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Meta avoids split, Roblox age checking and even Down Detector was down

Plus: Introducing the Meta Ray-Ban 'glasshole' detector

Author

Cam Wilson
November 19, 2025

Edition 2463

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The News

Instagram and WhatsApp will not be spun off from Meta after it was ruled not a monopoly

Meta is not a monopoly and therefore did not break the law with its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions in the early 2010s, a US judge has found (BBC). The judgment is the conclusion of a 2020 proceeding filed by the US trade commission against Meta which sought to break up the company. Judge James Boasberg said that Meta faced “fierce competition” in social media, citing the emergence of TikTok, the growth of YouTube and Meta’s apparently shrinking market share. FTC hasn’t said if it will appeal.

The Sizzle: This always felt like a long shot to me. Yes, Meta is huge and incredibly dominant. But I don’t know how you can look at the landscape of a gazillion platforms and believe that Meta is the only social media supplier, even if it clearly was looking to avoid competition from Instagram by buying it. In the same way that copyright law won’t defeat AI companies, I don’t think it’s wise to hope that a century old legal framework designed to break up oil companies is going to save us.

If we want to rein in the power of these massive tech giants, we’re going to have to be brave enough to pass some new laws.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Roblox to limit social features to people who’ve proven their age and to people of the same age

Roblox will limit chatting to users within the same age groups and, as a result, only if they’ve proven their age (Guardian Australia). The new features are being rolled out in Australia first after the company behind the wildly popular children’s game made a commitment to the eSafety Commissioner earlier this year (eSafety). Users will need to go through a facial scan to estimate their age, which is then used to sort them into one of six age groups starting from under nine to 21 and over, or be limited from chatting and speaking with other users.

The Sizzle: There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Roblox being included in the teen social media ban, but I think this goes to show that there are ways to restrict how young people use technology without just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

You know the outage is bad when even Down Detector is down

ChatGPT, X and even Down Detector were among the victims of the latest mass outage, this time caused by Cloudflare (Verge). For a few hours in the middle of the Australian night, sites that used Cloudflare were showing an error message “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed”. Cloudflare has a very thorough incident report page if you wanna check it out for yourself, but apparently the cause was an internal error.

not the Sizzle, though!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

FYI - I’m hearing that we’re going to get some more teen social media ban news from both the government and tech companies in the next day or so. Stay tuned!

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Introducing the Meta Ray-Ban detector

You know how people are taking Meta Ray-Ban’s glasses, which the company says have safety guardrails to prevent misuse, and getting around those guardrails by deactivating the recording light (404Media, $) or installing their own facial recognition software (404Media, $)? Well, that’s a good reason to be alert to whether someone is wearing them.

Enter Australian art group The New Radicals who have built a Meta Ray-Ban detector that will tell you if someone is a “glasshole”:

Gottem

And, helpfully, they’ve put the code and design online for anyone who wants to build their own. Grouse!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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