"Garmin's Collier Trophy award-winning Autonomi emergency Autoland, a system designed to safely land an aircraft in the event of pilot incapacitation, made its first real-world use and save on Saturday," writes Slashdot reader slipped_bit. AvBrief.com reports: Social media posts from flight tracking hobbyists reported a King Air 200 squawked 7700 about 2 p.m. local time today. The Autoland system was initiated and landed the aircraft at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Denver. A recording from LiveATC's feed of the airport's tower frequency includes a robotic female voice declaring a pilot incapacitation and the intention to land on Runway 30. The aircraft landed successfully and there have been no reports of injuries. The nature of the incapacitation and the condition of the pilot have not been released. VASAviation put together this nice animation of the event [here].

The aircraft, N479BR, was being operated by Buffalo River Outfitters from Aspen to Rocky Mountain Metropolitan. It's not clear how many people were on board. The system appeared to work flawlessly, and the controller at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan seemed to take it in stride, accommodating as many requests as he could before shutting down the airport for the landing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: With just three days to go before Christmas, a cyberattack knocked France's national postal service offline Monday, blocking and delaying package deliveries and online payments. The timing was miserable for millions of people at the height of the Christmas season, as frazzled postal workers fended off frustrated customers. No one immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicions abounded.

What the postal service La Poste called a ''major network incident'' remained unresolved by Monday evening, more than eight hours after it was first reported. For a company that delivered 2.6 billion packages last year and employs more than 200,000 people, that's a big hit. La Poste said in a statement that a distributed denial of service incident, or DDoS, "rendered its online services inaccessible." It said the incident had no impact on customer data, but disrupted package delivery. Letters, including holiday greeting cards, could still be mailed and delivered. But transactions requiring tracking or access to the postal service internal computer systems were impossible.

The cyberattack also hurt online banking. Customers of the company's banking arm, La Banque Postale, were blocked from using the application to approve payments or conduct other banking services. The bank redirected approvals to text messages instead. "Our teams are mobilized to resolve the situation quickly," the bank said in messages posted on social networks. The disruption came a week after France's government was targeted by a cyberattack that targeted the Interior Ministry, in charge of national security.

Australian restaurants facing a mounting cost-of-doing-business crisis are turning to automatic service charges as a way to shore up revenue. The practice is legal under Australian consumer law as long as customers are notified beforehand and can opt out, but it risks alienating diners in a country where tipping has traditionally been optional.

Wes Lambert, chief executive of the Australian Cafe and Restaurant Association, said only a handful of businesses in central business districts currently add automatic tips to bills, but the practice may spread as cost pressures continue. Automatic tipping is more common at venues frequented by international tourists, who view the practice as normal rather than exceptional. With international tourism now near pre-COVID levels, Lambert expects more restaurants to include tips on bills by default.

A Sydney wine bar recently abandoned its 10 per cent automatic tip after a diner's social media post triggered public backlash. University of New South Wales professor Rob Nichols said Australia's resistance to tipping stems from the expectation that hospitality workers earn at least minimum wage, unlike in the United States where tips constitute most of a server's income. Australians and tourists tip an estimated $3.5 billion annually, and tipping transactions grew 13% year over year in fiscal 2024-25.

They call it "the business-impersonator scam". And it's fooled 396,227 Americans in just the first nine months of 2025 — 18% more than the 335,785 in the same nine months of 2024. That's according to a Bloomberg reporter (who also fell for it in late November), citing the official statistics from America's Federal Trade Commission: Some pose as airline staff on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or e-mails claiming to be an airline reporting a delayed or cancelled flight to phish for travellers' data. But the objective is always the same: to hit a stressed out, overwhelmed traveller at their most vulnerable. In my case, the scammer exploited weaknesses in Google's automated ad-screening system, so that fraudulent sponsored results rose to the top [They'd typed "United airlines agent on demand" into Google, and the top search result on their phone said United.com, had a 1-888 number next to it and said it had had 1M+ visits in past month. "It looked legit. I tapped the number..." ]

After I reported the fake "United Airlines" ad to Google, via an online form for consumers, it was taken down. But a few days later, I entered the same search terms and the identical ad featuring the same 1-888 number was back at the top of my results. I reported it again, and it was quickly removed again... A [Google] spokesperson there said the company is constantly evolving its tactics "to stay ahead of bad actors." Of the 5.1 billion ads blocked by the company last year, she said, 415 million were taken down for "scam-related violations." Google updated its ads misrepresentation policy in 2024 to include "impersonating or falsely implying affiliation with a public figure, brand or organization to entice users to provide money or information." Still, many impostor ads slip through the cracks.
"Reported losses from business-impostor scams in the United States rose 30 per cent, to US$835 million, in the first three quarters of 2025," the article points out (citing more figures from the America's Federal Trade Commision). An updated version of the article also includes a response from United Airlines. "We encourage customers to only use customer-service contact information that is listed on our website and app."

And what happened to the scammed reporter? "I called American Express and contested the charge before cancelling my credit card. I then contacted Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to put a fraud alert on my file. Next, I filed a complaint with the FTC and reported the fake ad to Google.

"American Express wound up resolving the dispute in my favour, but the memories of this chaotic Thanksgiving will stay with us forever. "

"On Saturday, videos shared widely on social media showed Waymo vehicles stopped mid-intersection with hazard lights flashing, forcing other cars to maneuver around them," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Independent notes that "Without working traffic lights, the driverless cars were seemingly left confused, with many halting in their tracks and causing major traffic jams. Local riders and pedestrians shared photos and videos of the vehicles stuck at intersections with long lines of drivers piling up behind them..." In some instances, several Waymos were piled up in front of a single intersection. "6 Waymos parked at a broken traffic light blocking the roads. Seems like they were not trained for a power outage," another social media user wrote.
More from CNBC: San Francisco resident Matt Schoolfield said he saw at least three Waymo autonomous vehicles stopped in traffic Saturday around 9:45 p.m. local time, including one he photographed near Arguello Boulevard and Geary Street. "They were just stopping in the middle of the street," Schoolfield said.

The power outages began around 1:09 p.m. Saturday and peaked roughly two hours later, affecting about 130,000 customers, according to Pacific Gas and Electric. As of Sunday morning, about 21,000 customers remained without power, mainly in the Presidio, the Richmond District, Golden Gate Park and parts of downtown San Francisco. PG&E said the outage was caused by a fire at a substation that resulted in "significant and extensive" damage, and said it could not yet provide a precise timeline for full restoration...

Amid the disruption, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X: "Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage." Unlike Waymo, Tesla does not operate a driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco. Tesla's local ride-hailing service uses vehicles equipped with "FSD (Supervised)," a premium driver assistance system. The service requires a human driver behind the wheel at all times...

The Waymo pause in San Francisco indicates cities are not yet ready for highly automated vehicles to inundate their streets, said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and co-author of "How to Make AI Useful." "Something in the design and development of this technology was missed that clearly illustrates it was not the robust solution many would like to believe it is," he said. [He recommends "human backup systems in place around highly automated systems, including robotaxis."] State and city regulators will need to consider what the maximum penetration of highly automated vehicles should be in their region, Reimer added, and AV developers should be held responsible for "chaos gridlock," just as human drivers would be held responsible for how they drive during a blackout.

Waymo did not say when its service would resume and did not specify whether collisions involving its vehicles had occurred during the blackout.

"Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers...." writes New York magazine's "Intelligencer" column: Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was "overwhelmed with negative responses" from the "concerned Postal community" after fans spotted AI-generated material in the game's trailer. The developers of Arc Raiders were accused of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts, while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across Black Ops 7.Games that weren't developed with generative AI are getting caught up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are going to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools. Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November to the Call of Duty backlash:"We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits," he posted on X....

AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy, and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where, notably, technologies referred to as "AI" have previously been embraced with open arms.
And now "the price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed" (per Tom's Hardware). "The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody's going to be happy about that."

Insider Gaming shares another example of anti-AI sentiment in the gaming industry: The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.

In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it's removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded. "The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself," the statement reads. "When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Polygon notes the award-stripping is "due to inclusion of generative AI assets at launch that were quickly patched out." Quotes from earlier in the year from Sandfall Interactive's FranÃois Meurisse made the rounds on social media last week amid a news cycle caught up in the use of generative AI in games... In June, the Spanish outlet El País published a story including an interview conducted around Clair Obscur's launch, in which Meurisse admitted that Sandfall used a minimal amount generative AI in some form during the game's development... Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.

Archive.org now has a page with "the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, "including a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next).

Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" — and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972.

The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."

An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux: After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla's new CEO that Firefox will evolve into "a modern AI browser," the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser...

What was not made clear [in Tuesday's comments by new Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo] is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier Thursday to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.... "...that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this," said Firefox developer Jake Archibald on Mastodon.

In addition, Jake Archibald said that all the AI features that are or will be included in Firefox will also be opt-in. "I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That's unambiguous..."

Mozilla has contacted me shortly after writing the story to confirm that the "AI Kill Switch" will be implemented in Q1 2026."
The article also cites this quote left by Mozilla's new CEO on Reddit:

"Rest assured, Firefox will always remain a browser built around user control. That includes AI. You will have a clear way to turn AI features off. A real kill switch is coming in Q1 of 2026. Choice matters and demonstrating our commitment to choice is how we build and maintain trust."

echo123 shares a report from PBS: The Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, moving to dissolve a research lab that a top White House official described as "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." White House budget director Russ Vought criticized the lab in a social media post Tuesday night and said a comprehensive review of the lab is underway. "Vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location, Vought said.

The research lab, which houses the largest federal research program on climate change, supports research to predict, prepare for and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters. The research lab is managed by a nonprofit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities on behalf of the National Science Foundation. A senior White House official cited two instances of the lab's "woke direction" that wastes taxpayer funds on what the official called frivolous pursuits and ideologies. One funded an Indigenous and Earth Sciences center that aimed to "make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered," while another experiment traced air pollution to "demonize motor vehicles, oil and gas operations." The lab "is quite literally our global mothership," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University, in a post on X. "Nearly everyone who researches climate and weather -- not only in the U.S., but around the world -- has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources."

She continued: "NCAR supports the scientists who fly into hurricanes, the meteorologists who develop new radar technology, the physicists who envision and code new weather models, and yes -- the largest community climate model in the world. That too. Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual "Year in Sport" wrap-up -- a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user's athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ($80 per year), rather than making it free to everyone, as it had been historically since the review's debut in 2016. This decision has roiled numerous Strava users, particularly those who have relished the app's social encouragement features.

One Strava user in India, Shobhit Srivastava, "begged" Strava to "let the plebs see their Year in Sport too, please." He later explained to Ars that having this little animated video is more than just a collection of raw numbers. "When someone makes a video of you and your achievements and tells you that these are the people who stood right behind you, motivated you, cheered for you -- that feeling is of great significance to me!" he said by email. "Our goal was to give our users ample notice before the personalized Year In Sport was released," said Strava spokesperson Chris Morris. "With the relaunch of our subscription this year, we wanted to clarify the core benefits of Strava -- uploading activities, finding your community, sharing and giving kudos -- remain as accessible as possible."

TikTok's owner ByteDance has signed a deal creating a U.S.-focused joint venture majority-owned by American and global investors, allowing the app to avoid a U.S. ban while ByteDance retains a minority stake. The BBC reports: Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew. The deal, which is set to close on January 22, would end years of efforts by Washington to force ByteDance to sell its US operations over national security concerns. It is in-line with a deal unveiled in September, when US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law that would ban the app unless it was sold.

TikTok said in the memo that the deal would enable "over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community." Under the agreement, ByteDance will retain 19.9% of the business, while Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will hold 15% each. Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo.

Google's AI Mode is synthesizing "Frankenstein" recipes from multiple creators, often stripping away context and accuracy and siphoning traffic and ad revenue away from food bloggers in the process. Many recipe writers warn this shift amounts to an "extinction event" for ad-supported food sites. The Guardian reports: Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop.

Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions). Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by offering their work for free while using ads to make money. But now they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether. "For websites that depend on the advertising model," says Matt Rodbard, the founder and editor-in-chief of the website Taste, "I think this is an extinction event in many ways."

Tony Isaac shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump's social media and crypto company is making a huge bet on a far different industry -- nuclear fusion, a potentially lucrative albeit commercially unproven energy technology that could help power a suddenly electricity-starved economy. Trump Media and Technology Group Thursday announced a surprise merger with TAE Technologies, in an all-stock deal valued at more than $6 billion that would create one of the first publicly traded fusion companies. News of the deal shares of Trump Media (DJT) 35% higher in early trading Thursday.

After the deal closes, shareholders of Trump Media and TAE would own about 50% of the combined entity. The combined companies plan to begin construction as soon as next year of the world's first fusion reaction that could produce electricity on utility scale, rather than just in laboratory settings. The combination with TMTG could give TAE political clout. But it could also make it more politically controversial, particularly if it looks to receive any kind of federal government support, such as grants, low-interest loans or permitting approvals.

It could also give TAE access to capital that it needs. Under terms of the deal, TMTG would provide $300 million in cash for TAE's plans. But that is likely a fraction of the cash available from some of TAE's current investors, such as Google parent company Alphabet, as well as its bevy of private equity investors. But that $300 million is only a fraction of the money that TAE needs, or expects to be able to access, once it has become a public company with this deal. Staying a private company, even with deep pocketed investors, is no longer sufficient TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer told CNN Thursday. "It's a multi-billion dollar undertaking," said Binderbauer. "The velocity you can get the capital is differentiating. If I raise $2 billion over five years I can't built the plant sufficiently fast." He said the company has raised about $1.3 billion over the course of its 25-year history.

The world's best-performing stock is turning into a cautionary tale for investors chasing outsized returns from the AI boom. From a report: Little-known until recently even within its home market of India, RRP Semiconductor Ltd. became a social-media obsession as its shares surged more than 55,000% in the 20 months through Dec. 17 -- by far the biggest gain worldwide among companies with a market value above $1 billion.

That's despite posting negative revenue in its latest financial results, reporting just two full-time employees in its latest annual report, and boasting only a tenuous link to the semiconductor spending boom after shifting away from real estate in early 2024. A mix of online hype, a tiny free float and India's swelling base of retail investors drove 149 straight limit-up sessions, even as exchange officials and the company itself cautioned investors.

The rally is now showing signs of strain -- and regulators are taking a closer look. The Securities and Exchange Board of India has begun examining the surge in RRP's shares for potential wrongdoing, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The $1.7 billion stock, recently restricted by its exchange to trading just once a week, has fallen by 6% from its Nov. 7 peak.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company. The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company's backend, including the phone farm itself.

"I could see the phones in use, which manager (the PCs controlling the phones) they had, which TikTok accounts they were assigned, proxies in use (and their passwords), and pending tasks. As well as the link to control devices for each manager," the hacker told me. "I could have used their phones for compute resources, or maybe spam. Even if they're just phones, there are around 1100 of them, with proxy access, for free. I think I could have used the linked accounts by puppeting the phones or adding tasks, but haven't tried."

As I reported in October, Doublespeed raised $1 million from a16z as part of its "Speedrun" accelerator program, "a fastpaced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth." Doublespeed uses generative AI to flood social media with accounts and posts to promote certain products on behalf of its clients. Social media companies attempt to detect and remove this type of astroturfing for violating their inauthentic behavior policies, which is why Doublespeed uses a bank of phones to emulate the behavior of real users. So-called "click farms" or "phone farms" often use hundreds of mobile phones to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason. [...] I've seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.

U.S. video game hardware spending fell 27% year over year in November to $695 million, according to market analyst company Circana. "This is the lowest video game hardware spending total for a November month since the $455 million reached during the November 2005 tracking period," Circana says. Furthermore, only 1.6 million units of hardware were sold in the U.S. in November, which is "the lowest total for a November month since 1995 (1.4 million)." The Verge reports: The rising costs of consoles probably didn't help. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series of consoles both turned five in November, but customers looking to pick up one of the consoles brand new are having to grapple with higher prices following price hikes this year. Those hikes have led to an "all-time November high" for the average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware of $439, Circana says -- a number that's up 11 percent from 2024. (In November 2019, the average price was $235, according to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella.)

Longtime Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced that the Linux kernel has received its first CVE tied to Rust code. Phoronix reports: This first CVE (CVE-2025-68260) for Rust code in the Linux kernel pertains to the Android Binder rewrite in Rust. There is a race condition that can occur due to some noted unsafe Rust code. That code can lead to memory corruption of the previous/next pointers and in turn cause a crash. This CVE for the possible system crash is for Linux 6.18 and newer since the introduction of the Rust Binder driver. At least though it's just a possible system crash and not any more serious system compromise with remote code execution or other more severe issues.

Meta is informing some users that they will soon be restricted in how many link posts they can share each month, unless they pay for its Meta Verified subscription service. As per the notification message: "Starting December 16, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits to help protect your brand."

To be clear, right now this is a limited test, so relatively few Pages are impacted. But understandably, a lot of users are also seeking more information on the change, and whether it could be expanded to all Pages. So, Meta's seeking to boost take-up of Meta Verified, in order to make more money out of its subscription option, which, for business users, costs between $14.99 and $499 per month, depending on which package you choose.

A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: Though China's authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta's advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company's global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money -- more than $3 billion -- was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.

The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta's finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta's efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company's reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues. The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta's platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. "We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm," Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations.

To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 -- from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China. Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. "As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck," a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was "asked to pause" its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO's involvement or what the so-called "Integrity Strategy pivot" entailed. But after Zuckerberg's input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn't detail the specifics of those measures.

Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned "Meta's own behavior and policies" were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show. The upshot: Within a few months of Meta's brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta's China revenue. Rob Leathern, who was a senior director of product management at Facebook until 2020 and is no longer at the company, said the scale of predatory advertising revealed in the documents represents a major breakdown in consumer protections at the social media giant. "The levels that you're talking about are not defensible," he said of the percentage of abusive ads. "I don't know how anyone could think this is okay."

U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday. From a report: The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to finalize a trade framework they announced this year. The United States has been pushing Europe to open up its tech sector to American firms. But U.S. officials have complained that the European Union has not walked back broader regulation of company business practices while also proceeding with investigations of major American tech firms like Google, X, Amazon and Meta.

In a social media post, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has carried out the negotiations, said that the European Union and some member states had "persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines and directives" against American companies.

The United States had raised concerns with the European Union about these issues for years "without meaningful engagement," all while allowing European companies to operate freely in the United States, it said. If the European Union continues these policies, the United States would "have no choice but to begin using every tool at its disposal to counter these unreasonable measures," the U.S.T.R. said. It named fees and restrictions on service companies among the possibilities, and said it would use the same approach against other countries that echoed Europe's strategy.

The post singled out potential European service providers that could be targeted by name, listing Accenture, DHL, Mistral, SAP, Siemens and Spotify, among others.