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Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own. 

My cookbook of the week is often a hot new release, unless I decide to spotlight one that has been out for a few years. But I haven’t done a real throwback cookbook in a while. My very first cookbook of the week was Hershey’s Best-Loved Recipes, and while not quite as old, this week’s selection has been my trusted companion for quite some time.

This week I chose to highlight Tate’s Bake Shop Cookbook not only because it is packed withrecipes for fabulous sweet treats, but because it always offers a nice break from the annoyances of modern internet baking.

A bit about the book

Tate’s Bake Shop is an actual bakery in the Hamptons on Long Island. It’s a small shop with creaky wooden floors and a warm atmosphere—at least that’s how I remember it from when I worked in Bridgehampton for a summer. I would occasionally pop in and grab some cookies, but this was long before I realized they were the Tate’s Cookies—before their green bags started popping up in every grocery store cookie aisle. You may have tried the crispy, flat cookies Tate’s is now famous for, but did you know that they make more than cookies?

This cookbook is from the founder of Tate’s Bake Shop, Kathleen King. It turns out she makes a heck of a cookie…and a heck of a pie, and scone, and blueberry buckle. I love Tate’s Bake Shop Cookbook because it’s filled with reliable, classic bakes. The entire Tate’s brand is built on homemade, cozy, old-fashioned vibes, and that’s what you’ll find in the pages of this cookbook.

There’s nothing flashy about it. It’s not striving to be a part of your coffee table decor. The recipes are mostly one-pagers with short head notes and simple text, and you’ll only find pictures in the center section. This is a cookbook that’s meant to be dog-eared, annotated, used by your kids, and accidentally splattered with flour—a cookbook made to be loved.

A great cookbook for a spoon and a bowl

While I’ve owned this cookbook for nearly 15 years, I haven’t cracked it open in a while. I meandered through the recipes and marked some titles that caught my eye, or that I remembered being tasty. As I read through the short directions, I noticed some trends: most of the recipes are mixed by hand, several recipes are from family or friends, and King uses salted butter without a care in the world for anyone else’s opinion. 

Seeing a cookbook, especially a baking cookbook, filled with short, easy to follow recipes is a breath of fresh air. Recipes that don’t require the use of an electric mixer are almost too good to be true. But here it is, each recipe is enticing in its simplicity: Sour Cream Pound Cake, Chocolate Jumbles, Sticky Toffee Date Pudding, and the recipe for the famous chocolate chip cookie that you know from the store. 

Reading these recipes feels almost soothing. Dramatic, I know. But I often feel like social media recipes and newer cookbooks are throwing everything at me at once to catch my attention. This cookbook seems less an attempt at impressing readers with being on trend or shocking us with new flavor combinations, and more like a collection of personal favorite recipes from your hometown baker.

Baking from this cookbook feels like pastry meditation. No need to plug in an appliance or pause a YouTube video. Grab a bowl and a wooden spoon and take a moment to make something delicious. It’s great for a beginner baker, or anyone who enjoys baking in theory but hates dirtying too many bowls, or when recipes get complicated.

The dish I baked this week

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

I love a cookie, but we already know how good the Tate’s cookie is, so I wanted to showcase something else. Luckily, blueberry season is here, and that made my decision for me. I settled on the Blueberry Buckle. 

Without taking a picture of the actual recipe (which isn’t cool to do), I want to illustrate the simplicity of this buckle: The instructions for the whole cake, with a crumb topping, are completed in 12 lines. The headnote includes a three-sentence story about how it won a bake-off in Maine, and how King’s niece improved the crumb texture. If you’ve ever just wanted a recipe to cut to the chase, this is it.

A buckle is a cake-like treat with a crumb topping and fresh fruit mixed into it. (Between buckles, betties, cobblers, and crisps, it’s easy to get confused.) The cake batter is easy to stir together by hand. Employing salted butter eliminates worrying about measuring yet another ingredient, and all of the other ingredients were readily available in my pantry. In roughly 15 minutes, I was ready to throw an entire cake into the oven. 

I don’t know that I’ve had a buckle before, but I definitely would have voted for this to win that bake-off. The cake component is utterly tender, and I don’t really know why or how—there’s no sour cream or buttermilk involved. It must just be a perfect balance of tenderizing fat and strengthening gluten. The ratio of blueberries to cake is also perfect. I know folks are always begging for more berries, but if you have too many then the berries sink or they make the cake too wet. The crumb topping is exactly as it should be—sweet, buttery, and lightly spiced. It’s good enough to eat on its own. 

I could see myself making this buckle for a picnic, or a friend’s summer birthday brunch. June is just around the corner, so I’ll keep my copy of Tate’s Bake Shop Cookbook handy for other berry-centric bakes this summer. 

How to buy it

Despite being an older book, it’s still available in the hardcover. However, if you’re keen to save a buck, do check out your local used bookstores. Older books like this are almost always available used for a fraction of the original retail price. If you’re more of a digital baker, you can also spend less and download the ebook. 

Tate’s Bake Shop Cookbook: The Best Recipes from Southampton’s Favorite Bakery for Homestyle Cookies, Cakes, Pies, Muffins, and Breads

$31.94
at Amazon

$31.94
at Amazon

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

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

DevNull127 writes: Stack Overflow will test paying experts to answer questions. That’s one of many radical experiments they’re now trying to stave off an AI-induced death spiral. Questions and answers to the site have plummeted more than 90% since April of 2020. So here’s what Stack Overflow will try next. 1. They’re bringing back Chat, according to their CEO (to foster “even more connections between our community members” in “an increasingly AI-driven world”). 2. They’re building a “new Stack Overflow” meant to feel like a personalized portal. “It might collect videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs… and fold them together into one personalized destination.” 3. They’re proposing areas more open to discussion, described as “more flexible Stack Exchanges… where users can explore ideas or share opinions.” 4. They’re also licensing Stack Overflow content to AI companies for training their models. 5. Again, they will test paying experts to answer questions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google’s rapid adoption of AI has seen the Gemini “sparkle” icon become an omnipresent element in almost every Google product. It’s there to summarize your email, add items to your calendar, and more—if you trust it to do those things. Gemini is also integrated with Google Drive, where it’s gaining a new feature that could make it genuinely useful: Google’s AI bot will soon be able to watch videos stored in your Drive so you don’t have to.

Gemini is already accessible in Drive, with the ability to summarize documents or folders, gather and analyze data, and expand on the topics covered in your documents. Google says the next step is plugging videos into Gemini, saving you from wasting time scrubbing through a file just to find something of interest.

Using a chatbot to analyze and manipulate text doesn’t always make sense—after all, it’s not hard to skim an email or short document. It can take longer to interact with a chatbot, which might not add any useful insights. Video is different because watching is a linear process in which you are presented with information at the pace the video creator sets. You can change playback speed or rewind to catch something you missed, but that’s more arduous than reading something at your own pace. So Gemini’s video support in Drive could save you real time.

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An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-Ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man’s piracy cost movie studios millions.

Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.

Among popular movies Hale is believed to have widely leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied “tens of millions of times” at an estimated loss of “tens of millions of dollars” for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

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Most people are familiar with conventional cubical six-sided dice, but there are also polyhedral versions like the 20-sided dice used in ancient Rome and to play Dungeons and Dragons. Researchers have figured out how to design dice with even more exotic shapes, like a kitten, a dragon, or an armadillo. And they are “fair” dice: Experiments with 3D-printed versions produced results that closely matched predicted random outcomes, according to a forthcoming paper currently in press at the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Dice are examples of so-called “rigid bodies,” broadly defined as shapes that move as one solid piece, with no need for bending or twisting. Such shapes “are of scientific interest because they model so many of the phenomena we encounter in our daily lives: anything from the way your dishes roll around on the floor when you drop them, to how the gears in your watch push on each other, to how a satellite tumbles around under the pull of gravity,” co-author Keenan Crane of Carnegie-Mellon University told Ars. “So there’s an intense focus on developing computational methods for understanding and predicting how rigid bodies are going to behave.”

Crane and his co-authors—including lead author and CMU graduate student Hossein Baktash, as well as co-authors from NVIDIA Research and Adobe Research—wanted to explore where and how a rigid body will land when tossed. They chose dice as the best (and most fun) context in which to explore that question.

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Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is warning that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years — and overall unemployment potentially spiking between 10 and 20% during that period.

The prediction comes as new data from venture capital firm SignalFire shows Big Tech companies have already reduced their hiring of new graduates by approximately 50% compared to pre-pandemic levels, with AI adoption cited as a contributing factor. Amodei told Axios that AI companies and government officials are “sugarcoating” the risks of mass job displacement in technology, finance, law, and consulting sectors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TCL makes good non-OLED TVs (arguably some of the best when compared to the cost) as is the case with last year’s QM7 that I got my hands on, which is still a bargain in 2025. There are plenty of differences between QLEDs and OLEDs, but unless you’re planning on dropping thousands of dollars, a QLED will do just fine.

Consider TCL’s new QM6K QLED starting at $498 (originally $698 at launch) for the 55-inch class. This is the lowest price this TV has been, according to price tracking tools.

144Hz Refresh Rate, Google TV, Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Atmos

TCL QLED QM6K 55-inch TV

$498.99
at Amazon

$598.00
Save $99.01

$498.99
at Amazon

$598.00
Save $99.01

144Hz Refresh Rate, Google TV, Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Atmos

TCL QLED QM6K 65-inch TV

$698.99
at Amazon

$798.00
Save $99.01

$698.99
at Amazon

$798.00
Save $99.01

144Hz Refresh Rate, Google TV, Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Atmos

TCL QLED QM6K 75-inch TV

$782.10
at Amazon

$999.99
Save $217.89

$782.10
at Amazon

$999.99
Save $217.89

TCL’s QM lineup offers a good value regardless of which size you pick. The QM6K is much better than last year’s rendition, now with local dimming zones (500 of them, according to CNET’s review) and a mini LED panel, improving contrast dramatically. The color accuracy is also surprisingly accurate out of the box for HDR content, which is great for people who don’t like to mess with settings.

With the QM6K you get 144Hz native refresh rate, HDR formats like HDR ULTRA with Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+, HDR10, & HLG, Dolby Atmos Audio, an anti-glare screen, 4 HDMI Inputs (one of which is an eARC), and the Google TV Smart OS (my favorite OS) with Chromecast built in, meaning you can cast your phone to it. You also get Apple AirPlay 2 and Alexa built in, according to ZDNet’s review.

If you’re a gamer, there’s a lot to like in the QM6K, according to IGN’s review. The Game Bar feature lets you adjust settings on the fly. There’s also a VRR accelerator that doubles the refresh rate to a perceived 288Hz. It also has AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, so you can experience smooth gameplay on a PC or console. Truly a lot to offer for a budget QLED TV.

Unless you’ve messed with your smartphone’s camera settings, it’s very likely you snap photos in 3:4 (or 4:3 if you’re holding the phone in landscape). This aspect ratio is the default for most smartphone cameras, which means our photo libraries are full of images that all fit this frame.

The issue is, despite the smartphone’s place as the world’s most popular camera, not all social media platforms respect the 3:4 aspect ratio. Instagram, for example, supports its classic square 1:1 images, as well as a 4:5 aspect ratio, but not 3:4. At first glance, 4:5 looks like 3:4—so much so, you might not have ever noticed a difference when uploading your photos. But rest assured, a 3:4 photo uploaded to Instagram’s 4:5 aspect ratio gets cropped to match that frame, which means you lose a little of the top and bottom of each photo you post this way.

If you pinch on the preview of your post to zoom out, you’ll reveal the parts of your image that aren’t making the final cut. You can move the image up or down to reveal more of the top or bottom, but you’ll only cut off more of the opposite end either way.

Instagram now supports 3:4 images

Luckily, that’s now changing. In a post on Threads, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced that the app now supports 3:4 uploads. The reception seems largely positive, though some users clearly want more from Instagram—namely, 2:3 support, a popular aspect ratio with photographers.

Instagram also announced the news on its Creator’s Broadcast Channel. The post confirms the change applies to both single-photo posts as well as carousel collections, and that you can still share 1:1 and 4:5 images as you wish. The company attached an example, comparing two different Instagram posts—one that posts an image in 4:5, and another that posts the same image in 3:4, with dotted lines demonstrating where the image would be cropped in 4:5.

Credit: Instagram

The change is rolling out now for all Instagram users, but you might not see it right away. My Instagram app still appears to default to 4:5, even after I updated to the latest version on iOS.

It’s important to note that 4:3 images, as well as other landscape or horizontal aspect ratios, have been supported on Instagram. In theory, you could’ve flipped your 3:4 images to post the full picture, but you would have forced your friends to turn their phones (or heads) sideways to see it.

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

Mozilla recently announced that it’s shutting down the read-later app Pocket on July 8, 2025. If you’re a fan like I was, now’s the time to start looking at alternatives. You have until October 8 of this year to export your saves from Pocket, so get testing now to find the right read-later replacement for you.

Use your browser’s reading list feature

Credit: Pranay Parab

I’m a big fan of recommending simple tools, since you’re more likely to use them. Browser-based reading lists definitely fall into that category. Both Chrome and Safari have built-in reading lists, which let you save articles for reading later. The Safari version saves articles for offline reading, but Chrome just loads the saved page. You can technically save articles for offline reading in Chrome, too, but the browser treats it like saving the entire webpage and stores it in files that you have to manage separately. That’s a lot less convenient than just marking an article as read and deleting it off the device.

Use the reading list in Safari by hitting the Share button and tapping Add to Reading List. To access saved articles on your iPhone, tap the bookmarks icon in Safari’s tab bar, then the spectacles icon. In Safari for Mac, click the sidebar button next to the green button in the top-left corner of the browser’s window, and select Reading List from the sidebar. To save articles offline by default on your iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Safari, scroll to the bottom, and enable Automatically Save Offline. On the Mac, this is under Safari menu > Settings > Advanced > Reading List.

Google Chrome’s reading list is under the three-dots menu > Bookmarks and Lists > Reading List on the desktop browser. On Android, tap the three-dots menu and select Star. In Chrome for iPhone, this option is located under the three-dots menu > Add to reading list.

As convenient as browser-based reading lists are, they do lack a few features when compared with proper read-later apps, such as tagging, organizing articles by topic or creating custom folders.

Instapaper: The closest alternative to Pocket

Credit: Instapaper

Like Pocket, Instapaper was first launched in the late 2000s, and the service is still around. It offers apps for Android, iPhone, and the web, and has a generous free tier that lets you save, organize, and sync unlimited articles. The free tier shows a few ads to fund the service, though. The premium subscription costs $6/month or $60/year, and it adds useful features such as full-text search, offline reading, and removes ads.

The best paid features, though, are speed reading and the ability to send articles to your Kindle. Speed reading flashes one word at a time to help you read articles faster. The send-to-Kindle feature is also quite nice to have for long reads that you’d rather view on an e-ink display.

GoodLinks: An excellent read-later app for Apple devices

Credit: GoodLinks

GoodLinks is a great read-later app for all your Apple devices. You can purchase it off the App Store for $10, which lets you access the app on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The app lets you highlight text in articles, color code your highlights, and makes it easy to find highlighted content, too. You can save articles for offline reading easily from any website, simply by using the share sheet. The app also recently added support for saving Bluesky threads, which is a nice touch. GoodLinks doesn’t require you to create an account and it uses iCloud to sync your reading lists across devices.

Note that the app gives you free feature updates for one year after initial purchase. After that, you can continue to use GoodLinks with the features you paid for. If you want additional features developed in the future, you can pay $5/year to access that. The app already has almost all the features you’d need, though, so this business model isn’t going to lock out any essentials.

Readwise Reader: The best read-later service for power users

Credit: Readwise

Some people want a read-later service that can host multiple types of content, including videos, text, social media posts, newsletters, and even entire books. Readwise Reader is designed for just that. It lets you highlight text in any text file, and even transcripts of YouTube videos, and syncs those highlights to all your devices. You can even send highlights to apps such as Obsidian or Notion. The app generates a “daily review” for you, too, which is a quick digest of your saved articles that can help you quickly go through important reads.

The service also gives you an email address to subscribe to newsletters, and you can also use it to follow RSS feeds of the publications you love. Readwise Reader is an all-in-one app that offers a lot more than just a read-later service, which is great for power users, but it can be overwhelming for someone who just wants to save the occasional article for weekend reading. Readwise Reader has a 30-day free trial, after which it costs $10/month.

Matter: For those who value newsletters above all else

Credit: Matter

Matter is a premium read-later app for the iPhone, iPad, and the web. While it has a free tier, almost all of its best features are in the paid subscription ($15/month or $80/year). This service also gives you an email address, which you can use to subscribe to newsletters and have them sent directly to Matter. I prefer this approach over having newsletters delivered to my already crowded email inbox, and Matter’s choice of fonts and distraction-free reading experience make it even better. If you’re a paying subscriber, Matter can also scan your Gmail inbox and automatically pick up newsletters from there. To get you started, this service has a curated list of articles for you to read, just like Pocket, which may appeal to some. 

Other useful read-later services

There are a few other useful read-later apps and services that you might want to check out. These aren’t as well-rounded as the picks above, but they’re worth checking out for specific use cases.

• Send to Kindle: Amazon offers many ways to easily send files to your Kindle, but the Chrome extension is probably the smoothest way to use your e-reader as a read-later device.

• Wallabag: This is an open-source read-later service that costs $12.5/year and lets you self-host the service, too. It has apps for Android and iPhone and native clients for Kindle and Kobo, so you can easily access saved articles.

• Flyleaf: This is one of the best new read-later apps for Apple devices, and its free tier offers all the basics. There is an optional paid subscription ($17/year) if you want tagging and custom color schemes.

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

The entertainment industry has achieved an unprecedented milestone: more film and television content exists today than at any point in human history. The technical infrastructure to deliver this content directly to consumers’ homes works flawlessly. The problem? Actually finding something to watch has become a user experience nightmare that would make early-2000s software developers cringe.

Multiple streaming platforms are suffering from fundamental interface design failures that actively prevent users from discovering content. Cameron Nudleman, an Austin-based user, told Salon that scrolling through streaming service landing pages feels “like a Herculean task,” while his Amazon Fire Stick setup — designed to consolidate multiple services — delivers consistent crashes across Paramount+ and Max, with Peacock terminating randomly “for no discernible reason.”

The technical problems extend beyond stability issues to basic functionality failures. Max automatically enables closed captions despite user preferences, while Paramount+ crashes during show transitions. Chicago media writer Tim O’Reilly describes “every single interface” as “complete garbage except for Netflix’s,” though even Netflix has recently implemented changes that degrade user experience.

The industry eliminated simple discovery mechanisms like newspaper listings and Moviefone’s telephone service in favor of algorithm-driven interfaces that Tennessee attorney Claire Tuley says have “turned art into work,” transforming what was supposed to “democratize movies” into “a system that requires so many subscriptions, searching and effort.”

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