9 stories
404 Media says it is inundated with AI-written emails from people with ordinary tech problems. After it began asking senders how they found it, every one it asked said a chatbot recommended contacting it.
ChatGPT, asked how to recover a banned Instagram account, concluded that emailing Meta was probably hopeless.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
Brazil's electoral court ordered Meta to apply identical criteria to both campaigns, with a fine of R$500,000 a day. Watchdog groups filed new screenshots as evidence.
The thread split the exhibits into laughable ones and one that a commenter said was real.
According to Blast, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu asked the four operators to be ready to cut access, and the operators voiced doubts in the meeting afterward. The article notes the same measure was used in New Caledonia in 2024 and was later overturned by the Conseil d'État.
Commenters outside France argued about whether blocking apps stops riots or just removes the witnesses.
The Independent hangs a trillion-dollar-plus price tag on the case — a number almost no one in the thread believes will survive a courtroom. What they can't wave away is the paperwork underneath it.
A Facebook engineer who worked on the relevant team from 2017 to 2019 says the cited documents are real, and that safety projects with evidence behind them were 'cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm' whenever they cut into Time Spent.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers refused to throw out 29 states' claims that Meta engineered Facebook and Instagram to hook kids, and she granted the states summary judgment on Meta's failure to obtain parental consent under COPPA.
A 38-page ruling sends the addiction question to a jury, with trial on August 18. On HN the reaction runs from calls for case law to a skeptic who reads it as the government seeing dollar signs and blaming Meta for users' own choices.
A widely shared post claims Instagram is now inserting users' own photos into ads for Meta's smart glasses, with the caption 'the era of ultra personalized ads has begun.' The reaction on HN was less alarm than fatigue.
One reader dug up Facebook's 2013 terms granting exactly this permission, name, photo and content for sponsored use, with no compensation. As another put it: ten years ago this caused outrage; in 2026 nobody, including potential customers, seems to care.
A federal law quieted loud broadcast-TV ads back in 2012, but it never touched streaming — so streaming ads stayed loud. California's new law extends the same standard to streamers on July 1.
Industry groups argued that server-side ad insertion and a 'broad range of devices' make consistent loudness hard. The thread's top reply took that apart: loudness is a measured, solved problem at the source. 'Stop trying and fix it. It's your own damn system.'
The bill leaves messaging out (WhatsApp, Signal) and exempts YouTube Kids, then threatens multimillion-dollar fines for non-compliance, plus floated extras: overnight curfews and limits on infinite scroll for under-18s.
The author discloses he sits on a social-media board, which the thread treats as both a tell and a reason to discount him.
The harder asterisk comes from Australia's live version: a 15-year-old visitor reported it didn't touch existing accounts at all, because age checks there only gate newly created ones.
An estimated 4,000-5,000 software engineers, out of about 25,000, now sit in a new 6,500-person org doing data labeling and RLHF. The autonomy-to-labeler whiplash is the part people on core infra and security teams can't stomach.
Add keystroke and mouse tracking with no opt-out, rolled out in late April, and a CISO who resigned the day after an AI support flow let attackers hijack Instagram accounts.
The flip: a former Meta engineer says the well-run orgs were all acquired — the homegrown ones were always the mess.
