Some of the new Meta One bundles were in testing earlier this year, but are now available globally starting today, with several tiers for individual users, creators, and businesses. Meta says the "core experience" on its apps and Meta AI will still be free, and users can still get its subscriptions for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp without a bundle. It also says it plans to expand the bundles to include "Edits, AI glasses, and more over time."

There are two bundles for in …

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The White House says Truth Social is the ‘most powerful and popular social media platform in the world’

2026-09-11T13:39:11-04:00

The White House claims the Donald Trump-owned Truth Social is the "most powerful and popular social media platform in the world." The statement, provided to The New York Times by White House spokesperson Davis Ingle, is at odds with the user counts from some of the biggest social media platforms on the web.

Data gathered by Search Engine Land shows YouTube is the most popular platform in the world, with 2.65 billion monthly active users. Facebook comes in second with 2.39 billion active users around the globe, followed by TikTok with 2.21 billion and Instagram with 1.99 billion. Truth Social doesn't make Search Engine Land's top 10 list, wh …

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Instagram cracks down on AI accounts pretending to be human

2026-08-31T09:16:39-04:00

“AI creator” accounts like Aitana Lopez will get a new “AI-generated profile” label. | Image: Aitana Lopez

Instagram is finally taking steps to address the rise of fake AI-influencer accounts that have gotten harder to spot. It's also renaming the "AI creator" label to "AI-generated profile" to make it clear when a profile features an AI-generated person that's not a real human being.

"We've heard that people don't like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated," said Instagram in a blog post. "They want to know when a profile features an AI-generated person."

A look at how Instagram will deal with accounts that don't self-label their AI-generated profiles. | Image: Instagram" data-portal-copyright="Image: Instagram">

To that end, Instagram will be hunting down accounts that don't self-label their AI-generated profiles, and penalize them by limi …

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If Meta’s going down, it’s taking TikTok and YouTube with it

2026-08-27T10:24:29-04:00

Meta might be on the hook for $17.1 billion and a host of app changes under a new kids safety settlement, but it's already spinning the deal to its advantage.

After years of being the national punching bag for social media harms, Meta has reached a settlement with 47 US states and several districts and territories that gives it a rare opportunity: A chance to flex on its rivals. "We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone," Meta says in an "Open Letter" that is also running as a full-page ad in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. "These protections will only be truly ef …

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All the ways Instagram and Facebook are changing for teens

2026-08-26T15:56:06-04:00

Meta just agreed to make sweeping changes for teens as part of a child safety settlement reached with attorneys general across the US. Under the agreement, Meta must apply new safeguards across Instagram and Facebook that will change how teens interact with the social media platforms, as well as restrict their use during certain times.

The settlement stems from a nationwide lawsuit alleging Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap failed to protect children and made their platforms "addictive" by design. A group of 51 US states and territories signed the agreement, including New York, New Jersey, California, Nevada, South Carolina, Washington, Illino …

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Meta agrees to heavy restrictions on teen users in major lawsuit settlement

2026-08-26T10:17:47-04:00

Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Meta settled its latest kids online safety trial with a group of 29 state attorneys general, sparing it from the remainder of a trial that could have cost it hundreds of billions of dollars.

Under the terms of the settlement, which resolves claims by a larger group of 47 states and several districts and territories, Meta agreed to come up with an age assurance standard that is subject to independent testing, and must have a false positive rate no higher than 10 percent for users aged 16 to 17, and 3 percent for users aged 13 to 15. The company also agreed to give teens the option to turn off personalized feeds, meaning that they won't be s …

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Raspberry Pi shares its official tutorial for making a cyberdeck

2026-08-24T10:49:44-04:00

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Raspberry Pi's head of social, Ashley Whittaker, acknowledged the cyberdeck trend today, saying "we haven't been able to get away from cyberdecks this year." Tiny portable computers made out of things like purses, jewelry boxes, and other thrifted or recycled parts have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms over the past year, and Raspberry Pi now has its own guide to building one of the homemade computers.

Raspberry Pi has also increased its prices multiple times this year due to rising costs for RAM and other components, which could be another reason to support this growing market of active and would-be hobbyists. The 16G …

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