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The Brief A judge who approved a search warrant that led to the arrest of a Henderson County resident over a Facebook post concerning Trinidad's water supply says he was misled by the Trinidad Police Department. Judge R. Scott McKee sent a letter to outgoing Trinidad Police Chief Charles Gregory that questions "the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of information presented" by his officers when he approved the warrant. The woman arrested has since filed a lawsuit against the city after her charges were dropped, while the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is investigating the city's water supply. SNIP

Jennifer Combs says she never set out to become the face of a fight over free speech, dirty water and small-town power. She says she was simply trying to help people in Trinidad, Texas, report problems with their water. Some residents had complained about discoloration, sediment, odors and health concerns. So Combs used her Southern Belle Watch Facebook page to collect reports and send them to the state. Then, according to Combs, the situation took a turn that still sounds hard to believe. She says police came to her home and arrested her on a felony warrant over a Facebook...

The transgender Laramie resident who staged a protest at the state Capitol last summer of Wyoming’s new cross-sex access ban for public restrooms is now waging a self-defense argument in a felony aggravated assault case. Rihanna Kelver, 26, made headlines last summer for using the women’s bathroom in the Wyoming Capitol when a new state law activated banning the practice. The ban doesn’t allow for penalties against a transgender person using the women’s bathroom, but allows females aggrieved by that event to sue the state for letting it happen. About two months later, Kelver was involved in an altercation with...

A leaked audio recording reveals Zuckerberg's real explanation for why Meta was tracking its workers. You've heard of "learn by doing." Meta invented "learn by watching employees do it, then replace them." A leaked audio recording from a Meta all-hands meeting, obtained by More Perfect Union, captures Mark Zuckerberg explaining that Meta has been monitoring employee activity across Gmail, GChat, internal tool Metamate, and VSCode (the coding software most engineers use) to train its AI models. His reasoning: the AI "learns from watching really smart people do things," and elite engineers make better training subjects than outside contractors. Which is,...

A Tennessee man who was jailed for more than a month after refusing to take down a Facebook meme poking fun at the assassination of Charlie Kirk will be paid $850,000 as part of a settlement with officials. Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer, spent 37 days behind bars under a $2 million bond before authorities dropped the felony charge against him in October. While in jail, he lost his post-retirement job and missed both his wedding anniversary and the birth of his granddaughter, according to a federal lawsuit Bushart filed against Perry County, Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems...

She was “praying to Poseidon” that she’d get laid off. But on Wednesday morning, as thousands of her Meta colleagues found out they’d lost their jobs, the app designer was disappointed to find she still had hers. She’s now one of just two survivors on her team, left behind to navigate Meta’s shift to AI. “Thinking about what the company will be like after the layoffs depresses me more than thinking about getting laid off,” she said, asking for anonymity. “Nobody wants to stick around for that.” Hundreds of Meta employees in the Bay Area woke up early Wednesday to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter.

t's a rough time to be working at Facebook, Instagram, or one of Meta's many other properties. Mark Zuckerberg's social media giant will reportedly hand out roughly 8,000 pink slips on Wednesday, May 20, eliminating about 10% of its global workforce. Notably, though, these cuts will arrive on the heels of one of the most lucrative quarters in the company's history: $56.31 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in net income (1) for the first three months of 2026, per Meta's Q1 earnings filing. For many Meta employees, that stark contrast is apparently driving morale into the dirt. According to...

In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet and having sex. Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant. Meta says it's because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by the staff speaking out. Meta has not addressed that allegation but told BBC News in a statement it had "decided to end our work with Sama because they don't meet our...

H-1B visa filings at major tech companies fell sharply late last year, according to federal data, as layoffs mount and new visa restrictions take hold. The decline comes as changes to the work visa program since September have made the process costlier and placed applicants under tighter scrutiny, and as tech goliaths like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have undergone successive rounds of job cuts. Department of Labor data shows that some employers filed markedly fewer H-1B visa applications in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 than they did a year earlier. On the federal calendar, Q1 runs from October...

A Los Angeles jury found Wednesday that Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube harmed a young user with features designed to hook kids — in a bombshell verdict that “shakes Big Tech’s predatory business model to its core.” The high-profile case involved a 20-year-old woman who claimed she became dangerously obsessed with the apps at a young age because they were deliberately built to be addictive, using features like infinite scroll and autoplay. The tech giants were found liable for $3 million in damages. The multi-million-dollar judgment is likely to grow, as the jury of seven women and five men will...

Crab Costumes courtesy of "A Meta AI security researcher said an OpenClaw agent ran amok on her inbox" by Julie Bort, February 23, 2026 Okay, AI is going to take away all serious jobs, we have to reinvent ourselves with a new life mission that's not totally ridiculous make-work, we'll get perhaps $150 per month "guaranteed" minimal income, live in pod communities like the Coppertops in The Matrix, eat bug-burger, "you'll own nothing and be happy". But if it's A.I. that is trying to run down this "you will be assimilated, resistance is futile" trope, they'd better get cracking with...

Over a decade ago, Google showed off a pair of smart spectacles called Google Glass, sparking a major ethical debate over wearables being used to covertly film people without their permission. At the time, the outrage was enshrined by the derogatory neologism “glasshole,” meaning a Google Glass wearer who was accused of having little regard for the privacy of those around them. A seeming eternity later, Meta has attempted to revive the idea with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. While it’s arguably a significant technological leap over Google’s early forays, the debate has seemingly remained the same. Case in point, as...

Tough luck, Zuck! Mark Zuckerberg tumbled from third to fifth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index after Meta’ stock plunged 11% on Thursday — wiping out $29.2 billion from his fortune in just one day. The 41-year-old CEO’s net worth fell to $235.2 billion, his lowest ranking in nearly two years, as investors recoiled from Meta’s plan to issue $30 billion in new debt to fund artificial intelligence spending, according to Bloomberg. The drop was the fourth-largest one-day market-driven loss ever recorded by Bloomberg’s wealth index. Zuckerberg reportedly refused to clap Wednesday after singer Billie Eilish said at the Wall...

(original) Unboxing Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses | 7:01 Unbox Therapy | 24.7M subscribers | 1,394,517 views | September 19, 2025

More than 44,000 people have signed a petition calling on Meta to restore wrongfully disabled accounts, citing automated decisions, unhelpful support, and having to pay to speak with a human.A Maryland college student is battling to restore her Instagram account after Meta accused her of violating policies on child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity — claims she calls false, hurtful, and baseless. Mackenzie Blake, who wants to be a teacher, discovered last month that she couldn't log into her Instagram account. Instead, she saw a message saying her account was suspended for a rule banning Instagram users from interacting or...

A former United States Air Force counterintelligence agent was charged with espionage after she defected to Iran and helped it target her former colleagues, the authorities said. In an extraordinarily detailed indictment made public on Wednesday, prosecutors disclosed that Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, gave the Iranians the code name and mission of a secret Pentagon program involving American intelligence operations. According to the indictment, she was working with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The elite paramilitary group is known to carry out terrorist operations around the globe and has been sanctioned by the American government.

It’s hard to even imagine now, but immediately after it launched in 2004, there was nothing on the internet cooler than Facebook. It was initially available only to Harvard students, then gradually expanded to students at other elite colleges, giving it an aura of exclusivity that founder Mark Zuckerberg clearly coveted. By the time it opened up to public accounts in 2006, the hype was palpable, paving the way to an explosive initial public offering in 2012. Since those salad days, its trajectory has never been quite the same. Sure, it’s maintained market share with a series of cynical acquisitions...

A Southwest Airlines flight attendant prayed for President Trump’s assassination on social media after a gunman breached security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Michele Carpino made the perverse plea on her Facebook page just minutes after news broke that would-be assassin Cole Allen stormed the annual black-tie Washington press bash last Saturday. “Oh please sweet baby Jesus,” Carpino wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post, Libs of TikTok reported. “WE NEED BETTER ASSASSIN’S! [sic],” she commented after Allen was thwarted by Secret Service agents. Carpino has a history of posting disturbing anti-Trump screeds on social media. “One day we will...