TL;DR: Meta may stop funding the Oversight Board—its independent content moderation body—Platformer reported yesterday. The news caps a year in which Meta has been systematically dismantling much of its moderation infrastructure and increasingly handing trust and safety to AI and the community itself.

What happened: Meta told members of the board that it may stop funding it after 2028, following significant budget cuts this year and more expected in the next few years, according to Platformer. The two sides are reportedly negotiating a compromise, including a possible full split in which the board would serve other platforms (and have to find its own funding). Platformer says that “eliminating all funding” isn’t Meta’s “preferred option,” but its sources say it’s “unclear what changes the board would have to make to secure additional funding.”

What is the Oversight Board?: The board launched in 2020 as a kind of supreme court for content moderation: an independent body empowered to make binding decisions about content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and advise Meta on policy. Mark Zuckerberg pitched the idea amid intense criticism over the company's handling of hate speech and misinformation. The board was seeded with $130 million, and Meta added another $150 million in 2022.

Since 2020, the board has reviewed more than 200 cases spanning hate speech enforcement, political expression in conflict zones, religious and cultural speech disputes, and more.

More speech, less oversight: The board’s potential defunding comes as Meta makes a broader retreat on dedicated moderation, including shifting more of it onto AI. In January 2025, Meta also scrapped its third-party fact-checking program in favor of crowdsourced Community Notes—which produced just 900 published notes in its first six months in the US, compared to roughly 35 million posts professional fact-checkers labeled in the EU during the same period. The board warned last month that Community Notes "are not a proper substitute" for fact-checking and could "pose significant human rights risks" if expanded globally.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has apparently been taking a more hands-on approach to content decisions—per texts released last week as part of the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI lawsuit, he texted Musk offering to take down content "doxxing or threatening" DOGE employees.

Bottom line: The Oversight Board was built to limit any one person's power over what billions of people can say online. If it loses its funding, Meta will have shed its fact-checkers, its hate speech safeguards, and its only independent oversight body in roughly a year. —WK

How to enable Lockdown Mode on your iPhone

Last Friday, we included a story in Open Tabs about Apple’s Lockdown Mode—and after months of hearing about the security feature, it finally convinced me to enable it on my iPhone. (It was also our most-clicked story that day, so you can find it at the bottom of today’s newsletter.)

Since Lockdown Mode is all about security, it does restrict some features—but the peace of mind it’s given me over the last week makes it worth it. Here’s how to enable it and the restrictions that could affect you the most.

The setup: Open your Settings → go to Privacy & Security → scroll down to Lockdown Mode → turn Lockdown Mode On (this will force a restart of your phone).

What you need to know: The Lockdown Mode screen in your settings explains the restrictions that will be put in place if you enable it, but here are the most relevant ones:

• Most message attachments are blocked. I’ve noticed that links friends share don’t unfurl into a preview—it’s just the URL. I then have to copy and paste them into my browser to view them, which takes a few seconds. This could actually be great for those people in your life who don’t check to see if a URL is legit before clicking on it and get scammed as a result.
• Incoming FaceTime calls can be blocked. Note that this is only for “people you have not previously called” within the last 30 days. But it did mean I missed FaceTime calls from two of my best friends at Wired on Wednesday when they both unexpectedly tried to call the group chat (we usually do Zoom calls). To be fair, I could have FaceTimed them back. I chose to screenshot the notification and send it to them instead (they laughed).
• Changes to photo sharing. Apple says that “location will be excluded by default when sharing photos,” which I can only imagine is a good thing. It also notes that Shared Albums will be removed from Photos—so save the photos you want before turning it on.

There are a few more restrictions, but the only one that has affected my day-to-day life is the links in messages. You can read the full list here. —SM

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Jonathan has lived through two world wars, the Titanic disaster, the invention of the telephone, and almost all of his 193 years of life on the island where Napoleon died in exile—only to get exploited by a crypto bro in the year 2026. The giant tortoise—who’s also the oldest known land animal in the world—became the unwitting mascot of a crypto scam when someone with a fake X account impersonating his longtime vet announced his death. The person reminisced on Jonathan’s love of bananas and his “quiet wisdom” before hawking a Solana memecoin.

In a clear lack of wisdom, major news outlets including the BBC and USA Today ran the X post as fact before anyone actually checked up on Jonathan. The news reports were enough to cause a minor panic on Saint Helena, where Jonathan resides, and the island’s governor trudged outside in the middle of the night to confirm that the near-bicentenarian was still kicking. (Seychelles giant tortoises typically live for about 150 years.)

Elder abuse aside, this tortoise scam combines two categories of online content that often make you go “awww” in very different ways: cute animals (self-explanatory) and crypto (you really shouldn’t have put your last dollar into that memecoin). —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5