Using ‘spy glasses’ made by Facebook owner leads to floods of negative comments, say content creators
It was hardly an offensive video. Amid the buzz of the Tour de France finale, Oliver Hooson filmed himself whipping up a delicious-looking flat white for a fellow cycling enthusiast. But after posting the footage on social media, the comments that soon rolled in were a real shock. “PERV,” read one. “Out here pushing creep glasses,” said another. His mistake? Documenting the moment with Meta’s “spy glasses”.
Despite being marketed as the latest must-have gadget, Meta’s smartglasses, which can record video footage while being worn, have faced a vicious backlash, particularly relating to concerns about surveillance. There are widespread fears about the glasses being used to film people, especially women, without their consent, and the resultant footage being posted on social media. This has earned them the label of “pervert glasses”, and content creators, no matter how they are used, have faced a flood of negative comments for deploying them.
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© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found.
These pages and individual creators posted content that appeared to be in clear violation of Facebook’s own hate speech policies. Nonetheless, they were able to earn money on their posts through the platform’s “Content Monetization” program — which is invitation-only.
One receiving payouts from Meta was Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups. Lennon was taken away by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi during his stay at a Melbourne hotel, and is believed to be one of the organizers behind an “anti-immigration” march on a sacred Indigenous site in the city last year.
Lennon, in other words, was a known quantity, and Meta should’ve been under no illusions about who they were paying to drive engagement on the platform. Still, the investigation found that he’s been receiving payments from Facebook since September 2025.
Meanwhile, the Facebook page for the Australian white supremacist site The Noticer has been making money through the revenue program since November 2025. Underscoring how much Meta has dropped the ball on this one, even X — owned by Elon Musk, who performed two suspiciously Sieg Heil-looking salutes back in 2025 — has banned The Noticer for violating its “hateful profile policy.”
Facebook’s monetization program can be quite lucrative, though it’s unclear how much each of these pages made individually. In 2025, Facebook doled out nearly $3 billion to 16 million accounts, the reporting notes. The platform periodically discloses data on these monetized accounts, which has been collated into a searchable database by the tech accountability non-profit What to Fix.
What To Fix executive director Victoire Rio didn’t mince words when it came to Meta’s culpability.
“If we consider that Meta is in a direct commercial relationship with its publishers, insofar that they’re paying them royalties and that they have a monetization agreement with them,” Rio told ABC, “then you could argue that they are liable for the content that gets produced by their business partner in some ways.”
Hate, unfortunately, sells. Right-wing extremism researcher Kaz Ross told ABC that Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material: anything that will get people upset and arguing is the best way to get engagement.”
It’s another example of how quickly Meta dropped its once-stricter content moderation policies when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Shortly before his second inauguration, Meta loosened its standards around hate speech, particularly on topics like gender identity and immigration, two of the far right’s favorite issues.
Facebook is far from the only platform that’s gotten alarmingly chummy with extremists. Earlier this year, X awarded the $1 million first place prize of its article writing contest to a proudly self-proclaimed Nazi.
In a statement, Meta didn’t address specific questions about the pages it was awarding money to, but said it was “important to distinguish between speech that is offensive and content that could potentially lead to offline violence”.
“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.
More on Meta: FTC Concerned About Meta Surveillance of Users of Erectile Dysfunction Apps
The post Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook appeared first on Futurism.
A New Mexico judge yesterday ordered Meta to pay $567 million for a fund that would alleviate the "public nuisance" created by its social media services. The order to pay for youth mental health care is in addition to $375 million in civil penalties that a jury ordered Meta to pay earlier in the same case.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in a Santa Fe County court in 2023. A jury found in March 2026 that Meta's social media platforms do not effectively protect kids from child exploitation and ordered the company to pay civil damages for violating state consumer protections and misleading parents about the safety of its apps.
The jury trial was just phase 1 of the case involving Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. "The Phase 1 jury trial considered the State’s Unfair Practices Act claims and resulting civil penalties. The Phase 2 bench trial considered the State’s request for abatement based upon the State’s allegation that the Defendant, Meta, created a public nuisance," Judge Bryan Biedscheid wrote yesterday in the $567 million judgment. Meta reported $60.8 billion in revenue and $15.85 billion in net income in Q2 2026.
© Getty Images | Cavan Images
The backlash to what some dub ‘pervert glasses’ is growing – but people living with disabilities point out the new tech can also be life-changing
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One summer day earlier this year, Rhys left a cafe in Melbourne where he had been working remotely, when his phone pinged with a message on the dating app Grindr.
The message was a photo of him sitting at a table outside the cafe on his laptop, with his dog seated on the ground next to him. In the foreground, in a man’s hand was an iPhone unlocked.
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© Photograph: Supplied
© Photograph: Supplied
© Photograph: Supplied
The artificial intelligence tools developed by Meta recently went beyond their intended limits and breached a real organization’s network on the internet. On Wednesday, the tech giant confirmed that one of its language models gained unintended access during a routine cybersecurity evaluation and hacked into an external company. The model even made unauthorized changes to […]
The post Meta AI Model Breaches Third-Party Systems During Security Testing appeared first on The Mac Observer.
A state court has ordered Meta to pay $567 million to address the mental health impact its platforms have had on young people. The judge ruled that the company created a public nuisance by designing features that keep teenagers addicted to its apps. This brings the total penalty in this specific case to nearly $1 […]
The post Meta Ordered to Pay $567 Million in Massive Child Safety Case appeared first on The Mac Observer.
Ruling comes as part of second phase of landmark trial that found social media company enabled harm against users
A New Mexico court has ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay $567m into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts from the social media giant’s platforms.
The Thursday ruling comes as a part of the second phase of a landmark trial the social media giant lost in March. At the time, a jury found that the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms, and imposed the maximum penalty: a $375m fine.
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© Photograph: Jill Connelly/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jill Connelly/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jill Connelly/Getty Images
Last month, OpenAI revealed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.
On one hand, experts saw the incident as the latest warning sign that AI models had gotten to the point of being able to autonomously infiltrate targets, a threat we’ve been aware of for years rapidly turning into a reality.
On the other, a more skeptical read of the situation is that OpenAI could have orchestrated the hack as part of a “publicity stunt” — or at least lowered its guard just enough to allow it to happen, knowing the publicity would be invaluable. After all, just three months earlier, competitor Anthropic had made major headlines by announcing that its own Mythos AI model had similarly broken containment.
Put simply, it’s in the companies’ best interest to paint their AI models as capable enough to pose a real-world threat, especially as the industry grows ever more competitive.
Now the situation has gotten even stranger as a third company, Meta, has entered the fray. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant is claiming that during a recent test of one of its AI model conducted by an independent company, the AI accessed the internet and hacked a third-party service — an narrative that’s starting to get awfully familiar at this point.
According to The Information, the model involved was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, the company’s most advanced model yet, which was released by its Superintelligence Labs last month. Per the publication, the model breached an unidentified company’s systems and changed its internal environment.
Meta claims a “misconfiguration” during the hacking test had allowed its model to escape. A source told the WSJ that it was the same cybersecurity benchmark test that led to previous hacking incidents at Anthropic and OpenAI. Earlier this week, the company that conducted benchmark tests for all three AI companies, called Irregular, said it had caught OpenAI and Anthropic AI agents gaining unauthorized access to secure systems.
As we await more details regarding the latest incident — Meta has promised to investigate and publish a report — the suspicious optics of the situation are hard to escape. Meta has long struggled to keep up with the competition as the AI race continues to heat up. Could the company be looking for favorable media coverage about how its AI model is similarly capable of breaking containment?
Irregular said it hadn’t noticed any “current open issues” related to its test environment, per the WSJ. But while there wasn’t any real-world harm — at least that we know of — stemming from these hacks, researchers warn that the threat of AI models going rogue is coming to a head.
Just earlier this week, the UK government-backed AI Security Institute revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic models took “unsanctioned action on the live internet” and went as far as to create fake identities on GitHub to pressure a human user into approving a malware-tainted software update.
“What they’re doing is coming up with very sophisticated strategies or cyberattacks to be able to achieve the goal that they’ve been given,” global chief AI officer of advertising firm WPP Daniel Hulme told the BBC. “When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve the goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”
More on the hacks: OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported
The post Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too appeared first on Futurism.
Company is the third to report such an incident after Anthropic and OpenAI reported breaches during training
Meta said on Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during cybersecurity testing, after an error by its testing partner gave the model unintended internet access.
The incident adds to a growing list of cases in which AI agents from major developers breached systems at other companies during testing, after Anthropic said last week that some of its models hacked three companies, and OpenAI disclosed that an AI agent breached the startup Hugging Face.
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© Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
© Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
© Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
Apple briefly removed Telegram from the App Store on Monday night after a review found content that violated its guidelines against child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but restored the app a short while later, according to Reuters.
It seems like this was a symbolic gesture. Removing the app didn’t affect any of the customers who had already downloaded it. Probably none of them saw the image. And restoring the app doesn’t mean that it’s completely free from CSAM—probably none of the major platforms is. It just means that Telegram did the obvious thing after the violation was reported, which presumably they would have done, anyway.
They removed an entire app for ONE app user???
And before even contacting the developer? Telegram banning the account is what actually prevented users from potentially seeing the CSAM. Apple’s action seems like either a mistake or trying to send them a message.
I would note, by the way, that the Telegram app was apparently never removed from the Mac App Store. Which goes to show how little Apple cares about the Mac App Store.
I’m sure this stance will be applied equally to all other apps in the store, in the future right? @Apple
Pavel Durov (Telegram, MacRumors):
Because Telegram quickly removes illegal content from public groups using all kinds of moderation tools, the attacker had to resort to a technical trick. He inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat. As a result the content was effectively hidden from the group’s members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it.
The attacker was a takedown extortionist: someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. These extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them.
[…]
Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting. Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us. This creates a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content. If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be.
During the time the app was unavailable, many speculated that the move was politically motivated, or perhaps in response to the recent discovery that Telegram has allegedly been using an obfuscated private UIKit API to animate its emoji picker.
It’s sad but kind of hilarious that both of these so disparate theories were considered possible. Durov really does have political enemies, and Apple really does seem to have it out for Telegram. But, also, using private API to animate emojis totally seems like something that Telegram would do and that Apple would overreact to.
Previously:
Update (2026-08-06): Matt Burgess (Hacker News):
Over the last nine months, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements, according to details of the ads shared with WIRED. The ads, which in some cases reached several thousand accounts, were targeted at people living in the United States, United Kingdom, and more than a dozen European countries.
This is much worse than what happened with Telegram, yet Apple didn’t overreact.
There’s also the Twitter/Grok case.
Previously:
'Most people don’t want pervert glasses that can film us without our consent,' said a spokesperson from activist group Everyone Hates Elon. The group has launched a series of guerilla adverts deriding non-consensual filming by the glasses as well as an email campaign encouraging people to legally object to being filmed by Meta glasses under general data protection regulations, which over 20,000 people have signed.
Rights groups have warned that the glasses threaten the right to privacy, while countries such as Germany are reportedly considering a ban.
And while Meta’s safety guidelines say smart glasses should not be used for 'harassment, infringing on privacy rights, or capturing sensitive information', women have taken to social media to share their stories of being filmed by men without their consent.
Watch as Guardian columnist and Opinion editor Kirsty Major dives into why fears of surveillance and 'creepy men' mean Meta can never convince her to love the glasses – and read more about the glasses via the link in the bio
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© Photograph: Guardian
© Photograph: Guardian
© Photograph: Guardian
Meta has opened Pandora’s box with its AI-infused smart sunglasses.
The pricy accessory has sparked a heated debate over privacy, with unsavory individuals abusing the eyewear’s easily-missed cameras to harass unsuspecting strangers in public — garnering the specs the distinctly unflattering nickname of “pervert glasses.”
It’s gotten to the point that owners who shelled out hundreds of dollars for a pair have become too afraid to wear them in public. Meanwhile, Meta is seriously struggling to crack down on its badly-behaved users.
Now, Google alternative DuckDuckGo, a company that has long attempted to actively distance itself from Big Tech, has come up with a genius new product that’s guaranteed not to spark controversy: a pair of plastic, non-pervert glasses that lack any electronics whatsoever.
The company partnered with sunglasses maker Knockaround to create the “world’s most innovative anti-surveillance sunglasses,” or “Normal F***ing Sunglasses.”
“No camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind,” Knockaround boasts on its website. “Just a beautifully crafted pair of matte black sunglasses with a glossy DuckDuckGo logo, designed to block the sun and never send data to the cloud.”
“Yes, these are actually real,” DuckDuckGo had to reassure netizens in an official announcement on X.
Best of all, at $35, they’re an absolute bargain compared to Meta’s pervert glasses, which start at a far steeper $299.
Satire publication The Onion, which promoted the sunglasses, rounded up some fictional reactions.
“0/10,” the publication quoted one fictional man. “Useless for perverts.”
“Guess I’ll have to violate people’s privacy the old-fashioned way: from the bushes,” another quote reads.
The marketing stunt appears to be working out. A DuckDuckGo representative told CNET that a “significant percentage of the inventory has sold, though it’s still too early to release sales data.”
It also perfectly illustrates how the public is becoming fed up of having AI shoved down its throats, in the kind of tech-obsessed overreach that’s facilitating some extremely boorish behavior.
Some netizens were inspired by the product, pointing out other categories that could benefit from being stripped back down to the basics.
“This is a good start,” one Bluesky user wrote. “Can we get Normal F***ing TV and Normal F***ing Refrigerator next?”
More on sunglasses: Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing
The post DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever appeared first on Futurism.
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