Meta

Starting next month, Meta Platforms will no longer allow companies to send targeted ads to teens based on their gender, the company said Tuesday. Meta also said that data about teens’ engagement on Meta’s own apps — including whether teens followed Instagram or Facebook pages — won’t be used for ad targeting.

The decision is one of the most consequential issued under the E.U.’s landmark data-protection law and creates a new business headwind for the social media giant.

Meta Platforms will pay $725 million to settle class-action claims that it violated users’ privacy by sharing their information with outside developers, including the defunct political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, according to court papers filed late Thursday.

Google and Meta, known together in the ad industry as the “duopoly,” are expected to bring in less than half of all U.S. digital advertising this year for the first time since 2014. The duo’s ad dominance has for years made both companies the target of antitrust investigations and lawsuits. While they still tower over digital rivals, their momentum is starting to slow as competition moves in.

Meta’s chief executive made a rare court appearance as the Federal Trade Commission tries to block his company’s purchase of the virtual reality start-up Within.

Facebook owner Meta threatened to remove news content from its platforms on Monday following reports that U.S. lawmakers have added controversial legislation favoring news media to the annual defense authorization bill. The warning highlights the danger that Meta perceives to its business model in the face of the proposed bill, known as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA).

The job market is booming, so why is the tech industry getting hit with layoffs?

Among the mass layoffs at the company formerly known as Facebook last week are several roles that have served as a bridge between the news industry and the sprawling tech company.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news today in a note to staff: “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” he wrote. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”

Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week, according to people familiar with the matter, in what could be among the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry’s rapid growth during the pandemic.

The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said.

Facebook parent Meta Platforms is urging a federal appellate court to prevent advertisers from proceeding with a class-action fraud lawsuit over allegedly inflated ad metrics. In papers filed Monday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Meta Platforms argues that the claims do not lend themselves to class-action treatment, partly because the metrics were allegedly inflated by different proportions for different advertisers.

Just as Twitter comes under fire for new brand-safety concerns, rival Meta has achieved an important milestone: Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for content-level brand safety on Facebook. The accreditation comes two years after Meta committed to an MRC audit of its brand-safety solutions.

Big Tech companies took a heavy beating last week, to the tune of more than $255 billion in lost market capitalization that’s helped make a bad year even worse for the once-beloved sector. The five tech giants that posted results have now lost a combined $3 trillion in market cap on the year, according to Dow Jones Market Data, showing that Big Tech isn’t immune to the macroeconomic storm sweeping up the broader stock market.

The quarter’s weak results raised fresh questions about whether Meta’s plans to spend $10 billion a year on the metaverse — a concept that doesn’t quite exist yet and possibly never will — is prudent while its main source of revenue is faltering. The quarterly results from Meta Platforms Inc. sent its stock tumbling 19% in after-hours trading to $105.20. If the sell-off holds through Thursday’s regular trading day, it will be the lowest it’s been since 2016. The stock closed Wednesday down 61% for the year.

The penalty issued by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North was the maximum allowed for more than 800 violations of Washington’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, passed by voters in 1972 and later strengthened by the Legislature. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson argued that the maximum was appropriate considering his office previously sued Facebook in 2018 for violating the same law.

The company’s chief executive had signaled for several months that he wanted to rein in costs as he shifts attention toward the metaverse.

In response to stalling growth and intense competition, Facebook parent Meta is looking to reduce costs by at least 10%, people familiar with the plans said, while Google has required some employees to apply for new jobs.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, shared data for the first time about the number of times it’s applied its newsworthiness allowance. The company will sometimes leave up posts that could violate its rules, if it determines the posts are newsworthy.

Univision Noticias’ fact-checking program elDetector is the first fact-checking platform in Spanish in the United States. The platform will join Meta’s International Fact-Checking Network.

Facebook will pay $37.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company collected users’ IP addresses, which offer general information about location, in violation of a prior privacy policy. The company, now named Meta Platforms, disclosed in June that it had agreed to settle the litigation, but the terms weren’t made public until Monday. The settlement agreement specifies that Facebook does not admit to doing anything wrong.

IBC’s first in-person event since 2019 may have fewer days and attendees than at its high-water mark, but vendors are packing their schedules with meetings and say they’re excited to be doing business in person again.

Summer 2022 has brought waves of changes at Meta that demonstrate its deprioritization of news products, including its wind-down of payments to U.S. news publishers. In parallel, the company has been planning shifts to how it delivers content. These recent announcements have left local news publishers wondering what the changes mean for their Facebook strategies moving forward. Here’s what we know.

Meta Platforms said Thursday that most of people “do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn’t make sense to over invest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.”

The results largely followed a broader decline in the digital advertising market that is dinging Meta rivals such as Google, Twitter — which also posted a revenue decline — and Snap. Google’s parent company Alphabet reported its slowest quarterly growth in two years on Tuesday.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals.

Meta is getting backlash for changes that make some of its platforms act more like TikTok.

HUD had accused Meta of engaging in housing discrimination by letting advertisers restrict who could see housing ads on Facebook based on characteristics like race, religion and national origin.

Meta Platforms Inc. was sued Friday over claims that private medical data is being shared secretly with Facebook when patients access web portals for some health-care providers. Facebook’s Pixel tracking tool redirects patient communications and other supposedly “secure” information without authorization and in violation of federal and state laws, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action on behalf of millions of patients.

Meta this week was hit with several lawsuits claiming that it designed Facebook and Instagram in a way that posed a risk to the health of young users. The cases, filed in nine states, all essentially claim that Facebook and Instagram designed their services to be addictive, and served potentially harmful content to teens and children.

Facebook is developing a product that will not rely on anonymized personal information from users and will be more in line with privacy guidelines set by Europe and U.S. states that have privacy regulations. “I think it will use a lot less user data visible to the advertiser,” said Marty Weintraub, Aimclear founder and Facebook expert. The product — Basic Ads — is aimed at brand advertisers wanting to build awareness. It focuses on mass marketing, similar to the way a television station targets viewers, Weintraub said.

Facebook parent Meta, which also owns Instagram, said it will start releasing details in July about the demographics and interests of audiences who are targeted with ads that run on its two primary social networks. The company will also share how much advertisers spent in an effort to target people in certain states.

Free Press, Common Cause and a number of other progressive groups and civil rights advocates have called on the biggest social media companies to combat disinformation in the run-up to the midterm elections, the first national election since the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, saying if they don’t, they are “the dominant threat” to the democratic process. That came in the form of letters to the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet from more than 100 groups.

Meta Platforms is considering reducing the money it gives news organizations as it reevaluates the partnerships it struck over the past few years, according to people familiar with the matter. The reassessment comes as Meta looks to cut costs broadly and rethinks the value of including news in its flagship Facebook app.

Shares of Facebook parent Meta jumped 18% in extended trading on Wednesday after the company reported earnings that topped estimates even as revenue was disappointing. Revenue rose 7% in the quarter, marking the first time in Facebook’s 10-year history as a public company that growth has landed in the single digits. Analysts were expecting 7.8% growth.

Facebook parent Meta is urging a federal appellate court to intervene in a lawsuit brought by advertisers suing the company over allegedly inflated metrics. In papers filed this week with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Facebook seeks permission to immediately appeal U.S. District Court Judge James Donato’s decision granting class-action status to the companies DZ Reserve (an e-commerce store operator) and Max Martialis (which sells weapons accessories).