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Singapore Threatens Meta With Fines Over Facebook Impersonation Scams

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The Singapore government has given Meta Platforms until the end of this month to introduce stronger safeguards, including facial recognition technology, to combat impersonation scams on Facebook—or face steep fines.

The Ministry of Home Affairs said on Thursday that Meta could be fined up to S$1 million ($776,639) if it fails to comply “without reasonable excuse.” After the deadline, Meta would face additional penalties of S$100,000 per day until measures are implemented.

The directive, issued Wednesday, follows a surge in scams involving fake ads, accounts, and business pages impersonating government officials. Authorities say incidents of such scams rose sharply between June 2024 and June 2025.

A Meta spokesperson said impersonation and deceptive ads are against company policy, adding: “We remove these when detected.” The spokesperson noted that Meta uses specialized systems to catch fraudulent accounts and “celeb-bait” ads, and works with law enforcement to pursue legal action against scammers.

Earlier this month, Singapore police ordered Meta to step up anti-scam measures on Facebook, but that directive did not include a compliance deadline.

Officials said this is the first enforcement order under Singapore’s Online Criminal Harms Act, which came into effect in February 2024. The law gives regulators new powers to hold platforms accountable for online scams and harmful digital activity.

“While Meta has taken steps to address impersonation scams globally, including in Singapore, the Ministry of Home Affairs and police remain concerned by the prevalence of such scams locally,” the ministry said.

TSMC and Chip Design Firms Use AI to Cut Energy Use in Next-Gen Chips

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The chips powering artificial intelligence consume enormous amounts of electricity, but Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, unveiled new efforts on Wednesday to make them more efficient—by using AI-powered software in the chip design process.

Speaking at a Silicon Valley conference, TSMC showcased strategies it says could boost the energy efficiency of AI chips by as much as 10 times.

Nvidia’s flagship AI servers, for instance, can draw up to 1,200 watts under heavy workloads—comparable to the electricity used by 1,000 U.S. homes if run continuously. TSMC’s approach centers on a new generation of chiplet-based designs, where multiple smaller chips made with different technologies are packaged together to function as a single processor.

To enable these designs, chipmakers are increasingly turning to AI-driven software tools. Partners like Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys debuted new products on Wednesday, built in close collaboration with TSMC. These tools have shown they can outperform human engineers in solving complex design problems—and in a fraction of the time.

“That helps to max out TSMC technology’s capability, and we find this is very useful,” said Jim Chang, deputy director of TSMC’s 3DIC Methodology Group. “This thing runs five minutes while our designer needs to work for two days.”

Still, physical constraints remain. As chips scale up, moving data on and off them via traditional electrical connections is reaching its limits. New approaches, such as optical interconnects to transfer information between chips, must be made reliable enough for deployment in massive data centers.

“Really, this is not an engineering problem,” said Kaushik Veeraraghavan, an engineer at Meta’s infrastructure group during his keynote. “It’s a fundamental physical problem.”

Instagram Reaches 3 Billion Monthly Active Users, Zuckerberg Says

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that Instagram has grown to 3 billion monthly active users, cementing its status as one of the world’s most widely used social media platforms.

The last time Meta disclosed Instagram’s user numbers was in 2022, when the app surpassed 2 billion monthly users.

Meta, then known as Facebook, acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion—a deal that was initially met with skepticism since the app was focused mainly on photo sharing and generated little revenue. Since then, Instagram has become a central part of Meta’s business, with analysts estimating it could contribute over half of the company’s U.S. ad revenue this year.

A key driver of Instagram’s rapid growth has been Reels, the short-form video feature launched in 2020, which directly competes with TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, reported earlier this month that it has more than 1 billion monthly users worldwide, underscoring the intense competition in the short-video market.