Outrage after Meta suspends No Kings Instagram account during protests Running a protest movement on Instagram is basically holding the union meeting in the boss's office and acting shocked when security walks in.
And there are alternatives: Bluesky, Mastodon, the fediverse in general. None of them perfect, but at least Zuckerberg or Musk can't pull the plug on you there. People still keep building everything on their enemy's turf and then get mad when the owner acts like he owns it.
Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.
Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.
As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.
If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?
In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.
Sneak peek at National Geographic's Super Scam Me.
Scamming a romance scammer
Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.
My Instagram page started as something to amuse my friends, but it took off – and led to me meeting Sophie, who is now my wife
The idea came to me in summer 2019, when I finished studying at Swansea University. One day I went walking with friends around the beautiful Penllergare Valley woods. As they played Poohsticks, I sat on a bench and took in the view.
I noticed that someone had left flowers on the bench. I wondered who had put them there, who they were for, and why they’d chosen this location. By the time we reached the next bench along the route, I was deep in thought about all the people who had sat there before me.
The model, actor and influencer is known for making her own frozen yoghurt, bubblegum or even toothpaste while dressed in immaculate haute couture. But she insists she is not who the internet thinks she is
Nara Smith is not a tradwife, she wants you to know that. Nor is she an ex-tradwife – pace the New York Times who included her in a feature on how ex-tradwives are as popular a movement now as the tradwives were in the first place. Nor was she peddling a tradwife-adjacent lifestyle choice by marrying at 18, having four children by 24, and devoting hours to cooking and documenting it online. Nor is she Mormon, by the way. Although, yes, her husband, the model and former teen heart‑throb Lucky Blue Smith, was raised Mormon, but we’ll get to that. Nor was she telegraphing subliminal religious messages in her content: “There is no secret agenda.” Nor was she abandoning her biracial heritage by wearing her hair in a sleek little bob. Nor was she leaning into a 1950s housewife archetype – even when dressed in a pink and red polka-dot minidress to batch-cook sourdough.
Smith wants you to scrap everything you think you know about her and start again. She also doesn’t care if you don’t.As with her content:“Those that get it, get it. Those that don’t, don’t. And that’s totally fine. I tell people: ‘If you don’t like my content, I won’t see you scroll past me.’ ‘If you need to block me for your own sanity, please do. I promise I won’t know.’ And if you want to stick around, that is beautiful, I’m grateful, welcome.”
Skits and parodies making fun of the trillion-dollar industry have taken over social media, racking up millions of views
Johnny Hilbrant Partridge kept getting stuck next to the same kind of finance guy at weddings – the one bragging about his family’s full-time nanny and lavish vacations whilename-dropping elite club memberships and private schools.
To Partridge, a former fitness instructor, their shameless knack for self-promotion felt ripe for comedy. Using a filter that puts an exaggerated sneer on his face, Partridge donned a puffer vest and created “The PE Guy”, a caricature of the men who work in the private equity industry.
Béjar’s daughter was 14 when she told him Instagram was failing to keep her safe. So when he became part of Meta’s ‘wellbeing team’, he knew he had to speak out – and his testimony cost it billions
The Social Reckoning hits cinemas this Friday, but the real world has already been working on a sequel – or rather, a threequel. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a follow-up to The Social Network, detailing the further misadventures of Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, and in particular Frances Haugen, the employee who in 2021 leaked internal documents that appeared to show Facebook was aware of the harms its products had inflicted.
It’s no spoiler to reveal the film climaxes with Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate, on 5 October 2021. That very same day, Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme. “I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” Béjar began, before laying out some shocking statistics from his team’s survey. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.
In ad to be shown before The Social Reckoning, Ian Russell will say ‘too little has changed’ since death of Molly, 14
Molly Russell’s father will tell UK cinemagoers that “Instagram helped kill my daughter” in an advert to be shown before screenings of a new film about Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire.
In the 30-second ad before The Social Reckoning, released on Friday, Ian Russell says “too little has changed” since the death of his 14-year-old daughter, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful content on Instagram.
Watchdog examining whether company carried out adequate risk assessment as required by Online Safety Act
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is under investigation for a potential breach of the UK’s digital safety laws after launching a Snapchat-style feature on Instagram.
The communications watchdog, Ofcom, is investigating whether the $1.9tn (£1.4tn) company infringed the Online Safety Act (OSA) by failing to carry out adequate checks on whether its Instagram Instants product could show illegal content or be accessed by children.
In 2024 Jane Doe was raped at a Cornell frat party. Now in 2026 she's suing Cornell and Chi Phi for the mishandling of her case. No criminal charges were filed, only two of the rapists were expelled, and others "were offered the chance to mitigate conduct by submitting essays."
(CW: descriptions of rape)
Contrast the violent and punitive actions of Cornell towards it's students peacefully protesting for Palestine vs seven violent gang rapists who not only raped Jane Doe, but forced her to snort ketamine, while advertising the assault in a group chat to invite more participants. Not only were the punishments for the rapists laughably light, the victim claims she only ever talked to the first police officer on the scene, and that the DA's office declined to prosecute without even talking to her.
According to the Cornell Daily Sun's editorial board, this sort of laughably light punishment is a common theme with regards to how the University handles rape specifically and student safety concerns generally. When students are accused of plagiarism the machine works very quickly, but when a woman is gang-raped it took 5 months before a mealy mouthed task force was launched, and 23 months before the public knew anything. Meanwhile, only two of the rapists were expelled, the rest served light suspensions, and none of them have served, or likely will serve a day in jail.
This goes deeper than one horrible act, and the subsequent acts covering it up. The actress Florence Pugh wrote an essay on her instagram decrying the rape and trying to bring awareness to the lawsuit, only for meta to censor it. Outcry forced a reversal, but unless your individual feeds follow the sorts of people who report on this or if you're still getting your news from legacy news sites like CNN, this might be your first time hearing this. The way a lot of people online get their news is now through sites like Facebook and Instagram and multiple accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook etc are noting that their posts on this crime are being taken down or hidden by "the algorithm". Pugh had enough of a platform to contest that, but less well known posters wont be able to.
Of course, even if "the algorithm" shows a person this news, will they care? As put by Claire Cohen in British vogue "it's getting harder and harder to believe that they aren't breeding a generation of young men who believe they can inflict unimaginable horror on others without fear of consequence." The group chat that advertised this horror had far more than 7 men in it. 7 men chose to rape Jane Doe. Far more read those messages and did nothing.
There is a lot going on right now regarding the safety of kids online.
In the United States, the majority of state legislatures have passed age verification laws requiring a variety of websites to more rigorously verify the age of their visitors. In the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Spain, and Germany, lawmakers are considering bans on social media access for anyone under the age of 16—Australia passed its ban in 2025. In schools across the world, smartphones have been removed from classrooms, hallways, and cafeterias. And online, some of the most popular apps and video games with children, such as Discord and Roblox, have implemented default restrictions on what young users can find and who they reach.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we bring back Anna Brading, editor-in-chief of Malwarebytes Labs and director of content and, perhaps most importantly, mother of three. With a long career in cybersecurity—and an equally long time spent reading, writing, and assigning some of the cybersecurity world’s most pressing headlines—Brading has a unique perspective on what is most dangerous to her children online.
Brading’s list of priorities is long, and includes improper image use, “online nastiness,” and Roblox, but she has a few rules and guidelines to help. She sets a one-hour-a-day video game limit on the weekends, restricts YouTube to a communal and monitored activity, and requests that no one share photos of her children online without her express permission. Importantly, she also reminds parents to trust their guts.
“If the norm now is mental health issues or online grooming or non-consensual porn or constant comparison, then I’m okay without my kids fitting in. I would say be radical, buck the trend, don’t do what everybody else is doing. Say no to things you don’t feel comfortable with.”
The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords.
A screenshot from a video released on Telegram claiming to show how Meta’s AI customer support bot could be tricked into resetting a target’s password.
On May 31, word began to spread on several Telegram instant message channels that Meta’s AI bot would happily add an email address to an existing account as part of the bot’s standard password reset flow.
A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target’s usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta’s AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset.
The Telegram account that posted the video also linked to screenshots of pro-Iran images, videos and messages that defaced the hacked Instagram accounts, saying hackers had used the exploit to hijack a number of valuable (read: short) Instagram account names that allegedly have a resale value of more than a half million dollars.
Meta has not responded to requests for comment on the video’s claims, but Meta’s Andy Stone said on Twitter/X that the issue had been resolved and that they were securing impacted accounts. The security blog thecybersecguru.com reports that Meta pushed an emergency patch over the weekend, and clarified that no back end database was breached.
“Instagram has notoriously poor human support infrastructure,” Cybersecguru wrote. “Recovering a locked account – especially a high-value one can take weeks of back-and-forth with an automated ticketing system. Meta’s solution was to deploy a conversational AI layer to handle common recovery workflows: relinking a lost email address, triggering a password reset, verifying account ownership. The assistant, presumably, was supposed to reduce friction for legitimate users stuck in account-access hell.”
Ian Goldin, a threat researcher at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, said we’re entering unchartered security territory as more large online platforms start allowing AI chatbots to handle sensitive account recovery requests. Just like human customer support employees can be social engineered into providing unauthorized access to someone’s account, AI bots are equally eager to help and vulnerable to persuasion and trickery, he said.
“AI chatbots create interesting new attack surface, and we’re likely going to see a lot more of these kinds of attacks,” Goldin said.
Securing your various online accounts means taking full advantage of the most secure form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) offered (such as a passkey or security key). In this case, even using the least robust form of MFA that Instagram offers — a one-time code sent via SMS — likely would have blocked the exploit: The hackers who released the video on Telegram said their exploit failed to work against any accounts that had MFA enabled.
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