Kalakshar US

A nearly year-old Facebook event for a “simple maths competition” has been one of the most viral posts on the platform for six months. The “event” racked up about 51 million views on Facebook during the first quarter of 2025, according to the company’s latest report on “widely viewed content” on the platform.

That would be an impressive stat for any single post, but it’s the second quarter in a row in which the “maths competition” has nabbed the number two spot on Meta’s list of widely viewed content. It also appeared on last quarter’s report, during which time it received about 64.3 million views, according to an archived version of the report.

So why is a random Facebook event that’s not really an event getting more than 100 million views? It would seem to be a repackaging of an old engagement bait tactic. The header image for the event is an image of a piece of paper with the words “only for genius” followed by a seemingly simple equation. When shared as a Facebook post, the image is prominently displayed in a way that may look like a normal image post. The image also has some striking similarities to other seemingly simple math equations that have been going viral on Facebook for nearly 15 years.

A look at the event page itself shows that hundreds of thousands of people have engaged with the event. More than 800,000 people responded to the supposed July 8, 2024 event. Even now, nearly a year later, the event is seeing regular comments from Facebook users — most of whom are intent on earnestly explaining how the equation should be solved (or arguing with others’ interpretation). As Slate noted back in 2013, there’s something irresistible about arguing basic arithmetic with strangers on the internet.

What is a bit of a mystery is why this post has gone so viral months after it was originally posted. I reached out to the account behind the post, a Nigerian-based creator named Ebuka Peter Ibeh and didn’t immediately hear back. The post seems to be far more successful than any other recent posts from Ibeh, who has about 25,000 Facebook followers.

In any case, the post offers an interesting window into the kinds of bizarre content and questionable tactics that still regularly goes mega-viral on Facebook. Meta recently said it would crack down on creators sharing spammy posts on Facebook, though it’s unclear if this type of engagement bait would fall under the category of content it’s explicitly trying to discourage.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/a-fake-facebook-event-disguised-as-a-math-problem-has-been-one-of-its-top-posts-for-6-months-231852601.html?src=rss 

YouTube Shorts is beta testing the addition of Google Lens. Integrating this tech into the short-form video platform will allow viewers to search for more information about what they can see in a clip. The functionality will begin rolling out to all Shorts users this week.

Once it’s enabled on your account, the feature can be accessed by pausing the video, selecting Lens from the top menu and then tapping or highlighting an element of the clip to search about. Visual matches and search results will be overlaid on top of the Short. More details are provided in Google’s support pages.

The post announcing the Lens beta notes that advertisements won’t be shown in the results during the test phase. Additionally, it states that “the Lens experience isn’t available for Shorts with YouTube Shopping affiliate links or with paid product promotions.” While the beta test isn’t going to be tied to commerce, this feels like an integration that could very likely become a Shopping-centric resource in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/google-lens-is-coming-to-youtube-shorts-221803755.html?src=rss 

J Allard, a former Microsoft executive and the mind behind the Zune, is leading a new team at Amazon, CNBC reports. Allard is officially the vice president of Amazon’s ZeroOne, which, based on at least one Amazon job listing, is “a special projects team dedicated to inventing breakthrough consumer product categories.”

What ZeroOne is actually working on remains a bit mysterious, but CNBC was able to find another listing for a “Senior Applied Scientist” role that suggests the team will be “conceiving, designing, and bringing to market computer vision techniques for a new smart-home product.” Computer vision is the umbrella term for technologies that allow computer systems to “understand” images and video — for example, the ability for a Ring Video Doorbell to identify when a package is on your door step.

Depending on your taste in MP3 players, Allard’s role in the creation of the Microsoft Zune could justifiably give you pause. Microsoft’s failed MP3 player looked distinct, but was no match for the popularity of the iPod. The Zune was one of several interesting, if unsuccessful projects Allard led at Microsoft, including the Microsoft Kin, and the Courier, a book-style tablet that was later reimagined as the Surface Neo. Allard also co-created the original Xbox, arguably his biggest claim to fame at the company.

ZeroOne will exist inside Amazon’s larger devices and services division, which is led by Panos Panay, another Microsoft expat. Panay joined Amazon to lead the division in 2023, after several years overseeing the development of Surface hardware and Windows 11 at Microsoft. Since Panay joined the company, Amazon has launched a new lineup of Kindles and introduced Alexa+, its integration of generative AI into the well-known voice assistant. Hiring both Allard and Panay suggests Amazon plans to lean even harder into product development going forward.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-zunes-creator-is-leading-a-secretive-team-at-amazon-194136949.html?src=rss 

Under new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Germany could impose a new 10 percent tax on major online platforms such as Google and Facebook. Reuters reported that political factions in the country struck a deal earlier this year to pursue these fees for digital service companies.

“These corporations do billions in business in Germany with extremely high profit margins and benefit enormously from the country’s media and cultural output as well as its infrastructure — but they pay hardly any taxes, invest too little, and give far too little back to society,” Germany’s Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said of the draft rule during an interview with the magazine Stern.

Other nations around the world have also explored and enacted taxes on online revenue generated by the largest internet tech companies. Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, India, Austria and Canada have similar legislation to the draft rule Germany’s culture minister is proposing, according to Reuters.

If the tax is passed, Germany could see retaliation from President Donald Trump‘s administration. Trump had said in February that he would seek tariffs on nations that impose a digital service tax on US tech businesses.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/germany-is-considering-a-10-percent-digital-service-tax-on-us-tech-giants-195705330.html?src=rss 

Meta is bidding to build high-tech wearables for the US Army, as reported by Wall Street Journal. The company is teaming up with Palmer Luckey’s defense firm Anduril Industries on the project, which has been dubbed EagleEye. The contract is worth around $100 million, though it hasn’t been awarded yet. It’s part of a larger $22 billion Army wearables project of which Anduril is the lead vendor.

As expected from Meta and Luckey, EagleEye will be a line of tech-forward helmets, glasses and other wearables that provide an augmented reality or virtual reality experience. Reporting indicates that these devices will include sensors that enhance the hearing and vision of soldiers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement that this tech will “protect our interests at home and abroad.”

This could be used to detect drones flying miles away, for instance, or to suss out hidden targets. It’ll also allow these soldiers to interact with AI-powered weapon systems, as Anduril’s autonomy software and Meta’s AI models will underpin each device. This all sounds very dystopian, but such are the times we find ourselves in.

“I have successfully persuaded not just Meta but many others that working with the military is important,” Palmer Luckey said in an interview, speaking on Big Tech’s embrace of defense contract work. He’s become a big player in the defense space in recent years, securing $6 billion in global government contracts and partnering up with many of the tech world’s major players.

“I’ve always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store,” he said in a recent interview with CBS News. Luckey is a long-time supporter of President Trump and recently said that Anduril “did well under Trump in his first administration” and that he thinks the company is “going to do even better now.”

This is something of a homecoming for Luckey. He co-founded Oculus VR, which Meta purchased. He was fired back in 2017 after news broke that he donated $10,000 to a group trying to install 4chan-style anti-Hillary Clinton memes on roadside billboards. Zuckerberg has since cozied up to Trump in various ways, so I guess the two can be friends again or whatever. “I finally got all my toys back,” Luckey told WSJ.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-could-soon-start-building-tech-for-the-us-army-184405058.html?src=rss 

WhatsApp will soon allow users to post collages, music and new stickers as part of their WhatsApp Status. The status feature within WhatsApp functions similarly to the Stories feature on Facebook and Instagram. Users can share text, photo or video to their status, which will disappear after 24 hours.

Since March, users have had the option to add a song clip to their status and can select songs from the app’s music library. These music clips can be 15 seconds long when posted with photos or 60 seconds long when posted with videos. Now, those clips can be turned into stickers to add some musical flair to your status. Users also have the option to share the song itself as a standalone status update.

A new “Layout” feature will let users create a collage of up to six pictures and share them in their status in a customized layout. A new sticker called “Add Yours” will ask your followers to engage with your status by responding with their own photos. Photos can also now be turned into stickers, which can then be resized and reshaped before being added to your status.

According to Meta, the new status features will start rolling out soon and will become more widely available on WhatsApp in the coming months.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/whatsapp-introduces-new-creative-tools-for-status-updates-180516963.html?src=rss 

Meta has published the first of its quarterly integrity reports since Mark Zuckerberg walked back the company’s hate speech policies and changed its approach to content moderation earlier this year. According to the reports, Facebook saw an uptick in violent content, bullying and harassment despite an overall decrease in the amount of content taken down by Meta.

The reports are the first time Meta has shared data about how Zuckerberg’s decision to upend Meta’s policies have played out on the platform used by billions of people. Notably, the company is spinning the changes as a victory, saying that it reduced its mistakes by half while the overall prevalence of content breaking its rules “largely remained unchanged for most problem areas.”

There are two notable exceptions, however. Violent and graphic content increased from 0.06%-0.07% at the end of 2024 to .09% in the first quarter of 2025. Meta attributed the uptick to “an increase in sharing of violating content” as well as its own attempts to “reduce enforcement mistakes.” Meta also saw a noted increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment on Facebook, which increased from 0.06-0.07% at the end of 2024 to 0.07-0.08% at the start of 2025. Meta says this was due to an unspecified “spike” in violations in March. (Notably, this is a separate category from the company’s hate speech policies, which were re-written to allow posts targeting immigrants and LGBTQ people.)

Those may sound like relatively tiny percentages, but even small increases can be noticeable for a platform like Facebook that sees billions of posts every day. (Meta describes its prevalence metric as an estimate of how often rule-breaking content appears on its platform.)

The report also underscores just how much less content Meta is taking down overall since it moved away from proactive enforcement of all but its most serious policies like child exploitation and terrorist content. Meta’s report shows a significant decrease in the amount of Facebook posts removed for hateful content, for example, with just 3.4 million pieces of content “actioned” under the policy, the company’s lowest figure since 2018. Spam removals also dropped precipitously from 730 million at the end of 2024 to just 366 million at the start of 2025. The number of fake accounts removed also declined notably on Facebook from 1.4 billion to 1 billion (Meta doesn’t provide stats around fake account removals on Instagram.)

At the same time, Meta claims it’s making far fewer content moderation mistakes, which was one of Zuckerberg’s main justifications for his decision to end proactive moderation.”We saw a roughly 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes on our platforms in the United States from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025,” the company wrote in an update to its January post announcing its policy changes. Meta didn’t explain how it calculated that figure, but said future reports would “include metrics on our mistakes so that people can track our progress.”

Meta is acknowledging, however, that there is at least one group where some proactive moderation is still necessary: teens. “At the same time, we remain committed to ensuring teens on our platforms are having the safest experience possible,” the company wrote. “That’s why, for teens, we’ll also continue to proactively hide other types of harmful content, like bullying.” Meta has been rolling out “teen accounts” for the last several months, which should make it easier to filter content specifically for younger users.

The company also offered an update on how it’s using large language models to aid in its content moderation efforts. “Upon further testing, we are beginning to see LLMs operating beyond that of human performance for select policy areas,” Meta writes. “We’re also using LLMs to remove content from review queues in certain circumstances when we’re highly confident it does not violate our policies.”

The other major component to Zuckerberg’s policy changes was an end of Meta’s fact-checking partnerships in the United States. The company began rolling out its own version of Community Notes to Facebook, Instagram and Threads earlier this year, and has since expanded the effort to Reels and Threads replies. Meta didn’t offer any insight into how effective its new crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking might be or how often notes are appearing on its platform, though it promised updates in the coming months.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/facebook-sees-rise-in-violent-content-and-harassment-after-policy-changes-182651544.html?src=rss