Instagram and Facebook will force their checkout experience on Shops soon
Meta announced today that it will be phasing out onboarding of new Shops without checkout on Facebook and Instagram enabled. Beginning April 24 of next year, Shops without checkout on…
Things are looking up for Meta. The company beat revenue expectations, reporting an increase in year-over-year revenue for the first time in three quarters. But this ray of light for…
US tech giants warn India’s fact-checking rule will ‘profoundly infringe’ on press freedom
The Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry organization representing technology giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Amazon, has voiced concerns over a recent amendment to India’s IT rules,…
India’s central bank has halted its plans for a high-profile project intended to rival the nation’s dominant payment system, Unified Payments Interface. The project had attracted significant interest from a…
Facebook Gaming, a division of Meta, has announced that you can now play games during video calls on Messenger. At launch, there are 14 free-to-play games available in Messenger video…
India amended its IT law on Thursday to prohibit Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms from publishing, hosting or sharing false or misleading information about “any business” of the…
Meta launches paid verification on Instagram and Facebook in the US
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the company is rolling out Meta Verified on Instagram and Facebook in the U.S. The subscription service, which first launched in Australia and…
A retiree’s group for cheese toast lovers is an earnest glimpse of Weird Facebook
Scott Kominkiewicz suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. After retiring from a career as a copywriter and high school English teacher, the 60-year-old found a new mission:…
Mark Zuckerberg says engineers who joined Meta in-person perform better than those who joined remotely
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook parent Meta, has pointed to internal data analysis that suggests engineers who initially joined the company in an in-person capacity performed better than…
Meta to cut another 10,000 jobs and cancel ‘low priority projects’
Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people and withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it had yet to fill, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday,…
Looks like Meta is NGMI, as some might put it. Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel posted on Twitter that the company will sunset its NFT and…
UK closes ‘Jedi Blue’ antitrust collusion case against Google and Meta
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) won’t be pursuing an anticompetition collusion case against Google and Facebook’s parent Meta, following a similar decision made by its counterparts in the…
Meta will stop offering Reels bonuses to creators on Facebook and Instagram
Meta is pausing its program to pay bonuses to creators for making Reels and hitting specific benchmarks. The program, originally introduced in 2021, incentivized content makers to generate more short…
Facebook head Tom Alison announced today that the company is testing the ability for users to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app. Back in 2016, Facebook removed messaging…
This Week in Apps: Meta’s paid verifications, Instagram’s founders’ new app and Spotify’s AI DJ
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in…
Meta Verified is rolling out to users in Australia and New Zealand
Meta announced its subscription plan, Meta Verified, earlier this week and now the social media company is rolling out to users based in Australia and New Zealand. The company began…
Meta announces ‘Facebook Jail’ reforms that focus more on better explanations of policy, less on ‘timeouts’
“Facebook jail,” the name the social network’s users have bestowed on the company’s system for determining policy violations, is getting an overhaul. Meta announced today it will be reforming its…
Meta Verified won’t let you change name, username or profile photo for now
After looking at Twitter’s struggle with impersonation problems when Elon Musk relaunched Twitter Blue, Mark Zuckerberg is putting up guardrails before launching Meta Verified. Earlier this week, the company announced…
Meta begins selling blue badge on Instagram and Facebook as Zuckerberg borrows Musk playbook
Facebook-parent Meta has launched a new subscription service, called Meta Verified, that will allow users to add the coveted blue check mark to their Instagram and Facebook accounts for up…
Meta improves its consumer-facing tool that explains why you’re seeing that ad
Meta today announced it’s making changes to increase transparency around ads. The company says it’s updating a nearly decade-old Facebook feature “Why am I seeing this ad?” to better explain…
Facebook announced today that it’s introducing more comment moderation tools and controls to make it easier for creators to manage conversations on the social network. Creators will now be able…
Is Instagram considering paid verification? Code reveals references to a ‘paid blue badge’
New references in Instagram’s code suggest the company could be developing a paid verification feature following the rollout of a similar system at Twitter under Elon Musk. Recently discovered code…
A bug in a new centralized system that Meta created for users to manage their logins for Facebook and Instagram could have allowed malicious hackers to switch off an account’s…
Meta is killing Move, another experimental social app from its in-house incubator NPE Team
Meta is killing off yet another project from its in-house R&D group, the NPE Team, following the company’s sizable layoffs announced in November, impacting 13% of its workforce. The latest…
Meta will restore Trump’s Facebook account ‘in the coming weeks’
Two years after the company formerly known as Facebook suspended then-president Donald Trump’s account, it’s bringing him back. Meta announced its decision to restore former president Trump’s Facebook and Instagram…
Meta centralizes more user and privacy settings across its apps, announces changes to ads controls
Facebook parent Meta announced today it’s further centralizing various user settings across its suite of apps — Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. As a result, several existing settings will be relocated…
Oversight Board presses Meta to revise ‘convoluted and poorly defined’ nudity policy
Meta’s Oversight Board, which independently evaluates difficult content moderation decisions, has overturned the company’s takedown of two posts that depicted a nonbinary and transgender person’s bare chest. The case represents…
India proposes social media firms rely on fact checking by gov’t agencies
The Indian government has proposed making the Press Bureau of India and its other agencies the arbiter of truth on what information is misleading online, escalating troubles for social media…
Instagram and Facebook introduce more limits on targeting teens with ads
Meta is making some changes to how its apps handle advertising and young users. Under the new rules, advertisers on Instagram and Facebook won’t be able to leverage as much…
US tech giants say Indian panel’s recommended competition act ‘absolutist and regressive’
An influential industry group that represents Google, Meta and Amazon, among other tech firms, has expressed concerns about the digital competition law recommended by an Indian parliamentary panel that seeks…
