Over the Summer break, Startup Daily is republishing key stories from 2025. This opinion piece from editor Simon Thomsen first appeared in March as news emerged of Meta’s use of Library Genesis, an online warehouse of stolen intellectual property, to train its AI, emerged. This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckberg launched Facebook, having… Read more »
Meta has begun warning users it suspects are under 16 that their accounts will begin to be deactivated under the teen social media ban, as it investigates why Instagram already won’t let some users create accounts. On Thursday, Meta was the first tech company to announce its plans for complying with the government’s social media minimum age… Read more »
Twenty-one years after Facebook’s launch, Australia’s top 25 news outlets now have a combined 27.6 million followers on the platform. They rely on Facebook’s reach more than ever, posting far more stories there than in the past. With access to Meta’s Content Library (Meta is the owner of Facebook), our big data study analysed more… Read more »
Big tech company hype sells generative artificial intelligence (AI) as intelligent, creative, desirable, inevitable, and about to radically reshape the future in many ways. Published by Oxford University Press, our new research on how generative AI depicts Australian themes directly challenges this perception. We found when generative AIs produce images of Australia and Australians, these… Read more »
An Australian AI researcher has reportedly turned down a $1.54 billion package from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. University of Sydney graduate and Perth native Andrew Tulloch accrued a reputation as a ‘genius’ during a ten-year tenure at Meta, where he initially worked on machine learning for Facebook before eventually securing one of the company’s… Read more »
When Sue Keay’s Facebook account was hacked, Meta didn’t warn her of the obvious problem, it preferred to go nuclear and deleted all her accounts. It’s a reminder that digital sovereignty matters. There used to be a lot of different ways that people could connect with me but please know that you are no longer… Read more »
Last week, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp – unveiled a new “personal artificial intelligence (AI)”. Powered by the Llama 4 language model, Meta AI is designed to assist, chat and engage in natural conversation. With its polished interface and fluid interactions, Meta AI might seem like just another entrant… Read more »
Warning: This story contains references to child sexualisation. Meta’s artificial intelligence chatbot has reportedly been found engaging in sexual conversations with underage users, even while voiced by the likenesses of celebrities such as actors John Cena and Kristen Bell. The social media giant’s AI chatbot, Meta AI, reportedly engaged in sexual discussions with accounts set… Read more »
Facebook’s Australian arm saw revenue grow by $110 million to $1.46 billion in 2024, but its greedy parent company gobbled up all of that additional revenue in service charges according to regulatory filings. The 20-year-old social media is barely profitable in Australia, just getting by on margins similar to the restaurant industry, at 3.2%, according… Read more »
Tech giant Google has just suffered another legal blow in the United States, losing a landmark antitrust case. This follows on from the company’s loss in a similar case last year. Social media giant Meta is also currently embroiled in a landmark legal battle in the US that could change not only how it operates,… Read more »
Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted. The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen,… Read more »
This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, having kicked it off as The Facebook in 2004. He was already notorious for Facemash, the “hot or not” site that ranked Harvard students by their attractiveness, which he created in late 2003. Zuckerberg hacked into house face book websites at the university to get… Read more »
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been ordered by a US court to provide details on how scammers use the social media platform to create scams ads as part of legal action by Dr Andrew Forrest. The WA mining billionaire has been doing battle with Facebook both here and in California for the last three years… Read more »
Social media giant Meta is attempting to lessen the impact of a tell-all memoir by its former director of global public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled Careless People, which the company alleges is “defamatory”. Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling in the United States on Wednesday, where an absent Wynn-Williams was ordered to temporarily stop personally promoting… Read more »
Meta has announced it will abandon its fact-checking program, starting in the United States. It was aimed at preventing the spread of online lies among more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads. In a video, the company’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said fact checking had led to… Read more »
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