It’s been two years since Facebook — now Meta — first showed off its VR metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. The app, which was in private beta until now, is at last open to the public starting Thursday. The virtual meeting space and gaming hub is a familiar mix of existing VR social apps such as Rec Room, AltSpace …
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Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said Wednesday it has created artificial intelligence technology that can adapt more quickly to new types of harmful content, including posts discouraging COVID-19 vaccinations. Generally, AI systems learn new tasks from examples, but the process of gathering and labeling a massive amount of data typically takes months. Using technology Meta calls Few-Shot Learner, the new …
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A day before Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri is scheduled to testify before Congress, the photo-sharing app on Tuesday unveiled new parental controls and other features aimed a keeping teens safe. Among the new features, Instagram will let parents and guardians set limits on how much time teens are spending on the app. There will also be an option to notify parents …
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This story is part of Gift Guide, our year-round collection of the best gift ideas. An unfolding supply chain crisis and a continuous pandemic won’t stop the holidays — but it’ll definitely make it more difficult for you to get your hands on the perfect holiday gift. And while seeing empty shelves might push you into a panic to buy something ASAP, …
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California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, will leave Congress to run the former president’s new social media company. The Trump Media & Technology group said in a statement that Nunes will serve as its chief executive officer, beginning in January. Trump announced in October it would launch a social network called Truth Social to take …
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WhatsApp is adding more options to control your disappearing messages, the popular app announced Monday. You can now turn on disappearing messages by default for all new chats, and you can choose how long you have until the messages fade. Brett Pearce/CNET When you enable the feature, every one-on-one chat that you or someone else starts will be set to …
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Every year has its ups and downs. The ups are a thrill. The downs are often fascinating, for what they reveal about the limits of our ambitions, the challenges of trying to get things right and the escape hatches that might get us out of trouble (or the rabbit holes that take us ever deeper). Or just because misery loves …
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When co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter as chief executive in 2015, he made it clear the social media company needed to constantly reinvent itself. “The world needs a Twitter that not only remains relevant,” Dorsey said during a conference call that year, “but thrives and continues to redefine what came before it.” Parag Agrawal became Twitter CEO with Jack …
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This story is part of Gift Guide, our year-round collection of the best gift ideas. The metaverse is happening now! Or it’s already happened. The metaverse is gaming. It’s virtual reality. It’s a marketing term. It’s Web 3.0. It’s Facebook’s quick-change identity shift to Meta. Or, of course, it’s still a decade away. I’ve been covering VR and AR for years, …
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A federal judge on Wednesday granted a preliminary injunction against a Texas law that prohibits large social media companies from banning users or blocking posts based on their political viewpoints. HB 20, signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Sept. 9, targets companies with at least 50 million monthly users in the US, including Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube, and …
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