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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...

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) are scrutinizing major corporations for filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees. “In evaluating the high unemployment rate for American tech workers, we cannot ignore the massive, ongoing layoffs ordered by you and your peers in Big Tech C-suites over the past few years … At the same time you have been laying off your employees, you have been filing H-1B visa petitions for [thousands of] foreign workers,” Grassley and Durbin wrote in letters to 10 major employers in...

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.

How does one of the world's most powerful companies please powerful Republicans — without actually doing that much? Mark Zuckerberg figured out that trick in the summer of 2024. That's when he sent a letter to Congress that sort-of-but-not-really apologized for behavior conservatives have accused Big Tech platforms of for years — but also said the real bad actors were Joe Biden and his administration. Now, we're seeing Google use the same playbook, with one twist, which we'll get to in a minute. But the very big picture is that Google, like Meta in 2024, is attempting to give a...

In Abilene, Texas—in the heart of what locals call the Big Country, long defined by ranching, farming, shale oil exploration, and now dotted with wind turbines—OpenAI and Oracle staged a carefully crafted media showcase on Tuesday to talk about the latest boom underway... In Abilene alone, a crew of 6,400 workers have already moved massive amounts of soil to flatten the hills, and laid down enough fiber optic cable to wrap the Earth 16 times.... The five new Stargate projects—in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and in an undisclosed Midwest location—will bring Stargate’s current pipeline to nearly 7 gigawatts and more...

If you can't resist the urge to check your phone over and over, even if you're out with friends, Meta has a solution: check your glasses instead...Meta's Reality Labs division burns cash at an alarming rate, which has concerned investors over the years...Meta has had its fair share of flops, like the entire promise of its social metaverse...But with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta has created a remarkable piece of technology, unlike any other consumer-facing product on the market -- we have yet to test it ourselves, so we can't quite say just how groundbreaking this really is, but it...

The Harris-Biden administration’s campaign to censor COVID-related content on Facebook during the height of the pandemic – as revealed by a remorseful Mark Zuckerberg this week – was so aggressive that it even cracked down on lighthearted memes, satirical posts and regular old jokes. On Monday, Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook parent Meta to “censor” pandemic-related content in 2021, as well as The Post’s exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. The takedown requests included posts that Zuckerberg considered...

Mark-ing his territory in the most Meta way possible. An Indiana lawyer who shares the name Mark Zuckerberg is suing Meta after the social media platform repeatedly shut down his personal and business profiles, claiming he was impersonating its founder. Zuckerberg, an Indianapolis bankruptcy lawyer, has battled mistaken identity issues on Facebook for 15 years, sharing a name with the platform’s billionaire creator. His verified personal account has been shut down five times, and after losing $11,000 in ad funds to Meta when his law firm’s page was taken down in May for the fourth time, he’s taking his fight...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks smart glasses are the future. During Meta's second-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg doubled down on the idea that smart glasses will soon become the main way people interact with AI and replace other devices as "primary computing devices." "I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI," he told investors on Wednesday's call, adding that wearables with cameras, microphones, and displays will unlock new levels of utility. "I think in the future, if you don't have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I...

Meta and Microsoft — two of America’s biggest companies — both delivered blockbuster earnings on Tuesday. The news helped to calm fears that President Donald Trump’s tariffs were hurting consumer and business spending. That boost to confidence in the broader US economy gave a lift to 401(K)s invested in major indexes like the Nasdaq and S&P 500. Meta and Microsoft are considered bellwethers for the US economy because they sit at the heart of key growth sectors — digital advertising, AI, cloud computing, and office software. Their strong performance often reflects broader consumer and business trends, from advertising spending to...

Meta has poached at least 10 artificial intelligence researchers from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, while reportedly offering some other top talent packages worth more than $150 million ($US100 million) in the first year alone for joining its new superintelligence team. The aggressive hiring spree, which has reportedly been criticised by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, comes as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg hopes his firm can make AI as smart as humans (artificial general intelligence, or AGI) or smarter than humans (superintelligence) before anyone else. Meta has offered some top-tier AI researchers and executives packages of up to $450 million ($US300 million) over four...

Executives from high-tech firms Meta, OpenAI and Palantir are joining the Army Reserve at the rank of lieutenant colonel to serve in Detachment 201, a new “Executive Innovation Corps,” the service announced Friday. The move is the latest push by the department to tap into capabilities and know-how from Silicon Valley and the commercial sector. The new corps “brings top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap” and is “designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation,” the Army stated in a press release. On Friday, the service is set to swear-in Meta’s chief...

"We're done with Teams!" declared Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schrödter, speaking via an open-source video platform, in his announcement that the German state of Schleswig-Holstein will phase out all Microsoft software from government workplaces. The goal is to fully transition from Microsoft programs to Linux and open-source programs within the next three months. Also: Why Denmark is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and LinuxThe decision will affect nearly every civil servant, police officer, and judge, about 30,000 employees. Eventually, the rest of the civil service employees, primarily school teachers, will make the open-source shift. The radical change is being...

AI-driven ­vehicles stand the chance of being hijacked by terrorists and used to deliver mass casualty attacks without the need for a suicide bomber, a U.N. report warns. The report, Algorithms and Terrorism: The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence for Terrorist Purposes, details ways emerging AI technologies could be weaponised by extremists and was first covered by The Times. Self-driving cars, drones and other automated systems to target crowded public spaces could all be seized and remotely controlled by terrorists to deliver deadly consequences in crowded public spaces. U.N. Report Warns Terrorists Could Weaponize Driverless Cars as ‘Slaughterbots’ LOS ANGELES,...

The Department of Defense (DoD) has repeatedly voiced intention to maintain “appropriate human levels of judgment” over autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems, but those who study frontier AI technologies have identified many challenges to aligning AI with human intentions. While questions of AI alignment occasionally smack of science fiction, frontier AI developers grapple with these challenges for product optimization and safety. Two challenges relevant to military AI applications have emerged recently: sycophancy and emergent misalignment . In the technical sense, sycophancy is the tendency of AI models to offer responses that are pleasing to their users at the expense of...

This week, a statement announcing former Vice-President Kamala Harris' decision not to run for California governor turned out to be fake. The initial posting of the announcement created quite a stir, but Harris' spokesperson Kristen Allen moved quickly to intervene before it could gain much traction. Allen expressed surprise that "the formerly reliable AI that we have been using to generate content for Kamala to help keep her in the news apparently went rogue with a post we had not previously seen or approved. The triggering event appears to have been Kamala's recent characterization of the recent riots in Los...

A survey from AI biz Qodo finds robo-coding productivity gains are unevenly distributedExclusive Software developers largely appreciate the productivity improvements they get from AI coding tools, but they don't entirely trust their output, according to a survey conducted by AI coding biz Qodo. As a result, some potential productivity gains get lost to manual reviews deemed necessary to check the AI's work. Qodo offers "an agentic code quality platform for reviewing, testing, and writing code," so it has an opinion on such matters. For its report titled "The State of AI Code Quality 2025" – provided in advance to...

OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly...

Over 80 years after scientists of the ‘Manhattan Project’ harnessed the power of the atom to end World War II, the top-secret worksite has a new mission to help dominate AI before China does. The first phase of the United States' latest uranium enrichment facility opened in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in May. ... The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported 99% of U.S. nuclear fuel is imported from other countries. In 2023, most of America's uranium products came from Russia, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The U.S. banned the import of uranium products from Russia in May 2024, but companies can...

Exclusive Meta has made lavish and lucrative offers to a select set of AI researchers in an effort to develop superintelligent AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has taken to emailing job offers to elite talent. One AI researcher told us Zuckerberg offered them an eight-figure compensation package – at least $10,000,000 a year. "I got an email from Mark personally," our source said. "And he said, 'I have an offer for you.' Wow, and the offer was crazy." The researcher, who may or may not accept the offer, asked not to be identified. The offer did not specify exactly what...