Using ‘spy glasses’ made by Facebook owner leads to floods of negative comments, say content creators
It was hardly an offensive video. Amid the buzz of the Tour de France finale, Oliver Hooson filmed himself whipping up a delicious-looking flat white for a fellow cycling enthusiast. But after posting the footage on social media, the comments that soon rolled in were a real shock. “PERV,” read one. “Out here pushing creep glasses,” said another. His mistake? Documenting the moment with Meta’s “spy glasses”.
Despite being marketed as the latest must-have gadget, Meta’s smartglasses, which can record video footage while being worn, have faced a vicious backlash, particularly relating to concerns about surveillance. There are widespread fears about the glasses being used to film people, especially women, without their consent, and the resultant footage being posted on social media. This has earned them the label of “pervert glasses”, and content creators, no matter how they are used, have faced a flood of negative comments for deploying them.
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© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found.
These pages and individual creators posted content that appeared to be in clear violation of Facebook’s own hate speech policies. Nonetheless, they were able to earn money on their posts through the platform’s “Content Monetization” program — which is invitation-only.
One receiving payouts from Meta was Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups. Lennon was taken away by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi during his stay at a Melbourne hotel, and is believed to be one of the organizers behind an “anti-immigration” march on a sacred Indigenous site in the city last year.
Lennon, in other words, was a known quantity, and Meta should’ve been under no illusions about who they were paying to drive engagement on the platform. Still, the investigation found that he’s been receiving payments from Facebook since September 2025.
Meanwhile, the Facebook page for the Australian white supremacist site The Noticer has been making money through the revenue program since November 2025. Underscoring how much Meta has dropped the ball on this one, even X — owned by Elon Musk, who performed two suspiciously Sieg Heil-looking salutes back in 2025 — has banned The Noticer for violating its “hateful profile policy.”
Facebook’s monetization program can be quite lucrative, though it’s unclear how much each of these pages made individually. In 2025, Facebook doled out nearly $3 billion to 16 million accounts, the reporting notes. The platform periodically discloses data on these monetized accounts, which has been collated into a searchable database by the tech accountability non-profit What to Fix.
What To Fix executive director Victoire Rio didn’t mince words when it came to Meta’s culpability.
“If we consider that Meta is in a direct commercial relationship with its publishers, insofar that they’re paying them royalties and that they have a monetization agreement with them,” Rio told ABC, “then you could argue that they are liable for the content that gets produced by their business partner in some ways.”
Hate, unfortunately, sells. Right-wing extremism researcher Kaz Ross told ABC that Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material: anything that will get people upset and arguing is the best way to get engagement.”
It’s another example of how quickly Meta dropped its once-stricter content moderation policies when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Shortly before his second inauguration, Meta loosened its standards around hate speech, particularly on topics like gender identity and immigration, two of the far right’s favorite issues.
Facebook is far from the only platform that’s gotten alarmingly chummy with extremists. Earlier this year, X awarded the $1 million first place prize of its article writing contest to a proudly self-proclaimed Nazi.
In a statement, Meta didn’t address specific questions about the pages it was awarding money to, but said it was “important to distinguish between speech that is offensive and content that could potentially lead to offline violence”.
“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.
More on Meta: FTC Concerned About Meta Surveillance of Users of Erectile Dysfunction Apps
The post Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook appeared first on Futurism.
A New Mexico judge yesterday ordered Meta to pay $567 million for a fund that would alleviate the "public nuisance" created by its social media services. The order to pay for youth mental health care is in addition to $375 million in civil penalties that a jury ordered Meta to pay earlier in the same case.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in a Santa Fe County court in 2023. A jury found in March 2026 that Meta's social media platforms do not effectively protect kids from child exploitation and ordered the company to pay civil damages for violating state consumer protections and misleading parents about the safety of its apps.
The jury trial was just phase 1 of the case involving Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. "The Phase 1 jury trial considered the State’s Unfair Practices Act claims and resulting civil penalties. The Phase 2 bench trial considered the State’s request for abatement based upon the State’s allegation that the Defendant, Meta, created a public nuisance," Judge Bryan Biedscheid wrote yesterday in the $567 million judgment. Meta reported $60.8 billion in revenue and $15.85 billion in net income in Q2 2026.
© Getty Images | Cavan Images
The backlash to what some dub ‘pervert glasses’ is growing – but people living with disabilities point out the new tech can also be life-changing
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One summer day earlier this year, Rhys left a cafe in Melbourne where he had been working remotely, when his phone pinged with a message on the dating app Grindr.
The message was a photo of him sitting at a table outside the cafe on his laptop, with his dog seated on the ground next to him. In the foreground, in a man’s hand was an iPhone unlocked.
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© Photograph: Supplied
© Photograph: Supplied
© Photograph: Supplied
The artificial intelligence tools developed by Meta recently went beyond their intended limits and breached a real organization’s network on the internet. On Wednesday, the tech giant confirmed that one of its language models gained unintended access during a routine cybersecurity evaluation and hacked into an external company. The model even made unauthorized changes to […]
The post Meta AI Model Breaches Third-Party Systems During Security Testing appeared first on The Mac Observer.
A state court has ordered Meta to pay $567 million to address the mental health impact its platforms have had on young people. The judge ruled that the company created a public nuisance by designing features that keep teenagers addicted to its apps. This brings the total penalty in this specific case to nearly $1 […]
The post Meta Ordered to Pay $567 Million in Massive Child Safety Case appeared first on The Mac Observer.
Ruling comes as part of second phase of landmark trial that found social media company enabled harm against users
A New Mexico court has ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay $567m into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts from the social media giant’s platforms.
The Thursday ruling comes as a part of the second phase of a landmark trial the social media giant lost in March. At the time, a jury found that the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms, and imposed the maximum penalty: a $375m fine.
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© Photograph: Jill Connelly/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jill Connelly/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jill Connelly/Getty Images
Last month, OpenAI revealed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.
On one hand, experts saw the incident as the latest warning sign that AI models had gotten to the point of being able to autonomously infiltrate targets, a threat we’ve been aware of for years rapidly turning into a reality.
On the other, a more skeptical read of the situation is that OpenAI could have orchestrated the hack as part of a “publicity stunt” — or at least lowered its guard just enough to allow it to happen, knowing the publicity would be invaluable. After all, just three months earlier, competitor Anthropic had made major headlines by announcing that its own Mythos AI model had similarly broken containment.
Put simply, it’s in the companies’ best interest to paint their AI models as capable enough to pose a real-world threat, especially as the industry grows ever more competitive.
Now the situation has gotten even stranger as a third company, Meta, has entered the fray. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant is claiming that during a recent test of one of its AI model conducted by an independent company, the AI accessed the internet and hacked a third-party service — an narrative that’s starting to get awfully familiar at this point.
According to The Information, the model involved was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, the company’s most advanced model yet, which was released by its Superintelligence Labs last month. Per the publication, the model breached an unidentified company’s systems and changed its internal environment.
Meta claims a “misconfiguration” during the hacking test had allowed its model to escape. A source told the WSJ that it was the same cybersecurity benchmark test that led to previous hacking incidents at Anthropic and OpenAI. Earlier this week, the company that conducted benchmark tests for all three AI companies, called Irregular, said it had caught OpenAI and Anthropic AI agents gaining unauthorized access to secure systems.
As we await more details regarding the latest incident — Meta has promised to investigate and publish a report — the suspicious optics of the situation are hard to escape. Meta has long struggled to keep up with the competition as the AI race continues to heat up. Could the company be looking for favorable media coverage about how its AI model is similarly capable of breaking containment?
Irregular said it hadn’t noticed any “current open issues” related to its test environment, per the WSJ. But while there wasn’t any real-world harm — at least that we know of — stemming from these hacks, researchers warn that the threat of AI models going rogue is coming to a head.
Just earlier this week, the UK government-backed AI Security Institute revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic models took “unsanctioned action on the live internet” and went as far as to create fake identities on GitHub to pressure a human user into approving a malware-tainted software update.
“What they’re doing is coming up with very sophisticated strategies or cyberattacks to be able to achieve the goal that they’ve been given,” global chief AI officer of advertising firm WPP Daniel Hulme told the BBC. “When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve the goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”
More on the hacks: OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported
The post Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too appeared first on Futurism.
Company is the third to report such an incident after Anthropic and OpenAI reported breaches during training
Meta said on Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during cybersecurity testing, after an error by its testing partner gave the model unintended internet access.
The incident adds to a growing list of cases in which AI agents from major developers breached systems at other companies during testing, after Anthropic said last week that some of its models hacked three companies, and OpenAI disclosed that an AI agent breached the startup Hugging Face.
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© Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
© Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
© Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
Apple briefly removed Telegram from the App Store on Monday night after a review found content that violated its guidelines against child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but restored the app a short while later, according to Reuters.
It seems like this was a symbolic gesture. Removing the app didn’t affect any of the customers who had already downloaded it. Probably none of them saw the image. And restoring the app doesn’t mean that it’s completely free from CSAM—probably none of the major platforms is. It just means that Telegram did the obvious thing after the violation was reported, which presumably they would have done, anyway.
They removed an entire app for ONE app user???
And before even contacting the developer? Telegram banning the account is what actually prevented users from potentially seeing the CSAM. Apple’s action seems like either a mistake or trying to send them a message.
I would note, by the way, that the Telegram app was apparently never removed from the Mac App Store. Which goes to show how little Apple cares about the Mac App Store.
I’m sure this stance will be applied equally to all other apps in the store, in the future right? @Apple
Pavel Durov (Telegram, MacRumors):
Because Telegram quickly removes illegal content from public groups using all kinds of moderation tools, the attacker had to resort to a technical trick. He inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat. As a result the content was effectively hidden from the group’s members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it.
The attacker was a takedown extortionist: someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. These extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them.
[…]
Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting. Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us. This creates a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content. If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be.
During the time the app was unavailable, many speculated that the move was politically motivated, or perhaps in response to the recent discovery that Telegram has allegedly been using an obfuscated private UIKit API to animate its emoji picker.
It’s sad but kind of hilarious that both of these so disparate theories were considered possible. Durov really does have political enemies, and Apple really does seem to have it out for Telegram. But, also, using private API to animate emojis totally seems like something that Telegram would do and that Apple would overreact to.
Previously:
Update (2026-08-06): Matt Burgess (Hacker News):
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.
This is much worse than what happened with Telegram, yet Apple didn’t overreact.
There’s also the Twitter/Grok case.
Previously:
'Most people don’t want pervert glasses that can film us without our consent,' said a spokesperson from activist group Everyone Hates Elon. The group has launched a series of guerilla adverts deriding non-consensual filming by the glasses as well as an email campaign encouraging people to legally object to being filmed by Meta glasses under general data protection regulations, which over 20,000 people have signed.
Rights groups have warned that the glasses threaten the right to privacy, while countries such as Germany are reportedly considering a ban.
And while Meta’s safety guidelines say smart glasses should not be used for 'harassment, infringing on privacy rights, or capturing sensitive information', women have taken to social media to share their stories of being filmed by men without their consent.
Watch as Guardian columnist and Opinion editor Kirsty Major dives into why fears of surveillance and 'creepy men' mean Meta can never convince her to love the glasses – and read more about the glasses via the link in the bio
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© Photograph: Guardian
© Photograph: Guardian
© Photograph: Guardian
Meta has opened Pandora’s box with its AI-infused smart sunglasses.
The pricy accessory has sparked a heated debate over privacy, with unsavory individuals abusing the eyewear’s easily-missed cameras to harass unsuspecting strangers in public — garnering the specs the distinctly unflattering nickname of “pervert glasses.”
It’s gotten to the point that owners who shelled out hundreds of dollars for a pair have become too afraid to wear them in public. Meanwhile, Meta is seriously struggling to crack down on its badly-behaved users.
Now, Google alternative DuckDuckGo, a company that has long attempted to actively distance itself from Big Tech, has come up with a genius new product that’s guaranteed not to spark controversy: a pair of plastic, non-pervert glasses that lack any electronics whatsoever.
The company partnered with sunglasses maker Knockaround to create the “world’s most innovative anti-surveillance sunglasses,” or “Normal F***ing Sunglasses.”
“No camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind,” Knockaround boasts on its website. “Just a beautifully crafted pair of matte black sunglasses with a glossy DuckDuckGo logo, designed to block the sun and never send data to the cloud.”
“Yes, these are actually real,” DuckDuckGo had to reassure netizens in an official announcement on X.
Best of all, at $35, they’re an absolute bargain compared to Meta’s pervert glasses, which start at a far steeper $299.
Satire publication The Onion, which promoted the sunglasses, rounded up some fictional reactions.
“0/10,” the publication quoted one fictional man. “Useless for perverts.”
“Guess I’ll have to violate people’s privacy the old-fashioned way: from the bushes,” another quote reads.
The marketing stunt appears to be working out. A DuckDuckGo representative told CNET that a “significant percentage of the inventory has sold, though it’s still too early to release sales data.”
It also perfectly illustrates how the public is becoming fed up of having AI shoved down its throats, in the kind of tech-obsessed overreach that’s facilitating some extremely boorish behavior.
Some netizens were inspired by the product, pointing out other categories that could benefit from being stripped back down to the basics.
“This is a good start,” one Bluesky user wrote. “Can we get Normal F***ing TV and Normal F***ing Refrigerator next?”
More on sunglasses: Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing
The post DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever appeared first on Futurism.
If you’re among the 2.6 million active users of the popular telehealth apps Hims and Hers to obtain medication for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and a cavalcade of other intimate issues, there’s probably a very short list of people you want to know about it — and Mark Zuckerberg probably isn’t one of them.
On Wednesday, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a major lawsuit against Hims and Hers, over allegations the firm was sharing user’s health information with third party companies, Gizmodo reported. Chief among those third-parties apps was Zuckerberg’s Meta, as well as Snap, two social media companies with horrible track records on protecting sensitive information.
Though Hims and Hers advertises its app-based health services as “100 percent online, private, and secure,” the FTC suit alleges “those assurances were false or misleading.”
“Instead of honoring its privacy promises,” the filing says, “Hims opted to grow the company and increase its revenue streams… with advertising platforms such as Meta and Snap.”
The suit doesn’t blame Meta directly, but argues that Hims and Hers used two “automated tracking technologies offered by Meta” to surveil users’ actions on the telehealth app. “These two tools automatically tracked and disclosed certain Events [user actions] to Meta,” the lawsuit reads.
Hims sells all kinds of men’s health meds, but most people know it for one thing: erectile dysfunction pills. While any leak of patient data would be an outrage, the thought that Hims could be sharing this particular kind of medical information is especially horrifying.
In a statement, Hims and Hers argued that the FTC’s case “is not enforcement grounded in consumer protection,” but rather “an effort to generate headlines at our expense.”
The lawsuit comes on the back of a three-year investigation by the FTC, and is currently in the very early stages — meaning it could be years before a final verdict is reached.
More on Meta: Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing
The post FTC Concerned About Meta Surveillance of Users of Erectile Dysfunction Apps appeared first on Futurism.
Se colocou uma música menos conseguida num post antigo do Instagram ou se o áudio foi removido por direitos de autor, já não precisa de apagar a publicação. Saiba como trocar a banda sonora mantendo os gostos e os comentários.
The post Arrependeu-se da escolha da música numa publicação no Instagram? Saiba como trocar sem ter de a apagar appeared first on Tek Notícias.
Despite having almost nothing to show from his enormous spending on AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down.
Earlier this week, the social media company announced during its second quarter earnings call that it was raising capital expenditures from $125 billion to at least $130 billion, a clear sign that it’s not taking its foot off the pedal.
Yet amid renewed concerns that the tech industry may be nearing the edge of a cliff thanks to its obsession with building out enormously expensive data centers without a clear path to profitability, investors sent back a clear signal in return. Meta’s shares nosedived following its announcement, plummeting over 11 percent over the last five days alone.
According to Zuckerberg, all that extra AI spending was “accelerating every part of our core business.” He also claimed that some of the tech would be sold off to other businesses.
But whether the company will have anything compelling to offer them remains dubious at best. Meta has been burning through its funds at an alarming rate. Even strong revenue numbers — a 28 percent increase this latest quarter compared to the same period last year — couldn’t stem the bleeding, with free cash flow sinking to the lowest level in at least five years thanks to AI spending.
Despite committing well over $100 billion to the tech, Meta has been practically absent from the frontier AI model race. Its so-called Superintelligence Lab has turned into a “soul-crushing gulag” plagued with rock-bottom morale — and most importantly, it’s not getting results.
Its efforts to develop an in-house frontier model, dubbed Muse Spark, have been mired by setbacks, with Meta continuously shifting back the timeline of its release to developers. On July 11, the company released version 1.1 of its AI to little fanfare, with Axios noting that it’s still easily outdone in most tasks by competing models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
At the same time, Meta released an image-generation model called Muse Image, which felt like an afterthought and a too-little-too-late attempt to catch up with its competitors.
The latest news has given some analysts a feeling of déjà vu. Zuckerberg has garnered a reputation for making major strategic missteps since long before AI. Case in point was the company’s heavily criticized pivot to the “metaverse,” an ill-fated attempt to sell customers on the idea of spending their workday inside a hollow and cartoonish virtual reality world, which feels like the perfect precursor to Meta’s current pains.
“There’s a bit of similarity to Meta’s metaverse missteps in that Meta is once again spending ahead of proven product demand,” Forrester analyst Mike Proulx told the BBC.
Meanwhile, Meta’s platforms have descended into a practically unrecognizable ocean of clickbait and AI slop, something the company has yet to meaningfully address as user numbers and engagement continue to slide.
For his part, Zuckerberg remains infatuated by the concept of AI agents “that can work 24/7 on your behalf,” as he told investors this week, and growing its Muse Spark model into a “large business for large businesses.”
But considering Meta is entering a game with much bigger players who’ve seen far more success in attracting customers and growing AI revenue so far, the company’s long-term success is anything but guaranteed.
And investors who’ve already shaken their heads after both Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet announced major spikes in AI spending this month haven’t taken kindly to Zuckerberg’s lofty vision. Judging by how little the billionaire has to show, who can blame them?
More on Meta: Is Mark Zuckerberg Actually TRYING to Destroy Meta?
The post Mark Zuckerberg’s Pivot to AI Is Blowing Up in His Face Spectacularly appeared first on Futurism.
Meta Platforms revealed a dramatic acceleration in its infrastructure commitments, disclosing in a regulatory filing it has secured $279 billion in off-balance sheet lease obligations primarily dedicated to expanding its AI capabilities.
The future costs, which exist on top of its active leases, comprise short- and long-term agreements covering data centres, co-location facilities and certain network infrastructure.
The total for uncommenced lease commitments as of the quarter ended 30 June represents a 53% surge from the $183 billion reported in the previous period.
The social media giant is showing no signs of slowing its aggressive AI buildout, adding an extra $68 billion in commitments during July alone, with those leases slated to commence in 2027 and 2028.
The disclosure comes alongside mounting investor pressure on CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta’s stock fell today (30 July) following a disappointing Q3 revenue forecast yesterday which heightened investor scrutiny over the company’s massive capital expenditures on AI.
During the Q2 earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta could sell compute directly to large enterprises but stated the social media giant believes there will be a “significantly higher margin on selling [super]intelligence rather than selling compute directly”.
The post Meta eyes $279B AI infrastructure expansion appeared first on Mobile World Live.
Meta knows its AI-powered camera equipped spectacles are widely seen as “pervert glasses.” And though it professes to be cracking down on creeps using them to record people without their consent, whatever measures it’s taking clearly aren’t working.
After Meta announced this month that it would ban users using the glasses to film themselves harassing strangers, a recent investigation by Oligarch Watch still found hundreds of these videos on its platforms. Many of them are from sleazy “pickup artists” who approach women in public, making sexual or degrading comments and recording their buttocks or breasts.
In one viral video on Instagram, a pick-up artist who goes by “_mypointofvue” films himself approaching an underaged girl in a shopping mall.
“I’m 17,” the girl says, seemingly unaware that she’s being recorded, when he asks her age.
“That’s crazy. I can’t do nothing with you, baby,” he replies, grumbling that he “can’t believe that ho was 17.” He then pulls out his phone on camera to do an ad for a crypto-based online casino.
In another Instagram video, a man who goes by Justin uses his Meta glasses to zoom in on a woman’s buttocks as she orders coffee, before repeatedly asking for her contact information and being shut down each time. “Shawty had the gyat,” he wrote in the caption. The user, according to Oligarch Watch, has posted dozens of similar videos since Meta announced the crackdown.
Another popular pickup artist who goes by “moreno.rizz” recently shared a video of himself approaching a woman by saying, “Excuse me, have we f*cked before? I’m just kidding. I just thought you were really pretty.”
The harassment can sometimes be even more blatant. Another pick-up artist called “dkdanny” boasts over half a million followers, and in some of his most popular videos that rack up millions of views, he wears Meta glasses while insulting the weight of random women on the street.
“You don’t get to talk, OK,” he tells one woman. “You already look big enough. Don’t talk big, too.”
The clear privacy risks posed by Meta’s glasses have been a heated topic since the devices debuted. The company has used big-name celebrity endorsements and run heavy marketing campaigns to improve how they’re perceived, but it’s not winning everyone over. Earlier this month, Instagram head Adam Mosseri addressed the harassment being carried out using the smart glasses, vowing to crackdown on it “every way we can.”
Some of the accounts that Oligarch Watch referenced in its reporting seemed to have been taken down after it was published, but that’s only a drop in the ocean — and one of the world’s largest tech companies relying on random journalists to police abhorrent content on its platforms clearly isn’t a serious strategy.
Meta told the publication in a statement that its glasses that it “built privacy into the camera for the glasses from the ground up,” including an LED that lights up when the glasses are recording. It did not, however, address the fact that there are many workarounds to this small deterrent.
More on Meta: This New Meta “Advertisement” Is Absolutely Brutal
The post Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing appeared first on Futurism.
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) outlined his high-stakes vision for AI across consumer and enterprise markets during a Q2 investor call, casting the technological transition as a massive commercial opportunity despite heavy infrastructure outlays and operational charges weighing on profitability.
Zuckerberg detailed three primary expansion pillars driving Meta’s long-term strategy. He noted AI investments are actively boosting performance across the main portfolio by improving user experiences, optimising return on investment for advertisers and enabling internal product teams to ship software faster.
Looking ahead, Zuckerberg stated that Meta is “developing new personal agents that will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead”.
Expanding beyond consumer applications, he highlighted a growing commercial footprint, pointing to “a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we’re building for large customers”.
Q2 financial performance
Meta delivered strong Q2 top-line performance, driven by continuous gains across its AI-enhanced advertising suite, though rapid infrastructure spending and operational charges squeezed overall profitability below Wall Street expectations.
Meta generated $60.8 billion in revenue, representing a 28% increase compared to $47.5 billion in the same period last year. However, net income dropped 14% to $15.8 billion.
Advertising revenue accounted for $59.8 billion of total sales, up 28% year-over-year. This growth was supported by high adoption of AI automated ad features, with ad impressions growing 14% year-over-year across its Family of Apps and the average price per ad climbing 12%.
Family Daily Active People reached an average of 3.6 billion in June, reflecting a 3% increase year-over-year.
Total costs and expenses surged 55% to $42 billion, heavily weighed down by $2.4 billion in legal proceeding charges as well as $1.2 billion in severance expenses following restructuring in May.
Driven by the aggressive capex ramp and operational charges, free cash flow dropped 91% year-over-year to $784 million, compared to $8.5 billion in the prior-year period.
Capital expenditures jumped to $31 billion from $17 billion, including principal payments on finance leases, as Meta continued to scale its computing infrastructure, servers, and data centres to expand generative AI capabilities.
Looking ahead, the social media giant issued a Q3 revenue forecast of $61 billion to $64 billion.
For the full year, Meta maintained its capital expenditure guidance at $130 billion to $145 billion and anticipates total expenses between $165 billion and $169 billion, while reiterating full-year operating income is expected to exceed prior-year levels.
Highlighting engagement growth across its app suite, Zuckerberg noted Threads crossed 500 million monthly active users, “making it the fastest-growing conversation app ever,” while Facebook reached more than 2 billion daily active users a while ago.
“WhatsApp just hit an all-time messaging record, peaking at 30 million messages sent per second during the World Cup final,” he said.
Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses the company’s VR and AR hardware efforts including Quest headsets and smart glasses, continued to weigh on overall profitability.
The unit posted an operating loss of $4.6 billion, widening slightly from a year earlier, on revenue of just $431 million, up from $370 million in the same period last year.
The post Meta eyes enterprise growth as AI spend surges appeared first on Mobile World Live.
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