Meta

What I learned

Meta's new Commercial Terms let it crawl any website linked to a business account, and the backlash reached the Senate

Nieman Lab ran the legal experts' read that the terms allow scraping of news sites. The Hacker News thread hit 469 points, with one commenter calling it "next level legal judo" and another arguing that demanding licenses from partners undercuts Meta's claim that it never needs one from copyright owners. Sen. Adam Schiff urged Meta to reverse course and "compensate creators and publishers" (1,566 likes on Threads), while @creativeflairhq walked 5,118 TikTok viewers through two retreats: Meta dropped the word "train" from the crawling clause on 17 October and pushed back the start date on 23 October. A "Boycotting Meta" thread on r/Instagram (21 upvotes) is the grassroots version of the same anger. The pushback escalated further: WAN-IFRA sent Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan a formal letter from Frankfurt and Paris on 22 October demanding Meta suspend the crawling provision for news publishers and open "genuine dialogue" with the sector. Three days later Meta blinked again. Digiday reports Meta extended the effective date from 30 October to 20 November after publisher groups sent letters and lobbied lawmakers, with a spokesperson saying the company needs "more time to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not." PPC Land noted the confusion in the rollout itself, the terms page footer still read "Effective date: 30 October 2026" with no mention of 20 November anywhere in the document even after the delay was announced. A follow-up Nieman Lab piece and The Hindu both found that despite the wording tweaks, the terms still let Meta or anyone acting on its behalf deploy "web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers" against any site "associated with" a business account, and Search Engine Journal confirmed legal experts remain skeptical the delay changes much substantively.

Q3 earnings on October 21 came with an $18-19 billion Reality Labs loss forecast and a 6% stock slide

Meta's Q3 release guides 2026 capex to $135-145 billion, narrows full-year 2026 total expenses to $175-179 billion, and says Reality Labs losses decline from 2025 to a range of $18-19 billion as investment shifts to "primarily AI." Business Insider reports Mark Zuckerberg admitted Muse is still unprofitable. WSJ clocked the drop at more than 6% after fresh spending commitments, and CNBC flagged 3.64 billion daily active people against 3.65 billion expected, along with the specific Reality Labs quarterly numbers: $443 million in revenue against $4.13 billion in losses, versus StreetAccount's forecast of $513 million in revenue. That same week a New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion, per Al Jazeera.

Meta wants $95 billion in new stock, and an SEC filing shows Zuckerberg weighing a California exit over Prop 40

CNBC reports the plan starts with $35 billion in underwritten offerings, followed by a $60 billion at-the-market program to fund AI infrastructure. Fox Business (134,517 views) dug into the filing, which says Zuckerberg considered dumping his $110 million Palo Alto home ahead of the billionaire-tax vote. One host asked whether Meta is "socializing the costs of California's bad policy." Bettors aren't spooked: Polymarket gives a 90% chance Meta's market cap ends October between $2.00T and $2.25T, a 92% chance Meta tops OpenAI's valuation on December 31, and just 7% on "Will Meta launch a USD stablecoin in 2026?"

Muse Spark Open weights dropped October 15, tuned to run on Mac Studios through an Apple partnership

Zuckerberg's @finkd announced it to 31,997 likes and 4.8 million views. CNBC called the local-AI tie-up "an unlikely alliance between two longtime rivals." The ai-model-radar tracker on GitHub logged the specs: an 816B mixture-of-experts with 42B active parameters, a 1M context window, and gated open weights running on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Polymarket is less sure Meta has reached the frontier, pricing only a 36% chance that a Meta model scores 55% or higher on Humanity's Last Exam in 2026.

Meta Enterprise Platform launched September 28 to sell Muse and business agents, and Zuckerberg now says Muse has product-market fit

His launch post pitching "advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure" drew 2,196 likes. Muse for Small Business followed on September 29, plugging into Instagram analytics, Facebook Pages and ad accounts. Schwab Network (81,700 views) relayed the product-market-fit claim alongside JPMorgan's $940 price target. The privacy crowd isn't sold: TIME reported Muse is told to notice "inside jokes, memorable phrasing" to "strengthen your relationship," and Ars Technica found shared conversations exposing personal and business secrets.

Meta blamed "technical issues" for Lula's shrunken reach during Brazil's elections

The r/technology thread pulled 3,760 upvotes and 276 comments, the biggest Reddit post on Meta this month. Businesses describe similar automated misfires. @tinothegc says an AI error locked their Instagram DMs for 30 days on a business doing 100k a month through DMs, despite paying $150 a month for Meta Verified support. Mashable reports Meta is allegedly deleting LGBTQ and plus-sized business accounts, and on r/FacebookAds, "Meta Ads Are Killing My Business" drew 52 comments while a counterpoint post claiming a 13.36 ROAS and 46 sales in 3 days earned 108 upvotes.

Oakley Meta AI glasses filmed Kade Edwards' Red Bull Rampage line, and Instagram's reel did 50.9 million views

The Rampage reel marked the event's 25th anniversary on the original Utah cliffs, and @meta's VR Glasses reel ("lighter than a deck of cards") hit 1.73 million views on September 30. Instagram's own account posted even bigger numbers in the same window. @jordanclarksons trained with @cbrickley603 ahead of his @nyknicks season (61.7 million views), alongside painter @hichiyan686 (79.4 million), @asuki_millecolle's Double Dutch dance (80.8 million) and @alleymcglynn's paper art (71 million). The hardware marketing clearly lands, even while Reality Labs bleeds billions.