Meta Loses Two Landmark Cases Regarding Product Safety and Children’s Use; Google Loses One ⇥ latimes.com

Morgan Lee, Associated Press:

A New Mexico jury found Tuesday that social media conglomerate Meta is harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of state consumer protection law.

The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial. Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew [about] the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.

Meta communications jackass Andy Stone noted on X his company’s delight to be liable for “a fraction of what the State sought”. The company says it will appeal the verdict.

Stephen Morris and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta and Google were found liable in a landmark legal case that social media platforms are designed to be addictive to children, opening up the tech giants to penalties in thousands of similar claims filed around the US.

A jury in the Los Angeles trial on Wednesday returned a verdict after nine days of deliberation, finding Meta’s platforms such as Instagram and Google’s YouTube were harmful to children and teenagers and that the companies failed to warn users of the dangers.

Dara Kerr, the Guardian:

To come to its liability decision, the jury was asked whether the companies’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to KGM [the plaintiff] and if the tech firms knew the design of their products was dangerous. The 12-person panel of jurors returned a 10-2 split answering in favor of the plaintiff on every single question.

Meta says it will also appeal this verdict.

Sonja Sharp, Los Angeles Times:

Collectively, the suits seek to prove that harm flowed not from user content but from the design and operation of the platforms themselves.

That’s a critical legal distinction, experts say. Social media companies have so far been protected by a powerful 1996 law called Section 230, which has shielded the apps from responsibility for what happens to children who use it.

For its part, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is standing up for beleaguered social media companies in an editorial today criticizing everything about these verdicts, including this specific means of liability, which it calls a “dodge” around Section 230.

But it is not. The principles described by Section 230 are a good foundation for the internet. This law, while U.S.-centric, has enabled the web around the world to flourish. Making companies legally liable for the things users post will not fix the mess we are in, but it would cause great damage if enacted.

Product design, though, is a different question. It would be a mistake, I think, to read Section 230 as a blanket allowance for any way platforms wish to use or display users’ posts. (Update: In part, that is because it is a free speech question.) From my entirely layman perspective, it has never struck me as entirely reasonable that the recommendations systems of these platforms should have no duty or expectation of care.

The Journal’s editorial board largely exists to produce rage bait and defend the interests of the powerful, so I am loath to give it too much attention, but I thought this paragraph was pretty rich:

Trial lawyers and juries may figure that Big Tech companies can afford to pay, but extorting companies is certain to have downstream consequences. Meta and Google are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence this year, which could have positive social impacts such as accelerating treatments for cancer.

Do not sue tech companies because they could be finding cancer treatments — why should I take this editorial board seriously if its members are writing jokes like these? They think you are stupid.

As for the two cases, I am curious about how these conclusions actually play out. I imagine other people who feel their lives have been eroded by the specific way these platforms are designed will be able to test their claims in court, too, and that it will be complicated by the inevitably lengthy appeals and relitigation process.

I am admittedly a little irritated by both decisions being reached by jury instead of a judge; I would have preferred to see reasoning instead of overwhelming agreement among random people. However, it sends a strong signal to big social media platforms that people saw and heard evidence about how these products are designed, and they agreed it was damaging. This is true of all users, not just children. Meta tunes its feeds (PDF) for maximizing engagement across the board, and it surely is not the only one. There are a staggering number of partially redacted exhibits released today to go through, if one is so inclined.

If these big social platforms are listening, the signals are out there: people may be spending a lot of time with these products, but that is not a good proxy for their enjoyment or satisfaction. Research indicates a moderate amount of use is correlated with neutral or even positive outcomes among children, yet there are too many incentives in these apps to push past self-control mechanisms. These products should be designed differently.

Meta Laid Off Several Hundred People Today ⇥ cnbc.com

Ashley Capoot and Jonathan Vanian, CNBC:

Meta is laying off several hundred employees on Wednesday, CNBC confirmed.

The cuts are happening across several different organizations within the company, including Facebook, global operations, recruiting, sales and its virtual reality division Reality Labs, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they are confidential.

Some impacted employees are being offered new roles within the company, the person said. In some cases, those new positions will require relocation.

“Several hundred” employees is a long way off from the numbers reported earlier this month. Perhaps Reuters got it all wrong but, more worryingly for employees, perhaps those figures were correct and this is only the beginning.

Talking Liquid Glass With Apple ⇥ captainswiftui.substack.com

Danny Bolella attended one of Apple’s “Let’s Talk Liquid Glass” workshops:

Let’s address the elephant in the room. If you read the comments on my articles or browse the iOS subreddits, there is a vocal contingent of developers betting that Apple is going to roll back Liquid Glass.

The rationale usually points to the initial community backlash, the slower adoption rate of iOS 26, and the news that Alan Dye left Apple for Meta. The prevailing theory has been: “Just wait it out. They’ll revert to flat design.”

I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team.

Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position. They made it emphatically clear that Liquid Glass is absolutely moving forward, evolving, and expanding across the ecosystem.

Unsurprising. Though I expect a number of people reading this will be disappointed, I cannot imagine a world in which Apple would either revert to its previous design language or whip together something new. It is going to ride Liquid Glass and evolve it for a long time; if history is a good rule of thumb, assume ten years.

In theory, this is a good thing. Even on MacOS, I can find things I prefer to its predecessor, though admittedly they are few and far between. This visual design feels much more at home on iOS. The things that cause me far more frustration on a daily basis are the unrelenting bugs across Apple’s ecosystem, like how I just finished listening to an album with my headphones and then, when I clicked “play” on a new album, Music on MacOS decided it should AirPlay to my television instead of continuing through my headphones. That kind of stuff.

Regardless of whatever one thinks the visual qualities of Liquid Glass, the software quality problem is notable there, too. We are now on the OS 26.4 set of releases and I am still running into plenty of instances with bizarre and distracting compositing problems. On my iPhone, the gradients that are supposed to help with legibility in the status bar and toolbar appear, disappear, and change colour with seemingly little relevance to what is underneath them. Notification Centre remains illegible until it is fully pulled down. Plus, I still see the kinds of graphics bugs and Auto Layout problems I have seen for a decade.

I hope to see a more fully considered version of the Liquid Glass design language at WWDC this year, and not merely from a visual perspective. This user interface is software, just like dedicated applications, and it is chockablock full of bugs.

Bolella, emphasis mine:

I plan to share an article soon where I break down the exact physics, z-axis rules, and “Barbell Layouts” of this hierarchy. But the high-level takeaway from the NYC labs is crystal clear: maximize your content, push your controls to the poles, and never let the interface compete with the information.

If you say so, Apple.

OpenAI to Discontinue Sora App, Video Platform ⇥ wsj.com

Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal:

CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.

OpenAI is not shutting this down because it has ethical qualms with what it has created, despite good reasons to do just that. It is because it is expensive without any clear reason for it to exist other than because OpenAI wants to be everywhere.

If you are desperate for a completely synthetic social media feed, Meta’s Vibes is apparently still around. Users are readily abusing it, of course, because that is what happens if you give people a text input box.

Update: In a tweet, OpenAI has confirmed it is shutting down Sora. But, while it originally announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora”, it changed that about an hour later to read “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app“, emphasis mine. The Journal has not changed its report to retract claims about shutting down the platform altogether, though, while OpenAI continues to promote Sora API pricing.

Ads Are Coming to Apple Maps Later This Year ⇥ apple.com

Apple, in a press release with the title “Introducing Apple Business — a new all‑in‑one platform for businesses of all sizes”, buried in a section tucked in the middle labelled “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps”, both of which are so anodyne as to encourage missing this key bit of news:

Every day, users choose Apple Maps to discover and explore places and businesses around them. Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

The way they are “clearly marked” is with a light blue background and a small “Ad” badge, though it is worth noting Apple has been testing an even less obvious demarcation for App Store ads. In the case of the App Store, I have found the advertising blitz junks up search results more than it helps me find things I am interested in.

This is surely not something users are asking for. I would settle for a more reliable search engine, one that prioritizes results immediately near me instead of finding places in cities often hundreds of kilometres away. There are no details yet on what targeting advertisers will be allowed to use, but it will be extremely frustrating if the only reason I begin seeing more immediately relevant results is because a local business had to pay for the spot.

Update: I have this one little nagging thought I cannot shake. Maps has been an imperfect — to be kind — app for nearly fifteen years, but it was ultimately a self-evident piece of good software, at least in theory. It was a directory of points-of-interest, and a means of getting directions. With this announcement, it becomes a container for advertising. Its primary function feels corrupted, at least a little bit, because what users care about is now subservient to the interests of the businesses paying Apple.

Someone Has Publicly Leaked an Exploit Kit That Can Hack Millions of iPhones ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

Last week, cybersecurity researchers uncovered a hacking campaign targeting iPhone users that used an advanced hacking tool called DarkSword. Now someone has leaked a newer version of DarkSword and published it on the code-sharing site GitHub.

Researchers are warning that this will allow any hacker to easily use the tools to target iPhone users running older versions of Apple’s operating systems who have not yet updated to its latest iOS 26 software. This likely affects hundreds of millions of actively used iPhones and iPads, according to Apple’s own data on out-of-date devices.

This is an entirely different exploit chain to the “Coruna” one which also surfaced earlier this month — so now there are two massive security exploits just floating around in the wild affecting a large number of iPhones. Apple is apparently concerned enough about these vulnerabilities that it is issuing patches as far back as iOS 15 though, disappointingly, only for devices that do not support newer major versions. If you have a device that can run iOS 26, you will be safer if it is running iOS 26.

It is, I should say, pretty brazen for the developers of this exploit chain to call the JavaScript file “rce_loader.js”. RCE stands for remote code execution. It is basically like calling the file “hacking_happens_here.js”.

In a ‘Test’, Google Is Automatically Rewriting News Headlines in Its Search Results ⇥ searchengineland.com

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

As I noted when I linked to Hollister’s article about Discover back in December, this is not new in search results; it has been happening for years.

Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Land:

Dig deeper. Google changed 76% of title tags in Q1 2025 – Here’s what that means […]

According to the Google Search Central section on title links, originally published in 2021:

I am not arguing this is good or normal — the examples Hollister shows are extremely poor reflections of the articles in question — but I do not understand why it is only gaining traction now, nor how it meaningfully differs from what Google has been doing all along. It is indeed frustrating.

Many of the results you see in Google Search misrepresent the source material and are misleading. But that has been true for a while — which is a problem unto itself. People should not trust the results they see as represented by Google Search. The visual tone Google has maintained, however, is that it is a neutral directory. The summaries in A.I. Overview are delivered with an unearned dry authority, and the ten links below it are there because of a tense truce between Google’s goals and those of search optimization professionals.

Also, I had no idea that Search Engine Land had been acquired at some point by Semrush which, in turn, was bought by Adobe.

Lobbying Firms Funded by Apple and Meta Are Duelling on Age Verification ⇥ bloomberg.com

Emily Birnbaum, writing for Bloomberg in July:

Meta is also helping to fund the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition of conservative groups leading efforts to pass app-store age verification, according to three people familiar with the funding.

The App Store Accountability Act is based on model legislation written by the Digital Childhood Alliance. The lobbying group also publishes marketing pieces, including one (PDF) that calls Apple’s age verification frameworks “ineffective”. Specifically, it points to the lack of parental consent required “for kids to enter into complex contracts”, with “no way to verify that parental consent has been obtained”.

Meta, for its part, requires users to self-report their birthday and click a button that says “I agree” to create an Instagram account. In fairness, the title of that page says “read and agree to our terms” and, on the terms page, Meta does say you need to be 13 years old. This is pretty standard stuff but, if Meta actually cared about this, it could voluntarily implement the stricter controls at sign-up without a legislative incentive.

Though this article was published last year, I am linking to it now because something called the TBOTE Project recently resurfaced these findings and added some of its own in an open source investigation. Unlike similar investigations from sources like Bellingcat, it does not appear that the person or people behind TBOTE have editors or fact-checkers to verify their interpretation of this information. That does not mean it is useless; it is simply worth exercising some caution. Regardless, their findings show a massive amount of lobbyist spending on Meta’s part to try and get these laws passed.

Birnbaum continues:

The App Association, a group backed by Apple, has been running ads in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Ohio arguing that the app store age verification bills are backed by porn websites and companies. The adult entertainment industry’s main lobby said it is not pushing for the bills; pornography is mostly banned from app stores.

This is obviously bad faith, but also flawed in the opposite direction: the porn industry wants device-level verification.

Tech CEOs and Investors Are Just Saying Stuff ⇥ businessinsider.com

Jacob Silverman, Business Insider:

The growing bloat of popular tech rhetoric could serve as evidence for how the tech industry, having conquered so much of daily life, work, and entertainment, has begun to exhaust its imaginative capacities. Industry leaders promised that the mammoth capital for AI outlay would lead to the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence that would serve as a universal solvent, fixing climate change, poverty, and even the problem of death itself. But that horizon — which we are supposed to reach by pumping out more fossil-fuel emissions and destabilizing labor and education — remains impossibly far away.

Gallup’s polling on views of different business sectors has, frustratingly, no ability to permalink to a particular industry and its historical rankings; so, you will need to go down to “Industry and Business Sector Ratings, B Through E” and then click the pagination arrow to get to “Computer Industry” on the second page. Once there, you will find what seem at first glance to be some remarkably stable figures.

Look a little closer, though, and the numbers tell a different story. Summing the “very” and “somewhat” figures for each type of response shows a marked decline in positive reception since a high in 2017, and a steady climb in negative reception. There are lots of reasons for this; many of them I have written about. But I do not think these loudmouth executives are doing the industry any favours by bullshitting their way through interviews and promising nonsense.

That is the data-driven answer. These guys also just sound really stupid when they say stuff like “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” or “the long-term vision is to […] create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion” or “I bought Twitter […] to try to help humanity, whom I love”. I know I am writing this on a website called Pixel Envy and I am, well, me, but these barons sound comical and dorky.

Adobe Pays Early Termination Fee, or ‘Settlement’, in U.S. Lawsuit Over Hidden Fees ⇥ pcmag.com

When the United States Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice jointly filed a lawsuit in 2024 against Adobe, I commented on the similarities between that complaint and the one against Amazon. Both are about the ease of entering into subscriptions that are later difficult or expensive to leave, both had alleged personal liability by executives — and, now, both have been settled out of court.

Michael Kan, PC Magazine:

Adobe has settled a 2024 lawsuit from the US government that alleged the company used hidden fees to trap users into paying for subscriptions.

On Friday, Adobe “finalized” an agreement with the Justice Department, which accused the software vendor of failing to inform new customers about payment terms or early termination fees. “While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe says.

I am sure Adobe has learned its lesson. Let us go and check its work. In its statement, Adobe says it has “made [its] sign-up and cancellation processes even more streamlined and transparent”. Here is how it describes its annual pricing, billed monthly, on its U.S. website:

Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Mar 31.

This is not the most direct sentence, but it is an accurate explanation of how much the fee will be, and when that fee takes effect — fourteen days from when I am writing this. It is followed by a little “i” informational icon. Clicking on it will display a callout noting when service will be cut off. For comparison, here is the equivalent disclaimer on its Canadian site:

Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days.

Here, too, there is a little informational icon. When you hover over it, Adobe says the same thing about cancellation, and adds that cancelling will incur an early termination fee. It is the same on the U.K. site.

What is the answer here? Does each country need to sue Adobe for its billing flow to disclose a reasonable amount of information?

Meta Realizes Horizon Worlds on Quest Never Had Legs, Will Shut It Down in June ⇥ communityforums.atmeta.com

A few weeks ago, Meta published an update from Samantha Ryan, of Reality Labs, announced a “renewed focus” and a “doubling down” on virtual reality. It planned to achieve this by “almost exclusively” betting its future on the smartphone Horizon Worlds app.

In an announcement today, Meta shifted its definition of “almost exclusively” to simply “exclusively”:

Earlier this year, we shared an update on our renewed focus for VR and Horizon. We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience. This separation will extend across our ecosystem, including our mobile app. To support this vision, we are making the following changes to streamline your Quest experience throughout 2026.

This opening paragraph is opaque and, though the announcement goes on to explain exactly what is happening, it is not nearly as clear as the email sent to Horizon Worlds users. I really think Meta is looking to exit from its pure V.R. efforts, especially with the sales success of the perv glasses.

As I write this, the Horizon app for iOS is the sixty-ninth most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just behind Wordscapes and ahead of Perfect Makeover Cleaning ASMR. Nice?

A Roadmap for Currency Symbol Implementation ⇥ blog.unicode.org

The Unicode Consortium would like to remind you to work closely with them if you are introducing a new symbol for your currency:

Such public usage leads to a need for the symbol to be encoded in the Unicode Standard and supported in commercial software and services. Standardization of a new character and subsequent support by vendors takes time: typically, at least one year, and often longer. All too often, however, monetary authorities announce creation of a new currency symbol anticipating immediate public adoption, then later discover there will be an unavoidable delay before the new symbol is widely supported in products and services.

I had no idea so many currency symbols had been introduced recently. Then again, before I read this, I had not given much thought to the one we use: $.

Hephzibah Anderson, for the BBC, in 2019:

The most widely accepted theory does in fact involve Spanish coinage, and it goes like this: in the colonies, trade between Spanish Americans and English Americans was lively, and the peso, or peso de ocho reales, was legal tender in the US until 1857. It was often shortened, so historians tell us, to the initial ‘P’ with an ‘S’ hovering beside it in superscript. Gradually, thanks to the scrawl of time-pressed merchants and scribes, that ‘P’ merged with the ‘S’ and lost its curve, leaving the vertical stroke like a stake down the centre of the ‘S’. A Spanish dollar was more or less worth an American dollar, so it’s easy to see how the sign might have transferred.

Not only the explanation for why all the world’s dollars have the same symbol, but also why we share it with the peso.

A Friendly Wager on the Future of Repairability and Performance ⇥ dithering.passport.online

On a recent episode of “Dithering”, Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss the Tech Re-Nu teardown of the MacBook Neo and what it reveals about the supposed trade-offs of repairability. Thompson says at about 5:48 into the paywalled episode:

The MacBook Neo is a perfect counterpoint to the iFixit perspective. It’s like: you can get repairability, but what it’s going to cost you is a less capable computer with lower battery life.

And that’s fine. We’re at the stage where these iPhone chips are so good — it’s still a very good computer. But it’s quite handy to have the MacBook Air next to the MacBook Neo. They weigh the same. One has much more performance than the other, and that’s the price.

To summarize: “the price”, it is implied, is that the MacBook Air must be less repairable for it to have good battery life and better performance.

I am less certain. You can complain as I did about the adhesive-attached batteries and unrepairable keyboards in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but the most recent updates are effectively speed increases with few other changes. If Apple would like to bring the same repairability advantages of the Neo to the Air and the Pro, it would do so when it redesigns those computers.1 And I think Apple could bring at least some of those repairability improvements — battery or keyboard, perhaps? — to those products in the next major hardware revision.

Call this a friendly wager which I will only be making in internet points. Also, this might be wishcasting — but I think this is the way the winds are blowing. My impression of Apple’s approach to repairability is that it was not a high priority for a long time — particularly for products nearer the beginning of their development cycle — and that it argued for trade-offs that were ultimately irrelevant. That is not only Apple’s approach; there are plenty of companies with poor track records on this stuff. But a patchwork of right-to-repair legislation around the world is helping make devices easier to fix. Also, if assembly costs are indeed reduced by using screws instead of glue — something I am skeptical of but which Thompson and Gruber posit — surely Apple would want to do the same in other products.

  1. I am giving myself a little exit ramp in this footnote for the MacBook Ultra, or whatever Apple ends up calling the rumoured touch laptop. I assume that thing will be full of glue. ↥︎

Trump Administration to Receive $10 Billion Kickback for TikTok Deal ⇥ wsj.com

Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.

The payment is part of the agreement through which investors friendly with the administration gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. It comes in addition to the investments made to create a new entity to run the app in the U.S.

Over five years ago, during the first Trump administration, he floated the possibility of getting “key money” for the U.S. Treasury, something he later bemoaned was apparently illegal. So much for that, where by that I mean respect for the law. This is a 70% commission rate to be given to — well, exactly where it will be booked seems like a mystery because it is not like there is a U.S. Department of Bribery.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian […]

“View from nowhere” journalism means these reporters from the Journal cannot call this naked corruption what it is, nor can they quote someone stating it. They can only gesture toward the obvious while writing the straightest of articles about the wackiest events. Things are going well.

Transport Canada’s Vehicle Headlights Survey ⇥ tc.canada.ca

Transport Canada is running a survey about the brightness of car headlights:

While new headlight technology in vehicles can help drivers see better, they can also cause problems for other road users. Transport Canada wants to learn how headlight glare affects road users and what vehicle or lighting features may influence how people experience it at night.

If you live in Canada and have been momentarily blinded by over-bright and poorly aimed headlights, it is worth taking this brief survey to share your thoughts.

Reuters: Meta Is Planning to Wreck the Lives of 20% of Its Staff Because It Is Spending So Much on Data Centres ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, Reuters:

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

I do not know what is the right number of staff to run Meta’s operations but, whatever it is, there has to be a better way of figuring it out than by luring tens of thousands of people to work for you with promises of a huge salary and benefits, then upending their lives some time later. They have rent or a mortgage; they might have a family depending on their income; their ability to remain in a country may depend on their having a job. Perhaps it could be beneficial for staff to bargain with their company in a more collective manner.

BuzzFeed’s A.I. Pivot Might End in Bankruptcy ⇥ futurism.com

I know — weird that there is news about Digg and BuzzFeed on the same day in 2026. Anyway.

Victor Tangermann, Futurism:

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Just a few months after BuzzFeed announced it was pivoting to A.I. to generate more personalized quizzes, it closed its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division.

Not to worry, though, because it launched a new company called Branch Office, which has an on-trend for last year website, some vague apps, and a name that shares an abbreviation with “body odour”. The announcement comes with a killer quote from BuzzFeed’s CEO:

“We’re accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles, and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content,” said Jonah Peretti. “We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution.”

An era of “slop”? “Cuts at the organizations that actually care”? Listen to yourself, Peretti.

Digg Reboot Needs to ‘Reset’, Lays Off a ‘Significant’ Amount of Staff ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

When this “reboot” was announced about a year ago, I was not optimistic. I feel bad for the staff who took a chance on this experiment, but I will be surprised if it comes back.

Meta Says It Is Removing End-to-End Encryption From Instagram Direct Messages ⇥ about.fb.com

In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced his “privacy-focused vision for social networking”.

This did not come out of nowhere. Facebook is a technology firm hostile to user privacy, and media coverage has reflected its poor record. The company had even been pursuing a deal to operate in China and accept that government’s surveillance and censorship demands. So it decided to make some changes. It ended its plan for operating in China — not because it no longer wanted that massive audience, but because it was easier to lobby for a U.S. TikTok ban.

It also decided on six principles for that “privacy-focused vision”, among them:

Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

Zuckerberg noted some of the risks for end-to-end encryption, but “[o]n balance,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do”. As a result, Meta’s Sara Su announced in August 2022 that the company would begin testing it in two key applications:

People want to trust that their online conversations with friends and family are private and secure. We’re working hard to protect your personal messages and calls with end-to-end encryption by default on Messenger and Instagram. […]

To Meta’s credit, Messenger defaulted to end-to-end encryption in December 2023. But the company has never flipped the switch for Instagram.

Earlier this week in a note appended to the top of Su’s post, the company said it was ending this pursuit:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. You can keep messaging with end-to-end encryption easily on WhatsApp.

I am not sure if it is worth reading anything into the explicit callout of WhatsApp but not Messenger.

In any case, this is another one of those fleeting Zuckerberg obsessions that is only relevant so long as it serves a media relations purpose. Of course not many people opted into end-to-end encryption — that is the whole point of the power of defaults, and something users should not have to think about. This is not an outright rejection of end-to-end encryption, given Meta’s support in other apps, but it is no longer important because it is a few trends behind.

This is now an artificial intelligence company. Do not ask what “Meta” means. It is not important either.

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  • Games

  • Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox

All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.