Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a plan to ‘evolve’ how users interact on its social networks via AI profiles. According to the Financial Times, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg is developing thousands of fictitious user profiles created through generative AI.

Specifically, the goal is to enhance interaction and entertainment among its platforms' 3 billion active users. These artificial profiles, which began appearing in mid-2024, will feature bios, profile pictures, and AI-generated content, explained Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta.

“We want interactions between real users and AI users to be more realistic and emerge more naturally and socially,” Hayes said. While most of these accounts are private, Meta is already exploring integrating them more openly with human profiles.

AI profiles vs human profiles 

However, Meta's plan has sparked fierce debate among users and analysts. One of the main fears is that these artificial accounts will contribute to the dehumanization of social networking relationships, a problem already seen with anonymous profiles and fake accounts.

In addition, communication experts have warned that this strategy could aggravate the proliferation of disinformation, 'fake news' and hoaxes on the platforms. Although Meta has assured that “content generated by these accounts will be clearly labeled as AI-produced,” the risk of manipulation and confusion among real users remains a major concern.

Meta has insisted that this initiative seeks to enrich the user experience and experiment with new forms of interaction. According to the company, AI-generated profiles will be designed to be compatible with humans, opening up a new dimension in the use of social networks.

Despite these intentions, the debate about the impact of this technology remains open. While some see an opportunity to explore creativity and innovation, others fear that this is a further step towards the depersonalization of platforms and an increase in the risks associated with artificial intelligence in the digital sphere.

For now, Meta is proceeding cautiously, but the first signs of its strategy are already generating controversy and questions about the future of social networks.

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Meta – parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp –  will not launch its upcoming multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) models in the European Union (EU) due to the “unpredictable nature” of its regulatory environment.

“We will launch a multimodal Llama model in the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment,” the company has advanced to Axios media.

This decision may have several consequences for both companies and users in the EU. One of them is that European companies will not have access to this multimodal AI technology to carry out their work processes, despite the fact that these are models that Meta always publishes under an open license.

In this line, users and companies will also not be able to develop their own products if they make use of the new models that Meta plans to launch. Similarly, the technology company has pointed out that it could also affect other companies that operate outside the EU and that, therefore, do use the multimodal models, as it could prevent these companies from offering their products and services in Europe.

Despite the fact that the Artificial Intelligence Regulation will come into force on August 1 this 2024, Meta is currently facing problems with the European regulation due to the need to use data from users participating in its platforms to continue training its AI models.

Specifically, the EU opposes the use of user data by companies such as Meta under the requirements of the current General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which seeks to ensure that users have greater control over the personal information handled by its online services, as well as deciding the type of advertising they receive.

Meta wants to use public info to train their AI 

In this context, Meta announced last May its intention to use information shared in Facebook and Instagram posts by public users to train its upcoming AI models. However, Meta later added an option so that, through an objection form, users could prevent using their data posted on both platforms.

Finally, in June, Ireland's data protection authority, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), announced that Meta had halted plans to train its AI models on public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram in the EU.

For its part, Meta shared its “disappointment” at having to delay training its large language models (LLMs) using public content from its platforms. “This is a step backward for European innovation, competition in AI development, and further delays in bringing the benefits of AI to people in Europe,” it sentenced in a statement on its blog, noting that “AI training is not a technology unique to Meta's services and that they are also more transparent than many of their industry peers.”

It is worth noting that other tech companies have also made this decision, as is the case of Apple, which recently detailed that it will delay the arrival of its AI features, Apple Intelligence, in the EU, as well as iPhone Mirroring for Mac and SharePlay Screen Sharing features due to “regulatory uncertainties” related, in this case, to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

However, despite all this, Meta has also indicated to the media above outlet that they plan to release a larger version of their text-only Llama 3 model. This new version will be available to customers and companies in the EU. 

Likewise, the technology company has also confirmed that it will launch its following multimodal AI models in the United Kingdom because, although they also have a law similar to the GDPR, they do not have the same uncertainty scenario as in the European Union; it has clarified.

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Instacart has announced that it has expanded its partnership with Google Shopping Ads to YouTube to boost its Retail Media network to provide greater shopping reach for its advertisers. Specifically, as it reports, selected brand partners can inspire and convert consumers who view YouTube directly to shop for same-day delivery.

The YouTube ads—which can be purchased with Instacart technology—will help selected brands turn their ads into instant shopping experiences powered by Retail Media's technology and Instacart's fulfillment network. Clorox and Publicis Media have become the first Instacart partners to test the offering.

CPG advertisers can use Instacart's first-party data to find and reach high-intent consumers on YouTube and receive closed-loop measurements. Viewers who click on the ads will be directed to an Instacart product page to order the promoted items for same-day delivery.

"We are proud to continue to bring our world-class advertising capabilities to more platforms and unlock innovative new touchpoints to connect brands and consumers. By expanding into shoppable YouTube ad formats, we are merging the power of video creative with our valuable first-party data and a seamless shopping experience," stated Fidji Simo, CEO and president of Instacart, noting that "the ad marks an important step in making grocery shopping simple by helping consumers move more easily from discovery to purchase."

Google Shopping ads via Instacart 

Last January, Instacart and Google announced that Google Shopping ads would be accessible to Instacart's advertising partners using the company's Retail Media data, an expansion that allows consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies on Instacart, such as Danone's Oikos, Kraft, Lunchables, Oscar Mayer and Kraft Heinz's Philadelphia brands; and Publicis Media's CPG clients, activate Google Shopping ads, powered by Instacart's first-party data and closed-loop insights, to reach high-intent consumers searching on Google and get their products into consumers' hands in as little as an hour.

Instacart's retail media growth is based on its ability to help advertisers reach shoppers on other channels, particularly YouTube, which are important avenues for research and product discovery.

According to Nielsen's Gauge, YouTube dominates the total share of streaming and TV viewing time. A recent Google/TalkShoppe study found that YouTube is the top platform consumers use to research products and make purchasing decisions. According to eMarketer data, U.S. adults spend an average of 36 minutes a day on the platform, surpassing Netflix, Hulu and Facebook and making it highly attractive to advertisers.

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Meta will offer an ad-free subscription plan for Instagram and Facebook in Europe starting in November. The price will be 9.99 euros per month for the web version or 12.99 euros per month for iOS and Android to comply with European regulations. 

As had been rumored, users who want to stop advertising on these social networks will be able to do so from this month upon payment of a monthly fee. In this way, it could avoid future sanctions such as those it has recently received.

As explained by Meta, regardless of where it is purchased, the subscription will apply to all Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in a user's Account Center until March 1, 2024. After that date, however, an additional fee of €6 per month on the web and €8 per month on iOS and Android will apply for each additional account listed in a user's Account Center.

Meta promises compliance with the EU 

The company remains committed to an ad-supported Internet, even with its new subscription offering in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland. Despite this, they respect the spirit and purpose of these European regulations and are committed to complying with them.

Last August, the company announced a change in the legal basis underpinning personalized ads on its platforms to offer users a consent-based model, in line with European regulation.

Thus, the alternative for individuals to purchase an ad-free subscription balances the requirements of European regulators while giving users a choice and allowing Meta to continue to serve all individuals in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland. In its ruling, the CJEU expressly recognized that a subscription model, such as the one being advertised by Meta, is a valid form of consent to an ad-funded service.

Thus, users who use the free option of these social networks will consent to the collection of information and its use to display personalized advertisements. On the other hand, those who choose the paid option will no longer share this data with Facebook or Instagram.

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Meta might launch paid versions of Instagram and Facebook for users in the European Union. The purpose of creating these subscription models is to make it possible to use social networks without advertising content, The New York Times has reported. 

This is a response to EU policies regarding privacy and data protection and a defense mechanism against regulatory scrutiny.

The company, headed by Mark Zuckerberg, made adjustments to adapt to recent regulations approved by the EU, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force last August 25. Among other things, it prohibits platforms from presenting ads based on the use of the personal data of minors.

For nearly two decades, Meta's primary focus has been to offer free social networking services and sell advertising to companies that want to reach the audience. Introducing a paid option is one of the examples of how it has had to redesign its product to comply with data privacy rules and other government policies.

Meta’s ‘free versions’ will remain… for now 

Meta's goal would be to avoid future sanctions such as those it has recently received. In May, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined them €1.2 billion for transfers of personal data of Meta users in Europe to the United States. Separately, in July, EU bodies banned Meta from combining user data across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as external websites and apps, unless it received explicit consent from users.

It has also highlighted how EU policies, specifically around data protection, may impact users' experience with the technology as opposed to other countries, such as the United States.

At the moment, the subscription cost for these social networks is unknown, but both would continue to provide their ad-supported free versions in the EU, as they have done so far.

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The new microblogging social network created by Meta and designed by Instagram, and linked to it, has been a huge success in its launch and promises to have unique features and tools that will captivate users of all kinds.

The app's potential is strengthened by its connection to the already successful Instagram. In fact, if you have an Instagram account, there is no need to create one on Threads. The potential for the over one billion users of the existing content social network to register on Threads is very high.

Threads allows users to create posts with text and add photos and videos. Messages will have a limit of 500 characters, and as a social network, users can reply to other people's posts, share them, or quote them by adding text or posts, etc.

Threads aims to be a decentralized social network in the future. That's why there are plans to implement the ActivityPub protocol, which is the same as Mastodon, making it part of the Fediverse.

Threads is compared to a new Twitter created by Instagram but with an independent app due to its great similarity.

However, being part of the Fediverse will be a significant advantage for Threads, as instead of all the content being stored on the servers of a single instance, its operation will be the opposite, with a network of servers and instances, even created by users, as in Mastodon.

This means that user data would be stored on the servers of the instance they are registered on, but they can read the content from all instances. In Threads, this translates into not needing to register but being able to follow users who use the same technology even if they are on different instances.

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Instagram is introducing two new marketing tools to offer businesses new ways to add advertising to the social network. These tools work via reminder ads and by adding ads in search results.

The goal will be for brands to be able to remind users of future events or launches.

The first point is that ads will appear in search results for people actively searching for businesses, products, and content of all kinds. Thus, they will appear in users' feeds before any other content.

Instagram reminders ads 

Instagram is partnering with brands like Starz to test a new ad format that makes it easier for businesses to advertise, remind and notify people about upcoming events or launches they might be interested in.

Reminder ads, which are launched to all advertisers as an option in the feed, help advertisers build awareness, anticipation, and consideration for upcoming moments. People can opt-in for convenient reminders and receive three Instagram notifications a day before, 15 minutes before, and at the time of the event.

Search result ads 

The second marketing tool announced by Instagram will be a functionality they are starting to test, which aims at adding ads in search results to reach people actively searching for businesses, products, and content.

The ads will appear in people's feeds when they tap on a post in search results. So they plan to launch this location globally in the coming months.

The launch of this new ‘ad results’ functionality has been greeted with a lukewarm welcome, as many users believe this could be detrimental to their user experience. 

For some experts, while the search result ads seem like they might be making the user experience worse, the second new ad type, called “reminder ads,” is mostly unintrusive and won’t change much about how ads are already used in a user’s feed. 

Essentially, ads will show up as usual while a user scrolls the app, but ads for events will have the option to send users reminders via push notifications as the event gets closer.

In practice, it’ll work like this: a user might see an ad for an upcoming event that now has a banner on it that says “remind me.” If selected, the user will get three push notifications: one a day before the event, the next 15 minutes before the event starts, and the final one as the event begins. 

Because reminder ads are opt-in, they shouldn’t change much about how a user experiences ads on the app currently unless their addition means that even more ads will be flooding feeds.

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Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is in the early stages of developing its decentralized social network based on text posts. The company does not want to lose ground and is looking to wrest the throne from Twitter. Meta sources have confirmed this to Platformer, who comment that they do not yet have a launch date.

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Although they do not have many more details about the project, the person responsible for carrying it out will be Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, and very active on social networks. The highlight of the platform is decentralization. What does it mean that the web will be decentralized? Users will be able to configure and set specific rules for using moderation. 

A decentralized network… to rule them all? 

Meta's goal is that the new social network can be accessed with Instagram credentials. To this end, the company's legal teams are working to resolve potential conflicts in terms of privacy they may have. 

Thus, they are exploring a decentralized standalone social network for text sharing. There is an opportunity for a separate space where content creators and the public can share news about their interests. On the one hand, it would have similarities to Twitter, although the operation would be more like Mastodon. 

For Meta, it is an excellent time to enter this territory of short text messages, which so far is dominated by Twitter. Although we will have to wait and see to what extent Meta will get involved in this social network. 

Twitter problems seem to have no end… 

Twitter problems keep rising and piling over and over. Last March 6, 2023, we witnessed a serious Twitter crash that lasted for quite some time and did not seem to have a clear explanation for its collapse, not even for Elon Musk; beyond that, it had some API relation.

Those affected were reminded of the good old days of the social network with its Fail Whale, only this time; the failures came in the most random ways.

All this is happening due to a combination of Elen Musk's apparent poor managerial control of the brand and the company, but also due to what many experts have already described as a massive revolt against Musk's vision of Twitter. 

In fact a report from The Verge, with information from data provided by anonymous employees aware of the incident, details the depth and delicacy of Musk's mass firings for the stability of Twitter by claiming that a single discontent employee did the crash. This programer was directly impacted by Elon’s recent round of layoffs.  

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Mark Zuckerberg, in one fell swoop last Wednesday, announced the dismissal of 11,000 employees of Meta, parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, a cut of 13% of the company's total workforce. 

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Zuckerberg acknowledged that he made mistakes in making large investments "I accept responsibility for these decisions and for getting to this point," he noted on his blog. He also apologized for his over-optimism in the company's growth, which led him to overstaff.

"I know this is hard for everyone and I am especially sorry for those affected," he added.

The market reaction to Meta's massive layoffs 

Investors thought that Meta’s massive layoffs were the right call as Meta's shares went up after the announcement, rising 6.36% late in the trading day.

The announcement of the layoffs also included a freeze on any new hiring until at least the first quarter of 2023.

Since Facebook's founding in 2004, the real wunderkind of the current web, the mother of all social networks, has been making significant and steady hires. At the end of September, the conglomerate had 87,314 people, the largest number of workers it had ever had on its payroll.

‘Over-contracting’ in times the good times

The staff cuts are the deepest of all the company's personnel cuts and are spread across departments and regions, although some areas, such as recruitment and business, have been more affected than others. The sifting even affects Reality Labs, the division that houses the metaverse, the future, and projects.

"At the beginning of covid, the world moved rapidly online and the growth of digital commerce led to a huge expansion of revenues," he stressed.

In his argument to justify the over-contracting, he qualified that "many predicted that this would be a permanent acceleration, which would continue after the pandemic was over".

Elon Musk Twitter massive layoff was dwarfed 

Meta - former Facebook -  for many years seemed to have no limits and be capable of overcoming the serious problems regarding user privacy, and many other controversies. 

But now, the economic pressure has pushed Meta to undergo a massive cutoff that - among other things - was manifested in a layoff three times the size of the recent Twitter layoff. 

But also Shopify fired roughly 10% of the staff, and many other tech companies like Snapchat and Salesforce have announced massive layoffs also. 

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Instagram is concerned about children's access to its platform. For years, Instagram has been making different efforts to steer kids away from its app. In this sense, it has recently announced the start of tests of an age verification system. 

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How does Instagram plan to steer children away from the app?

In June, the Meta-developed platform started collaborations with a company that specializes in age verification systems, called Yoti. 

According to the tests being conducted, when a user signs up to Instagram or wants to change their date of birth to one that accounts for those under 18, they will be given three options to verify their age. The first is to ask friends to verify their age. The second is to upload a file that identifies them, such as an identity document. And the third is to record a video selfie so that the app can check the required age. 

A controversial method 

Of the options mentioned, it is the video selfie that has generated controversy and it is the option for which Instagram is collaborating with Yoti. This is because it is not a person who will inspect the video to establish the user's age, it will be done by an artificial intelligence system. This, is based on facial features to assess whether the age is correct. 

In this sense, and considering that we are talking about minors, the question of privacy arises. According to Instagram, the platform will share the video with Yoti and, when the user's age has been verified, the video will be removed from both servers to make it inaccessible to third parties. 

As for the option to ask other users to verify the age of the applicant, this will be called a "social voucher" and at least three followers will be required to verify the person's age. These followers will receive a notice in the app to this effect and will have three days to respond.

Testing of these methods has recently begun in the United States. It is expected that, if they are successful, they could be expanded to other countries. The results will be seen in the coming months.

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