After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI. Specifically, the following language no longer appears on the commercial terms page:
… Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.
Many, including Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, interpreted it as an …
Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice?
In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking ticket …
Meta's new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms - including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to "develop, improve, research," and "train" its AI products.
While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says that the company is just "consolidating" its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts tell Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta "to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions," like a site's robots.txt file. That could …
The new Muse Spark Open AI model can work on M5 Ultra Mac Studios. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Meta announced the Muse Spark Open AI model today, claiming that it's the "most capable US open-weight model to date." But the company also says that it's the "the first model in its class" that can "run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework."
Meta and Apple, typically rivals, worked together on the launch and are publicly supporting each other.
"Muse Spark Open - weights releasing today - runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on X.
"Congrats to the team!" new Apple CEO John Ternus said in a reply. "Amazing to run a model of Muse …
There's a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of "AI personal assistants" like Meta's Muse, you're being cheerfully asked not just to give up your own data, but also the information of your friends, family, the person you went on a Hinge date with five years ago - and virtually anyone else you've ever come in contact with.
Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple's App Store. With the help of its creepy virtual av …
We knew that a number of big tech firms were helping to fund the construction of Trump's ballroom, but we didn't know just how much they were giving to the cause. Now the Washington Post published a list of all the major donors to the White House ballroom project, along with how much each contributed. In total, Silicon Valley and the crypto industry have reportedly delivered over $150 million for the effort.
Some of that money has come from individuals, some from charitable organizations tied to major firms or industry players, and some directly from the companies themselves. In Google's case, the $22 million was part of a controversial se …
The other day I whizzed past several people while running in the park, my playlist blasting at full volume. The next morning, I smiled at a barista while ordering a caramel apple-flavored matcha latte. Afterward, I sat on a park bench reading a book, called up a pal to chat about her recent trip to Prague, and then asked my Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses what meetings were coming up on my calendar. The chipper AI voice said I hadn't connected my Google Calendar yet (I had) and asked if I would like help connecting. I sighed and then asked it to play an upbeat song. It picked Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us."
Facebook's new "Your Algorithm" feature will let you directly add and manage topics you want to see in your feed and Facebook Reels. Meta says your recommendations "respond right away" after you make updates using the new feature by hitting "interested" or "not interested" for different topics. Your Algorithm previously launched on Instagram earlier this year, and Meta also launched a similar "Dear Algo" feature on Threads.
Facebook users will be able to access Your Algorithm or select "interested" or "not interested" from the three dots menu on individual posts. The "interested" and "not interested" buttons may also appear under posts, an …
Mia Goth at The 32nd Annual Actor Awards. | Variety via Getty Images
Earlier this month, news broke that actress Mia Goth had filed for divorce from actor and filmmaker Shia LaBeouf. An Instagram post from the account miagoth_ - marked with a blue verified checkmark - quickly spread.
The post shows Goth in a T-shirt that reads "MY EX IS MY BIGGEST FAN" in bold black letters. The Beyoncé song "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" had been added to the Instagram post. Hundreds of thousands of people - including some in the entertainment industry - liked the image, and entertainment outlets like OK! and even People wrote about it as if it were authentic. Soon, screenshots of the post were shared widely on other s …
As important as some of the messages in The Social Reckoning are, the movie has been drastically underperforming at the box office. Per Variety, Aaron's Sorkin's follow up to The Social Network only grossed a measly $5.5 million this past weekend against a budget that's somewhere within the $30-42 million range. That would make it a certifiable flop that's costing Columbia Pictures (and Sony) quite a bit of money - especially when you compare it to The Social Network's $22 million opening.
This isn't entirely surprising given how middling reviews for the film have been. It's currently got a 55% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has widely been …
Meta is making up for lost time in the AI race. After launching Muse Spark, the first model from its revamped Superintelligence Labs division, and buzzy AI agent Muse, it's now launching two new models it claims can go toe-to-toe with the industry's best.
The new models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, are available for Muse Code subscribers starting today. Wonder can also be accessed through the Meta Model API, Meta said.
Meta says it eventually plans to power its Muse AI agent with Wonder, starting with subscribers, and will develop specialized models it "can bring to everyone using Muse." It hasn't shared specifics or provided a tim …
Though writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” fancies itself a journalism thriller, the film offers only a handful of real thrills. Fans of the subgenre, known and loved for its depiction of journalism’s slow yet effective behind-the-scenes processes, might see this as a fatal flaw. After all, isn’t a journalism thriller without tension just a drama? Perhaps. But in the case of Sorkin’s latest — billed as a companion piece to the massively successful, defining 2010 film “The Social Network,” which he also penned — the lack of twists and revelations is a feature, not a bug.
Set between 2019 and 2021, Sorkin’s film stares down the dawn of a new decade, preparing for the birth of our current web of chaos, cruelty and thinly veiled deceit. Fifteen years after Facebook first took the web by storm, the company has now grown into a conglomerate whose arms shuffle politics, culture and social mores around the world’s face like pieces on a game board. Facebook’s users are being radicalized at alarming rates thanks to algorithms that feed them extremist groups and all of their content. Facing problems everyone else turns a blind eye to, Facebook civic integrity team member Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) reluctantly begins a working relationship with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). At the risk of losing her job and being indicted for violating her NDA, Frances provides information droplets that eventually become the Journal’s “Facebook Files” series, exposing a deluge of damning, ethically dubious information against the company. In other words: The perfect material for someone like Sorkin.
(Sony Pictures Entertainment) Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) in Columbia Pictures’ “The Social Reckoning.”
Of course “The Social Reckoning” arrives too late to feel revolutionary; it would be late even if it depicted something that happened last week. Wedged in the tiny space between irrelevancy and timeliness, Sorkin’s companion piece doesn’t need to say anything new to do its job. The film only has to persuade us to pay attention to its shouts.
Between “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” Sorkin’s indulgent forays into the sociopolitical have long been criticized for their hubris. But despite his work being a bastion of Hollywood’s overwrought liberal optimism, “The Social Reckoning” presents a similar but discernibly different picture from the ones Sorkin’s already painted. Here, Sorkin funnels his penchant for self-important sanctimoniousness through the journalism thriller’s always-intriguing lens. And though the result is sometimes stale, the banality creates an eerie dissonance between the film’s subject matter and the world outside the cinema, pitting the snail’s pace that good investigative journalism requires against an external culture that moves at 5x that speed. This same discrepancy has made the journalism thriller itself feel somewhat archaic. If audiences already know the intimate details of how a very real public leak, whistle-blow, or scandal came together, what’s left for them to learn by fictionalizing it all?
The answer, unfortunately, is very little. But just because the viewer might not learn something new by watching “The Social Reckoning,” doesn’t mean that they won’t understand something better. Sorkin’s film highlights the conflict between slow-moving reporting and the light-speed pace of modern culture, a velocity enhanced by the very tech the film has in its crosshairs. The movie isn’t so much about the Facebook leaks as it is about an era when bone-chilling data revealing a company’s malevolence isn’t enough to stop evil machinations in their tracks. Of course “The Social Reckoning” arrives too late to feel revolutionary; it would be late even if it depicted something that happened last week. Wedged in the tiny space between irrelevancy and timeliness, Sorkin’s companion piece doesn’t need to say anything new to do its job; it only has to persuade us to pay attention to its shouts.
And persuade it does — for the most part, anyway. While “The Social Reckoning” might stand in the shadow of its formative predecessor, the film confidently asserts its own merit. It’s a well-oiled machine, moving at a perfectly amiable pace thanks to Madison and White’s lead performances alongside a host of quippy, Sorkin-style side characters. (Few things in the film are more enjoyable than Betty Gilpin’s wise-cracking Wall Street Journal bureau chief.) Granted, much of this pleasantness relies on watching the movie anytime before sunset. This is a matinee coffee film, not a popcorn feature, lest anyone expect edge-of-your-seat tension.
Because, really, what’s ultimately compelling about a movie peering into Facebook’s impropriety? That’s like asking someone if they know that violence is bad, or puppies are cute. The funny thing is, though, that nowadays, surveying 10 people about those questions could easily return 10 different answers, or responses rife with caveats and asterisks. That intentional confusion and misdirection is exactly what Sorkin gestures to in vignettes of Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), intercut throughout the film, preparing for a civil hearing about Facebook refusing to fact-check political ads on its platform. Zuckerberg is a spin artist, skilled at worming his way out of trouble by tailoring the world around him to suit the beast he created. Facebook feeds a culture where up is down and left is right, and vice versa. Sorkin’s depiction of Zuckerberg as a sniveling coward might be smug, but it’s not inaccurate. The intention is not to show the audience who Zuckerberg is — Sorkin spent one film doing that already; it’s to assess the trickle-down effect of his spinelessness.
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Zuckerberg and his cronies have the upper hand. They can change things in the blink of an eye, so imperceptibly that users will barely notice a change if at all. Journalism can’t move at that pace — not good, well-sourced, fact-checked, influential journalism, that is.
To do this, Sorkin compares Facebook’s reluctance to fact-check political advertising with its enthusiasm for spinning the truth to get engagement. Naturally, these two things are the same, but their effects eventually diverge, meaning that political ads are only one metric for inciting engagement. The most frightening aspect of mining engagement — the part we might not always think about — is how the tools and algorithms designed for it must change as users age out of different platforms. How do Facebook, Instagram and all of Zuck’s other spawn remain integral parts of our lives until we die if users eventually get weary enough to figure out their existence is better off without them? For publicly traded companies like these, declining engagement results in lost value.
This is the crux of Frances and Jeff’s concerns. (And, by extension, Sorkin’s film.) They want to expose the obscure operations, to implore users to reconsider their relationship with these platforms. The problem is that Zuckerberg and his cronies have the upper hand. They can change things in the blink of an eye, so imperceptibly that users will barely notice a change if at all. Journalism can’t move at that pace — not good, well-sourced, fact-checked, influential journalism, that is. When Frances hands Jeff documents that confirm Facebook knows all about Instagram’s negative impact on teenagers, she urges him, “Get it out there, before they start marketing Instagram Kids.”
The line chills not because something like Instagram Kids feels plausible, but because it’s already a reality. Impressionable people of all ages around the globe have direct access to the platforms that exacerbate rage and depression for monetary gain and immeasurable power. They had that access before “The Facebook Files,” and they have it today, years after those stories ran. So, what’s the point of all this?
I’d wager the film’s purpose is not to explain, but to appeal. “The Social Reckoning” exists to make what we already know compelling again, reminding — perhaps even convincing — viewers that journalism is not only worthwhile, but critically important. So, too, are the movies that depict journalism’s procedures and how arduous and exhausting they are. Everyone’s mileage will vary, but I find the film’s matter-of-fact formal structure more convincing than not. “Spotlight” won the best picture trophy only a decade ago. And while that film far exceeds “The Social Reckoning,” I wonder whether the reaction would be entirely the same today. Haugen and Horwitz battled similarly daunting foes, and the rot they uncovered was just as systemic and frightening as the reporting. The primary difference is that the corruption Sorkin points to is unique to the digital age, where everything is ephemeral — trumped by the next headline. Maybe, he posits, we shouldn’t forget so easily.
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about thrillers that aren’t entirely what they seem
At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to "set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI." OpenAI would spend the day taking veiled shots at Meta's Muse, its primary competitor, for failing to keep users' data safe. Yet Muse itself, a couple of months earlier, had launched as a supposedly safer alternative to predecessor OpenClaw - with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising it was "built from the ground up for privacy and security."
In an age when companies hoard customers' personal data and cyberattacks are a dime a dozen, AI labs are trying to convince user …
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 04: Frances Haugen attends the Social Reckoning world premiere at Regal Union Square on October 04, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Getty Images for Sony Pictures Entertainment) | Getty Images for Sony Pictures E
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was mostly unfazed watching Oscar-winning actress Mikey Madison play a character named after her in The Social Reckoning, except for one thing: the wrist warmers.
In Aaron Sorkin's new thriller, the fictional Haugen - who, like her nonfictional counterpart, leaks thousands of documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz - habitually dons the accessories. It's a character quirk that reflects real life, where they're a way to deal with the effects of a vasoconstrictive disorder. "I've figured out lots of ways to minimize how much of an obstruction this is," she tells The Verge in an interview. …
YouTube, Twitch, Meta, and X aren't saying whether they'll allow the US government to livestream an execution on their platforms. The four companies didn't respond to The Verge's requests for comment after an unnamed Pentagon official said yesterday that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of a mass shooting at a Texas military base in 2009, will be livestreamed.
Two platforms responded to The Verge's inquiries. Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok's US operations, pointed to the platform's policies banning "shocking and graphic content," including "the moment of someone's death." Kick, a platform known for taking a hands-of …
Meta has banned ads from TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance across the US and several other countries as the rivalry between the major social media operators heats up, as reported earlier byBloomberg. The ban, which went into effect on Thursday, restricts ads and paid marketing messages from ByteDance, along with third-party ads that link to TikTok.
"We don't have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps," Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro said in a statement to The Verge. "Declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice across industries. We will continue to compete on pr …
Since TikTok burst into mainstream consciousness, many things have been called a "TikTok clone": YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, Netflix's Clips, LinkedIn's vertical video feed, and countless other, less recognizable names like Triller, Zynn, and Byte.
For years now, Facebook and Instagram have pumped users' feeds with video as Meta chases TikTok's runaway success. But if tests running abroad are any indication, the TikTok-ification of social media might finally be reaching its fullest form.
TechCrunchreports that some users in India are getting a Facebook test that, upon opening the app, drops them directly into a …
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