FollowingAustralia’s social media ban for children under 16 taking effect last month, Meta says it has nowremoved 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 nowpost 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.

[Meta]

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 algorithmsfor a decade now,including atFacebook, but apparently some things never change.

[the Guardian]

Meta’s AI translation feature initially workedwith English and Spanish.

[Meta Newsroom]

The platform hasadded a new “poke” button directly to users’ profiles, as spotted earlier byTechCrunch. 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.

[TechCrunch]

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.”

This isn’t a breach of one company or another’s systems, but compiled records, with some believed to be from “infostealer” malware, as well as previous leaks. AsBleeping Computer points out, what you should be doing hasn’t changed -- using unique passwords with apassword manager, enabling two-factor authentication, and adding other forms of security likepasskeys and security keys that can replace passwords altogether.

[bleepingcomputer.com]

to readers ofKatherine Losse’sThe Boy Kings. TheFinancial Times makes a compelling case thatloser-bro Zuck is who he has always been. Also, his feelings wereveryhurt whenwe all had a good laugh about Meta’s avatars (“Legs coming soon!”). No wonderhe wants AI friends, who’ll never mock him like that.

[ft.com]

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.

The Oversight Board points to a larger problem at Meta, saying it is “likely allowing significant amounts of scam content on its platforms” and that reviewers aren’t “empowered” to enforce the platform’s policy against deepfake scams.

[engadget.com]

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.

List makes this argument using a pricing experiment he ran where he paid a treatment group $4 for each hour they reduced their usage of Facebook and Instagram. The FTC has argued these apps have unique features that users greatly value to help them connect with friends and family. But List found that participants decreased their usage of Facebook and Instagram’s friends and family features about as much as all its other features – showing users don’t particularly value those features more than other ones the apps have to offer.

University of Chicago professor John List, who previously served as chief economist at Uber and Lyft, is now on the stand to try to dismantle the FTC’s market definition of personal social networking services, and dispute its claim that “friends and family sharing” is a core use case for Facebook and Instagram. He tells the court thatMeWe, a small competitor in the market Meta allegedly monopolizes, is “economically inconsequential.”

Alison testifies that he’s concerned about short-form video content being “commoditized,” since creators can post across many different apps. Still, he sees building Reels as a huge engineering undertaking and investment that was existential for the future of the business.“If we didn’t invest in Reels, then long term, our entire business was probably going to go down significantly,” he says. “We were really believing that this was going to be the future of our business.”

As the app grew early in the pandemic, Alison says, “we were very surprised by how much time people were spending on TikTok.” Meta found that number was roughly 120 minutes per user, per day.

When Matheson points out that Facebook still prompts users to log in or sign up to connect with friends, family, and people they know, Alison cautions that “just because something is on our website doesn’t mean that it’s completely up to date,” since they’re working to update how they describe the brand. He adds during cross-examination that “people are coming to Facebook for several other things besides friends” and it’s in the middle of an evolutions of how to describe the app.