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It's no secret that many teens have abandoned Facebook over recent years in favor of newer social media platforms. The issues have been growing since the social network became more popular with older users, resulting in an influx of parents, grandparents, and the sort of content teenagers aren't interested in. Facebook has taken steps to increase the appeal of its platform among teens, including things like AR effects in Messenger and Stories on the main platform, but now it is planning to take things up a notch.

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An Oculus Go unlocked OS build was released today, courtesy of John Carmack. After a prolonged period of time and a whole lot of work in securing the rights to release the software, Carmack and crew made this build a reality. It's a surprise, honestly, now that Oculus is owned by Facebook. It IS a welcome surprise, in any case.

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Facebook has announced that augmented reality effects can now be used by each participant in a Messenger Room or on a Messenger video call. The company calls these AR experiences "Group Effects," which will become more robust in coming months after Facebook expands access to the Spark AR Multipeer API. With this, more developers and creators will be able to make their own Group Effects.

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A report is going around that Facebook is gearing up to change the company name next week to reflect a focus on building a metaverse. Reports of the name change come from a source who claims to be familiar with Facebook's plans. According to the claim, the announcement of the changing name will come on October 28 from CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the annual Connect conference.

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The first reviews of Facebook's Portal Go are out, and while the social network's push into video calling gadgets may have met with confusion initially, amidst a pandemic and an improving product range it turns out this portable version is actually unexpectedly good. Of course, anybody who has been following the tech world - or, heck, the real world - even tangentially recently will already probably be able to predict the Portal Go's big problem.

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Facebook is back with a response to the latest criticism of its platform, stating in a lengthy new statement that it has drastically reduced the amount of hate speech its users have seen over the past three quarters. The company focuses on the prevalence of hate speech, which it describes as content that users actually see, not the sum total of problematic content found on its platform.

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When in a few years Facebook releases a new pair of glasses with cameras, microphones, and proximity sensors aboard, remember this article. Today we're taking a peek at some research posted by Facebook AI called "Ego4D". This research worked with "a consortium of 13 universities and labs across nine countries" that together collected "2,200 hours of first person video in the wild, featuring over 700 participants going about their daily lives."

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Instagram is making its live-streaming platform a bit more useful for creators and others who prefer to present their content to a live audience. The company has introduced a new feature called Live Scheduling that is, as you'd expect, a new scheduling tool for setting up a live broadcast ahead of time. Among other things, it'll help ensure viewers know when to tune in.

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Facebook is no stranger to scandals, including ones that land it in court or grilled by Congress, but there are a few notable ones that really rouse people's ire. While its meddling in a past US election still haunts it to this day, Facebook's latest debacle doesn't even involve its main social network but one of its biggest properties. Then again, the social tech giant has been blamed for how things are run at Instagram, and it is now promising to take stronger measures to protect its young users' mental health.

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The previous week has been a rough one for Facebook, which experienced a widespread outage across its product family that left many people scrambling for alternative platforms. October 4 brought a massive outage that spanned from Facebook to Oculus, though the company resolved it after several hours. A few days later, the company was hit by another outage.

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Instagram is apparently celebrating the end of the week with some more sporadic downtime, with users reporting issues loading new photos and videos in the app on Friday afternoon. The problems come only days after a huge Facebook outage that spanned the social network behemoth's various properties.

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For the past few years, Facebook has not only been criticized but also sued for this or that improper behavior, ranging from privacy missteps to monopolistic business practices to harmful work cultures. There have been repeated calls to boycott Facebook and its properties Instagram and WhatsApp, and there has even been some mass exodus of users over the years. Despite all that negative publicity, Facebook still has a firm hold over people's lives today, something that was confirmed by the hours-long outage that affected not just users but even businesses worldwide.

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