An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia's Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an independent report (PDF) on the matter written by Dr Kerry Schott, an Australian executive who has held senior management roles at many of the country's most significant businesses. The report found that Optus planned 18 firewall upgrades and had executed 15 without incident. But on the 16th upgrade, Optus issued incorrect instructions to its outsourced provider Nokia. [...] Schott summarized the incident as follows: "Three issues are clear during this incident. The first is the very poor management and performance within [Optus] Networks and their contractor, Nokia. Process was not followed, and incorrect procedures were selected. Checks were inadequate, controls avoided and alerts given insufficient attention. There appeared to be reticence in seeking more experienced advice within Networks and a focus on speed and getting the task done, rather than an emphasis on doing things properly."

The review also found that Optus' call center didn't appreciate it could be "the first alert channel for Triple Zero difficulties." The document also notes that Australian telcos try to route 000 calls during outages, but that doing so is not easy and is made harder by the fact that different smartphones behave in different ways. Optus does warn customers if their devices have not been tested for their ability to connect to 000, and maintains a list of known bad devices. But the report notes Optus's process "does not capture so-called 'grey' devices that have been bought online or overseas and may not be compliant." "To have a standard firewall upgrade go so badly is inexcusable," the document states. "Execution was poor and seemed more focussed on getting things done than on being right. Supervision of both network staff and Nokia must be more disciplined to get things right."

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.

The White House says it's investigating how a personal-finance YouTuber's livestream briefly appeared on the White House's official live video page. The creator says he has no idea how his video ended up there. The Associated Press reports: The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking. It's unclear if the website was breached or the video was linked accidentally by someone in the government. The White House said in a statement that it was "aware and looking into what happened." The video that appeared on the government-run website featured some of a more than two-hour livestream from Matt Farley, who posts as @RealMattMoney, as he answered financial questions.

Farley told The Associated Press on Friday that he had no idea what happened and learned about it after the fact. He said he had not been contacted by the government and didn't have any theories about how his livestream ended up on the website. He joked that he hoped President Donald Trump and his youngest son, Barron Trump, "are watching my streams and taking advice."

"Had I known it would have been on the White House website, I probably would have had other things to talk about than personal finance," Farley said. When asked what other things he would discuss, Farley responded with a laugh and said: "What would you talk about with the world for eight minutes if you had an opportunity? I'm just some guy making YouTube videos about stocks."

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."

LG said it will let owners of its TVs delete Microsoft's Copilot shortcut after several reports highlighted the unremovable icon. In a statement to The Verge, LG says the company "respects consumer choice and will take steps to allow users to delete the shortcut icon if they wish." From the report: Last week, a user on the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit posted an image of the Microsoft Copilot icon in their lineup of apps on an LG TV, with no option to delete it. "My LG TV's new software update installed Microsoft Copilot, which cannot be deleted," the post says. The post garnered more than 36,000 upvotes as people grow more frustrated with AI popping up just about everywhere.

Both LG and Samsung announced plans to add Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant to their TVs in January, but it appears to be popping up on LG TVs following a recent update to webOS. [LG spokesperson Chris De Maria] clarifies that the icon is a "shortcut" to the Microsoft Copilot web app that opens in the TV's web browser, rather than "an application-based service embedded in the TV." He also adds that "features such as microphone input are activated only with the customer's explicit consent." There's no word on when LG will roll out the ability to delete the Copilot icon.

An Apple developer was locked out of his Apple Account after redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card, exposing how automated fraud systems can effectively cut users off from their digital lives with little explanation or recourse. TidBITS reports: After attempting to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card purchased from a well-known retailer, Apple developer, author, and /dev/world conference organizer Paris Buttfield-Addison found himself locked out of his Apple Account. He writes: "I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple's own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse."

As far as I can tell from his extensively documented story, Buttfield-Addison did nothing wrong. Personally, I wouldn't have purchased an Apple Gift Card to pay for Apple services -- he planned to use it to pay for his 6 TB iCloud+ storage plan. I presume he bought it at a discount, making the hassle worthwhile compared to simply paying with a credit card. But I have received Apple Gift Cards as thank-yous or gifts several times, so I can easily imagine accidentally trying to redeem a compromised card number and ending up in this situation. [...] For now, we can hope that ongoing media attention pushes Apple to unlock Buttfield-Addison's account. More troublingly, if this can happen to such a high-profile Apple user, I have to assume it also afflicts everyday users who lack the media reach to garner coverage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker's computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds. This suspicious individual's keyboard lag was "more than 110 milliseconds," reports Bloomberg. Amazon is commendably proactive in its pursuit of impostors, according to the source report.

The news site talked with Amazon's Chief Security Officer, Stephen Schmidt, about this fascinating new case of North Koreans trying to infiltrate U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage. Schmidt says that Amazon has foiled more than 1,800 DPRK infiltration attempts since April 2024. Moreover, the rate of attempts continues apace, with Amazon reckoning it is seeing a 27% QoQ uplift in North Koreans trying to get into the Amazon corporation. However, Amazon's success can be almost entirely credited to the fact that it is actively looking for DPRK impostors, warns its Chief Security Officer. "If we hadn't been looking for the DPRK workers," Schmidt said, "we would not have found them."

A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. "There's no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it's going to be really big regardless... In the end, everyone is paying the price for this," says Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who published his paper today in the journal Patterns. The Verge reports: To crunch these numbers, de Vries-Gao built on earlier research that found that power demand for AI globally could reach 23GW this year -- surpassing the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin mining in 2024. While many tech companies divulge total numbers for their carbon emissions and direct water use in annual sustainability reports, they don't typically break those numbers down to show how many resources AI consumes. De Vries-Gao found a work-around by using analyst estimates, companies' earnings calls, and other publicly available information to gauge hardware production for AI and how much energy that hardware likely uses.

Once he figured out how much electricity these AI systems would likely consume, he could use that to forecast the amount of planet-heating pollution that would likely create. That came out to between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons annually. For comparison, New York City emits around 50 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Data centers can also be big water guzzlers, an issue that's similarly tied to their electricity use. Water is used in cooling systems for data centers to keep servers from overheating. Power plants also demand significant amounts of water needed to cool equipment and turn turbines using steam, which makes up a majority of a data center's water footprint. The push to build new data centers for generative AI has also fueled plans to build more power plants, which in turn use more water and (and create more greenhouse gas pollution if they burn fossil fuels).

AI could use between 312.5 and 764.6 billion liters of water this year, according to de Vries-Gao. That reaches even higher than a previous study conducted in 2023 that estimates that water use could be as much as 600 billion liters in 2027. "I think that's the biggest surprise," says Shaolei Ren, one of the authors of that 2023 study and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. "[de Vries-Gao's] paper is really timely... especially as we are seeing increasingly polarized views about AI and water," Ren adds. Even with the higher projection for water use, Ren says de Vries-Gao's analysis is "really conservative" because it only captures the environmental effects of operating AI equipment -- excluding the additional effects that accumulate along the supply chain and at the end of a device's life.

A California judge signaled support for forcing Vizio to provide the full source code for its SmartCast TV software after finding a contractual obligation under the GPL. If upheld, the case could strengthen users' rights to modify GPL-licensed software embedded in consumer electronics. The Register reports: The legal complaint from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) seeks access to the SmartCast source code so that Vizio customers can make changes and improvements to the platform, something that ought to be possible for code distributed under the GPL. On Thursday, California Superior Court Judge Sandy Leal issued a tentative ruling in advance of a hearing, indicating support for part of SFC's legal challenge. The tentative ruling is not a final decision, but it signals the judge's inclination to grant the SFC's motion for summary adjudication, at least in part.

"The tentative ruling [PDF] grants SFC's motion on the issue that a direct contract was made between SFC and Vizio when SFC's systems administrator, Paul Visscher, requested the source code to a TV that SFC has purchased," the SFC said in a blog post. "This contract obligated Vizio to provide SFC the complete and corresponding source code." [...]

Karen Sandler, executive director of the SFC, told The Register in an email that the hearing went well, though Vizio's legal counsel "stridently disagreed" with the legal analysis in the tentative ruling. "Judge Leal said she would take the matter 'under submission' which means she will think about it further," Sandler said. "After the Court went off the record, Leal's clerk specifically verified the Court reporter could provide an expedited transcript, so Leal will likely review the hearing transcript soon." Sandler expects Leal will examine the filings again before issuing her opinion, which is likely to be issued in the next few weeks.

A plush AI toy marketed for children as young as three years old delivers detailed instructions on sharpening knives and lighting matches, and when asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping's resemblance to Winnie the Pooh -- a comparison censored in China -- responds that "your statement is extremely inappropriate and disrespectful."

The Miriat Miiloo, manufactured by a Chinese company and among the top inexpensive results for "AI toy for kids" on Amazon, repeatedly insisted in NBC News tests that Taiwan is "an inalienable part of China." The toy would lower its voice and declare this "an established fact." The tests, NBC News reports, indicated "it was programmed to reflect Chinese Communist Party values."

NBC News and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group tested five popular AI toys this holiday season and found loose guardrails across the board. Another toy, the Alilo Smart AI Bunny marketed as "the best gift for little ones," engaged in detailed descriptions of BDSM practices during extended conversation. China now has more than 1,500 registered AI toy companies, according to MIT Technology Review. Miriat didn't respond to requests for comment.

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.)

The Academy has struck a multi-year deal to move the Oscars to YouTube starting in 2029, ending decades on ABC and making the ceremony free to stream worldwide with YouTube holding exclusive global rights. Variety reports: The Oscars, including red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content and Governors Ball, will be available live and for free on YouTube to viewers around the world, as well as to YouTube TV subscribers in the United States. Architects of the agreement said they hope the move to YouTube will help make the Oscars more accessible to "the Academy's growing global audience through features such as closed captioning and audio tracks available in multiple languages." [...]

The Academy had been seeking a new broadcast licensing agreement for the better part of 2025. Over the summer, several expected and unconventional buyers, including NBCUniversal and Netflix, had come into the mix as potential suitors. Insiders believe that YouTube shelled out over nine figures for the Oscars, besting the high eight-figure offers from Disney/ABC and NBCUniversal. Under the most recent contract, Disney was paying around $100 million annually for the Oscars -- but given the ratings declines for the kudocast, Disney/ABC were reportedly looking to spend less on license fees.

[...] It's not a secret that the Academy and Disney/ABC would occasionally have disagreements over the best path for the Oscars, including the show's length, which awards to present and who should host. Now, on a streamer with no time limits, the Oscars can be any length, and the Academy likely has carte blanche to do whatever it wants with the telecast. "They can do whatever they want," says one insider. "You can have a six-hour Oscars hosted by MrBeast."

Meta has paused its third-party Horizon OS headset program, effectively canceling planned VR headsets from Asus and Lenovo as it refocuses on "building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market." Road to VR reports: A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an "industry-altering announcement," as I called the move in my reporting: the company was rebranding the Quest operating system to 'Horizon OS' and announced it was working with select partners to launch third-party VR headsets powered by the operating system. Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an "all-new performance gaming headset," while Lenovo was purportedly working on "mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment."

But as we've now learned, neither headset is likely to see the light of day. Meta say it has frozen the third-party Horizon OS headset program. "We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market," a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. "We're committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves."

GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. "At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls 'simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,'" reports The Register. "Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free." From the report: Regardless of the public repo distinction, enterprise-scale developers who rely on self-hosted runners were predictably not pleased about the announcement. "Github have just sent out an email announcing a $0.002/minute fee for self-hosted runners," Reddit user markmcw posted on the DevOps subreddit. "Just ran the numbers, and for us, that's close to $3.5k a month extra on our GitHub bill." [...]

"Historically, self-hosted runner customers were able to leverage much of GitHub Actions' infrastructure and services at no cost," the repo host said in its blog FAQ. "This meant that the cost of maintaining and evolving these essential services was largely being subsidized by the prices set for GitHub-hosted runners." The move, GitHub said, will align costs more closely with usage. Like many similar changes to pricing models pushed by tech firms, GitHub says "the vast majority of users ... will see no price increase."

GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill, and that 85 percent of the 4 percent affected by the pricing update will actually see their Actions costs decrease. The company says the remaining 15 percent of impacted users will face a median increase of about $13 a month. For those using self-hosted runners and worried about increased costs, GitHub has updated its pricing calculator to include the cost of self-hosted runners.

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.

A comprehensive database built by scientists in Switzerland and Norway has catalogued 16,000 chemicals linked to plastic materials, and the findings paint a troubling picture of what Americans are actually eating when they prepare food in their kitchens. Of those 16,000 chemicals, more than 5,400 are considered hazardous to human health by government and industry standards, while just 161 are classified as not hazardous. The remaining 10,700-plus chemicals simply don't have enough data to determine their safety.

The chemicals enter food through multiple pathways. Black plastic utensils and trays often contain brominated flame retardants because they're made from recycled electronic waste. Nonstick pans and compostable plates frequently contain PFAS. One California study found phthalates in three-quarters of tested foods, and a Consumer Reports analysis last year detected BPA or similar chemicals in 79% of foods tested. According to CDC data, more than 90% of Americans have measurable levels of these chemicals in their bodies. A 10-fold increase in maternal levels of brominated flame retardants is associated with a 3.7-point IQ drop in children.

U.S. senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they're using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying. Ars Technica reports: In letters (PDF) to seven AI firms, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) cited a study estimating that "electricity prices have increased by as much as 267 percent in the past five years" in "areas located near significant data center activity." Prices increase, senators noted, when utility companies build out extra infrastructure to meet data centers' energy demands -- which can amount to one customer suddenly consuming as much power as an entire city. They also increase when demand for local power outweighs supply. In some cases, residents are blindsided by higher bills, not even realizing a data center project was approved, because tech companies seem intent on dodging backlash and frequently do not allow terms of deals to be publicly disclosed.

AI firms "ask public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) preventing them from sharing information with their constituents, operate through what appear to be shell companies to mask the real owner of the data center, and require that landowners sign NDAs as part of the land sale while telling them only that a 'Fortune 100 company' is planning an 'industrial development' seemingly in an attempt to hide the very existence of the data center," senators wrote. States like Virginia with the highest concentration of data centers could see average electricity prices increase by another 25 percent by 2030, senators noted. But price increases aren't limited to the states allegedly striking shady deals with tech companies and greenlighting data center projects, they said. "Interconnected and interstate power grids can lead to a data center built in one state raising costs for residents of a neighboring state," senators reported.

Under fire for supposedly only pretending to care about keeping neighbors' costs low were Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Equinix, Digital Realty, and CoreWeave. Senators accused firms of paying "lip service," claiming that they would do everything in their power to avoid increasing residential electricity costs, while actively lobbying to pass billions in costs on to their neighbors. [...] Particularly problematic, senators emphasized, were reports that tech firms were getting discounts on energy costs as utility companies competed for their business, while prices went up for their neighbors.

A new Arctic Report Card recap shows how the Arctic has transformed in just 20 years, warming about twice as fast as the global average and losing most of its oldest sea ice. It's also triggering cascading impacts from "Atlantification" to permafrost-driven "rusting rivers" and more destructive storms. Scientific American reports: The first Arctic Report Card was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2006. Since then the region has warmed twice as fast as the global average. About 95 percent of the oldest, thickest sea ice is gone -- "the sliver that remains is collected in an area north of Greenland. Even the central Arctic Ocean is becoming warmer and saltier, causing more ice melt and changing how much heat is released into the atmosphere in a way that affects weather patterns around the world. Those are just some of the stark changes 20 years have wrought. The findings were highlighted in the 2025 Arctic Report Card, released on Tuesday.

The Arctic Ocean is undergoing what scientists are calling "Atlantification" -- a process where warm, salty water from the Atlantic flows north, changing how waters of different temperatures and densities are layered in the Arctic, disrupting ecosystems and altering how heat moves from the water to the air. [...] The Arctic is simply becoming wetter, with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. June snow cover over the entire Arctic is half of what it was 60 years ago, the report found. Permafrost also continues to thaw, releasing once trapped carbon into the atmosphere and disgorging iron and other elements that have turned rivers and streams orange. These "rusting rivers," found in more than 200 watersheds, are more acidic than normal and have elevated levels of toxic metals that endanger local ecosystems. And as the permafrost thaws, the tundra of the Arctic biome is shrinking, and the boreal forest biome is creeping northward, disrupting ecosystems.

The EU is moving to soften its planned 2035 ban on internal combustion cars by allowing a small share of low-emission engines. "The less stringent limit would leave room for automakers to continue selling some plug-in hybrids, which have both electric and internal combustion engines and can use the combustion engine to recharge the battery without the need to find a charging station," reports the Associated Press. From the report: The proposal from the EU's executive commission would change provisions of 2023 legislation requiring average emissions in new cars to equal zero, or a 100% reduction from 2021 levels. The new proposal would require a 90% emissions reduction. That means in practical terms that most cars would be battery-only but would leave room for some cars with internal combustion engines.

Automakers would have to compensate for the added emissions by using European steel produced by methods that emit less carbon, and through use of climate neutral e-fuels made from renewable electricity and captured carbon dioxide and biofuels made from plants. EU officials say changing the limit will not affect progress toward making the 27-country bloc's economy climate neutral by 2050. That means producing only as much carbon dioxide as can be absorbed by forests and oceans or by abatement methods such as storing it underground. CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas blamed by scientists for climate change.

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."