Meta Platforms Inc.

Meta Platforms has halted ByteDance's TikTok advertising on Facebook and Instagram across several major markets as of early October 2026, cutting off the rival from using its apps as paid funnels to its short form video service in seven countries including the US, Canada and Indonesia. The move removes TikTok's paid promotion inventory from Meta's core social apps in multiple countries where both groups compete for users, reducing TikTok's ability to pay for user acquisition inside Meta's ecosystem and keeping more ad slots available for consumer brands and other advertisers. Separately, Chinese authorities have blocked Meta's attempt to acquire AI startup Manus, prompting Meta to abandon the transaction and cut ties with the target. Both developments underline heavier regulatory friction and uncertainty around AI investments already flagged as a risk in Meta's narrative, showing how cross border rules can limit access to AI talent and assets just as the firm spends heavily on multi gigawatt compute clusters and Muse related products. Attention now turns to how quickly Meta Enterprise Platform and Muse agents gain paying business users through 2027, with disclosed figures on active enterprise customers, usage of Muse APIs or new country rollouts serving as key proof points.

A Santa Fe jury found Meta Platforms liable for 43.9 million willful violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act over its handling of user data, misinformation, and its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The maximum statutory penalty of $5,000 per violation implies theoretical exposure of approximately $219.5 billion, though state attorneys subsequently requested $35 billion to $40 billion, and neither figure represents a penalty awarded by the court. The final penalty will be decided by a judge in a separate phase, and it marks New Mexico's second win against Meta this year, after a March child-safety case produced a $375 million award and a $567 million abatement order that the company is contesting after seeking permission to post a $1.8 billion bond. The state's revised request of $35 billion to $40 billion equals roughly 39% to 44% of Meta's $90 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, though the earlier March award came in at less than 20% of what prosecutors sought. Meta's forward P/E sits about 7% above its 5-year average, hedge fund holders fell from 262 at the end of Q1 2026 to 254 at the end of Q2 2026, and short interest was just 1.31% of float as of August 31, 2026.

Hunterbrook Capital disclosed a short position in Meta Platforms, pointing to alternative data indicating a marked deceleration in adoption for Muse, the company's flagship artificial intelligence application. The position was revealed alongside a report from affiliate investigative outlet Hunterbrook Media, which analyzed tracking metrics from alternative-data provider TickerTrends. According to the report, weekly downloads for Muse declined 8.1% week-over-week in the seven days ending October 7, averaging approximately 165,000 per day, while net daily active user additions slowed to roughly 74,000 in the first week of October, a 62.4% reduction from the average daily expansion rate of 198,000 recorded in late September. The report also cites functional barriers for Muse, including access restrictions imposed by major third-party platforms such as Amazon, as well as heightened scrutiny over data privacy and safety vulnerabilities. Meta shares traded less than 0.3% lower following the publication and have risen almost 10% over the past month, with market participants set to watch whether the alternative-data trends show up in the company's upcoming third-quarter financial results.

Agentic commerce is fragmenting across infrastructure layers, with control over the checkout gate splitting rather than consolidating even as 89% of merchants prepare for autonomous agents while only 3% of transactions currently involve them, according to the Checkout.com 2026 report. Merchants are reclaiming protocol-level control: Shopify recently implemented robots.txt restrictions to block AI crawlers from checkout and cart paths, the first major eCommerce platform to draw the line at the protocol level, while Amazon has blocked Meta Muse agent checkouts over unauthorized access and credential capture concerns, as GeekWire reported. Only 11% of SMBs are currently agent-ready per PYMNTS/Visa data, and just 28% of merchants are willing to offer agents their full product range. Settlement infrastructure is maturing in parallel, with Moody's issuing its first-ever stablecoin protocol rating, the Citi-Coinbase collaboration wiring its $6 trillion payment network to stablecoins, and SAP Pay stablecoin settlement embedded directly in its ERP software. The liability framework remains unallocated, however: PYMNTS Intelligence data shows 93% of merchants believe AI providers should bear the financial loss for agent errors, yet no clear mechanism exists, and Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller, speaking at Sibos, named authentication, liability, and fraud as the three binding challenges while framing the open-versus-closed choice as the variable that could significantly influence how market structure evolves. Walmart pilot data showed conversion rates roughly three times lower for direct agent checkouts than for click-out flows, according to Walmart executive Daniel Danker, first reported by Wired.

Meta Platforms reported fiscal Q2 2026 revenue of $60.80 billion, up 28% year over year, while free cash flow fell to $784 million from $8,549 million a year earlier. Advertising revenue reached $59.36 billion as ad impressions rose 14% and the average price per ad rose 12%, with daily users across its apps averaging 3.60 billion in the quarter's final month. Total expenses climbed 55% to $42.03 billion, including $2.40 billion of legal charges and $1.18 billion of severance, pushing operating income down 8% to $18.78 billion and operating margin to 31% from 43%; GAAP diluted earnings per share were $6.18, down from $7.14. The Family of Apps segment earned $23.39 billion in operating income, while Reality Labs lost $4.62 billion, and capital expenditures reached $31.08 billion against depreciation and amortization of $6.36 billion. Meta guided third-quarter revenue to $61 billion to $64 billion, full-year expenses to $165 billion to $169 billion, and capital spending of $130 billion to $145 billion, and warned that youth-related trials this year may ultimately result in a material loss.

Chinese AI startup Manus raised more than $500M in a funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, its first major fundraise since China blocked Meta Platforms' planned $2B-plus acquisition of the company. Butterfly Effect, Manus' parent company, said existing investors Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund also participated in the round. The company did not disclose its latest valuation or how it plans to use the proceeds, but said it would continue hiring in China and internationally. Meta announced the deal in December 2025 after Manus, which was founded in China, relocated its operations to Singapore, and Manus subsequently resumed independent operations. The latest funding follows reports in September that Manus was seeking to raise $500M at a $4B valuation, which would be roughly double the value of the proposed Meta transaction, though the valuation has not yet been confirmed.

A federal court in California on October 5 handed down a prison sentence of 6 years and 6 months to a self-proclaimed "Godfather" crypto businessman, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California announced the same day. The sentence covered three charges: defrauding Meta, tax evasion, and conspiring with a sheriff's deputy to violate rights; the defendant had pleaded guilty in January 2025. The amount defrauded from Meta exceeded 37 million dollars, roughly 5.85 billion yen, and the ruling also ordered restitution of 23,402,766 dollars, about 3.7 billion yen. The fraud used accounts on Meta's advertising management service Business Manager, with the defendant illegally gaining access to accounts and to credit lines usable for paying advertising costs, then selling the rights to use them to advertising companies. The fraudulently used advertising costs were billed to legitimate customers, and Meta bore the loss after refunding them once the scheme was discovered. The defendant also failed to file corporate tax returns on the income obtained and concealed his ownership of the company, moving income to a cryptocurrency custodian, among other actions. To threaten an adversary, he used a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputy who was off duty, and the deputy used investigative databases and fraudulently obtained warrants to look up the person's personal information and whereabouts. In 2022, targeting a person believed to possess a laptop with access to a large amount of cryptocurrency, the deputy obtained a warrant on false grounds and pinpointed the location from cellphone location data; the defendant sent three armed men to the person's home to seize the laptop, but the victim opened fire and the three fled. The defendant was also sentenced in September to 15 years in prison for involvement in a separate attempted Bitcoin robbery and kidnapping case, and the 6-year-6-month sentence will be served concurrently with that 15-year term.

The European Union is considering adjusting its levy on large companies so it can capture revenue from major US technology firms without introducing a digital tax aimed directly at those companies, in order to avoid conflict with the United States. The Financial Times reported today, October 7, citing six EU officials, that the European Commission is weighing changes to its revenue-raising proposal, the Corporate Resource for Europe, or CORE, to find ways to collect more revenue from major US technology companies such as Apple, Meta and Google without targeting them specifically. CORE currently requires companies operating in the EU with revenue of more than 100 million euros a year to pay a flat annual contribution of roughly 100,000 to 750,000 euros, which is seen as collecting only a small fraction relative to the earnings of large multinationals. One EU official said some member states oppose a direct digital tax because they do not want to antagonize the United States, while several other countries oppose the CORE proposal, making an expansion of the measure to cover nearly all large companies one of the options under consideration. A European Commission spokesperson said the commission stands ready to support the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament in reaching agreement on new EU revenue sources, which are important for allocating the budget for joint missions over the next 10 years. The effort comes amid continued tension in trade relations between the EU and the United States. US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose 100% import tariffs on goods from countries that levy digital services taxes on US companies, while the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has long opposed such taxes, has also threatened retaliatory tariffs on European countries that apply the measure, alleging discrimination against US companies.

Mark Cuban says Meta knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads, alleging on an August episode of the Pivot podcast that he receives weekly emails from older people about a $294 diabetes cure he has never sold. Cuban, who co-founded the online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs, called the platform "the worst of the worst" and said Facebook knows the victims are being ripped off. On Nov. 6, 2025, Reuters reported on internal Meta documents showing the company expected roughly $16 billion, or about 10% of its 2024 revenue, to flow in from ads pushing scams and prohibited products, with users seeing some 15 billion "higher risk" ads a day and one late 2024 document valuing that category at about $7 billion a year. Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters the documents "present a selective view that distorts Meta's approach to fraud and scams" and called the 10% estimate "rough and overly-inclusive," saying user complaints about scam ads had fallen 58% over the prior 18 months and the company pulled down more than 134 million scam ads in 2025. The same documents note the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into Meta over advertising tied to financial fraud, while the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report says people 60 and older lost $7.7 billion across 201,266 complaints, with AI appearing in more than 3,100 of those complaints and those victims losing over $352 million.

Ofcom has launched its first online safety investigation into Meta since the Online Safety Act came fully into force last year, examining whether the company carried out sufficient due diligence before launching a disappearing messaging feature on Instagram. The regulator said Meta had not carried out a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment for Instagram Instants, a separate app allowing users to share photo messages that disappear after they are sent, and risk assessments are required before the launch of a new product under the act. George Lusty, Ofcom's director of enforcement, said significant changes to platforms must be risk assessed before they are launched, adding that you would not launch a new car without testing it properly. Meta said it takes its regulatory obligations seriously, conducted a risk analysis and briefed Ofcom about the feature on a number of occasions before launching it, and will co-operate with the investigation. The investigation comes in the same week Meta is conducting a High Court challenge against what it calls burdensome new laws, seeking to quash three Ofcom information requests concerning Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; Meta said the regulator had asked for more than 10,000 extra pieces of information and wanted to build a bank of data, while a witness statement submitted by Elon Musk's X said Ofcom's was the most burdensome information request X has received from any regulator in any jurisdiction. Meta is separately challenging Ofcom over the fees charged to social media companies to enforce the regime, and over Instagram and WhatsApp being designated as category 1 services, which come with the most strict enforcement.