Meta Platforms is set to acquire Chinese-founded artificial intelligence startup Manus as the Facebook owner steps up efforts to embed advanced AI capabilities across its consumer and enterprise platforms.

According to Reuters, sources familiar with the transaction estimate the deal’s value at between $2 billion and $3 billion, although official financial terms have not been disclosed.

The acquisition highlights Meta’s growing focus on building scalable, revenue-generating AI products amid intensifying global competition in the artificial intelligence space.

Manus, now headquartered in Singapore, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the transaction.

The startup rose to prominence earlier this year after going viral on X (formerly Twitter) with the launch of what it described as the world’s first general AI agent. Unlike traditional chatbots, Manus claimed its AI agent can autonomously make decisions and execute tasks with minimal user prompting.

Often dubbed “China’s next DeepSeek,” Manus has drawn interest from Chinese authorities and major global technology firms. The company has also said its AI agent outperforms OpenAI’s DeepResearch in certain tasks and maintains a strategic partnership with Alibaba on AI model development.

Under the deal, Meta plans to operate and commercialise Manus’ services while integrating its AI agent into Meta’s broader ecosystem, including Meta AI and other consumer and enterprise products. The company said Manus will continue to run independently even as its technology is woven into platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta AI is already available.

For Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who has made artificial intelligence central to the company’s long-term strategy, the acquisition represents a shift toward AI platforms with demonstrated commercial traction.

Manus recently disclosed that it has signed up millions of users and surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, making it one of the few AI startups to achieve significant commercial scale. Industry analysts say this revenue profile likely played a key role in Meta’s decision to pursue the company at a multibillion-dollar valuation.

The startup is backed by its parent company, Beijing Butterfly Effect Technology, and earlier this year raised $75 million at a valuation of about $500 million. The funding round was led by U.S. venture capital firm Benchmark, with participation from HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China), ZhenFund and Tencent Holdings, according to PitchBook data.

Meta’s move follows a series of aggressive investments in artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, the company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, valuing the data-labeling firm at $29 billion and bringing its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, closer into Meta’s strategic orbit.

In June, Nairametrics reported that Meta was in advanced talks with major private capital firms to raise up to $29 billion to finance its rapid expansion into AI infrastructure. At the time, the company was engaging leading private credit investors, including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle and Pimco.

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The changes as CNN reports, come just before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump and other Republicans have lambasted Zuckerberg and Meta for what they view as censorship of right-wing voices.

“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy Tuesday. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

Zuckerberg, however, acknowledged a “tradeoff” in the new policy, noting more harmful content will appear on the platform as a result of the content moderation changes.

Meta’s newly appointed Chief of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan told Fox on Tuesday that Meta’s partnerships with third-party fact checkers were “well intentioned at the outset but there’s just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact check and how.”

The announcement comes amid a broader apparent ideological shift to the right within Meta’s top ranks, and as Zuckerberg seeks to improve his relationship with Trump before the president-elect takes office later this month. Just one day earlier, Meta announced Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White would join its board, along with two other new directors. Meta has also said it will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and that Zuckerberg wants to take an “active role” in tech policy discussions.

Kaplan, a prominent Republican who was elevated to the company’s top policy job last week, acknowledged that the Tuesday announcement is directly related to the changing administration.

He said that there’s “no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now, we’ve got a new administration, and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”

Meta gave Trump’s team an advanced heads up that the moderation policy change was coming, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN.

During a press conference Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said he watched Kaplan’s appearance on Fox and said Meta has “come a long way.”

“I watched their news conference, and I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they’ve, honestly, I think they’ve come a long way. Meta. Facebook. I think they’ve come a long way. I watched it, the man was very impressive,” Trump said in response to a question from CNN’s Steve Contorno.

Contorno asked if Trump thought the decision by Meta was a direct response to threats Trump has made to Zuckerberg in the past. “Probably. Yeah, probably,” Trump said.

Also following the announcement, Brendan Carr, who Trump has tapped to be chair of the Federal Communications Commission and who has railed on big tech companies over “censorship,” posted a gif of Jack Nicholson grinning and nodding in response to CNN’s Brian Stelter post on X with the news.

The Real Facebook Oversight Board — an outside accountability organization, whose name is a play on the company’s official group, comprised of academics, lawyers and civil rights advocates including early Facebook investor Roger McNamee — said the policy changes represent Meta going “full MAGA.”

“Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” the group said in a statement, calling the changes “political pandering.”

The moderation changes mark a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platforms.

In 2016, the company launched an independent fact-checking program, in the wake of claims that it had failed to stop foreign actors from leveraging its platforms to spread disinformation and sow discord among Americans. In the years since, it continued to grapple with the spread of controversial content on its platform, such as misinformation about elections, anti-vaccination stories, violence and hate speech.

The company built up safety teams, introduced automated programs to filter out or reduce the visibility of false claims and instituted a sort of independent Supreme Court for tricky moderation decisions, known as the Oversight Board.

Although Meta’s fact checking partners repeatedly said they checked claims from both the right and left, Trump supporters and other conservatives have long claimed that the system restricted their voices.

Zuckerberg is following in the footsteps of fellow social media leader Musk who, after acquiring X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, dismantled the company’s fact-checking teams and made user-generated context labels, called “community notes,” the platform’s only method of correcting false claims.

Starting in the United States, Meta says it is ending its partnership with third-party fact checkers and instituting similar community notes across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Meta also plans to adjust its automated systems that scan for policy violations, which it says have resulted in “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” The systems will now be focused on checking only for illegal and “high-severity” violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. Other concerns will have to be reported by users before the company evaluates them.

Zuckerberg said Tuesday that Meta’s complex systems to moderate content have mistakenly resulted in too much non-violating content being removed from the platform. For example, if the systems get something wrong 1% of the time, that could represent millions of the company’s more than 2 billion users.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said.

But Zuckerberg acknowledged that the new policy could create new problems for content moderation.

“The reality is this is a tradeoff,” he said in the video. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

The company is also getting rid of content restrictions on certain topics, such as immigration and gender identity, and rolling back limits on how much politics-related content users see in their feeds.

As part of the changes, Meta will move its trust and safety teams responsible for content policies from California to Texas and other US locations. “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

Source: CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/07/tech/meta-censorship-moderation/index.html

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Meta-owned Facebook marked its 20th anniversary yesterday, proudly boasting over three billion active users worldwide, making up 57% of global internet users and 38% of the global population.

In 2004, amidst the transition from dial-up to broadband and the rise of color-screen mobile phones, 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook” with his Harvard University roommates. Initially modeled after student directories, it quickly expanded across U.S. college campuses.

By 2006, the platform, renamed “facebook.com,” opened its doors to anyone above 13 with internet access, skyrocketing from 12 million users in 2006 to 100 million by the end of 2008.

In 2012, Facebook went public, valued at $104 billion, raising $16 billion with an initial public offering (IPO) at $38 a share. Fast forward to 2021, Zuckerberg announced the rebranding of Facebook, Inc to Meta Platforms, Inc.

With 3.03 billion users, surpassing the combined populations of India, China, and Bangladesh, Facebook’s significant user base includes 385.6 million in India, 188.6 million in the U.S., and millions more in various countries.

Despite privacy concerns and user safety issues, Facebook’s largest audience group, comprising 29.9% of users, falls within the 25-34 age range. The platform has faced challenges, notably the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, but continues to thrive.

Despite government scrutiny and a declining younger audience, Meta reported a staggering revenue of $40.1 billion and a profit of $14 billion for Q4 2023, surpassing analysts’ expectations.

Meta’s commitment to AI is evident, with plans to introduce its own AI chips, internally named “Artemis,” later this year, aiming to enhance Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp with energy-hungry generative AI products.

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TECHDIGEST: On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the WhatsApp Cloud API (Application Programming Interface), which has numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. According to a Facebook post by Zuckerberg, the API will enable businesses and developers to build on top of WhatsApp to customise their experiences and respond to customers quickly and easily. In August 2018, the Meta-owned messaging app also launched its WhatsApp Business API.

Remember that Zuckerberg began his push into business offerings in January 2018 with the release of the WhatsApp for Business app for Android devices, which was later expanded to iOS in April 2019. The WhatsApp Cloud API is the logical next step, allowing businesses of all sizes all over the world to establish a presence on WhatsApp using Meta’s free, secure cloud hosting services.

READALSO: WhatsApp Tackles Telegram With New Expanded Capacities For Group Participants

During his keynote, Zuckerberg stated, “The best business experiences are meeting people where they are.” Every week, more than 1 billion users connect with a business account via our messaging services. They’re looking for assistance, products, and services, and to purchase anything from high-ticket items to everyday necessities. “Any business or developer can easily access our service, build directly on top of WhatsApp to customise their experience, and accelerate their response time to customers by using our secure WhatsApp Cloud API hosted by Meta,” he continued. And this is an important step toward assisting more businesses in connecting with people and assisting more people in messaging the businesses they want to support—big and small.”

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The two related settlements were announced by the U.S. Justice Department and Labor Department.

The Justice Department announced last December that it was filing a lawsuit that accused Facebook of giving hiring preferences to temporary workers, including those who hold H-1B visas that let companies temporarily employ foreign workers in certain specialty occupations.

Such visas are widely used by tech companies.

Kristen Clarke, assistant U.S. Attorney-General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, called the agreement with Facebook, historic.

“It represents by far the largest civil penalty the Civil Rights Division has ever recovered in the 35-year history of the Immigration and Nationality Act’s anti-discrimination provision,’’ Clarke said in a call with reporters, referring to a key U.S. immigration law.

The case centered on Facebook’s use of the so-called permanent labor certification called the PERM programme.

The U.S. government said that Facebook refused to recruit or hire U.S. workers for jobs that had been reserved for temporary visa holders under the PERM program.

It also accused Facebook of “potential regulatory recruitment violations’’.

Facebook will pay a civil penalty under the settlement of $4.75 million, plus up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of what the government called discriminatory hiring practices.

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TECH DIGEST – WhatsApp on Friday entered an increasingly tense battle between multinational giants such as Google and Alibaba for a chunk of India’s fast growing digital payments market.

The Facebook-owned firm said it was launching Whatsapp Pay just hours after it was given permission by the country’s payments regulator. India is the messenger firm’s biggest market with some 400 million users.

Whatsapp Pay — which allows people to send and receive money through the messaging platform was launched in Brazil in June but was quickly suspended because of competition objections raised by the central bank. Authorities have since indicated that it will be allowed there.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said in a video statement accompanying the India launch that the move would boost “innovation” in payments.

Zuckerberg also hailed India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which is used in the country of 1.3 billion people to manage payment apps, with more than 140 Indian banks part of the network.

UPI is also used by Alphabet Inc’s Google Pay, Walmart’s PhonePe and Alibaba-backed Paytm, which dominate India’s digital payments market.

“India is the first country to do anything like this,” said Zuckerberg of the network.

India’s UPI processed more than two billion transactions in October and 1.8 billion the previous month.

The stakes are high for all the competitors as the digital payments market was worth about $75 billion in 2019 and is expected to rise past $500 billion by 2025.

WhatsApp has linked up with five Indian lenders including State Bank of India, the largest public sector institution, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and Jio Payments Bank to roll out the service.

The National Payments Corporation of India has put a cap of 20 million users of the Whatsapp service in the first phase. All must have a debit card and a bank account.

The American firm has been waiting for two years to launch its service, testing pilot payments for about a million customers.

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