Meta and social media 2025–2026: what happened and why

Compute was Meta's through-line. In March 2026 it signed a contract worth up to $27 billion over five years with Nebius, extending an earlier $3 billion deal and bringing what it has contracted with that provider to $30 billion. The company is working with capital spending of up to $135 billion for 2026.

It did not rely on a single supplier: it extended its Broadcom alliance to 2029 to build its own MTIA chips, rented Graviton5 cores from Amazon and became the first major customer of ARM's processor. The same coverage lists the sums committed to Nvidia, AMD and CoreWeave and describes demand that no single supply chain can meet.

In April came Muse Spark, the first proprietary model since Meta Superintelligence Labs was formed. It moves away from Llama, whose fourth generation drew criticism, and scored 52 on the Artificial Analysis index against 18 for Llama 4 Maverick.

The AI money was funded with headcount. The layoffs planned for May 20 hit about 8,000 employees, 10 percent of the total, on top of more than 25,000 positions cut since 2022. According to the coverage, they did not answer an immediate financial emergency but a reorientation toward AI teams.

Earlier, in January, Meta had laid off much of the Supernatural team and closed virtual reality studios after years of metaverse losses; more than a thousand employees were affected. In October a Reuters report, relayed by a technical newsletter, said leadership considered cutting teams by 60 percent, that Zuckerberg changed his mind, and that low morale and a more mercenary culture remained.

There was also a setback abroad: it was reported that China announced the reversal of a Meta deal, although the coverage does not say which deal it was.

Age regulation accelerated. From December 10 Australia required platforms to show they exclude under-16s or face fines of up to A$49.5 million; Meta said it would begin deactivating accounts from December 4. France drafted a bill to bar under-15s from social media from the 2026 school year.

The costs surfaced quickly. Bluesky blocked Mississippi rather than collect sensitive data from all its users, and Discord had to soften its global age checks after a breach exposed 70,000 ID documents held by an outside vendor. An analysis in Microsiervos doubts that banning without educating protects young people.

In court, Zuckerberg testified before a jury in Los Angeles in the first trial of a series with more than 1,600 plaintiffs. TikTok and Snap had already settled with the first plaintiff.

Meta adjusted its offer to regulatory pressure. It brought the ad-free subscription to the United Kingdom, from £2.99 a month on the web and £3.99 on mobile, the gap reflecting app-store fees, and retired the external Like and Share buttons as of February 10, 2026.

Usage data suggest changing habits: a GWI analysis across more than 50 countries put average time on social media at two hours and 20 minutes a day at the end of 2024, almost 10 percent lower than in 2022, with North America as the exception. Another study, using simulations, concluded that social media's pathologies are structural, and a survey of scientists recorded their move from Twitter to Bluesky.

TikTok was the most visible case of political control. In September it was announced that its algorithm would be retrained in the United States on American user data only and under Oracle's audit; in December deadlines were still in the air until ByteDance signed a deal leaving American investors with 80.1 percent and ByteDance with 19.9 percent. Sources differ on the closing: one says mid-January, another January 22.

Data security ran through the period: Malwarebytes found data on 17.5 million Instagram users on the dark web, linked to a 2024 API exposure, and Meta paused its work with Mercor after a supply-chain attack exposed about four terabytes and prompted a class action of more than 40,000 people.