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Zuckerberg Tells Court That Facebook Is No Longer About Connecting With Friends

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In a federal antitrust testimony, Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook's mission of connecting users is no longer a priority.

As times change, so do mission statements, especially in the fast-and-loose world of tech. In recent months, we've seen Google walk back its pledge to "do no evil," and OpenAI quietly delete a policy prohibiting its software's use for "military technology."

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is no exception. Its 2008 motto, "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life," is now a distant memory — according to Zuckerberg himself, who testified this week that Facebook's main purpose "wasn't really to connect with friends anymore."

"The friend part has gone down quite a bit," Zuckerberg said, according to Business Insider.

Instead, he says that the platform has evolved away from that model — its original claim to fame, as old heads will recall — in its over 20 years of life, becoming "more of a broad discovery and entertainment space," which is apparently exec-speak for "endless feed of AI slop."

The tech bigwig was speaking as a witness at a federal antitrust case launched by the Federal Trade Commission against Meta, the now-parent company to WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Oculus.

The FTC's case hinges on a series of messages sent by Zuckerberg and his executives regarding a strategy of buying other social media platforms outright, rather than compete with them in the free and open market — a scheme that's more the rule than the exception for Silicon Valley whales like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

The FTC alleges that Meta began its monopolistic streak as early as 2008, when Zuckerberg buzzed that "it's better to buy than compete" in a series of emails about then-rival platform Instagram. He finally got its hands on Instagram in 2012, after sending a memo that Facebook — which changed its name to Meta in 2021 — "had" to buy the photo-sharing app for $1 billion, fearing competition and a bidding war with fast-growing platforms like Twitter.

"The businesses are nascent but the networks are established," Zuckerberg wrote in a leaked email about startup platforms Instagram and Path. "The brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us."

"It’s an email written by someone who recognized Instagram as a threat and was forced to sacrifice a billion dollars because Meta could not meet that threat through competition,” said the FTC’s lead counselor, Daniel Matheson.

Those internal memos are now smoking guns in what could be the biggest antitrust case since the infamous AT&T breakup of 1982, which had many similarities to the FTC's suit against Meta. Back then, AT&T held unrivaled market influence that it used to box out smaller fish and shape laws to its whims — to chase profit above all, in other words.

Meta, in parallel, has spent millions lobbying lawmakers, is the dominant player in online advertising, and currently wields a market cap of $1.34 trillion — higher than the value of all publicly traded companies in South Korea, for perspective.

The FTC's challenge will depend on whether federal prosecutors can convince US District Judge James Boasberg that Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal by notoriously weak US antitrust standards. They'll have no help from Boasberg, an Obama appointee, who has voiced skepticism with cases against Meta in the past.

"The [FTC] faces hard questions about whether its claims can hold up in the crucible of trial," Boasberg said in late 2024, adding that "its positions at times strain this country’s creaking antitrust precedents to their limits."

Whatever happens, it's clear that Zuckerberg has moved on from the idealism of the early internet — to the sloppified money-grubbing of whatever it is we have now.

More on Meta: Facebook Is Desperately Trying to Keep You From Learning What's in This Book

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Another Young Bodybuilder Just Suddenly Died

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At just 44 years old, actor and bodybuilder influencer Vittorio Pirbazari has died — the second to pass away suddenly in a single month. 

At just 44 years old, actor and weightlifting influencer Vittorio Pirbazari has died — the second young bodybuilder to pass away suddenly in a single month.

According to People magazine, Pirbazari's death was confirmed in an Instagram video posted by his friend Said Ibraham, a German-language true crime YouTuber with whom the bodybuilder had worked in the past.

In the video, Ibraham lamented in German the death of his "bruderherz" or "dear brother" and said, per People's translation, that he was thrown "completely off track" upon learning that Pirbazari had passed away.

Though no official cause of death has been reported, Ibraham suggested that the 44-year-old strongman had a heart attack when he was in the gym. A similar fate befell 20-year-old Jodi Vance, a weightlifting coach who died of dehydration-induced cardiac arrest in March after allegedly taking an unspecified supplement.

Pirbazari's untimely demise came just a few months after suffering a torn chest muscle that resulted in a surgical reattachment. During his recovery, the weightlifting actor was unable to exercise — and just days before his death, he made another post about his slow return to the gym.

"I'm happy to be back in the gym at all and am focusing entirely on leg training and cardio," Pirbazari wrote, per IG's auto-translation. "I'm trying intervals on the treadmill right now, but since my legs aren't 100 percent healed yet, I'm taking it slowly."

Given that he had been out of the gym for three months, it's quite possible that the German muscle man's heart was no longer able to handle his workouts — especially if he pushed himself too hard.

Do you know anything about unsafe practices in the world of bodybuilding? Send us an email at tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

As with other young bodybuilder deaths, there's also a non-zero chance that any supplements Pirbazari was taking could have contributed to his passing.

One thing's for sure: there are toxic forces at work in the world of bodybuilding — and unfortunately, it's claimed another life.

More on muscle: Scientists Suggest Electrocuting Yourself at the Gym to Get Jacked

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Schools Using AI to Send Police to Students’ Homes

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Schools are employing dubious AI-powered software to accuse teenagers of wanting to harm themselves — and sending the police to their homes.

Worst Experience

Schools are employing dubious AI-powered software to accuse teenagers of wanting to harm themselves and sending the cops to their homes as a result — with often chaotic and traumatic results.

As the New York Times reports, software being installed on high school students' school-issued devices tracks every word they type. An algorithm then analyzes the language for evidence of teenagers wanting to harm themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the software can get it wrong by woefully misinterpreting what the students are actually trying to say. A 17-year-old in Neosho, Missouri, for instance, was woken up by the police in the middle of the night.

As it turns out, a poem she had written years ago triggered the alarms of a software called GoGuardian Beacon, which its maker describes as a way to "safeguard students from physical harm."

"It was one of the worst experiences of her life," the teen's mother told the NYT.

Wellness Check

Internet safety software employed by educational tech companies took off during the COVID-19 shutdowns, leading to widespread surveillance of students in their own homes.

Many of these systems are designed to flag keywords or phrases to figure out if a teen is planning to hurt themselves.

But as the NYT reports, we have no idea if they're at all effective or accurate, since the companies have yet to release any data.

Besides false alarms, schools have reported that the systems have allowed them to intervene in time before they're at imminent risk at least some of the time.

However, the software remains highly invasive and could represent a massive intrusion of privacy. Civil rights groups have criticized the tech, arguing that in most cases, law enforcement shouldn't be involved, according to the NYT.

In short, is this really the best weapon against teen suicides, which have emerged as the second leading cause of death among individuals aged five to 24 in the US?

"There are a lot of false alerts," Ryan West, chief of the police department in charge of the school of the 17-year-old, told the NYT. "But if we can save one kid, it’s worth a lot of false alerts."

Others, however, tend to disagree with that assessment.

"Given the total lack of information on outcomes, it’s not really possible for me to evaluate the system’s usage," Baltimore city councilman Ryan Dorsey, who has criticized these systems in the past, told the newspaper. "I think it’s terribly misguided to send police — especially knowing what I know and believe of school police in general — to children’s homes."

More on AI: Suspected Assassin of Insurance CEO Studied Artificial Intelligence, Spoke of "Singularity"

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Three Recent High School Grads Dead in Grisly Cybertruck Crash

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In Northern California, a group of recent high school graduates died in a Cybertruck crash that burst into flames.

Up in Smoke

In Northern California, a group of recent high school graduates have died in a Cybertruck inferno.

As San Francisco's KTVU reports, four young people who graduated high school last year in the town of Piedmont had been inside the Tesla vehicle when it slammed into a barrier and caught fire in the middle of the night.

Another driver reportedly pulled off the road to help after the Cybertruck crashed, and managed to pull one person out of the fiery wreckage. That lucky grad survived and was taken to a nearby hospital, while the other three — none of whom have been identified by name — died at the scene.

According to local police, the Cybertruck fire was so hot and burned so fast that water wasn't able to douse it out.

"The heat was just too intense," Piedmont police chief Jeremy Bowers told KTVU.

Getting Warmer

Though the report didn't speculate as to why the fire burned so hot, the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles like Cybertrucks caused consternation among firefighters.

During another fire involving one of the vehicles in Texas earlier this year — which ironically occurred after its driver crashed into a fire hydrant — the blaze took more than an hour to extinguish due to the high temperatures at which those mega-combustible batteries burn.

Notably, that debacle was the second Texas Cybertruck to catch fire in less than a month — and in the first instance, the driver lost their life.

While Cybertrucks' crappy paint jobs and clueless owners are easy to dunk on, we're increasingly seeing that these low-poly vehicles can be extremely hazardous. In the case of the Piedmont Cybertruck fire, that danger cost three recent high school graduates their lives.

More on Cybertrucks: Thousands of Cybertrucks Recalled for Bricking While Driving

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Implantable Device Can Detect and Reverse Opioid Overdose

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Researchers developed a implantable device that can detect the first signs of an opioid overdose and then rapidly inject naloxone.

When a person overdoses on opioids, their life can hang in the balance unless someone quickly injects them with an effective antidote like the life-saving medication naloxone.

But sometimes, people don't have access to naloxone, most commonly known as Narcan, or they don't get it soon enough, a scenario that has prompted researchers to develop a clever implantable device that can detect the first signs of an overdose and then rapidly infuse naloxone into the bloodstream.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Device, the researchers demonstrated the device's effectiveness in a series of preclinical trials, detecting and reversing opioid overdoses in 24 out of 25 pigs.

If it makes the huge leap from the lab to becoming a viable commercial product, the implant could make a sizable dent in the more than 100,000 deaths related to drug overdoses in the US in 2022.

"In overdose cases where there is a bystander nearby, that individual can be rescued through either intramuscular or intranasal administration of naloxone, but you need that bystander," said Giovanni Traverso, the study's principal researcher and a biomedical expert at MIT, in a statement about the research. "We wanted to find a way for this to be done in an autonomous fashion."

The device, small enough to be slipped under the skin, consists of sensors that track vital signs, a wirelessly rechargeable battery, and a reservoir for medication.

If a person starts exhibiting signs of an overdose, algorithms analyzing data from the sensors send an alert to the person's smartphone. If they don't cancel the alert, the implanted device shoots an infusion of naloxone into their tissue, acting in a "closed-loop" fashion, meaning that it can deliver the drug by itself.

"Beyond the closed loop, the device can also serve as an early detection or warning system that can help alert others — whether it be loved ones, healthcare professionals or emergency services — to the side of the person so that they can help intervene as well," Traverso explained in the statement.

The study's writers think people who have previously overdosed or are at high risk are the ideal patients for these implants.

They are now attempting to further optimize and miniaturize the device before testing it out on human subjects.

"This is only the first lab-based prototype, but even at this stage we’re seeing that this device has a lot of potential to help protect high-risk populations from what otherwise could be a lethal overdose," said Traverso.

More on opioids: Doctors Are Getting Ready to Give Patients a Vaccine That Blocks Fentanyl's Effects

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