Instagram has begun testing a new long‑form video format called Features, allowing horizontal videos up to 90 minutes. The pilot, initially rolled out to a handful of creators in Brazil, expands this week to a handful of U.S. podcasters, comedians and other long‑form creators. Features links short Reels clips to the full episode, letting viewers tap a three‑minute preview and continue watching without leaving the app. Instagram VP of Product Tessa Lyons said the videos will appear [...]

A New Mexico district court ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties after finding the company violated the state’s unfair practices law in more than 43 million instances. Judge Francis J. Mathew ruled that Meta’s promises that users controlled their data were false, linking the violations to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal in which a personality‑quiz app harvested data from millions of Facebook users and their friends. The case, filed in 2021, follows earlier settlements, including a $725 million [...]

Payday: Aces High, the franchise’s first full‑VR title, enters its final public playtest from October 19‑26 on Meta Quest and Steam. Participants who join this week receive an exclusive Kitty mask, unavailable elsewhere. The full game launches on November 5 across Meta Quest, SteamVR and Steam Deck for $24.99, featuring seven initial missions, co‑op heists for up to four players, and a new storyline with protagonists called The Aces. Gameplay emphasizes stealth, rewarding players with in‑game cash to unlock weapons, traps, masks [...]

Meta’s Muse AI assistant became the 12th app to reach 10 million U.S. downloads within 40 days, Sensor Tower reports. After a heavy ad push that kept Muse atop the App Store for 12 days, the app hit 5 million downloads and now sits second in rankings. Muse records a 30 % retention rate after seven days and 23 % after fourteen, beating ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, which linger near 19 % and 16 %. The service accounts for 39 % of Meta’s U.S. ad [...]

WhatsApp is preparing to let iPhone users open any hyperlink within the app, expanding a limited in‑app browser that previously supported only select business sites. The change was first spotted by WABetaInfo in the TestFlight build, which shows a new “In‑app browser” toggle under Settings > Chats. When enabled, links open inside WhatsApp, while a menu still offers to launch the default Safari browser. The settings provide controls to clear cookies, cache and other browsing data stored by the [...]

Meta has revised its commercial terms of use, initially stating that it could “use any content from a business account’s domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” its products and services. Legal analysts described the clause as a sweeping right to scrape publisher sites and feed the material into Meta’s artificial‑intelligence training pipelines. The language sparked concern after the company’s recent victory in a copyright lawsuit and amid [...]

Meta announced a fix for its Ray‑Ban Meta smart glasses, which were unexpectedly recording audio without user prompts. Users reported that the glasses triggered Meta AI and began voice recording even when the “Hey Meta” wake word was not spoken or enabled. The devices still alert users with an LED light, but the unprompted recordings raised privacy concerns. Meta confirmed the issue is resolved and released an update that disables the camera if the LED privacy light [...]