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Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Matt Burgess — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:26:00 GMT

Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions of imagery depicting child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

Over the last nine months, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements, according to details of the ads shared with WIRED. The ads, which in some cases reached several thousand accounts, were targeted at people living in the United States, United Kingdom, and more than a dozen European countries.

More than 50 image and video ads containing abusive content were recently discovered in Meta’s ad library by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), with the listings showing that some ads linked out to so-called nudify or undressing apps. Meta’s ad library—a transparency tool that catalogues ads displayed on the company’s platforms—shows the ads running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or Threads. The findings are the second time in recent weeks that paid ads linked to child sexual abuse material have been found on Meta’s platforms.

“These ads made no effort to mask the images or hide what they were promoting,” Katie Paul, the director of the TTP, an independent watchdog group, tells WIRED. “It’s important to point out that this isn’t content posted by third parties on Facebook or Instagram, these are ads that were reviewed, approved, and allowed to run by Meta, never encountering interference while the company collected the ad dollars.”

The ads discovered by the researchers—which have now been removed by Meta for violating its policies on child sexual abuse and exploitation material, and adult sexual solicitation and nudity—were all published between November last year and the start of August. The ads, according to data in Meta’s ad transparency library, often ran over a period of several days and some only targeted men.

One video ad, the TTP researchers say, used a thumbnail image of a child sitting on the floor with text appearing on top of it saying: “Realizing Deep Fantasies with Generation AI [sic]. There is so much more than what is shown, use your imagination.” The researchers say that when the ad was clicked, it played video clips of adults involved in sexual acts and then added the child’s face from the thumbnail to a sex act.

Another ad the researchers say had been repeatedly posted showed an image of a young girl laying back with her legs spread in a sexual position with text above it saying: “I can show you more.”

Most of the ads were not actively being shown to users when researchers found them, but they continued to be available, apparently undetected, in Meta’s ad library for months. Although many of the ads, according to Meta’s data, only “reached” a handful of accounts, at least one reached 2,563 accounts in Europe—including in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Meta’s ad library database does not include details about ad performance in the US or all countries, so the overall reach may be higher.

Paul says TTP first discovered the ads last week as its researchers continued to investigate nudify app ads on Meta, after publishing a report about a Chinese advertising partner posting them. Paul says the organization immediately reported the findings to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, which allows people to report online child sexual abuse material. A NCMEC spokesperson says it does not comment on reports it receives.

After WIRED reached out to Meta, the company removed the ads from its advertising library. “Sexual exploitation is horrific, and we work aggressively to keep it off our platform,” a Meta spokesperson says. “The majority of these ads had minimal reach and many were disabled before WIRED shared them. Many of these ads also predate new AI technology we launched recently to better detect and block violating ads at upload—and we’re constantly improving these systems. From removing over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year to taking legal action against nudify app developers, we will continue to relentlessly fight this abuse.”

As the company implies, some of the offending ads got past Meta’s new AI technology. Initially, the TTP researchers found around two dozen ads displaying the abusive content. However, hours ahead of publication, the researchers discovered around 30 more. Many of these ads had been published after WIRED first asked Meta about the content, with multiple ads being live and shown to accounts at the time researchers discovered them.

Paul says the tranche included some of the worst instances the researchers had seen. One of the video ads, the researchers say, showed a thumbnail of a girl appearing to put on lip gloss, and when it started playing, the video morphed into the child performing a sex act.

Meta’s policies say that all ads are reviewed before they are published, with the system “primarily” using “automated tools” to check them against its policies. The company’s advertising standards stipulate that child sexual and exploitation materials are not permitted, and say that when the company becomes aware of it, it makes reports to NCMEC. Beyond this, Meta’s advertising policies say that ads are not allowed to include any “imagery depicting nudity, sexual activity, depictions of people in explicit or sexually suggestive positions, or activities that are sexually suggestive.”

Meta’s ad library now shows that the ads found by the TTP researchers were removed for violating the company’s policies, displaying messages saying they violated rules on “child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity” and “adult nudity and sexual activity.”

In early July, a BBC investigation found that Instagram had been running ads that promoted the sale of what appeared to be child sexual abuse material in India. According to the reporting, the ads used terminology such as “rape video” and linked to channels on Telegram where the illegal content could be purchased. In response, Meta published a lengthy statement saying it takes a “zero tolerance” approach to child sexual exploitation.

The TTP’s Paul says that within the cache of ads seen by its researchers, there appeared to be some identical ads that Meta had previously removed due to violations of its policies. “This raises significant questions about how seriously Meta is taking child exploitation in paid advertisements if its own systems can identify identical ads but it does not remove those identical ads for CSAM material,” Paul says, adding that there are no ways within the ad library itself to report content that may violate Meta’s policies when the ads are no longer running.

The ads appear to have been mostly posted by Meta accounts with zero or a tiny number of followers; where paying advertisers were disclosed, they were linked to Chinese companies, Paul says. In one instance—the ad showing a girl reclining—the TTP researchers say Meta’s data indicates the advertiser was a Chinese firm called Meet Social. At one point, the company was one of Meta’s ad resellers, which handle ads in China, where Meta’s social media platforms are blocked. According to a 2019 New York Times profile, it published thousands of ads on Facebook per day and expected more than $1 billion in sales.

Meet Social did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Several of the Meta ads found by the TTP researchers linked to an app called MaskAI that appeared in Apple’s App Store. The app, which was linked to a Chinese software developer, did not show any nudity before it was downloaded, according to a WIRED review of the app. However, once opened, it exclusively contained AI-generated porn and included features that allow users to upload images and face-swap people into sexual situations.

After being contacted by WIRED, an Apple spokesperson says that it has removed MaskAI from the App Store for violating its policies against nudification apps, and the company has “always strictly prohibited apps designed to generate, distribute, or consume pornography.” (An email address linked to MaskAI did not respond to a request for comment). Other ads linked to different apps or websites.

Since around 2020, as machine learning and subsequent generative AI technology has improved, a large underbelly of dangerous AI nudification and undress services have appeared online—making millions for their creators and causing untold harms to countless women. They have also been used in the creation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, which is illegal in countries around the world.

After WIRED first contacted Meta about the TTP findings, the company asked two online safety organizations to provide comments to WIRED for this story. Sean Litton, the outgoing CEO of the Tech Coalition, a group that works with tech companies to tackle online abuse, said in a statement that Meta has shared “thousands of violating URLs” to the group’s Lantern service, which shares information about abuse content between companies. A spokesperson for the Revenge Porn Helpline in the UK, which works to combat nonconsensual images of adults, also responded with a statement praising Meta’s partnership with StopNCII.org and some of its efforts to combat nonconsensual intimate imagery. “We’ve been clear that nudify apps present a genuinely adversarial problem, not just because of who’s behind them, but because of how quickly this ecosystem adapts around any single point of enforcement,” the Revenge Porn Helpline said.

Alexios Mantzarlis, cofounder of digital deception publication Indicator and a former trust and safety worker at Google, says he has found and reported more than 25,000 ads for AI nudifiers on Meta’s platforms in recent years. The company has previously said it has taken down more than 344,000 ads for nudifiers and launched legal action against a Hong Kong company linked to one set of nudifier platforms. (WIRED has previously collaborated with Indicator on reporting about how nudify tech has been used against children in schools around the world).

“The actors on the other side are clearly well-equipped to create new advertiser accounts and new domains so that they can keep going, leveraging the same techniques used by scam networks,” Mantzarlis tells WIRED. “Unfortunately, this industry of image-based sexual abuse has gone from a novelty to a permanent fixture of our online ecosystem because of timid enforcement from platforms across the stack.”

Viral Mugshot Accounts Are Humiliating Women Years After Their Arrests

Hope Corrigan — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:30:00 GMT

About a month after Megan Davis’ biological mother died of a drug overdose in July 2025, she went out for drinks with a friend in Northgate, a cluster of bars in College Station, Texas.

She downed a couple of shots and got into an altercation with another group of patrons after bumping into them, according to Davis and body camera footage. Security at the bar kicked Davis out and called the police, who charged her with public intoxication, resulting in an overnight jail stay and a $450 fine.

“Right before my mugshot was taken, I had a panic attack,” says Davis, who was 23 at the time. “I knew I made a big mistake.” After being released the next morning, she set up a payment plan for the fine, and put the incident behind her.

Beginning the day of her arrest, on August 21, 2025, Davis' mugshot started going viral. It was first posted to the Facebook page SayCheese Brazos County Mugshots & Arrests, one of about a dozen Texas-specific mugshot pages under the SayCheese brand, then turned into a hoax on Facebook, alleging she was an Olive Garden waitress who’d been arrested for throwing breadsticks at a customer over tips. Then, on October 12, 2025, her mugshot appeared on Mugshawtys, a popular Instagram account that posts mugshots of young women, often framed as thirst traps.

Thousands of people have now commented—and harshly judged—Davis’ looks and character; when Mugshawtys reposted her photo in a roundup in June, a man wrote in comment on the post “I bet there [sic] parents are proud of them.” Davis replied underneath that her mother had died weeks before the mugshot was taken. “I hope she’s proud of what I’ve done to better myself since this happened,” she wrote.

Almost a year later, Davis is still wading through the fallout. “All that this has been for me is just being dragged through the mud,” Davis says, adding that she’s taken “full accountability” for the incident.

“I just don't understand where we are going to draw a line with social media and privacy.”

Mugshawtys was started around a decade ago by Josh Jeffery, a 31-year-old electrician in California. Up until very recently, it had about 1.8 million Instagram followers, including many loyal, mostly male fans—some of whom trawl arrest bookings and mugshot sites to send in submissions. The brand, which gained a million followers after being featured on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year, according to Jeffery, also had 19,000 Facebook followers and currently has nearly half a million on X.

Within the last week, in response to a list of questions from WIRED, both Meta and TikTok disabled Mugshawtys accounts on their respective platforms. A Meta spokesperson said the account breached multiple policies, pointing WIRED to its community standards page. A TikTok US spokesperson declined to comment on why the account was removed. Jeffery did not respond to a request for comment about the removals. X did not reply to a request for comment.

Jeffery says he’s friends with some of the girls he features on the page—and claims he’s not trying to exploit them. “A lot of them end up doing some form of OnlyFans or content creation or something,” he claims, adding that he encourages Mugshawtys followers to chip in for the women's bail or legal fees.

But the pages are rife with sexual fantasies and misogynistic jokes. “They don’t have to be old enough to drink, just old enough to swallow,” read one comment under an Instagram post featuring a woman arrested for underage drinking. Under carousel posts of mugshots, men wrote comments like “mid,” “that’s a man,” “6 at best,” sometimes ranking women in order of who they find attractive. Last summer, Mugshawtys’ Instagram account posted a photo of a woman who appears to be wearing an anti-suicide smock. The caption stated she had been arrested for alleged child endangerment. The gloved hand of a jail official is seen holding her head while she grimaces and pulls away from the camera. A comment underneath read "child abuse i hope the guards pushed her head to other places." The caption mislabeled the woman’s charges, and the case was ultimately disposed. But many commenters seem unaware that the existence of a mugshot is not an admittance of guilt.

As the brand has grown more popular, Jeffery even sells merch like T-shirts and hats with text that reads “i [heart] hot felons” for about $10. In 2024, small Amsterdam publisher 550BC made a Mugshawtys coffee table book, which Jeffery has since sold online. 550BC did not respond to a request for comment.

That those featured on Mugshawtys are all captured in a vulnerable state—many are disheveled, intoxicated, or appear to be crying—often seems to appeal to followers of the accounts. “You see a woman in the worst kind of condition that she might have found herself in without perfect makeup, being absolutely vulnerable, being held by the state,” sociologist Danielle Dirks tells WIRED. “Some men think this is the perfect time to seize upon them.”

Jeffery says he believes if anyone is exploiting women, it’s the justice system, and that he will remove a mugshot if a woman asks him to: “I'll take down anything. Especially if they didn't submit it themselves, then I'm more quick to do it.”

Early mugshots were primarily used as a law enforcement tool for alerting a community about a potential offender or for gathering tips, says Sarah Lageson, an associate professor of law and criminology at Northeastern University. Journalists could go down to a police station and flip through booklets of them, a process that required existing relationships with law enforcement or press credentials. Digitization made the images publicly accessible, and online mugshots became a cultural phenomenon in the mid-aughts, with pay-for-removal websites—which publish people’s mugshots then request a fee to remove them—taking off. But mugshot laws vary by state, leading to confusion for someone seeking removal of their image. For example, Oregon prohibits law enforcement agencies from releasing mugshots prior to a conviction; in Florida, a state with lenient open records laws, there are no guardrails on social media usage, but mugshot sites must remove a person’s mugshot, if requested, at no charge.

Navigating the legalese around mugshots can be daunting. “People are so exhausted by the mugshot itself, they often don't want to litigate and put their name back in the public record attached to mugshots,” says Lageson.

Now, amid the explosion of video across all social media platforms, YouTubers and social media accounts have expanded to body cam footage, with some creators accessing the footage through Freedom of Information Act requests.

In March 2026, bodycam footage from Davis’ arrest was posted to a YouTube called Sgt. Pepperspray. The footage shows her wearing a black crop top, visibly panicked and intoxicated. Viewers left linked timestamps in the comments redirecting to moments in the video when close-up shots of just Davis’ breasts were visible onscreen. (Davis contacted YouTube’s legal support team via a defamation claim which was denied. A rep for YouTube said that Davis would need to file a privacy complaint.)

“They're just really vivid public shaming tools in my view,” Lageson says.

But not everyone is opposed to the attention. Jeffery says some women submit their own photos or tag themselves in the comments to redirect traffic to their own page.

“It gave me a little bit of an ego boost,” says Holly Singleton, a 22-year-old in Indiana, whose mugshot was featured on the account on March 11. “I’m not bothered by it. Unfortunately, social media is forever,”

Most women posted to Mugshawtys are white and appear to be college-aged. In a study published in 2015 in the Contemporary Justice Review, Dirks wrote that white women are often viewed as “victims of circumstance deserving of empathy and redemption rather than as criminals.” But Dirks tells WIRED that in the case of Mugshawtys, the focus on conventional beauty standards can render these women more visible and therefore subject them to more punishment outside of the criminal justice system.

For many of the women featured, the sexist jokes and sexual harassment continues long after charges have been dropped, fines have been paid, or prison time has been served.

Taylor Johnson was arrested for a DUI in 2022 and spent 20 days in county jail to avoid probation. Two years later, while at work, her phone started buzzing with texts from her friends: Mugshawtys had posted her mugshot.

“At first, I was extremely embarrassed and humiliated just because I felt like I had really put that behind me,” Johnson says. She DM’d Jeffery asking who submitted the photo, and he said he receives so many DMs that he didn’t know. Initially, she says she told him she didn’t want her mugshot posted, but she says she learned that her mugshot was public record and let it remain up.

Johnson says her mugshot has since been used for clickbait, accompanying videos and articles that have nothing to do with her arrest. She shared a screenshot of a TikTok video with text reading “how i stayed pretty—even after 3 years in prison,” overlaid on her mugshot. The Mirror wrote an article with the headline “Woman’s Mugshot Goes Viral After Arrest as She’s Dubbed ‘Insanely Beautiful’—and She’s Livid.”

The unwanted attention wrought by her mugshot felt relentless. “My dad had just passed a few months before this post was made, and to me it just felt like I couldn't catch a break,” Johnson says.

After time passed, however, she says people at work started to recognize her as the “Mugshawtys girl.”

“I ended up learning to just laugh about it, because if I don't I'm going to cry,” Johnson says.

The UK Is Planning a Social Media Curfew for 16- and 17-Year-Olds

Miles Klee — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:08:00 GMT

The United Kingdom will require social media companies to implement a default block for adolescent users aged 16 and 17 at certain hours, the country’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology revealed on Tuesday evening.

This automatic new curfew would theoretically lock older teens out of social platforms between the hours of midnight and 6 am—though the feature can be turned off. The nonmandatory restriction is to be imposed along with a looming total ban on these services for children under 16, expected to come into force in spring 2027. Both measures come after the Online Safety Act, a controversial set of laws that requires platforms hosting pornography and other material considered potentially harmful to children to verify that their users are 18 or older.

Young Brits will also see a “crackdown” on “addictive” features of social apps, the DSIT said in a news release, including “videos that automatically play one after another and feeds that continually serve up personalized content.” These mechanisms will “be switched off by default for older teenagers,” according to a statement from the department. However, people will also be able to override those.

The first full set of social media regulations will be put to Parliament later this year before taking effect in 2027.

The DSIT said the latest set of proposed regulations are meant to “help ensure there is no cliff edge in protections as young people move into their later teenage years,” as future youths will hypothetically have no experience with social media before that age, thanks to the constraints imposed on apps and websites by the Online Safety Act.

“These measures will be crucial in helping young people get the sleep they need, focus on school and college, and spend more quality time with family and friends, all of which are fundamental to building a happy, healthy, and fulfilling adult life,” said UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall in a statement about the new measures.

“We want young people to enjoy the benefits of technology while having the tools to make the online world a place where they can thrive,” Kendall said.

The DSIT further signaled that Kendall aims to bring forth additional protections around artificial intelligence, including mandated chatbot breaks for children under 18, who are already set to be blocked from AI platforms that can imitate romantic conversations. Regulators will be charged with reining in services that provide “dangerous, misleading, or unverified mental health advice,” with the department warning that chatbots found to “pose a serious threat” to UK youths may be banned altogether.

Finally, the government is seeking to bolster children’s media literacy with updated school curricula covering AI, technological bias, and mis- and disinformation, as well as strategies for identifying violent and misogynist content.

In recent years, as tech giants faced a wave of major lawsuits and alarming research related to the potential negative effects of social media on younger users, advocates mobilized worldwide to push for broad age limits on these platforms, with parents and politicians often concurring on the need for such protections. The UK government, for example, has found that about 9 in 10 parents there “support a legal requirement for social media services to have a minimum age of access.” A Pew Research Center survey published this month found that 56 percent of American adults would likewise back a ban on social media for those under 16.

But groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and GLAAD have sharply criticized this type of “age-gating,” arguing that it’s an oversimplified solution that curtails the rights to open information and free speech. They point out that lawmakers can use these restrictions to censor sex education and LGBTQ resources that are of critical value to teens.

Then there’s the question of whether this regulation even works. In Australia, which in December became the first nation to ban children under 16 from a slew of popular social media apps, leading to the removal of some 5 million accounts within a month, early research has shown that around 75 percent of 14- to 15-year-olds are circumventing the age limit. The country’s government is investigating the alleged noncompliance of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube as it struggles to enforce the law, and it now plans to double the fines for platforms in violation, though it has yet to collect any.

For the UK, which has been quite explicit about adopting the “same model” as Australia to keep kids off social media, similar problems may lie ahead.

Update, July 14 at 7:00 pm: This story was updated to correct the full name of the EFF. It’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Dell Cameron, Dhruv Mehrotra — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:00:00 GMT

Meta is testing face-recognition software built by a company that sells surveillance tools to police departments and the United States military, as it explores bringing the technology to its smart glasses, WIRED has learned.

The arrangement is documented in a software license, obtained by WIRED, that was issued by Rank One Computing—a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients—and is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app that powers Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.

Rank One’s face recognition has been bought by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners’ identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—the Navy’s police force—which purchased the company’s video tool, ROC Watch. Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away. Police departments across the country use its algorithms too, embedded in tools they buy from other vendors.

The license is the first known evidence of a business relationship between Meta and Rank One, and it offers a rare look at the kind of technology Meta is weighing as it considers face recognition for a mass-market consumer device. It also shows how thin the line has grown between the surveillance technology sold to law enforcement and the military and the consumer products sold to everyone else.

Increasingly, the same companies, and the same underlying algorithms, serve both.

The license Meta acquired authorizes use of Rank One's face recognition along with its liveness detection, which checks whether a camera is seeing a real person rather than a photo or mask. It supports up to 10 million facial templates and remains active. Code reviewed by WIRED shows that remnants of Rank One’s integration—the routines that load its license and initialize its software—remained in a version of Meta’s app that shipped this month, dormant, to millions of consumers, alongside the company’s own face-recognition system.

None of the face-recognition systems tied to Meta's smart glasses were ever active for users. Meta deleted them from the app entirely on June 5, a day after WIRED revealed that the company had quietly built an unreleased face-recognition system, internally called NameTag, into the Meta AI app—the companion software for its smart glasses, downloaded to more than 50 million phones. The system was dormant and could not be accessed by users.

Meta would say almost nothing about the arrangement, declining to answer WIRED's questions about its relationship with Rank One. Meta would not say why it licensed the software, when the relationship began, or whether it is ongoing.

Rank One declined to comment for this story.

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Rank One Computing was founded in 2015 by a group of engineers who had built face-recognition systems at the nonprofit research institute Noblis—work that included evaluating algorithms for a US intelligence research agency. The company went public on the Nasdaq in February.

Rank One's leadership is drawn from the senior ranks of law enforcement and intelligence. Its chief executive, B. Scott Swann, previously ran the FBI division that operates the bureau's biometric databases. Its board includes a former CIA deputy director for science and technology, a former head of the FBI's science and technology branch, and a former Pentagon official who stood up a multibillion-dollar special-capabilities office.

“There's a long history of military technologies becoming consumer products,” says Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official. “That's arguably the story of the internet.”

Rank One’s technology is already running in some notable places. The US Marshals Service has used a biometric identification kit built on Rank One's technology since 2021. In West Virginia, dozens of schools have used the software to screen faces at their entrances against the state's sex-offender registry, the company's CEO said in 2024. Its algorithm is also bundled inside products from DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina firm, and inside LexisNexis's Lumen platform, which lets police officers run face searches against state and regional image galleries and the FBI's national investigative database.

Like other face-recognition systems, Rank One's does not perform equally across demographic groups. In testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a version of the company's algorithm produced false matches at sharply different rates depending on a person's sex and country of birth, which NIST uses as a proxy for race. Error rates were lowest for people born in Eastern Europe and tended to run higher for women than for men.

There are few national rules governing face recognition in the US. Many states require police to get a warrant before accessing such data, and more are folding biometric protections into their general consumer-privacy laws each year, says Eric Null, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“But consumer-facing companies clearly crave access to high-powered facial recognition technology,” he says. “And without proper checks, the risks of this tech becoming a common consumer product are significant and largely unbounded.”

Meta Employees Absolutely Hate Mark Zuckerberg’s Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon

Paresh Dave, Maxwell Zeff — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:45:00 GMT

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s internal announcement on Friday about a “large” companywide AI hackathon next month quickly sparked frustration and disbelief among employees.

In internal messages seen by WIRED, some workers wrote that added responsibilities in the wake of recent mass layoffs at the tech giant had left them with little time to join such ancillary activities. Others said they felt discouraged from participating because of what they viewed as low morale and declining trust in management across the company.

“I’m literally preoccupied with keeping the lights on for my team,” one employee wrote on Friday. “I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so.”

In a post shared to Meta’s roughly 70,000 employees, Zuckerberg framed the hackathon as a way for staff to build camaraderie at a time of widespread internal unrest. Ime Archibong, a vice president of product management at Meta, later shared additional details about the event, which he said would take place from July 14 to July 16 and focus “exclusively on AI Innovation.”

Archibong’s post drew swift pushback from several employees, who responded with angry messages and sarcastic memes. “I’m not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore,” one employee wrote in a comment that drew more than 200 thumbs-up and heart reactions. “People are being asked to cover more work with less support while their colleagues get laid off, while also trying to avoid the risk of causing SEV1s [serious technical errors] with incautious AI use.”

The same employee alleged that hackathon efforts would not count toward performance evaluations, fueling frustration among the workers about the prospect of setting aside other projects to participate.

Dozens of people also reacted with laughs and thumbs-up to a meme inspired by the comedy film We’re the Millers, stating, “You all have the time for a hackathon?”

“I honestly don’t have the time to focus on this, and I’m expected to be 100% devoted” to regular work, another employee wrote. “I’ve participated in previous hackathons but this no longer feels like an option alongside pod sprints in my corner of the company.”

A third staffer called out what they described as “a disappointing change in culture” because “I don’t believe there is sufficient feeling of safety to spend time on hackathon innovations.”

Meta declined to comment for this story.

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Meta has long hosted internal hackathons, but two sources tell WIRED this is the first companywide one to take place since 8,000 people were laid off last month.

A Meta software engineering veteran responded to some of the employee complaints by saying that everyone is encouraged to participate. But the message still didn’t quite land. “Every org I know has super aggressive goals, with efficiency gains expected and significantly less staffing,” an employee commented back. “There’s less time for focusing on other axis.”

The hackathon was one of several initiatives Zuckerberg laid out on Friday to reenergize his workforce and address internal criticism about the recent layoffs and other concerns. He said budgets for team offsites would increase and that the concept of hot desking, or workers only in the office part of the time having to share desks, would be done away with in some offices.

Last year, some workers banded together to survey colleagues about the removal of their desks and the chaos and lost productivity they believe it caused, according to a person familiar with the efforts who sought anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. The group urged management to return to every employee having their own space. The layoffs appear to have opened up room, while leaving less time to hack.

The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco

Jonathan Weber — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:00:00 GMT

A decade ago, commuter buses attracted big protests in San Francisco. Years later, the city is still feeling the repercussions.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

Activists in San Francisco’s Mission District weren’t giving up easily. David Campos had taken the baton from Chris Daly as the city Supervisor leading the anti-gentrification advocates, who were anchored in a handful of nonprofit community groups. During the springtime festivities for Cinco de Mayo in 2015, Campos called for a moratorium on all new housing construction in the Mission, saying it was the only way to give the district “a fighting chance.”

The idea that new apartment buildings would push rents higher was—and is—a source of endless exasperation for housing advocates. Scott Wiener, who’d taken a more centrist path than Campos, was now on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and led the charge against the Mission moratorium, which was voted down twice. It was too drastic a step even for the progressive-leaning Board. But development in the district slowed dramatically in the face of all the political resistance: a proposed 10-story apartment building dubbed “the Monster in the Mission” by activists had become a symbol of the fight and was ultimately abandoned. (As of this writing it was being revived as an affordable housing project, though opposition remains, and no shovels have been turned.)

Yet the gentrification arguments weren’t only, or even mainly, about the rent. Nothing would show that better than the theatrical protests targeting what were universally known as the Google buses—or, more commonly in many circles, the “fucking Google buses.”

Cari Spivack, the mid-level Google employee who first created the company’s commuter shuttle program, never imagined she’d be sparking a yearslong political row over whether tech was destroying San Francisco’s soul. Her motivation was simple and personal: She was sick of sitting in traffic.

A designer by trade, Spivack had been working at the networking company 3Com in the early 2000s when she saw the simple elegance of Google’s website, then just a white screen with the Google logo, a box to type your query, and a button that said, “I’m feeling lucky.” Spivack thought its pure functionality was inspiring, and a friend of a friend connected her to a hiring manager at the company. She was brought on as a product manager, joining Google at a magical time when there were just a few hundred employees. It was a dream job—except for the 45-minute white-knuckle commute from her home in Bernal Heights to the Google building in Mountain View.

She tried taking Caltrain, the creaking, then-diesel-powered commuter railroad that connected Silicon Valley and the city, but with inconvenient stations and glacially slow and infrequent trains, it took forever. She tried carpooling, and that worked better, but the coordination was a constant hassle. “We’re all leaving at the same time going to the same place on the same road—I thought there has to be a better way,” she recounted later. A friend who worked at Genentech, the biotech pioneer based in the industrial city of South San Francisco, mentioned that the company had a bus that picked people up at the Glen Park BART station and dropped them off at the office. Maybe Google could do that?

“Google was the type of place where you saw the patterns of problems and just came up with solutions,” she says. The company had hired her, in fact, for that very mindset. She was a product manager on the engineering team with no background in engineering. But nobody quite knew what product management was anyway, and she could teach herself programming. She had the quality that was judged “Googley,” as the company would come to call it, and though a computer science degree from a prestigious university would later be all but required for many jobs, it wasn’t like that at the time. Employees were encouraged to think creatively and use 20 percent of their time for their own projects, which could include almost anything—even commuter buses.

“I was yapping about it at lunch with people and they were like, ‘Larry would love that idea,’” she recalled, referring to cofounder Larry Page. A few days later she mentioned it to him in the cafeteria line—the company still worked that way in 2004—and he said sure, figure it out. So she did, researching the cost of a bus, where it would stop, and trying to answer the critical question of whether anyone would actually ride it. Page liked the idea of reducing the company’s carbon footprint, Spivack says, though Sergey Brin was doubtful that people would be willing to leave their cars behind in the city.

Spivack sent a company-wide email to gauge interest, and when almost every employee who lived in San Francisco responded, she figured she’d at least have enough people for one bus. It would pick up at Glen Park BART and at a parking lot near Candlestick Park, and it would make two trips a day in each direction. The company gave her a month to prove the concept.

“I think we had 24 people at the start, and it just kept increasing and increasing and increasing, and we just kept going,” she recounts. Google liked to call everything a “beta test,” which Spivack saw as a wise way to avoid permanent commitments, but her initiative was clearly a winner.

“People started complaining because they lived in a different part of the city, and they’re like, ‘We’d love a stop here, we’d love a stop there.’” She had never envisioned the buses serving the heart of the city, but she dug into her new role as a traffic planner with gusto, researching neighborhoods and streets and possible bus routes and stops, and developing rules on the fly. “I had some things that were really important to me like, number one, the bus should never take a left turn at a traffic light,” she says, lest they provoke delays and angry drivers.

It wasn’t long before some Google engineers volunteered to put wireless on the buses—a novel idea at the time, when Wi-Fi was still emerging and didn’t exist on moving vehicles. Management liked the idea that everyone could keep working. The buses also chipped at the problem of not enough parking in Mountain View, which would become a major motivator later on as Google’s head count soared.

Spivack, who was still doing the shuttle work on her 20-percent time, in 2006 would “roll off ” the project, as they say at tech companies, and a full-time manager would take over. Meanwhile, other big Silicon Valley companies that had a lot of employees living in the city, including Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo, began to spin up their own shuttle services. By the middle of the next decade there’d be many hundreds of tech company buses serving the city, carrying 10,000 people a day.

The commuter shuttles had proliferated in the late 2000s without much fuss. The city was mired in the Great Recession, and with unemployment topping 10 percent and so many mortgages upside down, people had bigger concerns. By the early 2010s, though, it looked like 1999 tech mania all over again, and the buses seemed to be everywhere, with Google deploying the largest fleet. Operated by private firms like Bauer's Intelligent Transportation, many of them were luxury coaches, sometimes double-decker, much larger than city buses, and they seemed out of place, appearing as outsize apparitions as they crawled across narrow, sloping neighborhood streets, physical symbols of the power of the tech industry and the priority it seemed to enjoy. Since one bus equals dozens of cars, residents in a very environmentally conscious city might have been expected to embrace them, or at least tolerate an efficient form of transit.

That logic did not carry the day.

The complaints began in Noe Valley, an unassuming but increasingly upscale enclave of old Victorians and low-rise apartments just west of the Mission. The tech shuttles, usually black, or white and gray, sometimes used the public bus stops, but they were not for the public. Their patrons stood conspicuously in lines on quiet sidewalks in their Allbirds and jeans, staring at their phones—walking symbols of a new reality in which rich, young professionals, most of them white, were pushing families and the working poor from their homes. Even otherwise prosperous people who couldn’t afford million-dollar homes or $5,000 rents were feeling the squeeze from what had come to feel like an invasion.

Noe Valley wasn’t hip, by any stretch, not like the Mission or certain corners of SoMa, but it had become popular with young families and was also convenient for commuting south to Silicon Valley. As the shuttles proliferated, so did the complaints. Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represented the neighborhood, led an effort to encourage the buses to use the bigger commercial arteries.

That would quickly backfire: Now the buses were even more visible, and they began using busier city bus stops along already congested commercial corridors, sometimes interfering with Muni service and further irritating neighbors. The city’s Municipal Transportation Agency, which was responsible for traffic as well as trains and buses, tried to engage the companies on possible solutions, such as adjusting routes and stops, but wasn’t making much headway.

Gillian Gillett, who was in charge of transportation policy for Mayor Ed Lee, got a call one morning in the fall of 2013 from a colleague at the MTA, asking her to join a meeting with the tech companies. Gillett, tall and blond, was a data analyst and a commanding presence with intricate knowledge of the issues and little time for posturing. She was often impatient with the city’s lack of tech savvy, and specifically its lack of interest in new tools and new sources of data that would very obviously be helpful in solving transportation problems. She could be withering in her criticism of unreliable politicians and incompetent city bureaucrats, but at the same time was personally offended that attacking tech workers was now part of the playbook for local progressives. She was a techie herself after all, by profession and disposition, even if she’d gone to college at St. John’s in Maryland, a bastion of the liberal arts.

On this day, though, it was the tech companies that were drawing Gillett’s ire.

Google and Facebook and the rest did not need the city’s permission to run the shuttles, since private buses are regulated by the state. And they hadn’t asked. But from a transportation planning point of view there were obvious benefits to working closely with the city. If the MTA knew the shuttle schedules and routes, it could coordinate with the public buses, adjust traffic-signal cadences and move stops around to better keep the traffic flowing. The bus fleets were also collecting a lot of data on congestion and speeds on city streets—information gold for a data analyst like Gillett.

Carli Paine, a friendly MTA staffer with a master’s degree in city planning, had been charged with trying to coordinate with the tech companies and stem the growing number of complaints and conflicts with Muni. About 50 people from the various companies were now gathered in the big conference room on the third floor of the MTA building. Paine was politely trying to explain, again, why the city needed them to share their bus routes and schedules, but she wasn’t getting anywhere. The firms had sent government relations representatives, whose jobs were essentially to refuse anything that wasn’t mandatory, and they were stonewalling; the law said they could mostly do what they wanted, and that’s what they were going to do.

When the Facebook representative began lecturing about how sharing bus schedules would be an invasion of privacy for the people on board—“What if one of the buses was attacked by a terrorist?” she asked—Gillett had heard enough.

“I stood up and said, ‘Hey, I’m from the mayor’s office. Are you kidding me?’”

She held up the latest issue of WIRED magazine, which featured a map of the bus routes, cleverly derived from the social media posts of the Google and Facebook employees riding them. “Are you kidding me?” she demanded again. “Everyone knows where your stops are. Politicians campaign at them, right? Recruiters try to poach employees from other companies at the same stop, right? You’ve got these really big buses, right? It’s not intellectual property we’re talking about here. And you’ve got this very kind civil servant here who is trying to help work this out for everyone, including you.”

Then she shut the meeting down, just 15 minutes in.

“You’re all going to leave because this is a bullshit meeting,” she recalls saying. “You will not meet with the city until you come back with your engineers and your transportation planners.” The meeting dispersed, and a few minutes later she got a text summoning her to the mayor’s office. “What did you do?” Ed Lee demanded. “You just pissed off every tech company in San Francisco.” She explained, and he told her to go home for the day. She retreated to her apartment in the Mission, not sure if she still had a job.

The following Monday, as she was walking to Ritual Coffee, there was a commotion at the intersection of Valencia and 24th Street. Protesters, some of them in clown suits, were blocking a bus and pranking those on board by pretending they were city inspectors and handing out citations. Led by an art collective called Heart of the City, the protesters delayed the bus for about 20 minutes, while celebrating it all on social media. Gillett’s phone buzzed. It was the mayor: “Come see me now.” It seemed the companies were suddenly anxious to meet. Lee told Gillett to get it done. “Within a week we had a meeting that was completely different,” she said later with a wry smile.

The protests, though, had only just begun.

Meta Changed Its Speech Rules. Then Threats Against Politicians Skyrocketed

David Gilbert — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time.

Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.

The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.

The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta.

The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say.

To assess the impact of these rule changes, CCDH’s researchers chose 100 members of the House of Representatives made up of the 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the most followers on Facebook. Then the researchers scraped nearly 8 million comments on Facebook posts made by those lawmakers in the six months before and after Meta’s policy changes.

The researchers used an AI system trained to identify comments in the dataset that were likely to violate Meta’s current policies in three areas: violence and incitement, hateful conduct, or bullying and harassment.

Comments that violated Meta’s policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta’s rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

“We regularly issue public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025,” a Meta spokesperson tells WIRED, adding that the company could not address the report’s claims directly without seeing the research in its entirety. WIRED did provide a list of the abusive comments cited in the report, but Meta did not comment on these. Hours before the report was published, many of the examples were deleted from Facebook.

“When companies reduce oversight in areas like violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be any surprise to see those harms increase,” Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah and a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said in a statement to CCDH.

The data collected by CCDH researchers is echoed in Meta’s own transparency reports from 2025, which show how the company cut its proactive content moderation enforcement by roughly half in the months following its policy changes. “The surge in abuse and the collapse in enforcement track one another almost exactly,” the report’s authors write.

While Meta claimed its decision to relax rules around abusive content was driven by free speech principles, experts say that extremist content like the comments covered in this report are the type of content that has been shown to be the most engaging on social media platforms.

“Threats and abuse perform well, as do the responses to the threats and abuse,” says Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board under President Joe Biden. “They keep users scrolling and keep eyeballs on ads. By divesting from content moderation, platforms are amplifying abusive content, saving on the ‘expense’ of keeping their platform safe, and falling into political lockstep with an administration that claims content moderation is censorship.”

The rising threats against lawmakers have real-world implications. The Capitol Police cited increased threats to politicians in March when seeking a budget increase. Former US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was the lawmaker in the report who faced the most abusive comments, referenced threats to her life as one of the reasons she stepped away from public life.

“We've seen a horrifying trend of political violence, from the latest attack on the president to the murder of Charlie Kirk to the assassination of Melissa Hortman and her husband,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, tells WIRED. “Lawmakers are canceling town halls; they're moving them off online. Election officials are leaving the job. Representatives are saying in public the fear of being targeted shapes how they vote. I don't see how publishing, amplifying, and failing to enforce your own rules against this kind of harassment, threats, and identity-based hate can in any way be portrayed as a moral act. I think it takes incredible levels of duplicity to claim that."

Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones

Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:28:00 GMT

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company's software.

Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.

The discovery of NameTag in the live Meta AI app shows that Meta had begun shipping face-recognition code to users' phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still “thinking through.” In April, Meta said if it were to utilize face recognition, it wouldn't be rolled out without first taking "a very thoughtful approach." But WIRED found that as early as January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people.

Though not yet enabled, NameTag sits inside a Meta AI companion app that's been downloaded over 50 million times and is necessary for use of key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban and Oakley models. If activated, it will transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone—a database that’s currently configured to receive updates from Meta. Recognized faces will trigger notifications, while the rest are cropped, indexed, and saved to a folder marked “pending.”

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NameTag would revive a type of technology Meta said it had sunsetted in 2021, when the company announced it would delete more than a billion faceprints belonging to Facebook users following years of controversy over its photo-tagging system. Meta ultimately paid $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by Illinois users and, in 2024, agreed to a separate $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over allegations it had unlawfully collected biometric data from users.

Its renewed efforts arrive amid mounting opposition to consumer-level face recognition, which privacy advocates argue will give anyone from stalkers to immigration agents easy access to a dangerous technology. Internal Meta documents published by The New York Times in February showed the company had planned to roll out the feature during a “dynamic political environment,” when Meta believed its biggest critics would be preoccupied.

Three AI models powering NameTag have already been deployed from Meta's servers and now reside on its customers' phones, according to WIRED’s analysis, which was independently reproduced by outside experts. One model detects faces, one crops them, and a third encodes them into biometric data.

Only traces of the user interface are currently present, hinting at how the feature may ultimately work. A May version of the app rebrands the feature for users as “Connections,” inviting them to “remember the people you met.” It remains unclear whose faces will be included in the system's recognition database, how those profiles are created, or how many people could ultimately be identifiable through it.

WIRED shared its findings with two outside security researchers who separately examined the app and reproduced key aspects of the analysis: Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, and an independent security and privacy researcher who goes by the pseudonym Buchodi and has spent more than a decade reverse engineering consumer software and surveillance technologies.

“The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” says Quintin. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”

Buchodi ran additional tests on the recognition pipeline. (Read their technical analysis here.) To see if the matching system worked, Buchodi added a single faceprint to the app’s gallery, taken from the deceased French philosopher Michel Foucault. After triggering NameTag with Foucault’s image, the app produced a notification: “Person recognized.”

“The main components of a face-recognition feature are already in Meta's companion app,” Buchodi says. “Not many pieces stand between this and a working feature.”

In April, more than 70 advocacy groups—including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Fight for the Future—demanded Meta scrap NameTag, warning it would let stalkers and abusers silently identify strangers in public. “Our competitors offer this type of face-recognition product, we do not,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED at the time. “If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out.”

Privacy advocates argue that by embedding face recognition into a mass-market wearable platform, Meta could normalize a capability it previously pulled back amid privacy concerns.

“You're setting norms and standards by putting technology into the ecosystem,” Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official who worked on privacy reviews for the company’s AR and VR products, says of Meta’s role in the wearable tech industry. “I don't know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this.”

"Regardless of any sensational reporting, the facts are simple: We've said before we're exploring these types of features, and what you're seeing is just evidence of that exploration," says Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels. "Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a central face database."

WIRED’s code review shows the NameTag system is currently designed to pull faceprints from Meta’s servers and store them on user devices.

Meta’s earlier system, announced by Facebook in 2010, analyzed photos and suggested tags for people who appeared in users’ images. It quickly scaled to more than a billion users and became one of the largest consumer face-recognition systems ever deployed.

The technology drew scrutiny almost immediately. European regulators and privacy advocates in the US questioned its legality as early as 2011, and there were concerns over whether users had meaningfully consented to the creation of biometric data. In 2019, Meta paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to settle a wider privacy case that included face-recognition concerns.

In November 2021, Meta announced it would shut down the system and delete the face templates it had built, citing growing concerns about the role of face recognition in society. But the decision was never understood internally as a permanent retreat, says Jerome, who joined Reality Labs in mid-2021. “There was always this tension of, well, when do we roll back out face recognition?”

In 2025, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times, Meta planned to debut face recognition on its smart glasses to attendees of a conference for the blind before making it available to the general public. It never did. But the technology answers a real demand: Existing assistive devices already let blind users identify faces they have personally enrolled, and a 2018 study of blind users by Cornell Tech and Facebook researchers found that every participant called recognizing people an important daily task.

Meta did not respond to questions about which users might be identifiable through NameTag; whether it intends for photos, faceprints, or other data generated by the system to ever be transmitted back to its servers; or whether the company has plans to let users opt in rather than out. EssilorLuxottica, which manufactures the Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses with Meta, did not respond to a request for comment.

Woodrow Hartzog, a privacy law professor at Boston University, says even opt-in protection—should Meta eventually offer it—would be thin. Consent, he says, can often be tied to a job, a benefit, or access to a service. Framing privacy as a matter of personal choice is advantageous to businesses, placing no meaningful limits on collection while letting companies claim users are in control.

“We know that the more these systems are deployed, the more people come to see them as unexceptional,” Hartzog says. “And the more we come to see them as unexceptional and routine, the more people tend to start to take their moral cues about whether it's desirable or good to have your face scanned. That's just human psychology.”

Enclayve Is a Drab Black Box for Your Private Group Chats

Boone Ashworth — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:30:00 GMT

Enclayve is a private social service hosted on a physical device. Plug it in, connect to Wi-Fi, and the device acts like a central server for a social network that can accommodate up to a few hundred people. Only the person with the device and the people they invite can log in and see what is shared there.

The device is a little rectangular plastic box, smaller than a credit card. It costs $129, but only one person needs to own it, and they can invite others in. (They’ll also have to download the app.) Once allowed in, the app looks like a bare-bones social media site. People can post in groups to chat and share photos. All messages and media sent between people in a group are stored on the device, which comes with a 32-GB microSD card that can be swapped out as needed. There is no subscription cost, no ads, no in-app purchases, and no data tracking by Enclayve, the company says.

Enclayve is meant to be a rebuttal to social sites like Facebook and X. Instead of having to post everything publicly and tacitly allow a company to suck up all data about your interactions on its platform, Enclayve stores all that information on a physical device and encrypts everything. It is the latest in a lineage of privacy-focused devices that aim to help users control their own data, like security cameras that keep footage local or hardware firewalls that protect you online.

Courtesy of Enclayve

David Chura, CEO of Enclayve, is a former director at Northrop Grumman and father of two. He says he was inspired to build the product in 2020 after watching Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg make some unconvincing privacy promises in testimony to US Congress.

“They were so underpowered it made me believe that there's never going to be legislation that can actually address issues in social media,” Chura says. “Consumers need to be able to protect themselves.”

Chura says that while Enclayve’s focus is a private social media service, there were initially three distinct versions of the device: one designed to be a wallet for cryptocurrency and another for NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. As the crypto economy collapsed and the idea of paying real money for digital “art” lost popularity, those deals fell through, and Enclayve became marketed solely as a social device.

Enclayve launched in March. The company positions its product like a group app for families like Family Album. Enclayve wants to take that a step further and keep everything everyone sends on its platform safe in its physical box. Device owners can create separate groups and topics and choose who gets invited to what. It feels like a stripped-down version of WhatsApp’s Communities feature, or even a very simple Slack workspace.

The app’s user interface, where users will spend most of their time, has limited features. Users can’t directly message a person outside the group or share more than one photo at a time. There was a single reaction emoji when I tested it on Android—the Like button—though Chura says more emoji reactions have been added to the iOS version of the app.

Privacy aside, it may be a hard sell to get people on the platform. The first thing you have to do is the hardest: convince the people you love to download a new app. I hooked up an Enclayve and invited my family to join, but my parents struggled to get access because the share links I sent them didn’t work properly. (My Dad still hasn’t gotten in.) When I post something, my brother mostly just sends extremely close-up pictures of his face and tells me I need to snort my vitamins. Ultimately, we all just went back to the regular group chat, and everyone still texts me through their usual channels. Your mileage may vary depending on how many people you can talk into joining the service, but the interface does not feel very inviting.

Courtesy of Enclayve

Chura’s hope is for Enclayve to expand into a peer-to-peer network that supports much larger groups of people. I ask Chura about content restrictions—whether Enclayve can do anything to monitor the content people share. Does he worry about people using this product for illegal things? Chura cuts right to the chase; he’s gotten these questions before.

“People have asked me directly, ‘Isn't this a great thing for child pornography or human trafficking?’” Chura says. “Privacy is a pretty powerful technology when you really can enforce it. Every technology can be used inappropriately and appropriately. We can't control the intent of people.”

A section on the Enclayve website called Child Safety acknowledges the possibility for bad actors—creeps, weirdos, predators—to use the device. Chura says the company will do anything it needs to do to comply with law enforcement in such an investigation. But ultimately, he says that his company will never really know what’s on people’s devices.

“It's like asking a gun manufacturer, ‘Can you make sure no one shoots you with this?’ I mean, no, you can't,” Chura says. “It's like asking Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Can you make sure there's no child trafficking on Facebook?’ But we know those products have incredible positives too. So that's what we have to get to.”

Meta Copies Snapchat’s Homework Again With ‘Plus’ Features for Instagram and Facebook

Reece Rogers — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:09:00 GMT

Meta announced new upcoming subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp this week. Instagram isn’t going behind a paywall, no. Rather, users will now be able to pay $4 a month for extra features, like seeing who rewatched your story post or pinning more posts to the top of your profile. Instagram Plus, Facebook Plus ($4 a month), and WhatsApp Plus ($3 a month) will roll out globally sometime this summer.

These “Plus” plans are an attempt by Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to diversify how it makes money from users. Meta is also doing what Meta does best with this move: mimicking other social media platforms’ successes—specifically, Snapchat.

“Loving husband, father of four boys, VP Product @ Meta” reads Evan Spiegel’s tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn profile. Spiegel, the cofounder and CEO of Snap, has never actually worked at Meta, though his social media platform has directly inspired at least some existing features on Instagram. After Instagram launched Stories in 2016, then-CEO Kevin Systrom didn’t mince words about how his platform was sometimes iterating on Snapchat features, telling TechCrunch that “they deserve all the credit” for the format of Stories.

In 2017, Snap launched a “Maps” tool where users could opt in and see the pinpoint location of where all of their friends were based on when they last opened the app. Instagram launched a very similar “Maps” feature just last year, where users could track the location of friends who chose to share their GPS data.

And while IG’s recently launched “Instants” app, with its ephemeral, unfiltered snaps, is more like the once-popular BeReal than anything, disappearing photo messages are totally Snapchat’s main lane.

“As we shared earlier this year, we're testing and scaling new subscriptions that provide deeper, more enhanced ways to use our apps and AI glasses,” says Maria Cubeta, a Meta spokesperson, over email. “So far, we’ve been testing subscription features for people to enhance how they express themselves and connect on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, like profile customization, stories insights, and super reactions.” She says this is just the start of the larger “Meta One” umbrella of subscription offerings, which will eventually include different, more expensive tiers catering toward businesses and creators as well as users who want extra access to Meta AI.

At launch, Instagram Plus will have the most extra features, from additional pins on your profile and unique bio fonts to creating siloed audiences for your Story posts and “Super Heart” reaction buttons. Facebook Plus will mainly allow you to control and customize your experience with Story posts, like rewatch insights. WhatsApp Plus will include more pinned chats, visual customizations, and premium stickers.

These subscription plans are simply history repeating itself. Snapchat dropped a $4 a month plan, called Snapchat+, back in 2022. It offered users access to exclusive features in the app and expanded over the few years, adding more options as well as AI tools. In February, Snapchat announced that this style of subscription plan helped the company achieve a “$1 billion annualized revenue run rate” in direct payments with over 25 million current subscribers around the world. (Despite being a font of feature inspiration, everything isn’t rosy at Snapchat, as the company struggles to turn a profit.)

So, even down to the Plus naming convention, Meta seems to be heavily inspired by Snapchat once again. I would expect nothing less from the company that renamed itself during the metaverse fad. Following trends is Meta’s modus operandi. Keep an eye out for what Snapchat does next for a sneak peek at what Meta might do in a few years.

You Can Get Some of Your Nudes Removed From the Internet Under a New Law

Maddy Varner — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:30:00 GMT

Starting on May 19, tech platforms have to provide a way for people to report nonconsensual intimate images and videos, or NCII, uploaded to their platforms. The new requirement is thanks to the Take It Down Act, a US law backed by First Lady Melania Trump that passed last year with bipartisan support.

The Take It Down Act applies broadly to a range of apps and online services, including social media and gaming platforms, according to business guidance published by the Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for enforcing platforms’ compliance with the law.

WIRED reached out to 14 companies that disclosed federal lobbying spending on the act to ask whether they believed they are subject to the law and, if so, how people could submit a takedown request.

Several company spokespeople were quick to say their companies supported the legislation, but they took additional time to explain how people could actually file a takedown request. One assured WIRED that their platform offered a secure reporting form, but they did not provide a link to the form in question until after WIRED followed up multiple times. Two companies provided links to support pages that appear to have been updated after WIRED reached out. At least two host their forms on third-party websites, potentially making it difficult for people to search for the form themselves. Others said they did not plan on launching their reporting forms until the day the law went into effect. Companies were given a year between the passage of the act and the date it became enforceable to set up their takedown systems and develop request portals.

A spokesperson for T-Mobile said that the company supported the act but that it doesn’t operate the types of online platforms the act applies to and that its core business is providing wireless and broadband services. (Broadband services are explicitly excluded in the act.)

Some companies did not respond to WIRED’s repeated outreach at all, including “First Buddy” Elon Musk’s X Corp., which garnered international scrutiny earlier this year after its AI chatbot Grok generated and posted thousands of nonconsensual images of women in various states of undress at users’ prompting. Verizon also did not respond.

The FTC did not respond to a request for comment. However, FTC guidelines say that platforms have to make it easy for people to submit removal requests. (Disclosure: The author of this story previously worked for the FTC.)

“The reporting piece of this is one of the most important pieces” of the Take It Down Act, says Jennifer King, a fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “And it's the thing that the companies I think often overlook.”

King points out that many people who might want to report nonconsensually shared nudes or deepfakes of themselves might be teenagers, who aren’t necessarily aware of their rights under the law or can’t easily understand the legalese written by compliance professionals included in these takedown request forms.

King says, “A lot of trouble with these types of reporting forms is that they don’t put any resources into testing them–they don’t test them with younger users. They probably don’t test them at all.”

How a Takedown Request Works

Regardless of the platform, the Take It Down Act has a few basic requirements for what information needs to be included in a takedown request, says James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech.

At minimum, a takedown request has to include a way for the platform to locate the content, such as a link, and a statement explaining that it was not uploaded consensually. The request also has to include a signature either from the person depicted in the content or someone authorized to act on their behalf, and a way to contact that person.

Once someone submits a takedown request, a platform has up to 48 hours to determine whether it is valid. If it decides that it is, then it has to remove both the content reported and any identical copies.

Several larger platforms say they use an industry tool called StopNCII, which uses matching algorithms to identify abusive images and videos and is maintained by a British nonprofit. People can open cases directly on the tool’s website to add to what the tool flags. Reddit, TikTok, Snap, Microsoft Bing, and Meta’s social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are all listed as participants on the tool’s website.

Though many major platforms have dedicated forms to help guide the submission process, Alejandro Cuevas, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy who studied the impact of initial passage of the law on deepfake communities, has observed that some sites offer only an email address for people to submit takedown requests.

Cuevas says in those cases, keeping good documentation, including links to the offending content, is especially important, because there’s a concern that if “submitters fail to just do one of these things, that would be a shield for the company potentially to not comply with the request or to delay it or to dillydally.”

Microsoft

To file a takedown request for some Microsoft products, including Bing Search and OneDrive, Microsoft has a form titled “Report a Concern.” People first have to identify the service the content is on and share a link to it before identifying their “Concern type” as “Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery.”

Brad Smith, the vice chair and president of Microsoft, says in a statement that “President Trump’s signing of the Take It Down Act provides essential tools to prevent the misuse of technology and protect individuals from digital harm.”

Google (Including YouTube)

A Google spokesperson tells WIRED that the company endorsed the act and has been investing in policies and tools to stymy nonconsensual intimate imagery since 2015. Google has a dedicated takedown request form where people can submit up to 10 links at a time, and has a separate form where people can submit YouTube-specific takedown requests.

Reddit spokesperson Jen Molina says that Reddit was an early supporter of the Take It Down Act and that it has “updated our systems to ensure full compliance with the Act’s specific requirements as they go into effect.”

Logged-in users can report individual posts, and Reddit added a reporting form and help center article to its website on May 19.

Snap

A Snap company spokesperson says in a statement to WIRED: “We’ve established processes for Snapchatters and other individuals to report this type of content. We continue to evolve these systems as part of our broader safety efforts, including investing in tools and technologies to proactively detect and take action on unwanted nudes and similar imagery shared without permission.”

The spokesperson shared a link to a help page that the company appears to have updated to include references to the act after WIRED’s outreach. (Following publication, a Snap spokesperson said the update is “unrelated” to its communication with WIRED.)

Snap has a general “Report Account or Content” form where people can select either “They’re actually sharing my nudes/intimate imagery without my permission” or “They’re threatening to leak my nudes/intimate imagery without my permission” as a sub-option of the “They leaked/are threatening to leak my nudes or other intimate imagery (real or AI-generated)” option in the “Report the violation” dropdown.

A LinkedIn spokesperson says the platform has “zero tolerance for nonconsensual intimate imagery.” Logged-in users can file a request by clicking the three dots at the top right of any post and select the “Nonconsensual intimate imagery” option.

Starting May 19, the spokesperson adds, anyone, even people without accounts, will be able to submit removal requests through a Help Center form, and that every report would be reviewed by a human.

TikTok

TikTok US spokesperson Mahsau Cullinane says that the company has a zero-tolerance policy for NCII abuse and was an early supporter of the Take It Down Act. People can make reports through a form that it also links to in its in-app reporting tool (which is accessible from every post through the Share button.)

Epic Games

Cat McCormack, a spokesperson for Epic Games, says that people can submit takedown requests through its illegal content reporting form tool, which she says will be updated with additional fields to comply with the Take It Down Act. Epic Games also has a guide on its website explaining how people can file takedown requests.

To submit a takedown request through the form, people should select either "Cyber violence" or "Cyber violence against women" for the "What type of content or behavior are you reporting?" question and then select either "Non-consensual (intimate) material sharing, including (image-based) sexual abuse (excluding content depicting minors)" or "Non-consensual sharing of material containing deepfake or similar technology using a third party's features (excluding content depicting minors)" options.

Roblox

In-app, users can submit removal requests through the Report Abuse menu item or through a reporting form in its help center. At the time of publication, the page had not been updated with Take It Down Act–specific information.

“Roblox proudly supported the passage of the Take It Down Act, and we are fully aligned with its objectives,” says Nicky Jackson Colaco, Roblox’s global head of public policy. “While our platform does not allow users to exchange images or videos through chat, to help protect individuals from nonconsensual explicit imagery, we are introducing dedicated reporting capabilities.”

A spokesperson confirmed that users can upload images and videos to both the developer forums and as part of experiences, which are 3D worlds that users create and play together.

Bumble

Elymae Cedeno, Bumble’s VP of trust and customer experience, says that the dating app takes NCII “very seriously and supported the passage of the Take It Down Act.” Anyone can submit a takedown request through a form included in its help center, and Cedeno says reports are reviewed promptly and handled “with urgency and care, prioritizing safety and privacy throughout the process.”

Proton Drive

A spokesperson for Proton AG, the Swiss company known for the encrypted email service Proton Mail, says that the company “is committed to user safety and has long standing policies and functionality in place to allow users to report abuse or request content removals.”

Though the act’s requirements don’t apply to email services like Proton Mail, the Proton spokesperson says that there’s “legal ambiguity” about whether the act applies to its file storage service, Proton Drive. Because of this, Proton now offers a way to submit takedown requests via a form.

Updated May 19, 2026, at 10 am ET: Added additional comment from a Snap spokesperson and links to Reddit and Epic Games pages for assisting people in removing applicable images.

Updated May 22, 2026, at 3 pm ET: Added details about Proton Drive.

It Sure Seems Like These Instagram Ads Want You to Do Cocaine

Miles Klee — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:30:00 GMT

Big money and powerful interests have entirely rebranded drugs like cannabis, mushrooms, and ketamine in the 21st century.

Today, millions of Americans can buy their pot legally in places that resemble Apple Stores or take powerful psychoactive substances in plush therapeutic settings. Cocaine, however, has yet to see the kind of tech-fueled makeover that changed the public perception of those drugs—but these luxury products in my Instagram feed may just give it a glow-up.

Though you might not instantly see them as drug paraphernalia, on closer inspection, many of these products are offering to serve a need that no real person has ever had. Consider, for example, this video demonstrating use of a SLYD pouch, a small leather pocket with a magnetic clasp. The ad shows a person loading a small quantity of a powdered substance into the $39 pouch, and a caption exhorts the viewer: “Stop using that sketchy bag for your electrolytes.”

The visual comparison with a resealable plastic bag containing whitish electrolyte power should make it clear what is seemingly being suggested here. The custom inscription of the word “BAG,” common drug slang, on the leather sachet dispels any lingering uncertainty. Because while the world has never wanted for a convenient way to carry electrolytes around in one’s pocket, a miniature wallet for cocaine—or other powder drugs like ketamine and MDMA—does have some consumer appeal.

It turns out that such accessories are widely (albeit stealthily) marketed on Instagram. An online store called Magic Items sells its own take on the small magnetized leather pouch; it’s called a Wildcard, comes in various sizes priced from $60 to $100, and is stamped with the logo of a rabbit in a jester hat. The company’s Instagram page also features a demonstration with electrolyte powder, though some of the comments on the post give the game away: “Will a dog still be able to smell through it?” asked one prospective customer. Another post shows a Wildcard next to a plastic dime bag, advertising it as “anti clog” and “luxury,” whereas the more common means of carrying “electrolytes” is “hard to open” and “single use.”

“In 2022, something changed,” reads a page on Magic Items’ website explaining the invention of the Wildcard. “Everyone wanted to be out again—at parties, on rooftops, in the desert—feeling good with music thumping and friends nearby. The world was alive, and everything just wanted to work better. We all needed a water-tight container that was low profile and stylish, but there was no great option available.”

A similar brand, FattyPack, has drawn comments from Instagram users observing that its product is well-suited for holding drugs, and recently posted a demo on how to attach a key to the bag—a useful tool if you’re going to be scooping powder out of it.

The makers of the SLYD pouch did not respond to a request for comment. Via Instagram DM, a representative for Magic Items denied that the company is selling drug paraphernalia or promoting the use of illicit substances, both of which would violate Meta’s advertising policies and guidelines on restricted goods and services. “It is a multi-use bag for perishables,” the rep said of the Wildcard. In an Instagram DM, a FattyPack representative says: “Since we don’t promote our product for drug use, we’ve had zero issues with Meta ads. While some customers may use it that way, we leave that to individual interpretation.”

Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin tells WIRED that it is investigating a number of the brand accounts mentioned in this article. The company said it routinely conducts sweeps in order to crack down on users who violate their policies on illicit drugs.

The various mini-wallet manufacturers have some plausible deniability when it comes to their leather goods. SLYD, for example, mostly touts its sleeve as a convenient carrying case for nicotine pouches. But the makers of high-tech nasal straws are a little more out in the open. First, there’s Bumpskē, a stainless-steel gadget that wouldn’t look out of place in a James Bond film, touted as a superior straw for the snorting of cacao. (A supposed European club craze for raw cacao “snuff” in the late 2010s led one enterprising Florida man to debut a snortable “Coco Loko” powder in 2017, though you can be the judge of whether this trend ever took off.)

Bumpskē’s Instagram page presented the device as a luxury essential for music festival and club settings, complete with an LED light at the tip to facilitate use in darker environments. Aside from having “bump” in the name (a common term for a small dose of cocaine), the account, which was removed after WIRED reached out to Meta for comment, was packed with not-so-subtle allusions to the drug, from a scene in Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland where Alice sticks her face into a giant mound of sugar to images of the device set against scenes of ice or snow.

Then you have Snogo, which sells a wide range of spring-loaded designer straws that can be worn as necklaces, somewhat recalling Sarah Michelle Gellar’s cross pendant coke spoon in 1999’s Cruel Intentions. They even sell a few all-in-one products that function as both a “bump straw” and carrying case for your, um, cacao. (As with Bumpskē, the website and social media copy indicate that the straw is intended to be used solely for the consumption of cacao powder.) Snogo also has clubwear available, including a bedazzled $110 ballcap with special pockets for stashing your straw and money.

On its Instagram account, also deleted after WIRED contacted Meta for comment, Snogo cultivated a flashy neon nightlife aesthetic and pitches its products as part of your “festival survival kit.” There were regular references to snow, along with promises that a Snogo straw will make you “the life of the party” thanks to the “inherent decadence” of its design and hashtags like “#discreetbumps.”

Rachel Froehlich, executive customer care manager at Snogo, tells WIRED that the brand works to “ensure our advertising, branding, and product messaging comply with applicable platform policies and advertising guidelines.” She adds that Snogo products are meant “for use with legal substances such as cacao and other lawful powdered products, and our marketing is designed accordingly.”

Both Snogo and Bumpskē maintained brand accounts on TikTok, though their reach on the platform was more limited than on Instagram—Bumpskē had just two followers on the platform. TikTok has a policy against marketing prohibited goods, and the accounts were removed after WIRED contacted the company for comment.

Because Meta’s ad guidelines prohibit the encouragement of “the consumption of illicit, recreational, or other potentially unsafe drugs, products, or supplements,” even something like the “post-party recovery” drink Soft Landings could potentially run into trouble depending on how the company pitches the beverage on Instagram. Most of the brand’s descriptions of a “bender” or all-night rager followed by a rough morning are vague, but many of its posts appear to nod at drug use. One of its taglines—“Love the sesh, hate the comedown?”—invokes common British slang for drinking and doing drugs.

A Soft Landings spokeswoman explicitly references club drugs in one Instagram video. “When you take molly, it drains your brain’s battery to zero,” she explains, using the colloquial name for MDMA. “That empty, foggy, terrible feeling—that’s the comedown.” She goes on to claim that Soft Landings “recharges you overnight.” The caption on the video asks: “Big night on the [pill emoji] this weekend?”

Reached for comment as to whether Meta’s moderation team had ever directly communicated with Soft Landings about its Instagram ads, a company representative declined to discuss the matter and requested that WIRED not include their product in this article.

Still, it appears that Meta won’t necessarily nail you right away for this sort of marketing, even if you pay to push customizable nose straws and dime-bag alternatives into users’ feeds. You may need to buy your cocaine and MDMA in person, but on Instagram, the high-end accoutrements for the party life are rarely more than a click away.

5/15/26, 1:16 PM EDT: WIRED updated the story to note product accounts removed by TikTok.

A Kid With a Fake Mustache Tricked an Online Age-Verification Tool

Fernanda González — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:24:00 GMT

Meta is beefing up its age-verification mechanisms with an AI system that analyzes images and videos on Instagram and Facebook for “visual cues,” such as height and bone structure, to identify and delete accounts of users under the age of 13. The company announced the move amid a wave of cases in which hundreds of children have managed to evade social network access restrictions, even through simple tricks such as drawing on a mustache.

The new approach is part of a series of measures Meta adopted as part of an AI-based security strategy designed to correct the limitations of traditional methods, which rely heavily on self-reported age. With this change, the company seeks to reduce the ease with which minors access platforms that, in theory, are restricted to them.

In a press release, Meta explained that it is implementing several tools to identify contextual indicators that allow estimating a person's age. This process includes the analysis of posts, comments, bios, and descriptions, with special attention to references related to school years or birthday celebrations—elements that can offer clues about the real age of the person who manages the account.

These tools are in addition to automated analysis techniques aimed at detecting physical traits from imagery shared to Meta's social platforms. These include characteristics such as height and bone structure. Meta is careful to stipulate that this system is not face recognition, as it does not seek to identify specific individuals in images or videos. Instead, the company notes that, “by combining these visual insights with our analysis of text and interactions, we can significantly increase the number of underage accounts we identify and remove.”

If, based on these elements, Meta suspects that an account is managed by a child under 13, it will be suspended. The user will have to revalidate their age using the procedures established by the company to regain access; otherwise, the profile will be permanently deleted.

Meta also announced that it will expand the scope of its technology to detect users between the ages of 13 and 15 and automatically assign them teen accounts. This type of profile incorporates content restrictions and parental controls enabled by default, with the aim of providing a safer environment for this age group.

Meta began implementing age-verification tech in 2024 for Instagram users in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Now, the mechanism will be extended to Instagram accounts in Brazil and 27 European Union countries. In addition, these practices will be applied for the first time to Facebook users in the US, with plans to expand to the EU and UK next month.

Looking All Grown-Up

The new measures have been interpreted as a response to a preliminary ruling recently issued by the European Commission, which concluded that the company led by Mark Zuckerberg is in breach of the Digital Services Act for allegedly failing to effectively prevent children under 13 from using its platforms. The EU body found that the company lacks sufficiently effective mechanisms to block such access and that its current systems for identifying and suspending accounts below the age threshold are insufficient.

These criticisms are supported by the results of a survey conducted by the nonprofit Internet Matters. After surveying nearly 1,300 children and their parents in the UK, the study revealed that approximately one-third of children have successfully evaded government-imposed restrictions on access to social networking sites. In some cases, the methods employed are particularly striking.

The report, titled “The Online Safety Act: Are Children Safe Online?” showed that 46 percent of 9- to 16-year-olds believe that circumventing age controls is very easy. In total, however, only 32 percent admitted to breaking the rules.

Among the most common techniques is registration with a false date of birth, a widespread practice. Other methods include the use of official IDs of older people, submitting verification videos with adult faces, using video game characters in place of real faces, and drawing on mustaches to fool automated systems.

The mother of a 12-year-old boy told researchers that she discovered her son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a mustache in an attempt to appear older to the verification system. The result was, to say the least, unusual: The system classified the child as a 15-year-old.

In its official blog, Meta says that no single company will be able to solve the challenge of effective and timely age verification in digital environments. Instead, it's suggesting legislation that forces app stores to verify the age of users, as well as to establish parental approval systems. The intention is that this information can be shared with apps and their developers, providing a “centralized, consistent, and privacy-preserving point of age assurance.”

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Elon Musk’s XChat App Is More Like Facebook’s Messenger Than Signal

Reece Rogers — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:04:00 GMT

Elon Musk spent his Friday reposting criticism of competitors after the launch of the XChat app, a stand-alone messaging option for X users. “Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage all have serious security problems,” read a message Musk reposted, in part. “XChat is the only secure, encrypted messaging app.” Encryption experts I spoke with in the lead-up to this launch expressed cautious skepticism about XChat’s execution and defended other communication platforms, like Signal, as solid choices.

One of XChat’s red flags is that users must connect an existing X account to log in and start messaging. “I'm a little suspicious of that, because the more data points you connect together about a person, the more you can track what they're doing,” says Maria Villegas Bravo, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Bravo considers Musk’s past attacks on other apps to be worrisome and self-serving.

Last year, when Musk unveiled XChat as a revamped, encrypted version of direct messages on X, security experts questioned the effectiveness of storing users' cryptographic keys on X’s servers rather than on-device, as Signal does. “Given XChat's history of security vulnerabilities, I would hesitate to use this until it's received a thorough outside auditing,” says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

While Musk wants the discussion to be over which encrypted messaging app is the best—XChat vs. Signal vs. WhatsApp—that’s the wrong comparison. After downloading XChat and going hands-on, there’s another, much less sexy, chat app it reminds me of: Facebook's Messenger. That app you may have on your phone out of an obligation to message your grandma occasionally? Exactly. Rather than launching a sleek, new encrypted messaging app, Musk dropped an insular, junky extension of his social media platform that happens to include encrypted messaging.

Late Launch

When the XChat team posted earlier this month about the app’s wide release, the “expected” launch date listed on Apple’s App Store page was April 17. This date shifted multiple times before release, changing from the original date to April 23, then April 24. The app also showed April 25 and April 27 as potential launch dates, before it dropped unexpectedly on Friday the 24th. (An official launch date for Android has yet to be announced.)

During this prelaunch period, the right app didn’t always appear when searching for its name. An app that also bore the name “XChat App,” though with a Russian-language design and no connection to Musk, rose to at least the seventh spot on Apple’s free download charts in the social media category. “Scam app,” read one user review, “This is not the real XChat.”

When the XChat app eventually arrived, the launch seemed haphazard. At first, folks in the US could access the app, while those in the UK could not. “UK should be live soon; had one snag,” wrote Nikita Bier, the head of product at X, in response to frustrated posters on social media. When early downloaders also complained about confusion during the onboarding process, Bier told them to “blame Apple” and its app requirements.

First Impressions

When I first downloaded the XChat app, I wasn’t sure who to message first. Looking through my iMessage history, none of the top five friends and family members that I text the most often even have X accounts. So, right at the top, XChat felt too niche for my actual messaging needs, putting aside any encryption concerns.

Lost and trying to find someone, anyone to message on XChat, I spent my afternoon scrolling through old DMs and decided to reignite three previous chats. After I sent my nudges, a pop-up appeared in the chat logs, “This conversation is now end-to-end encrypted.” Though I didn’t really need it because no one texted me back while I was testing the XChat app—I only received pitiful heart and flame emoji reactions to my messages.

Screenshot courtesy of Reece Rogers

Beyond the limited scope of only messaging people who have X accounts, the already limited features of XChat seem poorly implemented. For example, users can select “block screenshots” as an option, though this is not on by default, and it needs to be manually toggled on in the settings for each new conversation.

Anyone who wants encrypted messaging already has tried and tested methods available to them, so it’s hard to imagine XChat seriously breaking into the market. “If what you want is good security, use Signal. If what you want is to be able to talk to pretty much anybody using encrypted messages, use WhatsApp,” Quintin says. “If your whole life is based around X, I guess this is better than nothing.”

The app’s privacy measures are confusing too. The download page for XChat claims, “No tracking. Total privacy.” But the information listed below on that same page, under the privacy section, appears to contradict that. The “data linked to you” listed for XChat includes: contacts, identifiers, and usage data. When you click on the “developer’s privacy policy” for XChat, it just leads to the overall page for X, rather than a specific policy catered to the encrypted messaging app.

Another Messenger

The privacy policy isn’t the only thing X and XChat share. Clicking the Help tab in XChat launches X’s help center in a browser window outside of the app. It’s the same situation for other important documents, like the Terms of Service and the Cookie Use policy. There’s even a button in the lower left-hand corner of the XChat app that’s solely designed to bounce you back to the X app proper.

The first time I hit the button, that’s when I realized XChat feels more like Facebook's Messenger than anything else. Both platforms offer encrypted messaging, with Messenger adding it as the default setting for most chats in 2024. Just like XChat, you have to create a Facebook account to use Messenger, and your two accounts are linked together. Messenger even has a similar button to XChat, though it's in the top right-hand corner, that quickly bounces you back to the Facebook app.

Beyond just feature similarities, XChat already feels like Messenger in its pointlessness for most people. With Messenger, every aging relative who sends me an unhinged video or questionable news article already has my cell phone number and other ways to reach me, so the only time I actually read these chats is when I’m using the platform, trying to buy some used couch for the apartment on Facebook Marketplace.

I’ll probably miss your chats, too, if you message me on XChat. It’s just another niche in the fragmented field of messaging platforms. Outside of people who are already power users of X, XChat seems like a frivolous chat platform that just doesn’t have the juice.

Meta Is Sued Over Scam Ads on Facebook and Instagram

Maddy Varner — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:24:00 GMT

On Tuesday, the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the way the social networking giant handles scammers on its platforms violates Washington, DC’s consumer protection laws.

While many online scams involve direct outreach to victims by scammers (who are often themselves human trafficking victims trapped in scam compounds), CFA’s lawsuit focuses on fraudulent advertising that CFA alleges Meta profited from and allowed to "proliferate on its platforms,” despite publicly promising that it takes cracking down on fraud and scams seriously.

In its complaint, CFA points to ads found in Meta’s ads library that CFA claims are types of well-known scams, including several that appear to target people by their birth year and tout $1,400 checks, as well as others that advertise free government iPhones.

In a statement, Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro says, “These allegations misrepresent the reality of our work and we will fight them.”

Speaking with WIRED, Ben Winters, CFA’s director of AI and data privacy, says others can find more dubious ads just by searching Meta’s ad library using key words like “free phone” and “stimulus check.” WIRED’s quick perusal of the ads library on Monday shows more live ads for “secret tax checks” that lead to a website that promises to reveal “Wall Street’s recession-proof investing strategy.”

Meta did not respond to questions about whether the ads for “secret tax checks” are allowed under its policies.

CFA is seeking to recover damages and what it says are illegal profits from Meta, in addition to business reforms. Winters says that there’s more to be done to take down repeat violators and scrutinize ads that promise things like free government programs that don’t exist before they’re put in front of consumers.

Meta has faced particular scrutiny because Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—which are all owned by Meta—are among the most widely used online platforms by Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. In late 2025, Reuters reported on a set of internal Meta documents that detailed how the company dealt with fraudulent and prohibited user activity, including a May 2025 presentation that estimated that its platforms were involved with a third of all successful scams in the US. Another presentation cited by Reuters alleged that an internal Meta review found it “is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google.”

One Meta document from 2024 that Reuters cited estimated that the company would earn 10.1 percent of its revenue that year—around $16 billion—from ads that were actually scams or other types of prohibited content. To put that figure in perspective, the FBI estimated that in 2024, Americans lost $16 billion from all internet crimes. At the time, a Meta spokesperson called the estimate “rough and overly inclusive” and said that the set of documents Reuters reported on “distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams” and that the actual revenue was lower, but declined to tell Reuters by how much.

“We aggressively combat scams across our platforms to protect people and businesses,” says Sgro, the Meta spokesperson. “[L]ast year alone, we removed over 159 million scam ads, 92 percent of which we took down before anyone reported them, and took down 10.9 million accounts on Facebook and Instagram associated with criminal scam centers.”

In June 2025, a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general urged Meta to crack down on Facebook ads that led consumers to WhatsApp groups that were used for carrying out investment scams. The letter, which was signed by New York AG Letitia James, said that Meta’s solutions were not working and that investigators in New York kept seeing scam advertisements months after submitting reports to Meta.

Since then, the US Virgin Islands attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against Meta that, among other things, alleged that the company not only failed to crack down on scam advertising but charged advertisers higher rates to run ads flagged as likely to be fraudulent. That lawsuit is ongoing.

Though the federal government and many states have similar consumer protection laws as the DC law that CFA alleges Meta violated, Winters says he’s not holding his breath for the federal government to take action, and while he appreciates the work of state attorneys general, he believes consumers need relief now.

“We appreciate their work and think it's absolutely critical, but we can't wait for them to act when we haven't seen them able to act as quickly as we need to,” Winters says. “This is why nonprofits and civil society exist in the idealized world, right? To fill in gaps where there are gaps.”

Updated at 2:12 pm ET, April 21, 2026: Added statement from a Meta spokesperson.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

Ej Dickson — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Like many medical school students, Sam was broke.

The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online.

Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online?

But when Sam started posting generic photos of a beautiful, scantily clad woman on Instagram, he was dismayed to find that none of the content was hitting. He turned to Gemini for advice. “If you create a generic ‘hot girl,’ you’re competing with a million other models,” it said, according to a transcript Sam provided to WIRED.

Sam says he presented Gemini with a few possible options to help his model stand out, and the chatbot selected one in particular: the “MAGA/conservative niche,” referring to it as a “cheat code.” Plus, it said, “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal.” (A representative for Gemini said, “Gemini is designed not to give a particular opinion unless you tell it to. Instead, it is designed to offer neutral responses that don't favor any political ideology or viewpoint.”)

So last January, Sam created Emily Hart, a registered nurse and Jennifer Lawrence look-alike. On an Instagram account for Emily, @emily_hart.nurse, Sam posted photos of her ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, and shooting off a few rounds at the rifle range, with emoji-laden captions like “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported,” and “POV: You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal <clown emoji>.”

Though Sam has never lived in the United States, he became an assiduous student of MAGA ideology. “Every day I’d write something pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, and anti-immigration,” he tells me.

The grift seemed almost too obvious, but to Sam’s astonishment, he says the account “blew up.”

“Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it.” he claims. Within a month, Emily Hart had more than 10,000 Instagram followers, many of whom also subscribed to her softcore AI-generated content on the OnlyFans competitor Fanvue. And between Fanvue subscriptions and selling MAGA-themed T-shirts (one sample message reads ”PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats”), Sam estimates he was making a few thousand dollars a month.

“I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he says. “In India, even in professional jobs, you can't make this amount of money. I haven’t seen any easier way to make money online.”

Emily Hart is one of a slew of AI-generated hot girl MAGA influencers inundating social media, thanks to technologically savvy young men like Sam capitalizing both on pro-Trump sentiment and Americans’ relative lack of digital literacy.

The influencers are created from a specific template: they tend to be white and blonde, with jobs as emergency responders. (A lot of them are cops, firefighters, or EMTs.) They also incorporate right-wing views into all of their content, railing about immigration or the Epstein files or pronouns while posing in American flag bikinis or MAGA hats—often both.

Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution studying emerging tech and democracy, says while the trend of fake profiles isn’t new, “AI has made them more believable, and there has perhaps been an amplification of it.”

Though many social media platforms, including Instagram, require creators to disclose if their content is AI-generated, such guidelines are enforced only in a slapdash fashion. (Emily’s posts were not labeled as AI-generated, and Sam says he was unable to monetize her account on Instagram itself.)

Female MAGA influencers tend to do well on such platforms for a few reasons. They’re a relative rarity in the MAGA movement: Unlike their Gen Z male counterparts, 18- to 29-year-old women overwhelmingly skew liberal. Young MAGA women are therefore “more attention-grabbing,” Wirtschafter says, citing the uproar over the likely AI-generated “Swifties for Trump” photo Trump posted on TruthSocial during the 2024 campaign as one example.

The same logic, however, apparently does not apply to left-wing influencer accounts, as Sam learned when he created a short-lived liberal counterpart for Emily on Instagram: “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much.” (Sam’s explanation for why MAGA influencer accounts work is blunt: “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people—like, super dumb people. And they fall for it.”)

The algorithm also favors controversial views, making politically polarizing content more successful. This was Sam’s experience in running Emily’s account, which he characterized as “rage bait.” Even though liberals would flock to the page to leave irate comments, they were still clicking. “It’s a win-win situation, because you’re getting engagement anyway, and your content will go viral,” he says.

Lately, he says he’s noticed that “pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler content” has been getting especially high engagement on platforms like Reels, speculating that an AI hot girl Nazi influencer “would blow up. It would just break all the records.” (When asked about this claim, a Meta spokesperson said, “We prohibit content that glorifies, supports, or represents Nazism, and we remove it when we find it.”)

In recent months, the phenomenon has attracted more notice, especially after a Washington Post article charted the rise of Jessica Foster, a leggy blonde Army service member who went viral for posting a selfie with President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Though her Instagram account was clearly fake, it garnered more than a million followers in just over four months, which “Jessica Foster” appeared to capitalize on by promoting feet pics. (The account has since been taken down; an account for Foster has since been added to Fanvue.)

Another popular account, @mayflowermommy13, featured brief videos of a brunette woman in a car or in her kitchen, gazing coquettishly at the camera with captions like “If this <American flag emoji> is your Pride Flag, I want to be friends #letsMAGA.” Her followers ate it up: “Not a democrat lib in the world looks like this folks!!! Young fellas pay attention,” reads one top comment. (The account appears to have been removed after WIRED reached out to Meta for comment.)

Because OnlyFans also has a policy requiring AI disclosure, as well as creators authenticating their identities before joining, those trying to profit off hot girl MAGA accounts gravitate toward OnlyFans competitors, where such policies are less rigorously enforced. Fanvue, one of the most popular options, has differentiated itself by allowing AI-generated content.

Though he did not actively promote Emily’s Fanvue account for fear of alienating her conservative MAGA fan base, Sam says he used Grok AI to generate nude photos of her and uploaded them to the platform, with Emily’s fans sending him payments for exclusive content and exchanging messages. “I was basically doing nothing,“ he says. “And it was just flooded with money.” He says he made a few thousand dollars off the account in a few days, though he did not enjoy the interactive aspects. “Once a guy sent me a video with Emily’s nude on a tablet on a pillow, and he was basically recording himself fucking the pillow,” he says. “It was incredibly weird, but he sent me a $50 tip, so I was like, OK, do what you want.”

Few of the fans cared whether Emily was real, Sam says. This is very much in line with the psychology of the average hot girl MAGA fan, according to Wirtschafter. Whether it's plausible that a sexy blonde nurse would love Christ, ICE, and flashing her boobs for strangers is secondary to the fact that many, many people want to believe it is. “Even among some digital natives, there’s a perspective of, ‘Well, I don’t actually care if this is true. I like the sentiment of it,’” she says.

Even though platforms like Meta ostensibly require AI content to be labeled, it can often escape detection, and accounts like Emily’s continue to proliferate.

To Meta’s credit, however, emily_hart.nurse’s life on Instagram was relatively brief. In February, Emily’s account was officially banned after Instagram flagged it for “fraudulent” activity, though her Facebook account is still active.

Sam says even if her account had not been banned, he probably would have stopped posting anyway. He doesn’t have any regrets about creating Emily—“I don’t feel like I was scamming people,” he says. After all, he was getting paid, and people were happy with the content he was making. But he’s moved on from the AI hot girl influencer niche. He says he needs to shift to focusing on his studies.

X’s Big Bot Purge Wiped Out a Lot of People’s Secret Porn Feeds

Jason Parham — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:30:00 GMT

Justin Diego doesn’t typically avoid the spotlight.

He’s a celebrity news influencer with 617,000 combined followers across YouTube and Instagram. So when he created a secret account on X in 2024 to keep track of his favorite OnlyFans creators, he appreciated the anonymity it provided him outside of his main accounts.

Diego primarily used the burner account to bookmark and like solo content and masturbation videos, and never posted. But when he logged in to X over the weekend, he was notified that the account had been suspended.

Beginning this month, X has escalated its efforts to crack down on automated accounts. The company’s head of product, Nikita Bier, noted that the platform was flagging and suspending bots at a rapid pace—“208 bots per minute and growing,” he posted on April 9. But the large-scale campaign, which is intended to remove fake, inactive, or spam accounts in bulk, has also led to the suspension and deletion of accounts used by humans—including many used to privately curate niche porn.

The company has a policy against “inauthentic activity that undermines the integrity of X,” meaning private accounts that people used to repost or lurk were likely identified as spam trying to juice engagement.

While it is unclear how many actual bots have been wiped from the platform since early April—X did not respond to multiple requests for comment—the purge has been catastrophic for users who have long used their secret accounts, commonly called “alts,” to watch and archive their favorite porn. (My alt account, which I created in 2021 during the height of the pandemic, was also nuked over the weekend).

“Not a single rule was violated mind you, years of curation and accumulation gone in a flash for no reason,” posted Tom Zohar, an actor based in San Diego. “The burning of the library of Alexandria’s got nothing on this tragedy.”

“6 yr old goon acc is suspended this cannot be real,” wrote another user.

“Sometimes people just need a page that’s specifically for them to engage with content they don’t want other people to know they’re into. That doesn't make you a bot; that makes you human, actually,” Diego tells WIRED.

Though seemingly random, this most recent purge is part of an ongoing initiative by X. In October, Bier’s team scrubbed 1.7 million bots in an effort to reduce reply spam, with plans to focus on DM spam next. In the weeks leading up to April, Bier explained that “nearly half of the product team” had shifted its focus to improving X’s “spam mitigation features,” prioritizing bot detection systems and automated enforcement.

But a shift to more automated moderation has drawn blowback from users. “Your overreliance on AI systems is not nearly as successful as you’d like to think it is,” wrote a user in a Change.org petition in an attempt to get their account reinstated. “I mean let’s get serious here, these AI systems & LLMs can’t even distinguish between a real human account that’s been paying their premium subscription for 2 years & has as a credit card on file and is ID verified versus A BOT FROM NIGERIA OR SINGAPORE.”

“A moment of silence for all the gooner accounts we’ve lost,” posted a user who goes by the name buttmutt.

The reactions underscore the increasing difficulty of balancing aggressive enforcement with accurate action.

X has struggled with moderation under Elon Musk’s ownership—he promised to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!”—as hate speech, harassment, and misinformation have surged on his watch. More recently, X’s AI chatbot Grok was widely scrutinized after users exploited its image-editing feature to generate sexualized, nonconsensual deepfakes of women and minors, raising safety and legal concerns.

Even as X has failed to control bad actors, the platform has also been a crucial digital reservoir for consensual sexual media and queer education.

“When social media platforms purge sexual content, queer and trans creators are always collateral damage,” says Alexander Monea, an associate professor at George Mason University and author of The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight. “The very communities that are most dependent on digital platforms for finding information, exploring their identities, and forming communities due to the lack of safe offline environments for doing so are the same ones most susceptible to being swept up in blunt-force enforcement measures.”

While some accounts have been reinstated, many more users have expressed outrage for being unexpectedly shut out of accounts they’d been building for years.

“I actually am shocked, because I had a premium subscription. Wasn’t the whole point of paying for X to verify that you are human?” Diego says. He plans to continue to fight his suspension, though his appeals have been unsuccessful so far.

The Screenmaxxers Who Spend Every Waking Hour on Their Phones

Miles Klee — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:30:00 GMT

Morgan Dreiss, a copy editor in Orlando, has severe ADHD that they say requires them to always be “doing at least three things at once.” The result? A daily average screen time of 18 hours and 55 minutes.

“I'm reading a book or playing a game pretty much from waking to sleeping,” Dreiss tells WIRED. What they read comes from the library app Libby, so the books count toward overall screen engagement. Dreiss currently keeps their phone’s autolock feature disabled so they can continuously run a mobile game that pays out $35 for every 110 hours logged. (They’ve earned about $16 so far.)

For years, studies have brought forth worrying data about the potential negative effects of excessive screen time on both physical and cognitive health. Concerns over the neural development and mental health of young people glued to their phones have led to major legislative and courtroom battles; recently a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing their platforms with addictive features.

While the question of whether one can be clinically “addicted” to something like social media remains a subject of fierce contention, there seems to be a broad consensus in this decade that people would be better off scrolling less. On the more extreme end, there are virtual communities that share strategies for ditching smartphones and digital detox retreats where no notifications can find you.

Yet there are those, like Dreiss, who resist the emerging common wisdom about reducing screen time. You might call them “screenmaxxers.” It’s not that they necessarily have some totalizing concept of their habits; journalist Taylor Lorenz is likely in the minority of screenmaxxers eager to put the screen directly inside her brain, as she recently confessed to WIRED. It’s just that, for various reasons, they’re on their devices pretty much all the time, and they don’t see that as a problem whatsoever.

Part of the equation, of course, is work. Corina Diaz, 45, who lives in a remote forested region of Ontario, Canada, works in video game marketing and does influencer management for a game publisher. “So, a lot of screen time,” she says.

Diaz met her husband online in 2005 and had a child three years ago—her screen time increased when she was awake at strange hours because of her newborn, she says.

But Diaz has sought friendships online since the 1990s, when that meant availing herself of tools like Internet Relay Chat and bulletin board systems. “I’ve always felt screens, phone or otherwise, connected me to things I care about,” she says. “In particular, niche social groups that don’t have great mainstream visibility.” Now that she lives two and a half hours outside Toronto, the closest major city, her screen is “a bit of a connection lifeline,” she says.

Daniel Rios is in a similar position. A computer programmer, he lives in the South American country where he grew up after having lived abroad for years. Most of his friends moved away and didn’t return.

As a result, Rios keeps in touch with people over Discord, his primary social outlet. Not living in a city, he doesn’t go out all that much, and screens fill his days—though he says it’s “hard to quantify” exactly how many hours it all adds up to. “When I'm not working at the [desktop] computer, I'm playing at the computer or watching TV,” he says. “If I'm not at the computer, I'm looking at my phone. If I'm not doing any of the above, and I'm out of the house, I'm still probably listening to something on my phone.”

While Rios doesn’t actively seek to maximize his screen time, he says he doesn’t “really feel a need to cut out screen time in any capacity, either,” adding that that would mean “being bored at home.”

At an average daily screen time of 18 hours and 58 minutes, Brooke Williams, a UX designer in the San Francisco Bay Area, says her loved ones have occasionally expressed “annoyance or disbelief” at her level of phone usage. But as the “Google and TMZ in one” for her family—the person who always informs them when someone famous dies—she thinks they benefit from how much she’s online.

William says she has a sense of “hypervigilance” stemming from her family history and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The condition is “managed ‘well’ in that none of my issues seem to be harmful at this point,” Williams says, though “the constant monitoring of social media is definitely a part of it.”

“It helps me feel in control in a way, because I know I know as much as I can know. I can keep track of things, know what I have the power to change and what I don't.”

More broadly, screenmaxxers seem to believe that the general alarm over screen time distorts the issues at hand. “I think screen time is a tangential issue to other, bigger problems,” Diaz tells WIRED. “Social isolation, overworking, maybe addiction.” The screen is merely a medium, she says, “that should be regulated in terms of what content it delivers and how.”

Meanwhile, Diaz suggests, “Good screen time is undervalued, especially when it’s supporting accessibility, education, and socialization.”

Dreiss is more emphatic, calling the warnings about screen time a “moral panic” that seeks to “pathologize dopamine like that's the entirety of what addiction is.”

“I'm one of those people that gets really heated when people try to claim you can get ‘addicted’ to things like this,” Dreiss says. Like Diaz, they see phones as a kind of catch-all scapegoat. “Any negative effect of ‘screen time’ I've ever seen has just been some other societal issue being pushed off on a convenient villain,” they say.

In short, don’t expect to convince a friend or relative who’s permanently on their phone that it’s diminishing their quality of life. While plenty of people would love to see their screen time stats reduced—whether by sheer willpower or through the use of productivity apps that block time-sucking apps—there are plenty of others at peace with the infinite scroll. You can judge them all you want, but the screenmaxxers are undeniably adapted for this world.

The New Era of Militia Influencers

David Gilbert — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 03:00:00 GMT

Just over a week into the US and Israel’s war with Iran, Eric Roscher, an Air Force veteran, published a YouTube video on what he describes as the “very real concerns surrounding sleeper cells and terrorist threats” in the US.

The video, titled “Credible DOMESTIC Threat? FBI warns of attack—Drills/Considerations for the Prepared Citizen,” was produced by Roscher’s Florida-based company Barrel and Hatchet, which runs military-style training, sells branded merchandise and tactical gear, and produces online content. In the video, Roscher and his associates advise viewers to carry “extra mags” and “that truck gun,” while keeping “your head on a swivel.” Toward the end of the post, Roscher shows off a tactical vest that’s on sale from one of the video’s sponsors.

The video, which is part of YouTube’s monetization program and has a total of eight ads, has been viewed over 110,000 times. (YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.)

Barrel and Hatchet is not a militia, but the company and Roscher are part of a broader rebranding of the entire militia movement in the US, one that is focused less on showing up at drag queen story hours and more on expensive weapons, manly sweatshirts, and highly curated Instagram grids.

Influencers like Roscher produce slickly edited content that is then shared widely among militia groups on platforms like Instagram, in an effort to promote not only their ideology but also, crucially, links to their online stores and training sessions. In turn, those same militias emulate Roscher by posting their own videos and images of weekend training sessions in the woods, close-ups of their camo gear and rifles, and slo-mo footage of live firing drills. The give-and-take between these groups, and the influencers and military members they seek to emulate, marks a new era of American militias, where gaining followers and earning clout on social media is as important as being able to hit a target from 300 yards.

Roscher and these modern militia groups, with names like River Valley Minutemen and Mountain State Contingency Group, have positioned themselves as emergency response organizations working to help their communities and prepare citizens to “weather the storm”—whatever, or wherever, that may be. They use real-world events like the Iran war and ICE attacks on immigrant communities to spread fear, leveraging that fear to recruit new members.

These influencers are filling a gap in the US militia landscape, which has changed dramatically in recent years. With the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys largely disbanded in the wake of prosecutions over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, these influencers and groups have filled the vacuum, resulting in a decentralized network of local groups and people who support or emulate the previous movement—albeit in smaller, local ways.

“What used to be a national movement, with groups like Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, has really gone back to their local and regional roots,” says Travis McAdam, a senior analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who tracks militias and anti-government groups. “A lot of them have really tried to reframe themselves as auxiliary emergency preparedness groups and have done quite a bit to reform their reputation post-January 6, portraying themselves as ‘oh, we're just here to help the community.’”

This is a new era of militia recruitment and influence—and it’s all happening in social feeds near you.

The Militia Business

Dirty Civilian is a Tennessee-based group of influencers that describes itself as “prepared citizens inspiring and informing capable men to build strong families and resilient communities” in order “to weather the storms ahead.” The group doesn’t specify what those storms are, but in one YouTube video published on Sunday, Dirty Civilian outlined a scenario where a group of vigilantes take it upon themselves to assassinate someone they believe is a pedophile. The Dirty Civilian channel has almost 750,000 subscribers, and the video, which is monetized, racked up over 100,000 views on YouTube in its first 24 hours. Multiple militia groups reposted the video on Instagram.

“It's almost like a tutorial or something,” one commenter wrote under the video. “Food for thought at least.” Another commenter, using the acronym for minor-attracted person, a term some online communities use to refer to pedophiles, wrote: “A show that could inspire the targeting of MAPs? FANTASTIC.”

Dirty Civilian also has a Patreon with over 420 members paying $5 a month and an online shop where it sells branded merch and survival gear. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

These ubiquitous online stores, while not new, are a key part of the militia influencer business ecosystem. “The founders and cofounders of these groups end up having a side hustle where they're getting this stuff, and they're selling it as a way to make money,” says McAdam. “In some other cases, an actual legitimate small business is set up. In some cases, there’s a grift to it.”

What makes these militia-inspired influencers unique, however, is a burgeoning aesthetic that’s military meets Instagram. “I've seen them get into monotonous debates over the right type of camo to use. Painting their guns to match their outfit. It's extremely aesthetic, which also would make sense for a recruitment strategy based on the internet. It needs to be grippy,” Calum Farley, a research analyst at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, tells WIRED.

A key part of the appeal of groups like Barrel and Hatchet and Dirty Civilian is that they appear to be run by military veterans. “All these guys worship American special forces,” Barrett Gay, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED. “So much of the expensive gear they're using is just because they saw a picture of a guy using it in Afghanistan or Iraq. So they think they have to use it.”

The highly curated aesthetic of many of these groups reminds Gay of the Boogaloo Bois, a far-right militia movement that gained prominence in 2020. “It's very similar aesthetically,” Gay says. “It's that same hyper-specific interest in gear and the weapon systems.”

Both the influencers and the militias they inspire claim to be focused on preparedness and civic duty. But in reality, they haven’t really changed. “There hasn't been any change in the way they train and how they're preparing,” says McAdam. “You can tell a lot by what type of training a group is doing. And these guys aren't trying to figure out how to fill sandbags and stack them faster to prevent flooding. They're not out there working with chainsaws so that they're really efficient at cutting and moving debris. They're still doing the same paramilitary training that they've always done.”

The Texas State Militia similarly claims to be serving its “community and teaching Texans the importance of self-reliance.” The group has also stated: “Our team stands ready to assist law enforcement and other entities when necessary.” It recently posted an AI-generated video on Facebook seeking a drone operator to join its team. The video lists what is included in basic training for those applying, with the top item “weapons/tactics.”

Militias and influencers have also been leveraging the anger about immigrants in the US to their advantage.

In January, a member of the American Patriots militia group on Facebook whose profile picture states “I love ICE raids,” shared a comment which read: “Personally I think we should put together militia’s [sic] to protect ICE.” The post was shared with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that works to hold online platforms to account.

While some militia groups have been urging their supporters to sign up for ICE, the deployment of ICE agents has in some cases led to new recruits joining.

Aaron Alexander, who runs the Florida Militia Coalition, tells WIRED that some of those joining his group had been radicalized by the ICE raids. “Whether it’s from the perspective of the US government finally enforcing and going after immigration law breakers, but also the show of force of what the government can do, it’s a stark reminder of the government's strength.” Alexander shared one text exchange with a new recruit who appears to be referencing the ICE raids as his reason for wanting to join up. Alexander responded with a screenshot of Alex Garland’s film Civil War.

The new groups have also been working to put their organizations on legal footing. The Texas State Militia, for example, has set up a nonprofit arm called Viking Tactical which provides “miliitia-style firearm training.” Last week, the River Valley Minutemen, a militia based in the Ohio River Valley, announced on its Instagram page that it had “officially filed for our 501c(4) non-profit status.” This means that the group can engage in political lobbying work and does not have to disclose who is funding it.

“Blazing a new trail for the rest of us to follow, awesome stuff,” a supporter wrote in response.

Recruitment and advertising for these groups still goes through traditional social media outlets. While social media platforms like Facebook purged militia groups from their networks in 2020, pushing them to fringe platforms like Telegram and limiting their ability to organize and recruit new members, that’s all changed. In recent years, as social media companies have withdrawn from policing their platforms, militias have returned to the feeds; WIRED reported last year that a number of groups were openly recruiting on Facebook.

In recent months, militias have continued using Facebook to recruit new members, in many cases referring to the groups as a “community” or “tribe.” In one case, identified by the Tech Transparency Project and reviewed by WIRED, the Texas State Militia paid Facebook to run an ad on its platform on December 31, 2025, promoting the group.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. When WIRED flagged more than 100 militia groups organizing on Facebook in 2024, Meta said it was “removing the groups and accounts that violate our policies,” adding: “This is an adversarial space, where actors constantly try to find new ways around our policies, which is why we keep investing heavily in people, technology, research, and partnerships to keep our platforms safe.”

The militias of five years ago might be gone for now. But those interested in emulating them are just one click away.

This is an edition of the Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

The Danger Behind Meta Killing End-to-End Encryption for Instagram DMs

Lily Hay Newman — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:00:00 GMT

As law enforcement agencies scramble to address threats of terrorism, child sexual abuse, and human trafficking—and repressive governments around the world look to broadly expand their surveillance capabilities—researchers fear that Meta's retreat from its commitments to protect user privacy with end-to-end encryption on Instagram chat could create a problematic precedent in big tech.

Meta spent the better part of a decade working to deploy end-to-end encryption by default across all of its chat apps. It was a saga—fraught with both technical and political hurdles. But in December 2023, the company declared victory, announcing default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and promising that it was in testing to roll out for Instagram Direct Messaging as well. In the end, though, end-to-end encryption only came to Instagram chat as a backwater opt-in feature. And as threats to end-to-end encryption from governments around the world loom larger than ever, Meta quietly announced last week that it intends to eliminate the feature from Instagram chat entirely on May 8.

Crucially, few companies have the scale and stability needed to stake out an influential pro-end-to-end encryption position. And an even smaller group—namely, Meta and Apple—have made it a priority. Experts say that Meta's decision about Instagram chat could give other companies, or even simply other divisions within Meta, permission to do less, too.

“Meta's deployment of encryption was a public commitment, and they were weathering a lot of pressure from various governments to do it,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matt Green, who has consulted for Meta over the years on its end-to-end encryption rollout as both an unpaid advisor and paid reviewer. “Public commitments to support privacy features are literally the only thing that we the public have. If they’re worthless, then why should we assume we’ll continue to have end-to-end encryption in Messenger and WhatsApp?”

Meta's decision to revoke end-to-end encryption for Instagram chat seems to have been particularly alarming for researchers and privacy advocates because of the company's stated reason for the change: low user adoption.

“Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED and other outlets. “Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp.”

The statement struck many as disingenuous given that Meta emphasized for years that it was committed specifically to default end-to-end encryption, not the opt-in version that ultimately emerged for Instagram chat buried behind layers of menus.

“Designed the feature so nobody could find it, killed it for not being easy enough to find and, therefore, unpopular. It's deeply cynical,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security executive and creator of the post-quantum cryptography assessment tool pqprobe.

Johns Hopkins' Green adds, too, that Meta originally rolled out opt-in encryption for Messenger and seemingly learned the lesson about the need for default implementation from low adoption in that trial.

“This is a Meta post where they publicly commit to default encryption in Instagram chat. Then, seemingly without even looking back over it, they add an update to the top that implies that it was optional encryption, and blames lack of opt-in as the reason they need to remove this feature,” Green says. “Nothing about this is honest. They know what they promised.”

WIRED gave Meta multiple opportunities to comment for this story, but the company ultimately declined.

In a key 2019 treatise laying out his vision for privacy and security across Meta's properties, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “I understand that many people don't think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform—because frankly, we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy-protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing." But, he added, “we've repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”

Years later, in a December 2023 background call with WIRED ahead of the announcement that full, default end-to-end encryption was ready for Messenger and Instagram chat, a Meta employee who had worked for years on the project specifically described a phase from 2016 to early 2019 in which engineers were working on an optional encryption feature for Messenger, and then a phase beginning with Zuckerberg's 2019 announcement where the team shifted to implementing default encryption.

Documents from inside Meta released as part of a lawsuit alleging that Meta did not adequately protect underage users from abuse show, though, that implementing end-to-end encryption by default has long been politically fraught within the company as well as outside of it. Reuters reported at the end of February that Meta head of content policy Monika Bickert wrote internally in March 2019 ahead of Zuckerberg's announcement, “We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible.”

Privacy advocates have long pointed out that while child safety and public safety should always be paramount, child sexual abuse and other crimes still play out daily on chat apps and other digital services that do not offer the universal protection of end-to-end encryption. In other words, adding default end-to-end encryption gives numerous protections to everyone, while eliminating it takes those protections away without solving threats to the most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, Meta's statement about its decision to revoke end-to-end encryption for Instagram chat notably does not mention that the protection is available on Messenger, pointing users instead to WhatsApp. This is, perhaps, a revealing omission. As Casey Newton pointed out on Monday in a Platformer story, Meta will eliminate the stand-alone Messenger website in April and is in the process of recoupling Messenger with Facebook after a major push in 2014 and 2015 to separate Messenger as a stand-alone product. In 2015 WIRED reported that “Facebook wants to position Messenger as your default chat app.” Now, it seems the product is being sidelined.

Meta is investing in at least one new project that would bring encryption protections to more of its users: a partnership with Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike to deploy his new private AI technology, known as Confer, for Meta AI. The move, announced by Marlinspike this week, could protect millions of conversations people have with Meta's AI chatbot. The collaboration is in an early phase, though, and there are no details yet on exactly how Confer might be integrated.

Some sources tell WIRED that, absent more information from Meta about its Instagram chat decision, the only conclusion they can come to is that the company's commitment to implementing end-to-end encryption by default across its chat platforms was always a ploy to improve its public image and mend user trust in the wake of numerous scandals in which the company mismanaged user data or suffered breaches.

“Encryption was used politically as a shield and a sword,” pqprobe's Ottenheimer says. “The shield was against the post-Cambridge Analytica trust collapse and the sword was against governments who'd been pressuring Meta on safety and content moderation concerns. Now I guess the privacy brand isn't as valuable, so they just reverse it and blame the users.”

Meta Is Shutting Down Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest

Boone Ashworth — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:24:00 GMT

Pour one out from your digital bottle, because Meta is shutting down the virtual reality experience of Horizon Worlds.

Meta sent an email blast to Horizon Worlds users today stating that the social VR world will officially end on its Quest VR headsets; starting March 31, Horizon Worlds will no longer be in the Quest store. Some Horizon-specific perks, including Meta Credits, avatars, and some digital clothes and in-world purchases, will also be removed. The VR worlds will be shutting down entirely on June 15, after which the service will be available only as a mobile platform.

The move comes after Meta made widespread cuts to its Reality Labs division in February, laying off 10 percent of employees in its VR department.

Horizon Worlds was Meta’s grand foray into building out the metaverse, the aspiration of a fully virtual environment inspired by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The company believed in the effort so much that it changed its name from Facebook to Meta in support of its VR endeavors.

Horizon Worlds is one of the less popular VR services out there, if the borderline glee you can find in the comments of the r/oculus subreddit thread about the service ending is anything to go by. It was widely mocked since it was first announced, especially due to a rocky start. Player avatars didn’t have legs and looked like such dead-eyed monsters that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s uncanny avatar became a meme.

An avatar waves hello in Meta Horizon Worlds.

Almost immediately, Horizon Worlds was populated primarily by children. But screeching kiddos throwing digital doughnuts around are not the most stable or profitable user base. Meta pumped billions of dollars into the service, arranging high-profile partnerships with other brands and artists to have virtual concerts by Imagine Dragons and Coldplay. Even with all that pomp, Meta’s proprietary-verse has always been less popular than VRChat, the social service that people actually seem to like enough to attend virtual raves and presidential elections.

As Meta shifts its focus to artificial intelligence and its Ray-Ban smart glasses, it has drastically cut its investments in its metaverse divisions, including stopping updates to very popular services like Supernatural Fitness.

“Meta’s pivot on Horizon Worlds is the predicted and inevitable outcome of a big, risky bet that never found an audience,” wrote Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at market research firm Forrester, in an email to WIRED. “Meta was trying to solve for a consumer problem that doesn’t exist. You can’t build a mass social platform reliant on hardware most people neither own nor want to wear for more than short bursts.”

When asked for comment, Meta pointed toward a press statement that says the company still plans to invest in its VR efforts.

“We have a robust road map of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” the statement reads. “And Meta remains the single biggest investor in the VR industry. Why? Because we believe in VR as a critical technology on the path to the next computing platform.”

In a way, putting down Horizon Worlds in VR almost seems like an act of mercy for its struggling service. “This was inevitable,” says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “It seemed like they were trying to stretch it out by pushing it out to mobile, but realistically, it's been dead for a while. I really think that it should have given up a long time ago.”

Meta is rejiggering its VR efforts to be more competitive with companies working on VR. There is the Steam Frame headset, which Valve says is still on track to release this year; the Samsung Galaxy XR launched in December, running the new Android XR platform; and ByteDance-owned company Pico will release its Project Swan headset later in 2026. Apple's Vision Pro is still around, even getting an M5 chipset upgrade last fall.

For Meta, the biggest problem for Horizon Worlds may have been its dependence on advertisers. "Advertisers follow their target audiences," Proulx says. "And those audiences were never inside Horizon Worlds."

Meta Ramps Up Efforts to Disrupt Industrialized Scamming

Lily Hay Newman — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:01:00 GMT

With organized, industrial-scale scamming causing a multibillion-dollar crisis around the world, Meta announced new account protections on Wednesday aimed at flagging potentially suspicious activity to users as early in a scam interaction as possible. The company also shared details about a recent Thai law enforcement collaboration that resulted in 21 arrests and Meta disabling over 150,000 user accounts associated with Southeast Asian scam compounds.

The disruptive action—a joint effort of the Royal Thai Police, the FBI, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, the Australian Federal Police, and other law enforcement agencies—focused on alleged scammers targeting victims in numerous countries, including the US and UK as well as multiple Asian and Pacific region countries. The account protections Meta debuted on Wednesday include expanding its Messenger scam detection features for more users around the world, introducing warnings about potentially suspicious activity when a user is initiating a new WhatsApp device link, and testing new Facebook alerts to flag potentially suspicious friend requests.

“Transnational scam syndicates continue to exploit digital platforms and operate across multiple jurisdictions,” Gregory Kang, the deputy assistant commissioner of the Singapore Police Force, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Joint operations like this demonstrate the importance of close cooperation between law enforcement agencies and industry partners.”

Meta is offering new tools to warn people about contact with potential scammers on its platform.

Courtesy of Meta

Mainstream social media and communication platforms are a crucial digital meeting ground where online scammers—who are often forced laborers—and victims from around the world can cross paths. Professionalized “pig butchering”–style investment scamming has expanded in Southeast Asia and has proliferated around the world, creating more urgency than ever to block and deter fraudulent activity on consumer platforms.

Meta began speaking publicly about its work focused on scam compounds at the end of 2024. That year, the company said that it had taken down more than 2 million accounts related to scam compounds.

On Wednesday, the company said that in 2025 it took down 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts “associated with criminal scam centers” and removed more than 159 million scam ads across all categories. Meta has increasingly come under fire for not taking enough proactive action against scams across its platforms—with Reuters reporting in December that billions of scam ads appear every day and internal Meta estimates forecast up to 10 percent of its revenues may come from scam advertising. A company spokesperson at the time disputed the figures. Law enforcement in many regions—including Thai and Cambodian police—have carried out a spate of operations in recent months to intervene in scam compounds, make dozens of arrests, and seize funds. And the crackdowns aren’t limited to Southeast Asia. Meta said in February, for example, that it provided support for a Nigerian Police Force and UK National Crime Agency operation focused on disrupting an alleged scam center in Nigeria.

Police search the apartment of a person suspected of being involved in scam operations.

Courtesy of Meta

Meta announced other efforts on Wednesday to combat scamming and abusive behavior on its platforms. The company said it is further expanding advertiser verification with a goal that 90 percent of ad revenue will come from verified advertisers by the end of 2026, which would be a major increase from 70 percent currently. The goal, Meta says, is for the final 10 percent to accommodate small local businesses and other low-resource, benign entities that just want to run a few ads.

The company also said that its anti-scam specialists have built AI detection systems to help flag more situations where scammers may be impersonating brands, celebrities, or other public figures. These systems are also designed to catch more “deceptive links” that could be used to fool targets into visiting malicious websites.

The scamming ecosystem and industry around the world has expanded and matured to such a degree that no one platform or government can solve the problem. But experts have consistently emphasized to WIRED in recent years that Meta platforms are a key battleground where more detections and defenses could make a difference in the barrier to entry for scammers who are trying to reach new victims.

As Chris Sonderby, Meta vice president and deputy general counsel, put it in a statement on Wednesday, “we will continue to invest in technology and partnerships to stay ahead of these adversaries.”

Mark Zuckerberg Tries to Play It Safe in Social Media Addiction Trial Testimony

Miles Klee — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:04:00 GMT

Mark Zuckerberg walked somewhat stiffly into a courtroom of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County at 9 am on the dot on Wednesday, having first been escorted into the building by a security detail that included two Department of Homeland Security officers. The venue, overseen by Judge Carolyn Kuhl, was bursting with spectators and media, many crammed elbow-to-elbow on benches, all there to witness the Meta CEO testify before a jury about allegations that his company’s products pose serious risks to younger users.

Specifically, Zuckerberg was on hand to answer questions as to whether Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram were intentionally engineered to be addictive—as well as allegations that the tech giant had deliberately targeted tweens and teens with engagement-boosting strategies that led to mental health crises. It was to be a crucial showdown in a lawsuit brought by a now 20-year-old Californian identified as K.G.M. (although her counsel usually referred to her by her first name, Kaley) and her mother against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok back in 2023. They allege that her compulsive use of those platforms accounts at an extremely young age caused severe psychological damage.

After Meta and Google failed to get the case dismissed in November, Snap and TikTok settled out of court, leaving the other companies to face the first of nearly two dozen so-called bellwether trials about social media addiction currently on the docket in Los Angeles. These are the cases selected as representative of a much larger pool of litigants—some 1,600 in total—who have filed suits against the same brands on similar grounds, alleging that their children fell victim to depression, dysmorphia, and suicide after they got hooked on apps that absorbed their attention. The families of some of these children were among those vying for a chance to finally see Zuckerberg in the hot seat on Wednesday.

K.G.M.’s counsel, Mark Lanier, launched into his examination of Zuckerberg by putting the 41-year-old executive’s credibility under the microscope. Lanier picked apart claims Zuckerberg had made under oath in January 2024 during congressional testimony about online child safety. While Zuckerberg had claimed that children under 13 are not allowed on Instagram, Lanier showed that in 2015 the platform internally estimated that there were then 4 million Instagram users under age 13, comprising 30 percent of 10- to 12-year-olds in the US. While Zuckerberg previously claimed that the Meta team does not receive directives to increase the time users spend on their platforms, Lanier produced a 2015 goal-setting email from Zuckerberg that listed this as the first item.

Elsewhere, Lanier sought to establish Zuckerberg’s ultimate decisionmaking authority over Meta and quoted a remark he made in an interview with Joe Rogan last year: “Because I control our company, I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me,” he’d told the podcast host. Zuckerberg insisted in court that this was merely a “simplified” version of the truth.

Over the course of his testimony, Zuckerberg was oddly evasive about even insignificant details and basic definitions. He was not quite prepared to confirm that his relevant congressional testimony had taken place on January 31, 2024, for example, and was hesitant to agree with Lanier’s proposition that when something is “addictive,” people “do it more.” He ultimately hedged: “Maybe in the near term.” Zuckerberg also preferred to acknowledge any past comment, in probabilistic fashion, by saying, “It sounds like something I would have said.” Likewise, when asked whether internal documents appeared to suggest Meta’s interest in maximizing “total teen time spent” on their apps, he often replied, “That’s what the document says.”

Zuckerberg repeatedly fell back on accusing Lanier of "mischaracterizing" his previous statements. When it came to emails, Zuckerberg typically objected based on how old the message was or his lack of familiarity with the Meta employees involved. “I don’t think so, no,” he replied when directed to clarify whether he knew Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy in 2021. And Zuckerberg never failed to point out when he wasn’t actually on an email thread entered as evidence.

Perhaps anticipating these detached and repetitive talking points from Zuckerberg—who claimed over and over that any increased engagement from a user on Facebook or Instagram merely reflected the “value” of those apps—Lanier early on suggested that the CEO has been coached to address these issues. “You have extensive media training,” he said. “I think I’m sort of well-known to be pretty bad at this,” Zuckerberg protested, getting a rare laugh from the courtroom. Lanier went on to present Meta documents outlining communication strategies for Zuckerberg, describing his team as “telling you what kind of answers to give,” including in a context such as testifying under oath. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply,” Zuckerberg said. In the afternoon, Meta counsel Paul Schmidt returned to that line of questioning, asking if Zuckerberg had to speak to the media because of his role as head of a major business. “More than I would like,” Zuckerberg said, to more laughter.

In an even more, well, “meta” moment after the court had returned from lunch, Kuhl struck a stern tone by warning all in the room that anyone wearing “glasses that record”—such as the AI-equipped Oakley and Ray-Ban glasses sold by Meta for up to $499—had to remove them while attending the proceedings, where both video and audio recordings are prohibited.

K.G.M.’s suit and the others to follow are novel in their sidestepping of Section 230, a law that has protected tech companies from liability for content created by users on their platforms. As such, Zuckerberg stuck to a playbook that framed the lawsuit as a fundamental misunderstanding of how Meta works. When Lanier presented evidence that Meta teams were working on increasing the minutes users spent on their platforms each day, Zuckerberg countered that the company had long ago moved on from those objectives, or that those numbers were not even “goals” per se, just metrics of competitiveness within the industry. When Lanier questioned if Meta was merely hiding behind an age-limit policy that was “unenforced” and maybe “unenforceable,” per an email from Nick Clegg, Meta's former president of global affairs, Zuckerberg calmly deflected with a narrative about people circumventing their safeguards despite continual improvements on that front.

Lanier, though, could always return to K.G.M., who he said had signed up for Instagram at the age of 9, some five years before the app started asking users for their birthday in 2019. While Zuckerberg could more or less brush off internal data on, say, the need to convert tweens into loyal teen users, or Meta’s apparent rejection of the alarming expert analysis they had commissioned on the risks of Instagram’s “beauty filters,” he didn’t have a prepackaged response to Lanier’s grand finale: a billboard-sized tarp, which took up half the width of the courtroom and required seven people to hold, of hundreds of posts from K.G.M.’s Instagram account. As Zuckerberg blinked hard at the vast display, visible only to himself, Kuhl, and the jury, Lanier said it was a measure of the sheer amount of time K.G.M. had poured into the app. “In a sense, y’all own these pictures,” he added. “I’m not sure that’s accurate,” Zuckerberg replied.

When Lanier had finished and Schmidt was given the chance to set Zuckerberg up for an alternate vision of Meta as a utopia of connection and free expression, the founder quickly gained his stride again. “I wanted people to have a good experience with it,” he said of the company’s platforms. Then, a moment later: “People shift their time naturally according to what they find valuable.”

Meta Goes to Trial in a New Mexico Child Safety Case. Here’s What’s at Stake

Lauren Goode — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:54:00 GMT

Today, Meta went to trial in the state of New Mexico for allegedly failing to protect minors from sexual exploitation on its apps, including Facebook and Instagram. The state claims that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by implementing design features and algorithms that created dangerous conditions for users. Now, more than two years after the case was filed, opening arguments have begun in Santa Fe.

It’s a big week for Meta in court: A landmark social media trial kicks off in California today as well, the nation’s first legal test of social media addiction. That case is part of a “JCCP,” or judicial council coordinated proceedings, that brings together many civil suits that focus on similar issues.

The plaintiffs in that case allege that social media companies designed their products in a negligent manner and caused various harms to minors using their apps. Snap, TikTok, and Google were named as defendants alongside Meta; Snap and TikTok have already settled. The fact that Meta has not means that some of the company’s top executives may be called to the witness stand in the coming weeks.

Meta executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, are not likely to testify live in the New Mexico trial. But the proceedings may still be noteworthy for a few reasons. It’s the first stand-alone, state-led case against Meta that has actually gone to trial in the US. It’s also a highly charged case alleging child sexual exploitation that will ultimately lean on very technical arguments, including what it means to “mislead” the public, how algorithmic amplification works on social media, and what protections Meta and other social media platforms have through Section 230.

And, while Meta’s top brass might not be required to appear in person, executive depositions and testimonies from other witnesses could still offer an interesting look at the inner workings of the company as it established policies around underage users and responded to complaints that claim it wasn’t doing enough to protect them.

Meta has so far given no indication that it plans to settle. The company has denied the allegations, and Meta spokesperson Aaron Simpson told WIRED previously, “While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant, and distracting arguments, we're focused on demonstrating our long-standing commitment to supporting young people … We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we’re always working to do better.”

Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a tech industry watchdog, said in an emailed statement that these two trials represent “the split screen of Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmares: a landmark trial in Los Angeles over addicting children to Facebook and Instagram, and a trial in New Mexico exposing how Meta enabled predators to use social media to exploit and abuse kids.”

“These are the trials of a generation,” Haworth added. “Just as the world watched courtrooms hold Big Tobacco and Big Pharma accountable, we will, for the first time, see Big Tech CEOs like Zuckerberg take the stand.”

The Cost of Doing Business

New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez filed his complaint against Meta in December 2023. In it, he alleged that Meta proactively served underage users explicit content, enabled adults to exploit children on the platform, allowed Facebook and Instagram users to easily find child pornography, and allowed an investigator on the case, purporting to be a mother, to offer her underage daughter to sex traffickers.

The trial is expected to take place over seven weeks. Last week jurors were selected, a panel of 10 women and eight men (12 jurors and six alternates). New Mexico First Judicial District judge Bryan Biedscheid is presiding over the case.

In the months leading up to the trial, Meta submitted more than 40 motions in limine, or requests that the judge exclude or limit certain information that could unfairly sway a jury. These are standard procedures in cases like this, and within Meta’s rights to argue that some content brought to trial could be irrelevant to the case at hand.

But WIRED reported that Meta’s preliminary requests were extensive. Among these requests, Meta asked that the judge ban the court from mentioning Mark Zuckerberg’s time spent as an undergraduate at Harvard University; referring to the company’s financial status or wealth; citing articles from the former US surgeon general about social media’s mental health harms; citing third-party surveys or Meta’s own internal surveys that purport to show a high amount of inappropriate content on Meta’s apps; referencing Meta’s AI chatbots; and more.

Some of Meta’s requests were granted. For example, per Meta’s request, the judge ruled that the word “whistleblower” is not permitted in the courtroom, and during this morning’s opening arguments the plaintiff used phrases like “prior employees who have expertise” instead. But other requests, like Meta asking the court to ban references to mental health harms, AI chatbots, or third-party surveys, were denied. Meta also sought to block a video livestream of the trial, but was rejected.

Meta has brought in outside counsel from Washington, DC-based litigation firm Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick to assist with this case. Prior to this, the firm defended Meta in a case brought against the company by the FTC, which had argued that Meta was a monopoly in personal social networking and should unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The antitrust case was considered the most consequential threat to Meta’s dominance since the company’s inception, but Meta’s lawyers successfully argued that the company faces plenty of competition from other social media platforms.

Meta is hoping for another win in New Mexico and will try to prove that it was proactive about removing harmful content from its platforms and transparent with users about potential risks. The company is also likely to refer to the protections of Section 230, a well-known provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which shields online platforms from being liable for the third-party content people post on their sites.

“Meta is likely to make a variety of arguments, some of which may have merit, some of which will have no merit, because when we look at their previous filings or stances in litigation, this has been their pattern,” says Mary Graw Leary, a leading criminal law and procedure scholar at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, who is not involved in the Meta case. She points out that one reason why Meta and other tech platforms have leaned heavily on Section 230 in response to lawsuits is because if the argument is successful, courts will dismiss the case before discovery.

“They have a right to vigorously defend themselves, but I suspect that because this trial may be viewed as a ‘cost of doing business’ to them, Meta will try its best to exclude information that they don’t want the public to see,” Graw Leary says.

In a series of posts on X leading up to the trial, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone maintained that the New Mexico attorney general has led an “ethically compromised investigation into Meta that knowingly put real children at risk,” and that Torrez has been “actively raising money for his political campaign and building his reelection bid off the back of his criticism of Meta.”

Chelsea Pitvorec, deputy communications director at the New Mexico Department of Justice, said that the state’s lawsuit alleges that Meta has misled the public about dangers on its platforms for years, and that instead of making its products safer, “Meta is spending its time and resources falsely smearing law enforcement officials who put child predators behind bars. The company is deflecting attention from New Mexico’s undercover investigation because even Meta’s highest-paid PR flacks cannot defend why Meta’s platforms expose children to criminals.”

“We look forward to presenting the jury with the evidence we’ve obtained in over two years of litigation,” Pitvorec said.

In terms of remedies, the state is seeking civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation of the Unfair Practices Act, which, depending on how the violations are counted, could mean millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars for Meta. And Torrez has already signaled that he wants Meta to make significant changes to its platform. In a letter sent to Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri in December 2025, he asked the executives to stop marketing Teen Account content as “PG-13” and implement meaningful safety protections for children.

“This also includes, among other steps, promptly and broadly enacting effective age verification, removing bad actors from the platform, addressing harmful algorithms that proactively serve dangerous content, and resolving the safety risks created by end-to-end encryption,” Torrez wrote.