Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to scale back Metaβs content moderation policies in a Friday appearance on Joe Roganβs podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism for the decision, including from employees inside his own company. βProbably depends on who you ask,β said Zuckerberg when asked how Metaβs updates have been received. The key updates [β¦]
Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.
According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta's vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."
It's another move by Meta that some view as part of the company's larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration's politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.
In the wake of Metaβs decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the incoming Trump administration at the expense [β¦]
The bride says she thought the ceremony was just a social media prank.
Kenji Lau/Getty Images
A couple in Australia had their marriage annulled after the bride said she didn't genuinely consent.
The woman said she believed the ceremony was a "prank" being filmed for Instagram.
A judge ruled in her favor, saying it was likely the applicant believed she was just acting.
A couple in Australia had their marriage annulled after the bride testified in court that she thought the ceremony was part of a "prank" video orchestrated by the groom for social media clout.
In a family court judgment from October, which was made public this month, a judge declared the couple's December 2023 marriage void.
The bride, 24, filed for the annulment in May 2024, arguing that the marriage to the groom, in his 30s, was a sham because she did not offer real consent.
She said she thought she was merely playing the role of a bride for a video that the groom, a social media influencer with over 17,000 followers, would post on Instagram.
The couple, both originally from the same country, met on a dating platform in September 2023.
For legal reasons, their identities cannot be published.
In her affidavit, the bride said that after a brief period of dating, the groom invited her to Sydney in December 2023 to attend a "white party," instructing her to wear a white dress.
Upon arriving at the venue, she said she was "shocked" to find out for the first time that he had "organized a wedding for us."
She said she felt uncomfortable and told the groom she was leaving. However, she testified that she did not leave, and instead called a friend for advice.
The bride said the groom had told her it was a "simple prank" and that her friend assured her that she could not legally marry without a notice of intention to marry being filed.
During cross-examination, the bride testified: "He pulled me aside, and he told me that he'd organizing a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page."
Video evidence presented in court showed the celebrant leading the couple through their vows. The judge said that nothing in the words used by the bride "revealed hesitation or uncertainty."
"We had to act," she said in cross-examination, "to make it look real."
The couple got engaged 2 days earlier
In his affidavit, the groom disputed the bride's account, claiming the ceremony was legitimate and resulted in a valid marriage.
He said the bride had accepted his marriage proposal, which she did not deny.
However, she said that while she did eventually intend to marry him, she didn't expect to get married so soon after the proposal β just two days later.
In her affidavit, the bride said her culture would require either her parents to be present or to grant permission beforehand.
The judge wrote, "In my view, it beggars belief that a couple would become engaged in late December then married two days later."
The judge added that a wedding celebrant had been retained over a month before the groom proposed, a notice of intention to marry had been filed in November, and the bride didn't have a single friend or family member present.
The bride said she only found out the marriage was real in February last year when the groom, who was applying for refugee status, asked to be put as a dependent on her application for permanent residency.
In concluding remarks, the judge wrote: "On the balance of probabilities, in my view it is more probable than not that the applicant believed she was acting in a social media event on the day of the alleged ceremony, rather than freely participating at a legally sanctioned wedding ceremony."
Google searches for how to cancel and delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts have seen explosive rises in the U.S. since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will end its third-party fact-checking system, loosen content moderation policies, and roll back previous limits to the amount of political content in user feeds.Β Critics see [β¦]
Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta.
Its new content-moderation policy is a huge change β and it could be an improvement.
Mark Zuckerberg's "apology tour" from the past few years seems to be officially over.
Mark Zuckerberg's changes to Meta's content-moderation policies are potentially huge.
To fully understand their gravity, it's useful to look at how Meta got here. And to consider what these changes might actually mean for users: Are they a bow to an incoming Trump administration? Or an improvement to a system that's gotten Zuckerberg and Co. lots of heat before? Or a little of both?
Content moderation has always been a pit of despair for Meta. In its blog post announcing the changes on Tuesday, Meta's new head of policy, Joel Kaplan, talked about wanting to get back to Facebook's roots in "free speech." Still, those roots contain a series of moderation fires, headaches, and constant adjustments to the platform's policies.
Starting in 2016, moderation troubles just kept coming like a bad "We Didn't Start the Fire" cover. Consider this roundup:
The Facebook Files and whistleblower leaks about Instagram and teen mental health.
Whatever your political alignment, it seems like Meta has been trapped in a vicious cycle of making a policy β or lacking a policy β then reversing itself to try to clean up a mess.
That's maybe until now. As Zuckerberg posted on Threads on Wednesday, "Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better."
Maybe the big changes were already brewing this past September when Zuckerberg appeared at a live event and said, "One of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don't actually think we were."
In other words, as of this week, the apology tour seems to have ended.
What will Meta's changes mean for you and me, the users?
What will the changes mean? Who knows! I can make a few predictions:
The "community note" system might work pretty well β or at least not worse than the current human- and AI-led fact-checking system.
It's also possible that while certain content might exist on the platform, you won't actually come across it because it will have been downgraded. "Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach" has been X's mantra (though considering the flow of truly vile content that has proliferated in my feed there in the past year or so, I don't think that's been particularly effective).
One other piece of the announcement is that Meta will focus its AI-powered filtering efforts on the highest-risk content (terrorism, drugs, and child endangerment). For lesser violations, the company said, it will rely more on user reports. Meta hasn't given details on how exactly this will work, but I imagine it could have a negative effect on common issues like bullying and harassment.
A large but less glamorous part of content moderation is removing "ur ugly" comments on Instagram β and that's the kind of stuff that will rely on user reporting.
It's also quite possible that bad actors will take advantage of the opening. Facebook is nothing if not a place to buy used furniture while various new waves of pillagers attempt to test and game the algorithms for profit or menace β just consider the current wave of AI slop, some of which appears at least in part to be a profitable scam operation run from outside the US.
What do the changes mean for Meta?
If these changes had been rolled out slowly, one at a time, they might have seemed like reasonable measures just on their face. Community notes? Sure. Loosening rules on certain hot political topics? Well, not everyone will like it, but Meta can claim some logic there. Decreasing reliance on automatic filters and admitting that too many non-violations have been swept up in AI dragnets? People would celebrate that.
No one thought Meta's moderation before the announced changes was perfect. There were lots of complaints (correctly) about how it banned too much stuff by mistake β which this new policy is aiming to fix.
Still, it's impossible to weigh the merits of each aspect of the new policy and have blinders on when it comes to the 800-pound political gorilla in the room.
There's one pretty obvious way of looking at Meta's announcement of sweeping changes to its moderation policy: It's a move to cater to an incoming Trump administration. It's a sign that Zuckerberg has shifted to the right, as he drapes himself in some of the cultural signifiers of the bro-y Zynternet (gold chain, $900,000 watch, longer hair, new style, front row at an MMA match).
Together, every piece of this loudly signals that Zuckerberg either A., genuinely believed he'd been forced to cave on moderation issues in the past, or B., knows that making these changes will please Trump. I don't really think the distinction between A and B matters too much anyway. (Meta declined to comment.)
This probably isn't the last of the changes
I try to avoid conflating "Meta" with "Mark Zuckerberg" too much. It's a big company! There are many smart people who care deeply about the lofty goals of social networking who create policy and carry out the daily work of trust and safety.
Part of me wonders how much Zuckerberg wishes this boring and ugly part of the job would fade away β there are so many more shiny new things to work on, like AI or mixed-reality smart glasses. Reworking the same decade-old policies so that people can insult each other 10% more is probably less fun than MMA fighting or talking to AI researchers.
Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta. Scaling it back, allowing more speech on controversial topics, and outsourcing fact-checking to the community seems like a short-term fix for having to deal with this unpleasant and thankless job. I can't help but imagine that another overhaul will come due sometime in the next four years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company's platforms would prioritize speech and free expression.
Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg's plan to replace fact checkers with "community notes" is a familiar one.
A similar system of community moderation is already in place on Elon Musk's X.
On X, community notes let users add context to posts. Meta has said it seems to work well.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will use "community notes" to moderate content on its platforms like Facebook and Instagram β but what exactly does that mean, and how has it worked on other platforms?
Meta said the feature would function much like it does on Elon Musk's platform, where certain contributors can add context to posts they think are misleading or need clarification. This type of user-generated moderation would largely replace Meta's human fact-checkers.
"We've seen this approach work on X β where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see," Meta said in its announcement Tuesday.
So, will it be cool for Meta and its users? Here's a primer on "community notes" β how it came to be, and how it's been working so far on X:
How the 'community notes' feature was born
The idea of "community notes" first came about at Twitter in 2019, when a team of developers at the company, now called X, theorized that a crowdsourcing model could solve the main problems with content moderation. Keith Coleman, X's vice president of product who helped create the feature, told Asterisk magazine about its genesis in an interview this past November.
Coleman told the outlet that X's previous fact-checking procedures, run by human moderators, had three main problems: dedicated staff couldn't fact-check claims in users' posts fast enough, there were too many posts to monitor, and the general public didn't trust a Big Tech company to decide what was or wasn't misleading.
Coleman told Asterisk that his team developed a few prototypes and settled on one that allowed users to submit notes that could show up on a post.
"The idea was that if the notes were reasonable, people who saw the post would just read the notes and could come to their own conclusion," he said.
And in January 2021, the company launched a pilot program of the feature, then called "Birdwatch," just weeks after the January 6 Capitol riot. On its first day, the pilot program had 500 contributors.
Coleman told the outlet that for the first year or so of the pilot program β which showed community notes not directly on users' posts but on a separate "Birdwatch" website β the product was very basic, but over time, it evolved and performed much better than expected.
When Musk took over the platform in 2022, he expanded the program beyond the US, renamed it "community notes," and allowed more users to become contributors.
It's unclear how many users participate in community notes contributors. It's one of the platform's main sources of content moderation. X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
How the community notes feature works on X
The community notes feature is set to roll out on Meta's Instagram, Facebook, and Threads platforms over the next few months, the company said in a statement shared with BI. Meta said the feature on its platforms would be similar to X's.
On X, community notes act as a crowd-sourced way for users themselves to moderate content without the company directly overseeing that process.
A select group of users who sign up as "contributors" can write a note adding context to any post that could be misleading or contain misinformation.
Then, other contributors can rate that note as helpful or not. Once enough contributors from different points of view vote on the note as helpful, then a public note gets added underneath the post in question.
For instance, here's an example of a community note attached to a recent X post:
X has made the complex ranking algorithm behind the feature transparent and open-source, and users can view it online and download the latest data.
X says that community notes "do not represent X's viewpoint and cannot be edited or modified by our teams," adding that a community-flagged post is only removed if it violates X's rules, terms of service, or privacy policies.
Similar to X, Meta said its community notes will be written and rated by contributing users. It said the company will not write notes or decide which ones show up. Also like X, Meta said that its community notes "will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings."
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users can sign up now to be among the first contributors to the new tool.
"As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact-checked content and, instead of overlaying full-screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, said in Tuesday's statement.
Potential pros and cons of community notes
One possible issue with the feature is that by the time a note gets added to a potentially misleading post, the post may have already been widely viewed β spreading misinformation before it can be tamped down.
Another issue is that for a note to be added, contributors from across the political spectrum need to agree that a post is problematic or misleading, and in today's polarized political environment, concurring on facts has sometimes become increasingly difficult.
One possible advantage to the feature, though, is that the general public may be more likely to trust a consensus from their peers rather than an assessment handed down by a major corporation.
Maarten Schenk, cofounder and chief technology officer of Lead Stories, a fact-checking outlet, told the Poynter Institute that one benefit of X's community notes is that it doesn't use patronizing language.
"It avoids accusations or loaded language like 'This is false,'" Schenk told Poynter. "That feels very aggressive to a user."
And community notes can help combat misinformation in some ways. For example, researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Qualcomm Institute found in an April 2024 study that the X feature helped offset false health information in posts related to COVID-19. They also helped add accurate context.
In announcing the move, Zuckerberg said Meta's past content moderation practices have resulted in "too many mistakes" and "too much censorship." He said the new feature will prioritize free speech and help restore free expression on Meta's platforms.
Mark Zuckerberg, who often bends with the political winds, is getting out of the fact-checking business.
And this is part of a broader effort by the Meta CEO to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump after a long and testy relationship.
After a previous outcry, Zuck made a great show of declaring that Facebook would hire fact-checkers to combat misinformation on the globally popular site. That was a clear sign that Facebook was becoming more of a journalistic organization rather than a passive poster of usersβ opinions (and dog pictures).
But it didnβt work. In fact, it led to more info-suppression and censorship. Why should anyone believe a bunch of unknown fact-checkers working for one of the increasingly unpopular tech titans?
Now Zuckerberg is pulling the plug, announcing his decision in a video to underscore its big-deal nature:
"The problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts. Thatβs millions of people. And weβve reached a point where itβs just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech."
Let me jump in here. Zuckerberg bluntly admits, with that line about "cultural tipping point," that heβs following the conventional wisdomβand, of course, the biggest tipping point is Trumpβs election to a second term. And skeptics are portraying this as a bow to the president-elect and his team.
"So weβre gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platformsβ¦
"Weβre going to get rid of fact checkers" and replace them with community notes, already used on X. "After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.Β
"We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than theyβve created, especially in the U.S."Β
It was Zuckerberg, along with the previous management at Twitter, that banned Trump after the Capitol riot. This led to plenty of Trumpian attacks on Facebook, and the president-elect told me he had flipped his position on banning TikTok because it would help Facebook, which he viewed as the greater danger.
Trump said last summer that Zuckerberg plotted against him in 2020 and would "spend the rest of his life in prison" if he did it again.
The president-elect boiled it down in a posting: "ZUCKERBUCKS, DONβT DO IT!"
Hereβs a bit more from Z: "Weβre going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And itβs gone too far."Β
Indeed it has. And I agree with that. In 2020, social media, led by Twitter, suppressed the New York Post story on Hunter Bidenβs laptop, dismissing it as Russian disinformation, though a year and a half later the establishment press suddenly declared hey, the laptop report was accurate.
Letβs face it: People like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (now embroiled in a war of words with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over an alleged coverup of gang rapes of young girls when Starmer was chief prosecutor) have immense clout. They are the new gatekeepers. With so-called legacy media less relevantβas we see with the mass exodus of top talent from Jeff Bezosβ Washington Post and the recent rise of podcastsβthey control much of the public dialogue. And yes, they are private companies that can do what they want.Β
At yesterdayβs marathon news conference, a reporter asked Trump about Zuckerberg: "Do you think heβs directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past with promises?"
"Probably. Yeah, probably," Trump said, twisting the knife a bit.
Meanwhile, having made the obligatory trek to Mar-a-Lago for dinner, the CEO has taken a number of steps to join forces with the new administration. And it doesnβt hurt that Meta is kicking in a million bucks to the Trump inaugural.
Zuck named prominent Republican lawyer Joel Kaplan as chief of global affairs, replacing a former British deputy prime minister. On "Fox & Friends" yesterday, Kaplan said:Β
"Weβve got a real opportunity now. Weβve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference. One of the things weβve experienced is that when you have a U.S. president, an administration thatβs pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that donβt even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on US companies. Weβre going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world."
Weβre going to work with President Trump. Got it?
Whatβs more, Zuckerberg is adding Dana White, chief executive officer of United Fighting Championship, to the Meta board. White is a longtime Trump ally, so MAGA now has a voice inside the company.
In other words, get with the program.
Footnote: At his news conference, where Trump seemed angry about the latest court battles and plans to sentence him, the incoming president saidβor "didnβt rule out," in journalistic parlanceβ "military coercion" against two of his latest targets.
"Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes," he said. And Americans lost many lives building the Panama Canal. "It might be that youβll have to do something."Β
Heβs not going to use military force against either one. But his answer stirs the pot, as he knew it would.
Instagram has shut down a program that paid creators for ads placed on their profiles.
Meta began testing the program in 2022.
Instagram has launched several creator-monetization tests since 2020 β and some haven't survived.
Instagram has ended a program that allowed creators to earn money from ads placed between content on their profiles, the company confirmed to Business Insider.
The Meta-owned platform began testing the program with US creators in 2022 and expanded it in 2024 to eligible profiles in Canada, South Korea, Japan, and Australia.
Meta will continue to place ads in between content on nonteen public Instagram profiles. Businesses will still be able to prevent their ads from running on specific profiles.
According to court documents filed in 2024, Instagram has generated billions in ad revenue for Meta. In 2022, when the platform began testing the ads-in-profile program, it generated $16.5 billion, the same court filing said.
IGTV (Instagram's now defunct YouTube competitor) shared ad revenue with creators from 2020 to 2022.
Instagram briefly had a native affiliate program between 2021 and 2022 that allowed creators to earn revenue from shopping tags on their posts.
The Instagram Reels Bonus, which paid creators a sum of money based on how their reels performed, was paused in 2023. It was reintroduced in 2024 as a series of limited-time bonuses.
President-elect Donald Trump said he was pleased by Meta's changing policies.
Evan Vucci/AP
Donald Trump said that Mark Zuckerberg may have taken notice of his threats.
The president-elect previously threatened to jail the Meta CEO for life.
Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company will no longer partner with third-party fact-checkers.
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday praised Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for changing how it moderates political content on its three major social media platforms.
Trump, who previously threatened Zuckerberg with life in prison, said his comments might have led to the announcement.
"Probably," Trump said when asked if Zuckerberg is "directly responding to the threats you've made to him in the past."
Zuckerberg and Trump once had a frosty relationship, but both sides appear to be warming up.
"Honestly, I think they have come a long way, Meta, Facebook" Trump told reporters during a wide-ranging news conference.
Zuckerberg made the major shift on Tuesday, announcing that his company will no longer partner with third-party fact-checkers and will relax moderation policies on topics like gender and immigration.
"We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship," Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Facebook. "The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech. So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms."
Joel Kaplan, recently promoted to lead Meta's global policy team, outlined the announcement during an interview on "Fox and Friends," Fox News' morning show that Trump has long watched.
"There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values," Kaplan said.
Trump said he saw Kaplan's comments and called the former Bush White House official "very impressive."
Zuckerberg recently dined at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, part of a larger wave of tech CEOs hoping to reset relations with the incoming administration. Meta is also donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration.
Zuckerberg and Trump haven't always gotten along.
Trump's first administration and several states teamed up in 2020 on a major antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. In 2021, Trump, then-a former president, sued Facebook and other platforms for banning him in the wake of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Trump and his allies have also been highly critical of Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's charitable giving ahead of the 2020 election to help local election officials deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We are watching him closely," Trump wrote in his book earlier this year in a section about Zuckerberg," and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison β as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election."
Before the presidential election, Zuckerberg announced he would not make any donations to election officials again, and he called Trump a "badass" after the president-elect survived an assassination attempt in July.
A representative for Meta didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Meta announced today that it's ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what's used on Elon Musk's X platform.
The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political," Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections "feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech."
Illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Last week, people noticed (and hated) AI-generated users that were created and managed by Meta.
But these AI bots were actually a year old, and mostly defunct. Meta has now deleted them.
This is all totally separate from what a Meta exec described as a future with AI-generated users.
There's been some confusion about Meta's ambitions for AI-generated users. Let me clear it up for you: Meta is still, definitely, very excited about AI-generated users β despite removing a few of the ones people were complaining about last week.
Here's the backstory: Sometime last week, people discovered a handful of Instagram accounts that were "AI managed by Meta." In other words, they were Meta bots programmed to look and interact like real people β powered by AI. There was one named Liv, a "Proud Black queer momma of 2," Grandpa Brian, and a dating coach named Carter β all AI-generated.
These accounts spit out conversation that was treacly and weird β and also somewhat problematic. (Liv told Karen Attiah of The Washington Post in a chat that none of her creators were Black.)
As soon as people on social media noticed the AI bots, they hated them. Meta quickly removed the accounts.
But it turns out, these accounts were actually quite old. Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, said that the AI accounts were "from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters."
(This was around the same time Meta launched a bunch of AI chatbots based on celebrities like Kendall Jenner and MrBeast. Those celeb AIs were scrapped this past summer.)
But here's where there was some confusion: Liv, Grandpa Brian, and Dating with Carter were not the AI users that Meta is dreaming of β they were an abandoned experiment from over a year ago. Meta is very much full steam ahead with its vision of an AI-user-filled future.
Connor Hayes, VP of generative AI at Meta, recently gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he talked about Meta's vision for an AI user-filled future:
"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platformβ.β.β.βthat's where we see all of this going," he added.
Hayes's interview doesn't really give too much detail about what these AI users would be for βΒ or why people would want to interact with them, or much detail at all. (I asked Meta for additional comment.)
Meanwhile, Facebook already has AI bots you can chat with β they're inside Messenger. Just go to "Compose a new message" in Messenger, and you'll see an option for "Chat with AI characters," where you can design your own AI or use someone else's.
If you look through the user-made chatbots, you can sort of start to get a sense of what people are using these for: companionship chatting.
Companionship/romance AI chatbot services like Replika or Character.ai are becoming very popular (if not also problematic). There is a market for people who want to chat with an AI, even if I don't see the appeal. (I've tested them!)
Meta has been, uh, inspired by features from other competing social apps plenty of times before (Instagram Stories seeming to be rather inspired by Snapchat, for instance). Perhaps Meta is just seeing that social chatbots are popular, so they're rolling out their own.
I'm not sure I understand exactly what Meta's vision is here, and I'm pretty skeptical about why I would ever want to interact with an AI-generated user on Facebook. I tried out a few of the AI chatbots in Messenger and even tried creating a few of my own.
But as far as a social network full of these kinds of AI accounts? I just don't get it β even if Meta seems very confident about its future.
At a glance, the dozens of apps I've downloaded this year fall into a few themes: IRL social, close-friends-focused apps, social shopping, and anti-swipe dating apps.
Last year, I highlighted 13 apps that I downloaded in 2023 as part of my reporting on the social-media industry. Since writing that story, some of those startups have continued to grow, while others have been acquired, and a few have had to pivot.
For instance, Artifact, an AI-driven news app founded by the original creators of Instagram, shut down and was acquired by Yahoo. Lex, a queer social network, laid off staff before getting acquired by mobile app conglomerate 9count. And Landing, a creative social collaging app reminiscent of Polyvore, changed course and pivoted to building Zeen, a shoppable blogging platform.
Meanwhile, new apps have launched or expanded this year, making their way onto my phone (which, yes, has very low storage).
Here are the three of the best apps I downloaded in 2024:
Disclaimer: These are my favorite downloads of the year and this is very much an opinion.
1. PI.FYI is a recommendations-based feed
Screenshot/Business Insider; PI.FYI
What it is: Created by the team behind the pop-culture newsletter Perfectly Imperfect, PI.FYI is a mostly text-based feed where people answer questions, share recommendations, and post micro-blogs about topics like music or film. The app was built by ex-Meta staffer Tyler Bainbridge, who cofounded the PI newsletter with Alexander Cushing.
When it launched: 2024
Why I haven't deleted it: When I'm on the hunt for new forms of media to consume (be it books, movies, music, etc.), I'll open up PI.FYI to see what people are sharing. The app lets you add a link to a post, which helps when going down rabbit holes. Posting there sometimes feels like writing into the void on Tumblr or Twitter in 2012 (in a good way).
2. Airbuds lets you see what friends are listening to
Screenshot/Business Insider; Airbuds
What it is: It's a feed of music. It's that simple. Airbuds pulls information from several music streaming platforms (including Spotify, Apple Music, and Soundcloud). The team behind Airbuds also built Cappuccino, a social-audio app that launched in the early days of Clubhouse.
When it launched: 2022
Why I haven't deleted it: I switched from Spotify to Apple Music several years ago, and the one feature I missed was the ability to see what my friends were listening to. Airbuds lets me do just that and also makes it easy to save music to my own library.
3. IRL social app 222 coordinates experiences with strangers
Screenshot/Business Insider; 222
What it is: 222, which started as a dinner series in Los Angeles in 2021, is an app that matches users with strangers for in-person experiences. The in-person events range from dinner and drinks to DIY art classes, and users take a robust personality quiz that is used to pair them with compatible matches. It was founded by Keyan Kazemian, Danial Hashemi, and Arman Roshannai, and was part of Y Combinator. In February, 222 announced it had raised a $2.5 million seed investment round.
When it launched: 2021 (222 expanded to New York in 2024)
Why I haven't deleted it: I've gone to several experiences through 222 this year and even made a few friends along the way. I've described the app to friends as a way of working out my socializing muscles, more than a guaranteed way to make friends or find new romantic sparks. You do have to pay a fee to access the curated experience (the monthly fee, for example, is about $22) on top of drinks, food, and other expenses.
Madeleine White recently relaunched her pajama brand after criticism.
Madeleine White
Madeleine White's pajama brand faced backlash over pricing and material quality.
She took the website down and relaunched it seven months later with higher quality and lower prices.
White told BI building back trust with her audience is the most important thing for her.
Madeleine White learned what happens when your brand is a huge miss with your fans the hard way.
When she launched her pajama brand, See You Tomorrow, in May, White was thrilled because designing fashion was all she ever wanted.
But the launch went awry. Fans didn't like the price point or the materials used in many of the garments, leading to cries that White was out of touch and had lost the authenticity she had grown her millions of followers for.
"It was always a dream starting my own business," White told Business Insider. "But I could not have been prepared for how difficult it's been.
A clothing launch backfires
White started making content after she lost her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to learn how to use a sewing machine.
Using her decade of experience in modeling, White became known for sharing thrifting videos and industry insights.
On Instagram, she now has 1.6 million followers, and on TikTok, she has 4.7 million.
But after See You Tomorrow launched, fans lamented that she'd forgotten her roots.
White's aim was always to create a brand that would resonate with her followers: one that wasn't budget or fast fashion but also wasn't high-end and unaffordable.
But while things started off well with over half a million visitors on the website, customers felt See You Tomorrow fell short on price point and quality.
"I feel like her original fan base have nothing in common with her current ventures," one said on the InfluencerSnark subreddit.
Under one Reddit post showing a $145 pajama set, customers said they weren't too eager about the price or the materials.
"They're cute, and I've been trying to focus on a smaller but more quality wardrobe, so the price didn't immediately turn me off," one said. "$145 for 100% polyester is absolutely insane though."
"She should get backlash for this, because choosing fast fashion materials but selling it at a high-end price is wild," wrote another. "Were this made from cotton satin or even a cotton silk voile it would be worth it. It would be sustainable."
White told BI she was aware of the complaints immediately and decided to take action. She took the site down and started rethinking the entire brand.
"We went back to the drawing board after a couple of days," she said. "I decided that unless I could fix most of these concerns that people had and really give it a proper shot, then it wasn't really worth continuing the business."
Madeleine White immediately acted when fans didn't like her clothing brand launch.
See You Tomorrow
7 months later
White didn't want to make any announcements while things were in flux, which was hard to do with so many fans eager to know what was happening.
Seven months later, in December, See You Tomorrow relaunched with new, higher-quality pieces and lower prices.
"I decided to bet on myself and put my money where my mouth is and to create the product that I wanted to make," she said. "I trusted my instincts that something wasn't right and that we could do better β and we are doing better."
White had to find new manufacturers and pay for everything herself. She said that though it was hard, she's glad she took that leap of faith.
"I felt like it would be so much more powerful to my audience if I could prove to them that I actually cared about their opinions and I cared about that feedback," White said.
"It's easy to say, I'm so sorry, I fucked up," she added. "But it's much better to say I'm so sorry, I fucked up, and here is how I fixed it."
Madeleine White relaunched See You Tomorrow 7 months after an initial flop.
See You Tomorrow
White told BI that the last few years have been a mad rush because she was so eager to start her own brand. In hindsight, she would have spent longer researching what she wanted to do and not taken the first offer that came along, she said.
"It was definitely an eye-opener," she said.
Trust is everything
White posted a TikTok this month explaining everything. She said what was most important to her out of everything was building trust again with her audience.
It seemed to pay off, with followers thanking her for her transparency and applauding her for listening to their concerns.
White said she doesn't care if she sells one product or a thousand with this new launch β she just wants to repair her relationship with her supporters.
"I've definitely learned just how badly launching a brand that people don't like can hurt your public image," she said. "It just goes to show how important it is for us as people with large followings to do things right."
She said she's also learned that people are happy to pay for quality as long as they know how a price point was reached.
White said influencers are held to a high standard, but ultimately, she sees that as a good thing.
"It just makes the brand better," she said. "I've learned so much, and I've definitely learned not to put my name on anything until I'm 100% happy with it."
Cofounders of Whalar Group Neil Waller and James Street.Β
Whalar Group
Whalar Group cofounder Neil Waller shared his top predictions for the creator economy in 2025.
He expects an increase in AI tools and more creators developing content calendars.
Read his seven top creator-industry trends for 2025 below.
In 2024, a string of trends in the creator economy emerged or accelerated, from creator-led tours to buzz around artificial intelligence. But what will happen next year?
Neil Waller, cofounder of the creator-marketing agency Whalar Group, shared his top predictions for the creator economy in 2025 with Business Insider β from a continued rise of generative AI tools to audio.
More creators will plan out their content calendars.
From video themes to episodic content, Waller expects more creators to have planned content next year.
"This can allow them to hire people around achieving those goals as well," Waller said. "Just more planning, and more content from creators that's thoughtfully stitched together."
An increase in talent managers.
Waller said he thinks there will be an increase in the number of creator talent managers, both from external agencies and those hired directly by creators for their teams. (Whalar runs a talent-management firm for creators on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.)
"The amount of managers that are in this industry now supporting creators has grown dramatically," he said. "I think we'll see far more creators have managers, and far more people get into the management space, which I think is a really good thing when done well because it helps professionalize the space, and provide creators with more time to work on what they want to do, which is create and build communities."
Platforms will lean more into generative AI tools.
Waller said he believes there will be a larger wave of creators adopting generative AI tools into their workflows.
"They've been experimenting already," Waller said. "I think just with the rate of understanding and the rate of new technologies coming, we're going to see an adoption of all sorts of different tools, not just chatbots, but help with editing, thumbnails, and animation."
Aside from platforms like YouTube and Instagram integrating AI, Waller also mentioned several startups used by creators to help with workflow, like the captions tool Zeemo and the writing assistant Claude.
More creators will monetize their online communities through courses.
"Creating a physical product is quite a heavy lift," Waller said. "But I think creators are in an interesting place to take their skills and teach online courses. There are a lot of interesting niches that I think could do this."
Waller said tools and startups helping creators build courses or online products β from Mighty Networks to Kajabi β have made it easier for creators to start.
The creator economy will continue to professionalize and gain a new level of respect.
Working in the creator economy has gained acceptance as a real (and aspirational) profession.
"I see more and more educational creators teaching science, pottery, magic, finance, art, and we're just seeing lots of these interesting niches by professionals who are good storytellers and creators themselves," Waller said.
Audio is going to have another giant leap forward.
"I think audio is going to have another big moment of growth next year," Waller said. "And I think it will be driven by AI toolsets where the AI technologies are going to dub a translation of the content in your own voice."
Waller predicts that more accessible AI-powered tools will be available to change the movement of the creator's mouth to look as if they are speaking the dubbed language.
A new wave of athletes, politicians, musicians, and entrepreneurs will become creators.
"Just look at the Kelce brothers," Waller said about athletes Travis and Jason Kelce and the success of their podcast. "We've already seen those moves start. But I think that group of professionals are going to massively enter into the creative space."
