Meta

GIPHY’s library of stickers is now available on WhatsApp, allowing you to search through them without leaving the app. WhatsApp also announced that its custom sticker maker, which already rolled out on iOS, is now available on Android.

They’re on different sides of a debate over how to counteract pollution from data centers’ energy use, Financial Times reports.

Amazon and Meta are part of a lobby group that wants more lax standards for renewable energy certificates, which can pose similar risks as carbon offset credits. Google, meanwhile, backs a different strategy for bringing more renewables online wherever data centers operate.

After years of phaseout, Meta is shutting down the once-powerful social media research tool for good today. Academics and journalists aren’t all that happy with its replacement — a tool called MCL, which is available to far fewer people.

Notable measles enthusiast RFK Jr. spent a bunch of money on lawyers to learn that the First Amendment prohibits government speech regulations, not content moderation guidelines imposed by private companies like Meta, even if it talks to the government about them. The case was initially dismissed by the trial court, a ruling now affirmed on appeal:

Circuit Judge Eric Miller, appointed to the court by Republican former President Donald Trump, wrote for the appeals court that Meta was a “purely private” company with a First Amendment right not to use its platform to promote views it found distasteful.

“Meta evidently believes that vaccines are safe and effective and that their use should be encouraged,” Miller wrote. “It does not lose the right to promote those views simply because they happen to be shared by the government.”

Don’t worry, though: our nation’s brainworms candidate filed another lawsuit against Meta earlier this year for “election interference.”

Creators who break Facebook’s rules for the first time can now waive a warning from their account by completing in-app training. They’ll be eligible to remove another warning if they don’t violate Facebook’s policy for one year.

This feature is only available to professional mode users for now, and it doesn’t include serious violations, such as posting content containing sexual exploitation.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that the platform is close to reaching 200 million monthly active users, and now it’s official.

That growth puts it on track to becoming “another major social app,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s earnings call today. Threads reached 175 million users earlier this month.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook and Instagram are still running ads that promote online marketplaces for illegal drugs — including cocaine, hallucinogens, and prescription opioids — months after the publication first noted that Meta was facing a federal investigation for doing so.

Meta says it will continue working with law enforcement, and will “invest resources and further improve our enforcement” to combat this type of activity.

Meta’s CEO got a little heated while talking with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the SIGGRAPH conference today in Denver.

The topic turned to Meta’s approach to AI with Llama. Zuckerberg made clear that investing so much in foundational models is strongly influenced by not wanting to relive his history with Apple and the App Store:

“One of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is I just want to make sure we can build the fundamental technology that we’re going to be building social experiences on. Because there have just been too many things that I’ve tried to build and then have just been told, ‘Nah, you can’t really build that,’ by the platform provider that, at some level, I’m just like, ‘Nah, fuck that.’”

At 4:30PM ET, Nvidia’s CEO will sit down with Wired’s Lauren Goode to talk generative AI. Then at 6PM ET, Huang is scheduled to chat with Mark Zuckerberg — also about AI. You can watch both conversations on YouTube.

Reuters reports that Meta could be slapped with fines as high as $13.4 billion for tying classified advertisements service Marketplace with its Facebook social network.

The ruling, which is expected in the coming weeks, would come over 18 months since the European Commission accused Meta of “abusive practices” that enabled it to distort competition in the online classified ads market.

Musk famously challenged the Meta CEO to a cage match last year that Zuckerberg agreed to but never happened.

Now, more than a year later, a reporter from Fox News got Musk to say today that he’s again open to fighting — this time on Zuckerberg’s terms.

Update, July 24th: Zuckerberg’s response on Threads: “Are we really doing this again?”

Spotted by Radu Oncescu, it lets you view custom feeds from your homepage in the mobile app (as you already can on the redesigned desktop app), so you can easily access posts you’ve saved, liked, and filtered only to show posts by people you’re following.

That means mapping developers can access the 2.3 billion unique buildings, 54 million places of interest, 200 million addresses, and other global data collected by the Overture Maps Foundation. The open-source initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of offering a free alternative to mapping data provided by Google and Apple.

Demos on this Meta blog show how the company will implement its promise to bring AI to its VR headsets. Like the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, you can ask it questions about things you see (in passthrough), and it will answer.

The experimental feature rolls out in English next month, in the US and Canadia (excluding the Quest 2).