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Tech giant Meta has reportedly announced that it is shutting down its metaverse project, which was a dream project of its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who had called it “the next frontier" upon rebranding the social media company from Facebook to Meta in 2021. Four and a half years later and a total outlay of humongous $80 billion, the project has been dumped, making it a failed project. The shift in Meta’s approach came at a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) has become the new hotbed for tech companies, with capital expenditure reaching trillions of dollars and a heated race...

An Iowa school principal was arrested on first-degree harassment charges two days before his wife filed a restraining order against him, court records show. Justin Blietz, 40, was booked into a Linn County, Iowa, jail in connection with the alleged harassment on Saturday, March 14, according to online court records reviewed by PEOPLE. Blietz allegedly told a woman he would slit her throat and "watch her die," according to a criminal complaint obtained by The Gazette and KCRG. It wasn't immediately clear who the subject was of his alleged harassment. Blietz is the founding principal of a charter school in...

Meta Platforms may shrink its workforce by up to 20% in a sign that artificial-intelligence productivity gains are finally materializing. According to a Reuters report from Friday, Meta has not finalized specific dates or details for cuts but is considering widespread reductions to its workforce. The company had nearly 79,000 employees as of its last annual filing. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters, “This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” The company didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment. But Wall Street seems encouraged that the company is thinking about paring back its staff. Shares are up 2.9% in Monday’s...

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife Priscilla Chanhave bought a waterfront mansion in Miami that’s still under construction... The property on ultra-exclusive Indian Creek Island, otherwise known as ‘Billionaire Bunker,’ was on the market for $200 million. The price that Zuckerberg and Chan agreed to pay: a colossal $170 million. A message seeking comment from Zuckerberg was not returned by press time. The couple’s move from California to Florida follows in the recent footsteps of fellow online billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are the co-founders of Google. They’re fleeing the Golden State as California prepares to...

A newly granted patent to Meta is raising unsettling questions about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital identity. The company’s developments suggest that social media users could continue posting, commenting, and even interacting with loved ones after death.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just purchased a mansion located in South Florida’s most exclusive neighborhood, signaling that the multi-billionaire may be permanently moving out of California as the state weighs implementing a one-time 5% “billionaire tax.” Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan purchased an estate located in Indian Creek, on an island off of Miami. Indian Creek is home to about 41 homes owned by the top elite such as Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Carl Icahn, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The two acre property located along Biscayne Bay, which includes several private properties, is estimated to have sold for...

Days after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested a Watsonville resident last month, social media circles in the Pajaro Valley erupted in outrage over a pro-ICE Facebook comment by a teacher intern at a Watsonville elementary school.

Two Memphis City Council members think the snow from Winter Storm Fern is man-made. Council members Pearl Walker and Yolanda Cooper Sutton both publicly said the snow was artificial in differing Facebook posts and comments this week. Claims of fake snow have been rampant on social media during the storm, especially TikTok. Cooper Sutton posted a video showing who she says is her husband attempting to melt a chunk of snow with a lighter. ... In the video, Cooper Sutton says, “This is not melting. This is fire. OMG. What is falling from the sky hitting the ground? Oh my...

LAWRENCEVILLE, GA — A Gwinnett County magistrate judge and longtime local politician has resigned from his court position after being suspended over controversial posts he made on Facebook. Jim Hinkle, a part-time judge who has served on the court for 14 years, resigned Wednesday, Chief Magistrate Judge Kristina Hammer Blum said in a written statement. Blum had suspended Hinkle indefinitely after his Facebook posts came to light on Saturday. “For 14 years, Judge Hinkle has dutifully served this court,” Blum said in her statement. “He is a lifelong public servant and former Marine. However, he has acknowledged that his statements...

U.S. — Liberal women across the U.S. spent the day feverishly refreshing their Instagram feed to see what they are supposed to be angry about next. With the rage over the latest issue seemingly having passed its zenith, liberal women were left scrolling for somewhere else to target their unbridled fury. "Come on, come on, what do we hate now?" said local woman Denise Simmons as she refreshed her feed once more. "Throw me a bone here, people. I don't know whether to scream about voter identification, blowing up drug boats, global warming, white people -- I'm totally lost. Someone...

The pre-AI world is gone. Estimates suggest that already, as many as one in eight kids personally knows someone who has been the target of a deepfake photo or video, with numbers rising to one in four who have seen a sexualized deepfake of someone they recognize, either a friend or a celebrity. This is a real problem and it’s one that lawmakers are suddenly waking up to. In the 1980s, when I was a kid, it was a picture of a missing child on a milk carton from across the country that encapsulated parental fears. In 2026, it’s an...

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — A Miami Beach political activist got an unexpected knock on her door Monday over a comment she made to and about Mayor Steven Meiner on Facebook. Raquel Pacheco, a local activist and veteran who once ran for city commission and as a Democratic state Senate candidate, said she was stunned when Miami Beach detectives knocked on her door Monday, asking about a comment she made on one of the mayor’s Facebook posts. “He said, ‘We are here to talk to you about a Facebook comment’ and I said - ‘What? Is this really happening?” Pacheco told...

Meta Platforms on Monday named former Trump administration official Dina Powell McCormick as its president and vice chairman, boosting the company’s lobbying efforts in the U.S. capital. President Donald Trump congratulated Powell McCormick in a post on his Truth Social account minutes after the company announced her promotion. “Congratulations to DINA POWELL MCCORMICK, WHO HAS JUST BEEN NAMED THE NEW PRESIDENT OF META. A great choice by Mark Z!!! She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!” the president wrote. Her appointment is the latest in a series of changes Meta...

The shocking cause of death for the California-based food influencer Michael Duarte has been revealed more than a month after he was shot and killed by a Texas sheriff’s deputy. Duarte — known online as FoodWithBearHands — died from a gunshot wound, a spokesperson for the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office told People on Wednesday. The full autopsy report remains pending, the spokesperson said.

A Swiss wind instrument repairman is serving a ten-day jail sentence after refusing to pay a fine imposed for a comment he made on Facebook about biological sex. Emanuel Brünisholz, from Burgdorf in the canton of Bern, responded to a December 2022 post by Swiss National Councillor Andreas Glarner, writing: “If you excavate LGBTQI people after 200 years, you will only find men and women among the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that was fostered by the curriculum!” As we reported, the comment, which stressed the immutability of biological sex, triggered complaints from activists who accused him of...

A Swiss man, Emanuel Brünisholz, is serving 10 days in prison in Switzerland for saying on Facebook that skeletons are either male or female. For that remark I was fined 500 Swiss francs. I refused to pay, and so, on the 2nd of December 2025, I will serve ten days in prison. It is worth noting that, legally speaking, this prison sentence is not a punishment for refusing to pay the fine. Instead, the prison sentence is an alternative way to be punished for the Facebook post itself. I have chosen to trade a monetary fine for time behind bars....

In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his social media empire was officially rebranding itself as “Meta” as part of a sweeping company-wide doubling down on virtual reality tech.The head-scratching pivot has been nothing short of a disaster ever since, from blocky “Horizon Worlds” online environments filled with screeching children to never-ending rounds of layoffs and exorbitant losses.All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021 on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the...

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed that people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to a legal filing that was released on Friday. The social media giant was alleged to have initiated the study, dubbed Project Mercury, in late 2019 as a way to help it “explore the impact that our apps have on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions,” according to the legal brief, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The filing contains newly unredacted information pertaining to Meta. The newly released legal brief is...

Sex trafficking on Meta platforms was both difficult to report and widely tolerated, according to a court filing unsealed Friday. In a plaintiffs’ brief filed as part of a major lawsuit against four social media companies, Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that when she joined Meta in 2020 she was shocked to learn that the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.” “You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the 17th violation, your account would be suspended,” Jayakumar reportedly...

A Washington congresswoman is pointing the finger at daylight saving time for her son’s recent mishap in which he incurred a bad bloody nose, using the incident as a springboard to do away with the semiannual changing of the clocks altogether. “My kid just got his first gusher bloody nose. Thank you Daylight Savings Time for this annual rug pull,” Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, 37, perplexingly wrote on X and Facebook Sunday. “And it’s not just about tired kids bumping into s–t – research shows car and other accidents spike in the days and weeks following the time change,”...