New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act provides for no greater penalty per violation. The interest is 15% a year until Meta pays in full. The court deferred injunctive relief pending further briefing. New Mexico sought between $35 billion and $40 billion. Meta asked the judge to restrict penalties to $3.45 billion, saying that a higher number would risk chasing businesses out of the state. “Facebook systematically misled the public regarding the core of its business operations,” Mathew said. His order estimated Facebook’s value in 2025 at about $1.7 trillion and annual revenue of $200 billion.

Meta refutes user data sale allegations

On Sept. 25, jurors found that 26 of 29 statements made by Facebook and its leadership were misleading. The statements included who is able to see user data, how the company contends with hate speech and misinformation, and other internal policies. Each violation counted as one Facebook user or one New Mexico resident in the audience for a misleading statement.

Meta said in filings it does not sell user data and New Mexico never established any consumer was actually misled. Then-Attorney General Hector Balderas filed suit in 2021. Data from as many as 87 million Facebook users was harvested by British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica using a third-party app. “A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million violations of our consumer protection statute, and this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences,” said Attorney General Raúl Torrez in a statement.

New Mexico’s school system gets penalty money by state law. “We may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years,” Torrez said. If Meta appeals, the money will be tied up, he said. Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is “confident” it will “prevail on appeal.” “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said.

The decision is the second Santa Fe ruling against Meta in six months. A jury in March levied $375 million in penalties related to young users’ safety, and a judge later steered $567 million into a teen mental health fund. New Mexico opted out of a multistate settlement agreed to on August 26 that also settled claims against Meta over Cambridge Analytica.

The deal brings Oregon alone $125 million, and Meta shares climbed 2.1% that afternoon, reported Cryptopolitan. The state Department of Justice said its allegations were put to the test in court because it went to trial. Florida, the only other holdout, asked a Pasco County court on October 7 to ban Instagram and Facebook for users under 14.

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The request, filed in Pasco County Circuit Court, would hand Florida minors and their parents sweeping new limits on the apps’ behaviors, and comes while the rest of the country has settled similar claims against the tech company. The motion for a temporary injunction is one piece of a larger lawsuit Florida is pressing against Meta Platforms Inc. and Instagram LLC under the state’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

Florida makes its argument against the Meta apps

Florida accuses the tech giant of calling its apps safe for young users while internal and outside research have pointed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, sleep loss, eating disorders, and unwanted sexual advances as resulting from the use of these apps. The state court filing cites internal chat logs from workers at Meta, where these staff compared the apps to a narcotic.

In one of the messages, an employee wrote, “IG is a drug,” while another described the company as “basically pushers.” The proposed terms would disable infinite scrolling and autoplay by default, while like and comment counts would remain hidden unless a parent chooses to turn them on. It would also include a default quiet mode that blocks access from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. every day, with another restriction from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays during the school year.

The state also wants tighter limits on time spent on the apps, including a two-hour daily cap, mandatory breaks after long sessions, and a combined limit of 60 hours per month. Florida wants Meta to also work harder at preventing unrelated and random adults from messaging teens, put more in place to notify parents the first time an adult contacts their child, and strengthen its response to sextortion reports. Florida is seeking stronger verification measures for age checks.

The motion also states that if Meta cannot implement these measures within 30 days of a court order, the company should be barred completely from serving users under 14 in the state until it does. On August 26, a group of states and territories reached a deal with Meta that bundled a cash payment with youth-safety changes. Florida’s Voice stated that the agreement was at $11.66 billion spread over a decade across 51 states and territories.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the launch of a new Meta Enterprise Platform in a company newsroom post and on X, calling it “the next major pillar” of Meta’s business alongside its consumer apps and advertising. The platform puts tools Meta already operates, such as the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, a Muse API, and Muse Code, in a package and sells them to companies and developers. Chirantan “CJ” Desai, the former MongoDB chief, will fill the role of Chief Enterprise Platform Officer and run the new platform.

Meta Enterprise Platform to become next company pillar

Before his time at MongoDB, Desai led product and engineering at Cloudflare and spent close to eight years at ServiceNow, where he served as President and COO. Zuckerberg stated that Desai’s corporate experience and industry contacts are the reason he was hired, calling the appointment the start of “a new chapter” for the company. Meta is yet to provide exact details like a date when the platform’s products would be generally available or how they would be priced.

Muse, released on September 8, has added more than $200 billion to Meta’s market capitalization after logging 2.8 million downloads in its first 12 days, Cryptopolitan reported. That download pace was even faster than ChatGPT’s early adoption. Jefferies estimates that Muse could bring in roughly $10.8 billion a year if it reaches a billion users by the end of 2027, with at least 3% paying, and it lifted its Meta price target to $875.

Zuckerberg said during Meta’s Connect event on September 23 that Muse would stay free for most users, but the company will take a small fee from the purchases and bookings the agent completes. However, corporate buyers are a harder audience than consumers, and Meta brings baggage. Muse’s enterprise ambitions have so far faced a “trust deficit,” due to the company’s past privacy breaches and content-moderation failures. Cryptopolitan reported that Meta recently strengthened Muse’s safety warning after an outside researcher found a flaw, initially rated SEV-2, that could have exposed a user’s virtual machine along with their emails and files.

Notably, several AI agents have been involved in incidents where they acted outside of their guardrails, raising concerns about AI safety. For example, an OpenAI agent recently reached Australia’s Medicare portal while Britain’s AI Security Institute logged its unsanctioned actions. Gartner forecasts spending on securing AI will approach $4.8 billion in 2027, up 68.7% over the prior year.

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The case centers on a social media trend in which men use the glasses to film women in public without their consent and post the footage online, often on TikTok. Reuters reported on Friday that the prosecutor’s office in France has not disclosed how many complaints it has received or if any of the perpetrators have been identified. The scrutiny centers on Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, made with eyewear company EssilorLuxottica. The glasses have a small camera built into the frame and an LED light that signals when it is recording.

France opens criminal investigation into the act

Rights group e-Enfance released a warning that some users in France cover or disable the light, which makes it harder for people nearby to know they are being filmed. Meta has since released two software updates that stop the camera from recording when the indicator is blocked. Article 226-1 of the French Penal Code provides for up to one year in prison and a €45,000 fine for recording someone’s image without consent, but the provision applies to private places and not public areas.

This distinction is of note when assessing the prosecutor’s decision to open a criminal investigation. The data protection authority in France, the CNIL, while examining the issue from a regulatory perspective, warned in June that cameras and microphones built into ordinary-looking glasses can capture people without their knowledge. Nacera Bekhat, the CNIL’s head of economic affairs, told Reuters that the glasses pose “real challenges” when it comes to alerting people they are being recorded and obtaining consent.

Regulators and safety advocates say the burden of preventing abuse should not fall on the people being recorded. Ines Legendre, a legal expert at e-Enfance, told Reuters that an indicator light does not amount to consent to being filmed or to having someone’s image shared with thousands of people in France and abroad. Ines Girard, who studies technology-enabled gender-based violence at the Center Hubertine Auclert, added to that point, arguing that the burden of being more vigilant should not rest on the people being recorded.

Meta dominates the smart glasses market, with Reuters putting its global share at about 76%. Counterpoint Research had measured Meta’s share at 82% in the second half of 2025, before a wave of rivals subsequently flooded the market. EssilorLuxottica reported sales of over 7 million AI glasses in 2025 and described the category’s growth as exponential. France is not moving in isolation, with the German group HateAid also filing a criminal complaint last month against Meta, Ray-Ban, Oakley, and several retailers.

Australia’s finance minister, Katy Gallagher, asked the public service commission on Thursday for advice on whether the glasses should be banned in Commonwealth workplaces. Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office opened an investigation into smart glasses in March, while some venues have completely restricted the use of the glasses. The UK Cinema Association said in August that it was not aware of any members enforcing outright bans. The European Data Protection Board is also preparing to review the issue with national data protection authorities.

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The hardware is sourced from a mix of suppliers, said workers who asked not to be identified in a report by Wired. They are Watney Robotics in San Francisco, Kinova in Quebec, and ABB in Zurich. In one experiment, a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm is tasked with cutting power to servers, while another machine is being tested to swap networking cables. At some sites, the company has already deployed a device resembling a finger or a pointy stick that presses the power button on a Mac Mini or similar box to reboot it at the command of a remote human.

Meta data center employees wary about being replaced

Meta has since declined to comment on the testing, while Kinova and ABB declined to comment. Also, Watney did not respond to questions. A cable-swapping robot that works could take over 80% of some people’s workloads, one Meta data center employee said. That estimate did not come from a Meta prediction but from the worker, who said the machine still can’t match the speed of a human.

“We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” one worker said. He added, “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.” Some employees said Meta is building software to let it hire cheaper, lower-skilled staff and shift some roles to cost-friendly hubs like Denver. One said the company needs “smart hands,” people who can take instructions from AI without breaking anything. The long-term goals shared by Meta are to put robots in data centers.

Eric Xu, senior manager for robotics at Meta, mentioned at a conference last year that they could speed up incident response, monitor the environment, and handle preventative maintenance. The machines need to be supervised, and they falter on obstacles, short battery life, visual inspections, and tightly packed cabling. Industry trials sometimes failed in the past with robots crushing servers on simple tasks. In May 2026, the company began laying off about 8,000 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, and data center staff were among those layoffs.

The cuts were presented in part as freeing up cash for AI spending, with the company’s capital expenditure forecast of $125 billion to $145 billion for the year, more than double the prior year. ACE Robotics chairman Wang Xiaogang said embodied AI could have a “ChatGPT moment” by the end of 2027. Cryptopolitan reported that Unitree founder Wang Xingxing put a similar leap two to three years out, and as long as five to ten if progress stalls. He likened it to a robot doing about 80% of the work in an unfamiliar environment.

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Features like the infinite scroll, video autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms’ personalized recommender systems are being pointed out as part of the core problem. According to the Commission, these features “shift the brain into autopilot mode,” and it says that Meta failed to properly weigh their effect on users’ physical and mental health. However, a Meta spokesperson has stated that the company does not disagree with the regulators’ findings, including the conclusions about its teen accounts. The spokesperson also stated that Meta would keep working with the Commission on child safety.

Meta rejects European Commission’s findings on its platform designs

Meta has previously stated that it has put in more than a decade of work and built over 50 tools to protect younger users. The investigation was started in May 2024 and focused on minors and vulnerable adults. The Commission found that Meta ignored what it knew about how long children stay on the apps late at night and about how formats like Reels and Stories can drive what it calls an “excessive or even compulsive use.” The regulator added that the fixes Meta claims to have put in place did not hold up under review.

It also states that features such as time-management tools, parental controls, and screen-time awareness pages are too weak to offset features engineered for engagement. A senior Commission official told journalists that the teen accounts Meta rolled out in the EU in 2024 did not meet the standard set by the DSA. The official also added that their default settings “can be easily dismissed” and that parents need to be experts to locate the controls at all.

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, said, “The Digital Services Act provides a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design and effects of their services,” adding, “We are fully committed to enforcing our legislation in Europe.” The preliminary findings don’t mean the EU has made a decision or issued any penalty yet.

Meta, on the other hand, can respond in writing, examine the Commission’s files, and try to refute the case before any penalty is set. If the finding is confirmed, Meta could face fines of up to 6% of its total annual worldwide revenue, alongside orders to change the products. The Commission wants autoplay and infinite scroll switched off by default, and screen breaks added. It also recommends that Meta rework its algorithm to serve less personalized content.

In April, the Commission said the company was failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, and in October 2025, it accused Meta and TikTok of blocking researcher access to platform data. TikTok was separately found to be unlawfully addictive in February 2026. Also, an expert panel convened by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to present recommendations on social media limits for children by July 17. At least 10 member states, including France, Italy, and Spain, are already drafting their own rules.

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The development follows a protest campaign that saw employees circulate petitions, post physical flyers in conference rooms and on vending machines, and openly compare the company to an “Employee Data Extraction Factory.” The monitoring program was initially launched by Meta on April 22 by loading the software into the laptops of US-based employees, enabling it to track the movements of the mouse, clicks, and keystrokes.

Meta suspends employee mouse tracking for AI training

In its statement, Meta emphasized that such a program is vital in training AI agents to complete computerized tasks independently. “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them,” a Meta spokesperson said. Across the Atlantic, UK-based Meta employees have begun organizing with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a division of the Communication Workers Union.

Speaking against the move by Meta, an organizer with the UK-based United Tech and Allied Workers union (UTAW), Eleanor Payne said: Meta’s workers are paying the price for management’s reckless and expensive bets. They are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them. The backlash escalated quickly, with flyers appearing across multiple U.S. offices, in meeting rooms, on vending machines, and in restrooms.

The pamphlets directed colleagues to an online petition opposing the rollout. Both the flyers and petition cited the National Labor Relations Act, noting that workers are legally protected when organizing to improve working conditions. Hundreds of employees also voiced opposition on internal channels, according to a New York Times report. Employee anger at AI-driven restructuring has been common across the tech industry in 2026. However, what has not been commonly seen is concessions.

As Cryptopolitan reported in March, more than 30,000 tech jobs were cut in early 2026 as companies, including Amazon, Meta, and Crypto.com, cited AI efficiency, with Meta alone eliminating over 1,000 positions in its AI division. In most of those cases, worker objections made no difference. In this case, Meta staff pushed back and got a measurable result. The company did not cancel the program in its entirety, but it made adjustments.

Stephane Kasriel said in the memo: “While we remain confident in the privacy protections we put in place at launch, which went through several layers of risk review, we have heard your concerns about personal data on work devices, battery life, and wanting more control over when capturing happens”. Employees will now be able to pause the tracking software for up to 30 minutes at a time and request full exemptions from the program.

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Company executives told lawmakers on May 7 that the bill contains useful law enforcement measures, but its surveillance provisions need major changes. 

The testimony came one day after Apple publicly opposed the same provisions and warned against encryption backdoors.

Meta Warns Against Surveillance Powers

Meta told a parliamentary hearing that Part 1 of Bill C-22 gives law enforcement a legal path to collect critical evidence and support public safety. 

However, the company said Part 2 raises deeper risks because it could allow the Public Safety Minister to issue secret orders to technology firms and telecom providers.

Those orders could require companies to build systems that support third-party surveillance. Meta said such powers could harm Canadians by creating security weaknesses inside digital platforms. 

The company urged lawmakers to remove or revise measures that may force providers to change secure systems for government access.

Bill C-22 Raises Metadata Concerns

Part 2 of Bill C-22, also called the Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act, would let the Public Safety Minister require core providers to retain metadata for up to one year. The retained records may include transmission data, device identifiers, routing details, and location information.

The bill does not cover message content, browsing history, or social media activity. Still, privacy experts argue that metadata can reveal sensitive patterns about a person’s movements, contacts, and communications over time.

The bill also allows retention duties to expand beyond telecom firms through ministerial orders. That wording could bring cloud services, encrypted messaging platforms, and crypto infrastructure providers under future rules, depending on how regulators define electronic service providers.

Apple Opposition Adds Industry Pressure

Apple opposed the bill on May 6 and said it would not build backdoors into its products. The company also suggested it could withdraw certain services from Canada instead of complying with rules that weaken encryption.

The warning echoes Apple’s earlier move in the United Kingdom, where it withdrew Advanced Data Protection after pressure over encrypted iCloud access. Industry critics say Canada could face a similar dispute if Bill C-22 advances without clear encryption safeguards.

The Canadian government rejects claims that the bill would force companies to weaken encryption. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s office said the proposal does not require systemic vulnerabilities and remains consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Critics point to the Salt Typhoon cyberattack in the United States as a warning. Hackers exploited lawful intercept systems used by telecom carriers, exposing metadata and surveillance targets. Canada’s Parliament will now decide whether Bill C-22 can support investigations without creating wider security risks.

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Polygon Labs disclosed on April 29 that Meta has already paid out almost $3 billion to authors in 2025 alone. Moving even a small percentage of that amount on-chain could greatly increase the blockchain’s use in regular payments. The move aims to expand financial access by leveraging global off-ramps and connecting to Polygon’s “Open Money Stack,” giving creators greater freedom to receive, store, and spend their revenues internationally.

Meta shifts payment strategy with stablecoin adoption

Meta is returning to the stablecoin market after giving up on Libra, which was later renamed as Diem in 2022 due to strong political and governmental opposition. The change also coincides with a more permissive regulatory environment surrounding stablecoins, which allows big platforms to experiment without directly undermining monetary sovereignty. Meta is using USD Coin, a fully reserved and widely accepted digital currency that more readily complies with compliance requirements, rather than reviving an internal token.

This strategy lowers regulatory obstacles while enabling Meta to expand swiftly across markets. Meta is positioning itself as a payment facilitator integrated into blockchain infrastructure rather than issuing money. The company is focusing on distribution rather than control by integrating payouts via Stripe and deploying them on Polygon and Solana. The change places Meta in a larger trend in which financial infrastructure is increasingly integrated into digital platforms.

Stripe has announced this shift, noting that blockchain-based rails and stablecoin rewards are moving from testing to practical implementation across major companies, such as Meta. The convergence implies that programmable money, platforms, and payments are starting to function as a single integrated layer of the online economy. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated that stablecoins are now a fundamental component of digital commerce rather than a side project, with wider implications.

He further emphasized that Meta’s action highlights a concerted industry drive toward borderless financial systems, while Stripe extends payouts to more than 160 countries and incorporates stablecoins into its primary offerings. In that regard, Stripe’s CEO revealed that Meta is aligning with a developing global payments infrastructure that could completely change how value flows across social platforms, rather than merely testing a feature.

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The AI model, previously called Avocado, is available on Meta’s AI website and app now. Meta described it as the first product of a complete overhaul of the company’s AI efforts. According to Meta, Muse Spark handles the same work as the earlier Llama 4 Maverick model but uses less computing power to do it. This is Meta’s first AI release with Wang running things. Wang is a billionaire tech executive who came to Meta after the company invested $14.3 billion in his firm, Scale AI. Meta brought him on as chief AI officer and put him in charge of the Superintelligence Labs team.

Meta shifts AI approach

Unlike Meta’s previous models, Muse Spark breaks from the company’s open-source tradition. The model is closed and proprietary, marking a sharp change from past strategy. The company will give private preview access to some partners through an API, but hasn’t committed to releasing the model publicly. The model’s release was delayed because early versions didn’t perform well enough in benchmark tests.

Muse Spark failed to beat competing models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. But Meta’s new comparison data shows Muse Spark now matches or beats rival AI systems in different performance measures. Independent testing shows the model does well on health-related questions but still needs work on coding tasks. Meta expects to spend $135 billion on AI this year. That’s nearly double what it spent in 2025. The big spending comes after some problems in the AI race.

Meta’s Llama 4 model didn’t live up to expectations when it launched in 2025. The company abandoned development of its largest variant, codenamed Behemoth, which would have reached 2 trillion parameters. After that setback, Meta bought a 49% non-voting stake in Wang’s Scale AI for about $14 billion last summer. Then Meta committed $600 billion toward AI infrastructure in the U.S. through 2028.

The AI push meant cuts in other areas. Meta cut hundreds of jobs last year, including workers in its Reality Labs division. That division, which built the now-defunct Metaverse, lost $80 billion. Its Horizon Worlds platform, a social virtual reality system, had less than 200,000 monthly active users. The goal was 500,000. Meta also announced a “Contemplating mode” for Muse Spark that will roll out gradually. This feature uses multiple reasoning agents working together to handle complex problems.

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