The European Commission has preliminarily found Meta’s Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act over failures to adequately prevent children under 13 from accessing the platforms. The finding remains provisional and does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation.
According to the Commission, Meta’s existing measures do not effectively enforce its own minimum age requirement of 13. The preliminary findings say children below that age can still create accounts by entering false birth dates, while the company’s reporting tool for underage users is difficult to use and often does not result in effective follow-up.
The Commission also considers Meta’s risk assessment to be incomplete and arbitrary. It says the company failed to identify and assess the risks properly posed to children under 13 who access Instagram and Facebook, despite evidence from across the EU suggesting that a significant share of children under 13 use one or both services. This wording is best kept cautious unless you are quoting the exact percentage directly from the Commission text.
At this stage, the Commission says Meta must revise its risk assessment methodology and strengthen its measures to prevent, detect, and remove children under 13 from the platforms. It also says the company must better counter and mitigate the risks those children may face and ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security for minors.
The preliminary findings form part of formal proceedings opened against Meta in May 2024 under the DSA. The Commission says the investigation has included analysis of Meta’s risk assessment reports, internal data and documents, and the company’s responses to requests for information, with support from civil society organisations and child protection experts across the EU.
If the Commission’s preliminary view is confirmed, it may adopt a non-compliance decision and impose a fine of up to 6% of the provider’s total worldwide annual turnover, as well as periodic penalty payments. Meta now has the opportunity to reply before any final decision is taken.
Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said Meta’s own terms and conditions already state that its services are not intended for children under 13, but that the company appears to be doing too little in practice to prevent them from gaining access.
Why does it matter?
The case matters because it goes to the heart of how the Digital Services Act is expected to work in practice: not only by requiring large platforms to set rules for child safety, but by obliging them to enforce those rules effectively. If the Commission’s preliminary view is confirmed, the Meta case could become an important benchmark for how the EU treats age assurance, risk assessments, and platform accountability in cases involving minors, with wider implications for other services that rely on self-declared age checks and weak reporting tools.
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Meta has announced two energy partnerships to support its AI infrastructure, teaming up with Overview Energy for space solar power and Noon Energy for ultra-long-duration storage, with up to 1 GW reserved under each agreement.
Overview Energy operates satellites in geosynchronous orbit, roughly 22,000 miles above Earth, where sunlight is constant. The satellites collect solar energy and beam it to existing ground-based solar farms as low-intensity, near-infrared light, enabling around-the-clock electricity generation without requiring additional land or grid infrastructure.
Noon Energy‘s technology relies on modular, reversible solid-oxide fuel cells and carbon-based storage, offering over 100 hours of energy storage. Meta has reserved up to 1 GW/100 GWh, with an initial 25 MW/2.5 GWh pilot demonstration expected by 2028. The company describes this as among the largest commitments to ultra-long-duration storage in the industry.
Both partnerships build on Meta’s existing energy portfolio, which includes more than 30 GW of contracted clean and renewable energy. The company is also one of the largest corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in the US, with 7.7 GW secured across agreements with Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo and Constellation Energy.
Overview Energy’s orbital demonstration is planned for 2028, with commercial delivery to the US grid potentially starting as early as 2030. Noon Energy’s demonstration project targets the same year, with its modular design allowing capacity to scale alongside Meta’s growing data centre footprint.
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Meta has introduced new supervision features that allow parents to see the topics their teenagers discuss with its AI assistant across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.
The update provides visibility into activity over the previous seven days, grouping interactions into areas such as education, health and well-being, lifestyle, travel, and entertainment. Parents can review these themes through a new Insights tab, although they will not see the exact prompts their teen sent or Meta AI’s responses.
The feature forms part of Meta’s broader effort to strengthen safeguards for younger users as AI becomes more embedded in everyday digital experiences. For more sensitive issues, including suicide and self-harm, Meta says it is developing additional alerts to notify parents when teens try to engage in those types of conversations with its AI assistant.
Meta has also partnered with external experts, including the Cyberbullying Research Centre, to develop structured conversation prompts to help families talk about AI use. The company says these tools are intended to support informed, non-judgemental dialogue rather than passive monitoring.
Alongside these updates, Meta has created an AI Wellbeing Expert Council to provide input on the development of age-appropriate AI systems for teens. The move reflects a wider shift towards embedding safety, transparency, and parental involvement into AI-driven platforms.
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The European Commission has issued a supplementary charge sheet to Meta (called Supplementary Statement of Objections), outlining concerns over potential restrictions on third-party AI assistants’ access to WhatsApp.
A move that forms part of an ongoing investigation into a possible abuse of dominant market position under the EU competition rules.
The Commission’s preliminary assessment suggests that recent policy changes, including the introduction of access fees, may have effects equivalent to an earlier exclusion of competing AI services.
Something that raises concerns about barriers to entry and reduced competition in the emerging market for AI assistants.
In 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Horizon, a VR social experience that allows users to interact, create custom avatars, and design virtual spaces. Zuckerberg saw the platform, later renamed Horizon Worlds, as the beginning of a new era of VR social networks, with users trading face-to-face interactions for digital ones.
To show his confidence in VR, Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook Inc. as Meta Platforms Inc. in October 2021, illustrating the company’s shift toward the metaverse as a broad virtual environment intended to integrate social interaction, work, commerce, and entertainment. Building on this new vision, Meta’s ambitions expanded beyond social interaction and entertainment, with the development roadmap including virtual real estate purchases and collaboration in virtual co-working spaces.
Fast forward to 17 March 2026, and the scale of Meta’s retreat from the metaverse vision has become unmistakable. In an official update, the company said it was ‘separating’ VR from Horizon so that each platform could grow with greater focus, while also making Horizon Worlds a mobile-only experience. Under the plan, Horizon Worlds and Events would disappear from the Quest Store by 31 March 2026, several flagship worlds would no longer be available in VR, and the Horizon Worlds app itself would be removed from Quest on 15 June 2026, ending VR access to Worlds altogether.
Yet Meta soon reversed part of the decision. In an Instagram Stories Q&A, CTO Andrew Bosworth said Horizon Worlds would remain available in VR after user backlash. Even so, the greater shift remained unchanged: Horizon Worlds was no longer a flagship VR project, but a much narrower product that reflected a clear contraction of Meta’s original metaverse ambition.
As it stands, Meta’s USD 80 billion investment seems less like a gateway to a new socio-technological era and more like one of the most expensive strategic miscalculations of the 21st century. The sunsetting of Horizon Worlds was certainly not a decision made on a whim, which begs the question: Why did the metaverse fail in the first place? Does it have a future in the AI landscape, and what does its retreat say about the politics of designing the future through corporate platforms?
Metaverse’s mainstream collapse
The most obvious reason for the metaverse’s failure was that it never became a mainstream social space. Meta’s strategy rested on the belief that large numbers of people would start using immersive virtual worlds as a normal setting for interaction, entertainment, and creative activity. The shift never happened at the scale needed to sustain the company’s ambitions.
One reason was friction. VR headsets were less practical than phones, more isolating than social media, and harder to integrate into everyday routines than the platforms people already used to communicate. Entering the virtual world required extra time, extra hardware, and openness to adapt to a different social environment. Most digital habits, however, are built around speed, familiarity, and ease of access.
Meta’s own March 2026 decision makes that failure difficult to deny. A company still convinced that immersive social VR was on its way to becoming mainstream would not have moved Horizon Worlds away from Quest and towards mobile. The shift suggested that the metaverse had failed to move from technological promise to everyday social practice.
Metaverse’s failure was not just one of convenience. It also struggled because it was never presented simply as a new digital space. It was framed as a future built largely on Meta’s own terms, with access tied to the company’s hardware, platforms, rules, and wider ecosystem. Such decisions made the metaverse feel less like an open evolution of the internet and more like a tightly managed corporate environment.
The distinction mattered because Meta was not merely launching another product. It was promoting a vision of how people might one day work, socialise, shop, and create online. Yet the more expansive that vision became, the more obvious it was that the system behind it remained closed and centralised. A future digital environment is harder to embrace when a single company controls the devices, spaces, distribution, and boundaries of participation.
Meta’s handling of Horizon Worlds clearly exposed that tension. The company could remove features, reshape access, alter incentives, and redirect the platform from the top down. Such a level of control may be standard for a private platform, but it sits uneasily with claims about building the next phase of digital life. In that sense, the metaverse failed not only because people were unconvinced by VR, but because its version of the future felt too corporate, too enclosed, and too disconnected from the openness people still associate with the internet.
Metaverse’s economic contradiction
The metaverse did not fail only as a social project. It also became increasingly difficult to justify on economic grounds. Meta spent heavily on Reality Labs while generating only limited returns from those investments. In its 2025 annual filing, the company said Reality Labs had reduced overall operating profit by around USD 19.19 billion for the year, while warning that similar losses would continue into 2026.
Losses on that scale might still have been acceptable if the metaverse had shown clear signs of momentum. However, there was little evidence of mass adoption, strong retention, or a durable path to monetisation. Virtual land, digital goods, branded experiences, and immersive workspaces never developed into the economic base of a new internet layer.
Instead, the metaverse began to look less like a future growth engine and more like a costly experiment with uncertain returns. The gap between spending and payoff became harder to ignore, especially as Meta continued to frame the metaverse as a long-term strategic priority. What used to be sold as the company’s next major frontier was increasingly difficult to justify in commercial terms.
The broader strategic context also changed. Meta’s own forward-looking statements pointed to increased hiring and spending in 2026, especially in AI. In practice, this meant the company was no longer choosing between the metaverse and inactivity, but between two competing visions of the future. AI was already delivering tangible gains in product development, infrastructure, and investor confidence.
In that competition for attention and capital, the metaverse lost. Meta’s pullback was also not an isolated case. Microsoft moved away from metaverse-first ambitions as well, retiring the Immersive space (3D) view in Teams meetings, Microsoft Mesh on the web, and Mesh apps for PC and Quest in December 2025. The services were replaced by immersive events in Teams, a narrower offering built around specific workplace functions rather than a broad metaverse vision.
The wider retreat matters because it suggests the problem was not limited to Meta’s execution. Another major tech company also stepped back from standalone immersive environments and turned to more limited, use-specific tools instead. A larger pattern appeared from that shift: grand metaverse narratives gave way to practical features, embedded tools, and industry-specific uses. In that sense, the metaverse has not entirely disappeared, but it did lose its status as the next internet.
Metaverse’s afterlife in the age of AI
The metaverse’s decline does not necessarily imply a complete disappearance. What seems more likely is that parts of it will survive in altered form, detached from the sweeping vision that once surrounded it. Rather than continuing as a standalone digital world meant to transform social life, the metaverse may persist as a set of tools, features, and immersive functions folded into other technologies.
AI is likely to play a role in that transition. It can lower the cost of building virtual environments, speed up avatar creation, automate elements of interaction design, and make digital spaces more responsive. In this sense, AI may succeed where the original metaverse struggled, not by reviving the same vision, but by making parts of it more practical and easier to use.
Such a distinction is important because it shifts the focus from ideology to utility. The metaverse was once marketed as the next stage of the internet, yet its more durable applications now appear to lie in narrower settings where immersion serves a clear purpose. Training, design, simulation, and industrial planning are all contexts in which virtual environments can offer measurable value without becoming a universal social destination.
What might survive, then, is not the metaverse as it was originally imagined, but a smaller set of immersive capabilities embedded in gaming, education, industry, and workplace systems. Avatars, digital agents, simulations, and adaptive virtual spaces may all remain relevant, but as components rather than the foundation of a new social order.
The shift also helps explain the political lesson of the metaverse’s collapse. Large-scale investment, aggressive branding, and executive certainty were not enough to secure public legitimacy. Meta tried to present the metaverse as an inevitable horizon, yet users did not embrace it, markets did not reward it in proportion to the spending, and the company itself eventually narrowed the project it had once elevated into a corporate identity.
In that sense, the metaverse matters even in failure. Its retreat does not simply mark the end of an overhyped product cycle. It also reveals the limits of top-down corporate future-making, especially when private platforms try to define the direction of collective digital life before society has decided whether such a future is either desirable or necessary.
Conclusion
The metaverse failed because it asked too much of users, promised too much to investors, and concentrated too much power in a platform model that never convincingly earned public trust. Meta’s retreat from Horizon Worlds makes that failure difficult to ignore, while Microsoft’s parallel narrowing of immersive ambitions suggests the problem extended beyond one company’s misjudgement.
Immersive VR technologies are unlikely to vanish, and AI may even extend some of their useful applications. Yet the metaverse as a universal social future has largely collapsed under the combined weight of weak adoption, unsustainable economics, and an overly corporate vision of digital life. What remains is not the next internet, but a reminder that the future cannot simply be declared into existence by the companies most eager to own it.
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Meta has unveiled its first prescription-optimised AI glasses, expanding its wearable line with Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 models for everyday vision correction. The launch targets users who already rely on prescription eyewear, offering a more integrated and comfortable experience.
The range includes Blayzer Optics and Scriber Optics with adjustable hinges, nose pads, and temple tips for a better fit. Pre-orders begin at $499 in the United States via Meta and Ray-Ban platforms, with wider availability in optical retailers and select global markets from 14 April.
Alongside the hardware launch, Meta is introducing new frame and lens colour combinations across its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta collections.
Additional AI-driven features are also rolling out, including hands-free nutrition tracking, WhatsApp message summaries, and improved on-device recall capabilities designed to enhance everyday communication.
Further software updates extend functionality with discreet handwriting input, in-lens navigation across US cities, and expanded media recording tools. The company positions its AI glasses as a multifunctional platform combining vision correction, connectivity, and real-time assistance.
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TRIBE v2 is a next-generation AI model introduced by Meta, designed to simulate how the human brain responds to complex stimuli such as images, sounds and language. The system functions as a digital twin of neural activity, enabling high-speed and high-resolution predictions of brain responses.
Built on data from over 700 volunteers, TRIBE v2 analyses fMRI recordings to predict brain responses to media such as videos, podcasts, and text. The model improves significantly on previous approaches, offering higher accuracy and the ability to generalise across new subjects, tasks, and languages.
Meta says the system could enable brain studies without human participants in every experiment, potentially accelerating research into neurological conditions. The approach may also support future AI development by incorporating principles derived from neuroscience.
Alongside the launch, Meta has released a research paper, model code, and interactive demo under a non-commercial licence to encourage wider exploration and collaboration in neuroscience and AI research.
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Meta has introduced a range of new features for WhatsApp aimed at improving usability and integrating AI tools into everyday communication, rather than focusing solely on basic messaging functions.
The updates are designed to help users manage conversations more efficiently while enhancing flexibility across devices and accounts.
Among the key additions is improved storage management, allowing WhatsApp users to remove large files directly from chats without deleting entire conversations. The platform now also supports seamless chat transfers between iOS and Android devices, simplifying phone switching.
In addition, iOS users can manage two accounts on a single device, enabling clearer separation between personal and professional communication.
Meta AI can now assist with photo editing within chats, enabling users to modify images before sending them, while writing tools generate suggested responses based on conversation context.
These tools aim to enhance communication efficiency while maintaining user privacy, rather than compromising message security.
The update also introduces improvements to user expression, including smarter sticker suggestions based on typed emojis.
By combining practical tools with AI-driven features, Meta aims to position WhatsApp as a more versatile communication platform that supports both everyday messaging and advanced digital interactions.
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A coalition of civil society and industry groups has urged the European Commission to enforce the Digital Markets Act more rigorously, warning that major tech firms continue to exploit compliance gaps. The appeal centres on concerns over data use and online advertising practices.
Organisations including noyb, Check My Ads, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties argue that current models fail to offer users genuine choice. Critics say consent mechanisms tied to payment or tracking undermine the intent of the EU digital rules.
The letter against Meta calls for clearer standards, including equal options for personalised and non-personalised advertising, as well as stricter limits on design practices that influence user decisions. Campaigners also want stronger coordination between regulators to ensure consistent enforcement.
The push reflects wider frustration among European organisations, with several recent letters demanding faster action against dominant platforms. Observers warn that delayed enforcement risks weakening the credibility of the EU digital regulation.
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A jury has found Meta Platforms liable for misleading consumers and endangering children in a landmark case brought by the New Mexico Department of Justice. The verdict marks the first successful trial by a US state against a major tech firm over child safety concerns.
Jurors awarded civil penalties totalling 375 million dollars after finding violations of consumer protection law. The case focused on claims that platform design choices exposed young users to harmful and exploitative content.
Evidence presented in court included internal company documents and testimony suggesting awareness of risks to children. Allegations centred on failures to prevent exploitation, as well as features linked to addictive behaviour and exposure to harmful material.
Further proceedings in the US are scheduled, with authorities seeking additional penalties and mandated changes to platform safety measures. Proposed actions include stronger age verification and improved protections for minors online.
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