Meant to post this from one of underlying documents: Meta earns $3.5B ever six months in "higher legal risk" revenue from scams, and that such amount is could be the cumulative "outside order of magnitude" for fines from regulators for accepting scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

This is terrible news, as is the original decision to fold Teen Vogue -- it consistently did some of the best culture reporting on social media of any outlet, period. Great respect to those who stood up on behalf of their newsrooms.

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE AND MY FEET: A MYSTERY My wife wanted to sell a mirror, so I listed it on Facebook Marketplace this weekend. I neglected to wear shoes for the photo. I have since received seven offers: two for the mirror, and five for acts involving my feet. I'm now curious what's going on.

I'm skeptical that Twitter/X is going to heavily discount machine learning-based AI engagement farming in favor of generative AI-based curation, but you know why not? Give it a go. www.theverge.com/news/802480/...

I would gladly read a followup on this focused entirely on IRBs. I've been surprised by how often researchers say they could never got approval to run tests mimicking the sort of interventions that major platforms undertake on far larger populations as a matter of course on a daily basis.

This recent preprint on tech industry influence over external research is compelling. Beyond documenting the low rate of industry-funded researchers actually disclosing that fact, the paper points out that journals have routinely waived IRB review for industry work. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta. Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵 www.reuters.com/business/ins...

Four years ago, pre GenAI, someone showed me some stunning photos of ravens they'd taken. Among the most beautiful wildlife portraits I've seen. And they refused to put them even on a website because they didn't "want a tech company to steal them." I rolled my eyes. I think about that now and then.

Here is a reporter who deserves to be remembered. kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-jo...

Happy birthday to this trade publication, which I am fairly confident will outlive most of its news industry peers

This is really good. Actually testing the models remains underutilized as a reporting methodology. www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/01/1...

1. Great story by my former colleagues 2. I don't think copyright law works like that www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

In case anyone thought ICE shooting at journalists was just an LA thing. Or that they'd cut it out after repeated warnings from judges. Nope. More of the same in Chicago.

Going to have to chalk this up in the "Evidence for Simulation Theory" column, I think. deadline.com/2025/09/soci...

Instagram has long talked up its efforts to filter out eating-disorder-related content from young users' feeds and redirect teenagers who are binging on it. External testing, confirmed by documents reviewed by Reuters, suggests those classifiers don't work well.

It’d be great if people stopped engraving things on bullet casings (and also whatever the hell they do after carving things on the casings)

Practicing medicine? I’m going to guess they’re for practicing medicine now. And maybe clinical research.

If you accept $50,000 in a Cava takeout bag from some FBI agents who are posing as businessmen and then the investigation gets called off, does that just mean you’re just up $50k? This is not political commentary. I would like to know the answer to the hypothetical here.

One measure of the relative clout Trust and Safety staffers have is that, when you ask a chatbot to help you to commit a crime, sometimes they just say "sure!"

This feels like the early days of AI's use in scam compounds. Asking a bot to find one or two personalized hooks from someone's social media feed then make a run at getting them engaged before passing off the hot leads to humans seems real straightforward. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Exclusive: Fed Governor Cook declared her Atlanta property as “vacation home,” documents show - www.reuters.com/world/us/fed...

This is an incredible, classic bit of journalism about fake murder for hire and man does it beat reading about… well, everything else on here today.

🎧 Listen to the podcast! @kashhill.bsky.social and @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social spoke with @mina-kim.bsky.social about how AI chatbots can manipulate – or be manipulated – to cause harm, and what we're learning about the psychological impact of AI companions. 🔗:

X is getting fined for disobeying a Canadian legal order to remove a woman's non-consensual intimate image from its platform. In filings, X argued that geofencing the image (which a specific account is repeatedly posting) is it's obligated to do. www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

I try not to believe in market timing, but the WSJ’s planning a full year’s worth of stories on the ongoing triumph of American capitalism is one of those things that makes me wonder if my portfolio should be more skewed toward global stocks / canned goods.

“I don’t do regrets” is the sort of thing you only say when you have fucked up a lot, isn’t it?

Zuckerberg saying Meta intends to spend at least 600 billion in the US Zuckerberg at the end caught on a hot mic

Never before the Anthropic settlement offering payouts of up to $3,000 per pirated work have I ever thought to myself, "Damn, I wish I'd self-published a ton of low-grade e-books."

I’ve written one book which should be included in the Anthropic settlement class. It took me two years. Given the potential $3,000 per-work payout, I am both happy for and extremely jealous of highly prolific romance and fantasy authors. Some of those folks have turned out hundreds.

This story is brutal and man there is not much in the way of justice in the world. www.wired.com/story/the-ba...

Lawmakers in California killed an anti-AI price manipulation bill, and "a bill that aimed to protect electric utility customers from bearing higher costs associated with data center proliferation" that "required data centers to publicly disclose how much energy they use," per @khari.bsky.social:

A general journalism thought I've been having since jumping to Reuters: Part of responsibly covering things (tech, politics, wars, etc) is not sanitizing the details. It's important that people know that the images Meta AI was/is creating are more than "provocative." My eds over here get that.

Between this and Meta yanking celebrity chatbots right and left in the last few days (and saying the intimate images its own systems are producing violate platform rules) does make me wonder if Meta is rethinking its approach to chatbot companions. www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Meta created celebrity romance chatbot replicas of Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson and Selena Gomez. Reuters found these "parody" bots would generate hyperrealistic images of the women in lingerie with their legs spread and invite users to the women's homes.

A colleague I’ll never get to meet. Hussam al-Masri, the Reuters journalist killed by Israeli fire in Gaza - www.reuters.com/business/med...

Two unnamed companies spent $10.7B and $7.5B respectively on Nvidia chips last quarter. These two companies are essentially carrying the entire US stock market.

“this appears to be the first documented murder involving a troubled person who had been engaging extensively with an AI chatbot.” www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

I'd love it if headline writers to stop using the phrase "cue the outrage," "cue the pitchforks," "cue the anything." It's a cheap attempt at being droll and knowingly jaded and it sucks.

Has anyone ever done a study of the divorce rate among people highlighted by the NYT "Vows" section? Just asking questions here.

This is absolutely crazy and a reminder that the version of social we see in the United States is almost always more sanitized than the version overseas.

As a man who proudly received $3 from the class action settlement resolving claims that that “Stonefire Naan” was not in fact cooked in stone ovens, I eagerly await my tiny piece of this Anthropic settlement. www.wired.com/story/anthro...

I love @404media.co for this sort of relentless coverage. They have a good story and they just keep hammering it. Which is the only way to matter.

One big question here is how Bill Pulte has gotten access to individual mortgage records — and if that itself is a legal violation Via Adam Levitin: www.creditslips.org/creditslips/...

“Meta has sponsored the National PTA for years, while the education advocacy group has promoted the company’s child safety initiatives… without disclosing the financial ties” www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/m... sus

I don’t like making reporting asks on here, but if there a couple of people who have teenagers with teen instagram accounts and are willing to check on some features for me… let me know via DM?

This isn't a place where I'm deeply sourced up, but man I would love to understand how Midjourey produced better image GenAI than Meta did given their relative infrastructure spending. The below are Meta AI animations produced in the last couple of days.