Business

Losing its US online ad monopoly case is just the start for Google’s world of competition pain – and Meta’s in the firing line too

- April 18, 2025 4 MIN READ

Tech giant Google has just suffered another legal blow in the United States, losing a landmark antitrust case. This follows on from the company’s loss in a similar case last year. Social media giant Meta is also currently embroiled in a landmark legal battle in the US that could change not only how it operates,… Read more »

Other

Meta used pirated books by Australian authors to train its AI and now US courts may decide if this is ‘fair use’

- April 2, 2025 5 MIN READ

Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted. The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen,… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
Leadership

Zuck you all. Meta’s boss is back in steal mode

- March 25, 2025 4 MIN READ

This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckberg launched Facebook, having kicked it off as The Facebook in 2004. He was already notorious for Facemash, the “hot or not” site that ranked Harvard students by their attractiveness, which he created in late 2003. Zuckerberg hacked into house face book websites at the university to get… Read more »

Sarah Wynn-Williams
Global tech

The Zucksand Effect: Meta ensures everyone knows about a Kiwi whistleblower’s memoir, Careless People, about her time at Facebook, by trying to block her

- March 19, 2025 3 MIN READ

Social media giant Meta is attempting to lessen the impact of a tell-all memoir by its former director of global public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled Careless People, which the company alleges is “defamatory”. Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling in the United States on Wednesday, where an absent Wynn-Williams was ordered to temporarily stop personally promoting… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
Global tech

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta shift is more about monetising misinformation than free speech

- January 9, 2025 3 MIN READ

Meta has announced it will abandon its fact-checking program, starting in the United States. It was aimed at preventing the spread of online lies among more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads. In a video, the company’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said fact checking had led to… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
Data

Meta just got off cheaply in a $50 million compensation deal over data scraping scandal

- December 17, 2024 3 MIN READ

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has struck a $50 million deal with the Australian Information Commissioner to settle a Federal Court case over privacy breach involving the Cambridge Analytica political scandal. While it’s the second largest settlement struck by Meta over the matter, its a fraction of the US$725 million (A$1.14bn) the tech giant paid to… Read more »

Business

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, wins ‘Shonky’ award for not tackling scam ads

- November 13, 2024 4 MIN READ

Scam ads are lucrative for scammers, but the money they steal from vulnerable people is also delivering plenty of cash to Mark Zuckerberg and his social media company Meta. The business behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has been named one of five “winners” in consumer group CHOICE’s annual Shonky Awards for trash products. The CHOICE… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
AI/Machine Learning

Meta ignores its own policy to let the military use its AI platform, Llama

- November 12, 2024 4 MIN READ

Meta will make its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models available to the United States’ government, the tech giant has announced, in a controversial move that raises a moral dilemma for everyone who uses the software. Meta last week revealed it would make the models, known as Llama, available to government agencies, “including those that are… Read more »

Politics

New teen accounts on Instagram are a welcome step, but real ‘peace of mind’ requires more

- September 19, 2024 4 MIN READ

As Australia and other countries debate the merits of banning kids under 14 from social media, Meta has announced a significant “reimagining” of teenagers’ experience of Instagram. These new “Teen Accounts” will be set to private by default, have the maximum content and messaging restrictions possible, pause notifications at night, and add new ways for… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
Data

Facebook admits it scraped data from Australian users without letting them opt out. Here’s how to protect yourself

- September 13, 2024 3 MIN READ

Facebook acknowledged in a Senate inquiry yesterday that it is scraping the public photos of Australian users to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Facebook’s parent company Meta claims this excludes data from users who have marked their posts as “private”, as well as photos or data from users under the age of 18. Since… Read more »

Opinion

Why Meta’s plan to keep kids safe online is a missed chance for collaboration among the tech giants

- September 9, 2024 3 MIN READ

Meta, which owns social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, has revealed its plans for keeping kids safe online. It wants companies like Apple and Google, who run mobile phone app stores, to force parents to approve when their children attempt to install phone apps which are popular among young people. Meta’s announcement comes… Read more »