An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case. "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment (PDF) filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta." According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta's apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm. "Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued. Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming. Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads. Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was "pretty broken and duct-taped" together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it. Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant." Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg's state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless." "What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive' -- adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success." In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness to (supposedly) learn of Google's acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry." In sum: A ruling in Meta's favor could prevent a breakup of its apps, while a denial would push the trial toward a possible order to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.

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An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The Guardian, written by columnist Emma Brockes: Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a promotional tour to talk up the potential of AI in human relationships. I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it's one in which the world's "loneliness epidemic" is alleviated by people finding friendship with "a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do." In essence, we'll be friends with AI, instead of people. The missing air quotes around "knows" and "understands" is a distinction we can assume Zuck neither knows nor understands. This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution. The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.

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According to Rest of the World, a major confrontation between Meta and the local authorities in Nigeria is currently taking place: "Local authorities have fined Meta $290 million for regulatory breaches, prompting the social media giant to threaten pulling Facebook and Instagram from the country." Techdirt reports: As with earlier EU fines imposed on the company, the sticking point is Meta's refusal to comply with local privacy laws [...]. The fine itself is small change for Meta, which had a net income of $62 billion on a turnover of $165 billion in 2024, and a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion. Meta's current revenues in Nigeria are relatively small, but its market shares are high: "According to social media performance tracker Napoleoncat, Meta has a massive presence in the country, with Facebook alone reaching about 51.2 million users as of May 2024, more than a fifth of the population. Instagram had 12.6 million Nigerian users as of November 2023, while WhatsApp had about 51 million users, making Nigeria the 10th largest market globally for the messaging app." Since many Nigerians depend on Meta's platforms, the company might be hoping that there will be public pressure on the government not to impose the fine in order to avoid a shutdown of its services there. But it is hard to see Meta carrying out its threat to walk away from a country expected to be the third most populous nation in the world by 2050. In 2100, the population of Nigeria could reach 541 million according to current projections.

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Meta has eliminated key privacy protections for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users in a policy update that took effect April 29th. The company now permanently enables Meta AI with camera functionality unless "Hey Meta" voice commands are completely disabled, while simultaneously removing users' ability to opt out of having their voice recordings stored in the cloud. These recordings are kept for up to a year for Meta's product development, with the company only deleting accidental voice interactions after 90 days. Users can manually delete individual recordings but cannot prevent the initial collection.

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Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) on Wednesday and Meta 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. From a report: The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies. WSJ adds more details: The commission also issued cease-and-desist orders that could have a bigger impact than the fines. One order targets Apple's App Store and the other takes aim at Meta's use of personalized ads -- important revenue streams for each company. [...] The EU's action against Meta focuses on the company's effort to get users to agree to seeing personalized ads on Instagram and Facebook -- its main source of revenue. The commission ordered Meta to stop requiring users to either agree to those ads or pay for a subscription. It said it was still evaluating whether a "less-personalized ads" option that Meta introduced last fall complies with that order, raising the specter of further changes. The Apple case deals with the company's App Store rules. The commission said Apple had failed to comply with an obligation to allow app developers to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative ways to purchase digital products.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, testified on Tuesday in a landmark federal antitrust trial that he left Meta in 2018 because his company was denied resources. The government has argued that Meta purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a "buy-or-bury strategy" to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals. Last week, current and former Meta executives testified that the social media giant, formerly known as Facebook, used its deep pockets to invest in Instagram after its purchase. In testimony at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, Mr. Systrom painted a different picture, saying he left Meta because Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, wasn't investing enough. At that time, Instagram had grown to 1 billion users, about 40 percent of Facebook's size, yet the photo-sharing app had only 1,000 employees compared to 35,000 employees at Facebook, he said. "We were by far the fastest growing team. We produced the most revenue and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt like we should have been much larger," said Mr. Systrom, who is expected to testify for six hours. Mr. Systrom said he found the decisions baffling. When asked by an F.T.C. lawyer why Mr. Zuckerberg might have decided to give Instagram fewer resources, Mr. Systrom said it was a consistent pattern during his tenure at Meta. "Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth," he said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg's prioritization of Facebook.

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Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.

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During Meta's antitrust trial this week, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. From a report: Attorneys for both Apple and Snap called the errors "egregious," with Apple's representative indicating that it may not be able to trust Meta with its internal information in the future. Google's attorney also blamed Meta for jeopardizing the search giant's data with the mistake. Details about the attorneys' comments come from The Verge's Lauren Feiner, who is currently in the courtroom where proceedings are taking place today. Apple, Google, and Meta did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment. Snap declined to comment. Snap's attorney maligned Meta's "cavalier approach and casual disregard" of other companies swept into the case, and wondered if "Meta would have applied meaningful redactions if it were its own information that was at stake."

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Meta has disabled Apple Intelligence features across its iOS applications, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, according to Brazilian tech blog Sorcererhat Tech. The block affects Writing Tools, which enable text creation and editing via Apple's AI, as well as Genmoji generation. Users cannot access these features via the standard text field interface in Meta apps. Instagram Stories have also lost previously available keyboard stickers and Memoji functionality. While Meta hasn't explained the decision, it likely aims to drive users toward Meta AI, its own artificial intelligence service that offers similar text and image generation capabilities. The move follows failed negotiations between Apple and Meta regarding Llama integration into Apple Intelligence, which reportedly collapsed over privacy disagreements. The companies also maintain ongoing disputes regarding App Store policies.

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Alamo Drafthouse will not implement Meta's new Movie Mate technology during the April 30 nationwide rerelease of Blumhouse's "M3GAN," Variety reports. The specialty theater chain confirmed it will maintain its strict no-phones policy despite Universal's promotion of the second-screen experience, with staff instructed to remove patrons attempting to access the feature during screenings. Movie Mate represents Meta's first integration of its interactive movie technology, which operates via Instagram direct messaging. Users message the film's official account to activate a chatbot delivering "sneak peeks, exclusive recorded messages from directors and talent" synchronized with the screening. The "M3GAN" event serves as Meta's technological debut ahead of potential wider theatrical implementation.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered resetting all Facebook users' friend connections to boost the platform's declining relevance, according to internal emails revealed Monday in a landmark FTC antitrust trial. In a 2022 message to executives, Zuckerberg proposed "wiping everyone's graphs and having them start again," referring to users' friend networks. Facebook head Tom Alison questioned the idea's viability, citing Instagram's reliance on friend connections. Zuckerberg later testified that the plan was never implemented and that Facebook has "evolved" from its original purpose. The FTC argues Meta violated competition laws by acquiring Instagram ($1B) and WhatsApp ($19B) as part of a "buy or bury" strategy outlined in Zuckerberg's 2008 email stating, "It is better to buy than compete."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission told a judge that Facebook, fearing the competitive threat of Instagram posted to their social media network, acquired both as a way to "neutralize" the rival. "They decided that competition was too hard," the FTC's attorney, Daniel Matheson, said in his opening statement in the government's antitrust case against the Meta Platforms social media empire. He argued that with Meta's monopoly in social media, "consumers do not have reasonable alternatives they can turn to," even as satisfaction has declined. At stake is the potential breakup of Facebook-parent Meta, as the government has zeroed in on the 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp.

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Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast." And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's performance. But AI companies generally haven't customized or otherwise fine-tuned their models to score better on LM Arena — or haven't admitted to doing so, at least.") Friday TechCrunch on what happened when LMArena tested the unmodified release version of Maverick (Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct). It ranked 32nd. "For the record, older models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released last June, and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002, released last September, rank higher," notes the tech site Neowin.

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A former Facebook employee/whistleblower alleges Meta's AI model Lllama was used to help DeepSeek. The whistleblower — former Facebook director of global policy Sarah Wynn-Williams — testified before U.S. Senators on Wednesday. CBS News found this earlier response from Meta: In a statement last year on Llama, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote, "The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over 1T to surpass the US technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast, or faster, than US ones." Wynn-Williams encouraged senators to continue investigating Meta's role in the development of artificial intelligence in China, as they continue their probe into the social media company founded by Zuckerberg. "The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn't offer services in China, while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there," she said. The testimony also left some of the lawmakers skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech after the whistleblower also alleged Facebook worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government to censor its platforms: In her almost seven years with the company, Wynn-Williams told the panel she witnessed the company provide "custom built censorship tools" for the Chinese Communist Party. She said a Chinese dissident living in the United States was removed from Facebook in 2017 after pressure from Chinese officials. Facebook said at the time it took action against the regime critic, Guo Wengui, for sharing someone else's personal information. Wynn-Williams described the use of a "virality counter" that flagged posts with over 10,000 views for review by a "chief editor," which Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called "an Orwellian censor." These "virality counters" were used not only in Mainland China, but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to Wynn-Williams's testimony. Wynn-Williams also told senators Chinese officials could "potentially access" the data of American users.

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Meta says in its Llama 4 release announcement that it's specifically addressing "left-leaning" political bias in its AI model, distinguishing this effort from traditional bias concerns around race, gender, and nationality that researchers have long documented. "Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models and to make sure that Llama can understand and articulate both sides of a contentious issue," the company said. "All leading LLMs have had issues with bias -- specifically, they historically have leaned left," Meta stated, framing AI bias primarily as a political problem. The company claims Llama 4 is "dramatically more balanced" in handling sensitive topics and touts its lack of "strong political lean" compared to competitors.

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