← Daily Tech Headlines
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Want to get this show ad free? Head to DailyTechNews Show.com subscribe to find out how. These are the daily tech headlines for Thursday, March 26, 2026 I'm Rob Dunwood. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google's YouTube negligent for failing to warn users about platform dangers, awarding $6 million in total damages to a young woman identified as KGM who claimed addiction to Instagram and yout cause severe mental health harm. This verdict is considered a Big Tobacco moment for the social media industry. The trial, which included CEO testimony and focused on design flaws like recommendation algorithms to bypass section 230, serves as a bellwether case for similar social media addiction lawsuits. Adding to Meta's recent $375 million child safety fine in New Mexico, Meta has initiated significant workforce reductions across multiple divisions, including Reality Labs, recruiting sales, Facebook and global operations to help finance massive AI infrastructure investments, such as a planned $600 billion data center spend by 2028. This shift illustrates a move away from the company's failed Metaverse bets toward an increased focus on AI, even as SE filings reveal a new performance stock based compensation system that could grant six top executives, including the CTO and CFO, windfalls of up to $2.7 billion each. A bipartisan effort led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley is urging the Energy Information Administration to mandate comprehensive annual energy disclosures for data centers, arguing this data is essential for grid planning and preventing rising electricity costs for consumers. This push goes beyond the EIA's voluntary pilot program and follows previous legislative attempts by lawmakers like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rick Blumenthal to address the impact of data center energy consumption and related cost increase increases. Apple is investigating an additional $400 million by 2030 in its American Manufacturing program, collaborating with new suppliers like Bosch, Cirrus Logic, TDK and Qnity Electronics. This is part of a larger $600 billion commitment to domestically produced critical components. The partnerships will focus on US Manufacturing of sensing chips, semiconductor process technologies for features like Face ID sensors and crucial semiconductor and AI materials, boosting US Electronics and semiconductor capabilities and jobs. European lawmakers voted to delay key compliance deadlines of the EU AI act, pushing back requirements for high risk AI systems until December 2027 and watermarking AI generated content until November 2026, all of which were originally set for this August. The vote also included a supported ban on Nunify apps following public outcry over sexualized deepfakes. Though AI systems with effective safety measures are exempt. This vote extends a period of uncertainty for European businesses, not final, as Parliament must now negotiate the changes with the European Council before the original August deadline. French AI company Mistral has launched VoxTral TTS, a new open source text to speech model that supports nine languages and competes with ElevenLabs and OpenAI. Designed for low cost, high performance enterprise use, it can adapt a custom voice from under five seconds of audio, capture subtle human speech characteristics and boast a real time performance with a 90 millisecond time to first audio. This release, combined with Mistral's transcription models, positions the company to offer a complete multimodal voice platform aimed at broad enterprise adoption through its open source nature and strong customization features. Nintendo is changing its long standing pricing model for first party games starting in May with a new Physical Switch, two exclusive titles costing more than their digital versions. The initial example is Yoshi and the Mysterious book, priced at $70 for the physical copy and 60 for the digital, a difference the company attributes to the varying cost of production and distribution. The move comes after previous UNIFOR pricing and ongoing issues with the physical game key card system, which necessitates a physical game card for digital download and limited expensive physical cartridge storage. WhatsApp is rolling out several new features including an updated writing help function that uses meta AI to assist users in drafting, rephrasing, proofreading and adjusting the tone of messages, aiming to be the in app alternative to tools like ChatGPT. Other updates include better storage management by allowing users to delete large files within chats, the ability to edit photos using meta AI directly in chats, simplified chat history, migration between iOS and Android emoji based sticker suggestions, and the expansion of multi account support to iOS users. And finally, the European Union has launched a Digital Services act investigation into Snapchat, suspecting the platform inadequately protects minors from child grooming and illegal content sales. The EU is concerned about Snapchat's safety standards, including default settings for minors, content moderation, age assurance and the reporting of dark patterns. Penalties could be up to 6 of Snap's global annual sales. Snapchat is cooperating and reinforcing its safety measures. For more analysis of the tech news of the day, subscribe to dailytechnewshow. Com and if you enjoy the show, remember to tell a friend to check us out. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time.