I=4 Taiwanese banks have stopped advertising on Facebook due to rampant scams
Around 10 major Taiwanese banks have stopped advertising on Meta Platforms due to concerns of growing scams on the site.
“There have been endless scams on Facebook, with some fraudsters assuming the identities of banks. We hope Facebook can prioritize resolving this issue, so we will withdraw advertising on the platform with other banks in Taiwan,” said Ray Dawn whose bank Mega Financial has been spending around $490,000 annually on Meta Platforms.
Last month, Meta partnered with UK banks to share information on scams.
Meta had long faced calls from the UK banks to end scams on its platforms.
I=6 U.S. Supreme Court allows shareholder class action suit against Meta to proceed, settlement could be around $2 billion
The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed shareholders to proceed with a securities fraud case against Meta for misleading them about the 2015 data breach by Cambridge Analytica.
Meta had asked the Supreme Court to throw out the 2018 class action suit filed by shareholders led by Amalgamated Bank.
The shareholders have sought unspecified monetary compensation but Bloomberg analyst, Matthew Schettenhelm, estimates that it could be as large as $2 billion.
Meta already paid $100 million settlement in 2018 in an enforcement action initiated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Additionally, Meta already paid a penalty of $5 billion imposed by the the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the issue and settled with users for $725 million.
I=5 Meta is planning to build a 25,000 mile sub-sea cable that could cost over $10 billion
Meta plans to build a 25,000 miles fiber-optic subsea cable that could cost more than $10 billion, TechCrunch reported citing sources close to the company.
TechCrunch said Meta will be the sole user and operator of the cable.
According to the sources, the plan is still in early days and is expected to be announced by the company in early 2025.
Meta is ending third-party fact-checking and moving to community notes model in the US in order to boost free speech.
The decision is unlikely to cause advertisers to flee the platform like what happened to Twitter when Elon Musk relaxed content moderation since Meta isn’t as reliant on big advertisers. Similarly, in addition to X, TikTok has moved in the same direction, hence advertisers don’t have much options.
Following Meta’s announcement that it will replace fact-checkers with community notes system similar to that used by X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg now says that some users may leave the platforms due to virtue signaling.
“I think Community Notes will be more effective than fact-checkers, reducing the number of people whose accounts get mistakenly banned is good, people want to be able to discuss civic topics and make arguments that are in the mainstream of political discourse, etc. 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,” Zuckerberg responded to a Threads user.
Meta’s decision to end fact-checking received praise from president-elect Donald Trump who said he thinks Meta’s “presentation was excellent.”
An investigation by the Financial Times established that Meta exempted some of its top advertisers from the usual content moderation process.
This confirms Meta’s recent comments that their moderation system had introduced “too many mistakes and too much censorship”.
Assessment
The findings by the Financial Times could be positive as it points that Meta’s ad revenue may have been negatively impacted by the content moderation system.
I=5, Jan.10, 2025 Mark Zuckerberg criticised Apple’s Vision Pro for being too heavy and expensive, defends the decision to end content moderation
In an interview with Joe Rogan, CEO Mark Zuckerberg slammed Biden’s administration for moderating discussions during the Covid period.
“Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse,” he said. “It was brutal”. (min 00:13:14).
Zuckerberg also defended the decision to end content moderation.
“I think what Twitter and X have done with community notes, I think it’s just a better program,” Zuckerberg said. Rather than having a small number of fact checkers, you get the whole community to weigh in." (min 00:26:26)
Zuckerberg said he’s optimistic about Trump’s second presidency.
“And it’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win,” he said. (min 23:44).
Zuckerberg slammed Apple’s Vision Pro Headset, saying that despite having a higher-resolution than Quest, it’s heavy and expensive.
“But I mean, the V1, it definitely did not hit it out of the park,” he said. (min 02:26:07)
I=3
Meta will continue to use fact-checkers outside US “for now”, its head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn said.
“We’ll see how that goes as we move it out over the year,” Mendelsohn said. “So nothing changing in the rest of the world at the moment, we are still working with those fact checkers around the world.”
Meta to invest $60-65B this year in Capex and grow AI team significantly
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will spend $60-65B this year in Capex and grow AI team significantly.
Analysts were projecting $52.15 billion.
" I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts, " he said.
“Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. We’ll bring online ~1GW of compute in '25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. We’re planning to invest $60-65B in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead,” he added.
RBC said the capital spending announcement is probably a response to the Stargate AI investment announced this week to remind investors of its leading position in AI and that it biases positively to underlying business trends.
I=5 WhatsApp Channels now has 46.8 million average monthly active users in the EU
Meta Platforms said between 1 July 2024 to 31 December 2024, there were around 46.8 million average monthly active recipients of WhatsApp Channels in the EU.
Meta defines WhatsApp Channels monthly active user as someone who opened a Channel in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.
The EU Digital Services Act, consider platforms that exceed 45 million monthly active users as very large online platforms and requires them to carry out risk assessments on the spread of illegal content or face a fine of 6% of its annual global sales.
