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Meta announces paid subscriptions for both Instagram and Facebook in the UK

by admin September 26, 2025


Facebook and Instagram users in the UK will soon be offered paid subscriptions that remove ads. In the coming weeks, those over the age of 18 can pay £3 ($4) per month on the web, or £4 ($5) per month when using Meta’s iOS or Android apps. If you’re wondering why the mobile version is more expensive, Meta blames that on fees levied by Apple and Google in their respective app stores.

A no-ads subscription will apply to any Facebook and Instagram account added to a Meta Accounts Center, which is what Meta uses to let users connect various Meta logins on its different platforms. Any additional account listed in a user’s Accounts Center will automatically gain their own subscription for an extra £2 ($3) per month on the web or £3 ($4) per month for iOS and Android. Anyone who chooses to decline Meta’s offer will continue to see ads on its free platforms as normal, and can still use Ad Preferences to choose which ads they would prefer to see more or less of.

Meta says the change is a response to new regulatory “consent or pay” guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), whereby users are given the choice between consenting to an organization using their data to personalize ads, or paying to avoid it. Meta previously introduced a similar change for its EU users, offering an ad-free subscription option for €10 ($11), but was fined €200 million by the European Commission for allegedly failing to comply with its stricter Digital Markets Act (DMA) laws. The company later offered a revised, cheaper, ad-free plan that was still being assessed by the EC earlier this year.

Meta praised the ICO for its “constructive approach” to personalised ads, which it insists provide the best experience for both its users and businesses, and criticised EU regulators for continuing to “overreach” with its privacy regulations. As reported by Bloomberg, digital advertising accounted for around 97 percent of Meta’s revenue in 2024.



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September 26, 2025 0 comments
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Facebook adds an AI assistant to its dating app

by admin September 23, 2025


Facebook Dating has added two new AI tools, because clearly a large language model is what the search for love and companionship has been missing all this time. The social media platform introduced a chatbot called dating assistant that can help find prospective dates based on a user’s interests. In the blog post announcing the features, the example Meta provided was “Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech.” The chatbot can also “provide dating ideas or help you level up your profile.” Dating assistant will start a gradual rollout to the Matches tab for users in the US and Canada. And surely everyone will use it in a mature, responsible, not-at-all-creepy fashion.

The other AI addition is Meet Cute, which uses a “personalized matching algorithm” to deliver a surprise candidate that it determines you might like. There’s no explanation in the blog post about how Meta’s algorithm will be assessing potential dates. If you don’t want to see who Meta’s AI thinks would be a compatible match each week, you can opt out of Meet Cute at any time. Both these features are aimed at combatting “swipe fatigue,” so if you’re 1) using Facebook, 2) using Facebook Dating, and 3) are really that tired of swiping, maybe this is the solution you need.



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September 23, 2025 0 comments
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Check Your Bank Accounts, You Might Spot a Deposit From a Facebook Lawsuit

by admin September 16, 2025


Read your email carefully this week: On Monday morning, I received an email from PayPal with the enticing subject line, “Your Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation Settlement Payment.” And no, it wasn’t a scam. I opened it to find my PayPal account had been sent $37.55 as my share of Facebook’s $725 million privacy settlement. 

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

I was glad I spotted the email, because the money would’ve sat there in PayPal until I made a PayPal purchase. Instead, I chose to transfer it to my bank, where it’s expected to show up by Thursday.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that if you neglected to file a claim by the 2023 deadline, you’re out of luck.

This all stems from what might be the largest privacy settlement in US history: Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is paying $725 million to settle claims involving the sharing of user data with third-party companies.

Back in 2018, Facebook was accused of improperly disclosing users’ personal information. Cambridge Analytica, a UK political consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, ended up with the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users. Meta denied any wrongdoing, saying in a 2023 statement that it agreed to the deal because “it’s in the best interest of our community and shareholders.”

A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The amount you receive depends on how long you had an active Facebook account.

Screenshot by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper/CNET

Payment amounts differ

The official website for the lawsuit has more information about settlement payments. It notes that settlement payments are being sent only to class members with approved claims. Distribution of the payments will continue over the next 10 weeks. If your claim is approved, a notification will be sent to your email a few days before your payment is issued.

If you are unsure of the status of your claim form and would like to check, you can send an email to the Settlement Administrator at info@facebookuserprivacysettlement.com, but you must include your Claim ID.

Some recipients will be paid via direct deposit, Venmo, Zelle, a mailed check or a virtual prepaid MasterCard, based on the method they chose when they filed their claim. I certainly didn’t remember which method I chose back then, but the PayPal email jogged my memory.

Your settlement amount might be slightly different from mine. The website says authorized claimants receive one point for each month in which they had an active Facebook account during the class period. The number of points helps determine the amount you’re paid.

According to CBS News, the average payment amount is $29.43, and the maximum payout is $38.36.



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September 16, 2025 0 comments
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Mark E. and Mark S. Zuckerberg.
Game Updates

Mark Zuckerberg Sues Facebook (Sort Of)

by admin September 6, 2025


If you found that headline confusing, try to imagine the constant bemusing misery that arrives at the door of seemingly the only other Mark Zuckerberg, an attorney who is finding his life made increasingly complicated by the shared name. So even though it’s not actually Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg that’s suing Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the mop-haired billionaire remains the cause of the consternation, because for Indiana lawyer Mark Zuckerberg, sharing the Facebook creator’s name is causing him massive issues in both his work and personal life, and indeed costing him lots of money.

As reported by TechCrunch, Mark S. Zuckerberg—a bankruptcy attorney from Indiana—is repeatedly having his paid-for Facebook posts removed by Meta, and his accounts closed down, on the inaccurate basis that he’s falsely impersonating Mark E. Zuckerberg, co-creator of Facebook—and he’s not getting his money back. He’s had enough.

Speaking to Indiana’s WTHR, Mark S. explained that he and Facebook’s Zuck are the only two people he can find who share the name, meaning his situation is rather unique. Four times Facebook has suspended the attorney’s business account and deleted his firm’s advertisements, based on the belief that he’s deliberately trying to pass himself off as the tech billionaire, and then failing to return his resulting lost costs. So this Zuckerberg is now suing that Zuckerberg to get his money back, his legal fees paid, and potential lost money as a result of Meta’s actions.

“All my competitors advertise on Facebook,” says our new favorite Mark Zuckerberg, “so I have to do it too.” Speaking to the Indianapolis news station, he says he pays for ads, “they take my money, but then they shut me down.”

Meta gave a statement to WTHR saying, “We know there’s more than one Mark Zuckerberg in the world and we are getting to the bottom of this.”

Mark S. Zuckerberg’s life isn’t only affected in this way. It seems sharing his name with one of the most controversial figures in the world comes with a personal cost, too. He has in fact dedicated an entire website to the topic, on which he talks about how even his personal Facebook account has been suspended five times, despite providing three forms of identification each time he re-opens it, and when it’s working he’s the constant target of hacking attempts, while his phone blows up with notifications every night. (Dude, come on, just turn the notifications off. And don’t even have the app on your phone. No one should. It’s looking at data from all your other apps.) His office receives daily phone calls from furious people demanding tech support, and he says he “routinely” receives death threats and harassment via Messenger.

In fact, at one point he was accidentally sued by the State of Washington, which somehow mistook him for the other guy. And that must suck. Short of changing his own name (and really, the world should surely be able to cope with two people using it), he’s left resorting to legal action to at least not have it cost him money. Oh, and the attention it’s attracting in the press probably won’t do him much harm, either.

Mark S. Zuckerberg’s site ends on a lovely note:

“Like I said, I don’t wish Mark E. Zuckerberg any ill will at all. I hope the best for him, but let me tell you this: I will rule the search for ‘Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy‘. And if he does fall upon difficult financial times, and happens to be in Indiana, I will gladly handle his case in honor of our eponymy.”



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September 6, 2025 0 comments
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21 years later, Meta still hasn’t given up on the Facebook ‘poke’

by admin September 5, 2025


Meta currently has lots of priorities Mark Zuckerberg likely never would have imagined back in the early days of Facebook. The company has pivoted from social networking to the metaverse and, most recently, to AI. But somehow, one of its earliest — and most useless — features has not only survived but is apparently getting a revamp. I’m talking, of course, about the poke, which Meta is once again trying to revive. 

The company is making the storied feature easier to find by adding pokes back to user profiles in the Facebook app, according to a post it shared on Instagram. And you can track all poking-related activity between you and your friends at facebook.com/pokes. It even looks like there’s a Snapchat-streak like aspect where different emojis appear based on how many pokes have been exchanged. 

Just in case you weren’t on Facebook two decades ago, “poking” was something of a novelty in the early days of the social network. At the time, there weren’t that many features for interacting with your friends. You could leave comments on their profile and … you could “poke.” The feature never really did anything, but depending on who it came from it was considered something between creepy or flirty.  As Meta notes in its Instagram post, poking never really went away, but it was de-emphasized over the years and has been largely forgotten by users.

But the company has for some reason been trying to get poking to make a comeback for a while now. Meta said last year the feature was “having a moment” and that there had been a 13x spike in pokes after the company began surfacing the feature in the Facebook search bar. Now, it seems Meta is trying to build even more momentum for it, presumably for the current generation of younger Facebook users. 

Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year he wants to bring back more “OG” Facebook features like… being able to find content posted by your actual friends. And it’s hard to get more “OG Facebook” than poking. Meta has also been on a years-long mission to win over “young adults,”  so it might see the jokey feature as a way to appeal to a generation used to taking their Snap streak extremely seriously. 





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September 5, 2025 0 comments
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