Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, counts more than 3 billion monthly users across its family of apps. Now, it’s trying to build the next generation of services in virtual reality and the metaverse through Meta Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds — all while dealing with antitrust pressures, privacy concerns, and younger users shifting to other platforms.
The deal for the company, Assured Robot Intelligence, closed on Friday, according to Bloomberg. The publication reported last year that Meta was starting to work on humanoid robots.
Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook and current Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are considering bids for the Seattle Seahawks, Front Office Sports reports.
Paul Allen’s estate began the sale process for the NFL team in February after this year’s Super Bowl win. (Go Hawks, that was a great game.)
[Front Office Sports]
All the ad people I know keep saying “the content is the targeting” lately, and now I know why: Google and Meta are using AI to flip the online ad model upside down. Big dive in the NYT:
But the real business breakthroughs have come from targeting. It used to be that an advertiser would say, for example, “I want to target women in New York between the ages of 24 and 35.” Now it’s the opposite: Meta and Google are using A.I. to recommend customers the brands should be going after.
[The New York Times]
Meta announced a new deal this morning with Overview Energy, a space-based solar company with plans to demo beaming “energy wirelessly from space to a solar farm on Earth” in 2028, ahead of commercial delivery in 2030.
Its satellites sit in geosynchronous orbit roughly 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator, where sunlight is constant, collecting energy in space and beaming it to Earth-based solar facilities on the ground as low-intensity, near-infrared light. This means solar farms that currently sit idle at night can keep producing electricity around the clock, maximizing their output and creating more energy for the grid.
The economic watchdog did not explain its decision to cancel the deal, which Beijing had scrutinized since it was first announced in December. It was largely complete and Manus is already integrated into some of Meta’s tools.
DirecTV now supports mixed reality with its new app for the Quest 2, 3, 3S, and even Pro headsets. There’s live TV for subscribers, plus on-demand and ad-supported content anyone can watch, available in the app store or through the Horizon TV hub Meta launched last year.
This hub holds certain settings that work across Meta’s apps and allows for using a single password for access across all accounts and managing passkeys.
Any accounts users currently have connected in Meta’s Account Center will automatically transfer to the new Meta Account that’s rolling out “over the next year.”
The new supervision feature shows the topics that teens have asked Meta AI about over the last week and is available now in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. It also works on Facebook… as if teens use Facebook. It builds upon previous work to alert parents if their kids repeatedly search for self-harm topics.
When you’re in a Threads Community’s live chat, you can talk with real time with other users about what’s going on. For the NBA playoffs, the NBA Threads Community will be hosting some live chats to follow games. Live chats will come to other Community feeds in the coming months, Meta says.
Inventing the future requires a future people want.
The job cuts could affect around 10 percent of Meta’s workforce, or around 8,000 employees, according to Reuters. This is reportedly the first of two waves of layoffs planned for this year, and follows an earlier report from Reuters that suggests Meta could cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce.
A new “Messages” tab appears in this preview of its redesigned web layout that head of Threads, Connor Hayes, posted on Thursday, as Engadget reports.
Threads got DMs in 2025, but only on Android and iOS. Hayes noted that users will start to see Messages on the web version “over the coming weeks.”
The European Commission says it will order Meta to roll back its policy to only allow rival AI assistants on WhatsApp for a year if they pay an access fee, which appears to violate EU competition rules. Meta’s conduct “risks blocking competitors from entering or expanding in the rapidly growing market for AI assistants,” according to the Commission.
[European Commission - European Commission]
In a podcast with David Senra, Spiegel says, “I think Meta needed to partner with [Essilor]Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something people want anywhere near their face.” He’s not wrong. I hear that all the time from y’all in my smart glasses coverage — and the facial recognition controversy hasn’t helped.
The Meta CEO has always had a bit of an image problem, but surely reported plans to replace him with an AI clone will help?
eatyrgho.st:
“For years, our CEO has been dogged by memes and jokes claiming he is an inhuman freak. How do we fix this?!”
Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.
The civil rights organization and 75 other groups published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to “immediately halt and publicly disavow” plans for a reported facial recognition feature on its Ray-Ban smart glasses. It’s unsurprising that privacy advocates are wary, especially since documents show Meta originally planned to launch the feature during public unrest.
[ACLU of Massachusetts]
Now that a jury has ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark trial, the sharks are circling, and what better place to find potential clients than on those social media platforms? The only problem is that Axios reports Meta pulled “more than a dozen” such ads from firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law on Thursday.
Unity already powers the “majority” of the top-selling VR games on Meta’s platform, according to a statement from Unity’s COO.
The latest beta update for WhatsApp on Android and iOS includes the “phased rollout” of usernames, which have been in the works for years and allow users to keep their phone number private.
WhatsApp is currently testing usernames with a very limited number of users. To check if you are part of this initial rollout, you need to open your profile settings. Here, users who have access will notice a dedicated option for usernames. If the option is available, users can tap on it to begin creating their username.
Meta will “eventually” offer open source versions of its new AI models Alexandr Wang is in charge of, but first, the company “wants to keep some pieces proprietary and to ensure they don’t add new levels of safety risk,” Axios reports.
Meta has paused work with the company, Mercor (which The Verge has profiled), while OpenAI is investigating the security incident, Wired reports.
A proposed class action lawsuit claims Perplexity “effectively planted a bug” on users’ computers by embedding trackers from Meta and Google inside its AI search engine, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. It also alleges that Perplexity’s incognito mode “does nothing” to protect user privacy:
Even paid users who turned on the “Incognito” feature still had their conversations shared with Meta and Google, along with their email addresses and other identifiers that allowed Meta and Google to personally identify them.
The abrupt closure of a tuition-free private school founded by Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, will dump extra students into a local school district, increasing expected enrollment by 20 percent.
Now there’s a $70 million bond measure up for votes to help deal with the influx. The text of the measure says the closure created “an immediate crisis” for the school district.
[San Francisco Chronicle]
The company has already reduced funding to the Oversight Board this year and “has signaled that it will do so again in 2027 and 2028,” according to Platformer’s Casey Newton. The two sides are still in talks.
