Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.

Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.

An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.

A European Union research service publishes a paper about calls for VPN regulation, noting that they're 'increasingly used to bypass online age verification.'

just a reminder - congress rats block US gdpr 10th year after EU passed gdpr.

companies that lose data face no consequences.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1093208/the-devout-muslim-making-a-living-from-islamophobic-ai-slop-a-content-creator-in-pakista

• A man in Pakistan has been making thousands from Facebook pages spreading racist videos aimed at UK audiences;
• Posts target Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan, and turn a profit via Meta's ad revenue model;
• New AI tools mean creators can produce divisive viral content without needing to understand its message.