AI News August 2025: recent AI news that affects your small business.
AI moderation cancels Facebook and Instagram accounts
Recently a long time friend got out of jail, Facebook jail. She doesn’t post nasty images, use language or sell dubious drugs as cures. Facebook provided no specific reason (example this post with this picture was the problem), Meta disappeared her entire account for 10 days.
My friend is the tip of the iceberg. Recently CBC news reported that a solopreneur cooking business had their Instagram account shuttered, again no reason. And more importantly no one to contact. The business account, Home Cooking with Naj, was only restored when CBC asked Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to comment on why they closed the account. More on Najwa Cagnin and her struggle to get her Instagram account back here.
Who’s guilty here? Meta uses AI content moderation and it’s not working. Just one week before Najwa’s story broke, a teacher in Ontario finally won their fight to get their accounts back. AI moderation declared the teacher posted child porn. Again Meta only restored the account after CBC contacted them about the story.
The last time I wrote about Facebook jail, back in 2016, it was actually human content moderators that were shutting down business accounts. At that time Meta did not provide an easy method for a business owner to get their account back.
Last year Engadget reported how small claims court in the US became Meta’s customer service hotline. Meta continues to refuse to provide a quick easy way for folks to get their accounts back. Other companies like LinkedIn do provide a way.
My friend used her new freedom on Facebook to tell her friends and followers to find her posts on her WordPress site. She refuses to give more traffic to Meta.
If you’re a small business owner do you have a way to inform your followers/clients/customers outside of social media? Does your whole sales funnel depend on Meta?
AI and web site SEO
If you follow SEO news or pay someone to boost your business SEO, you know the Google focus on AI has changed SEO.
Recently I was on a webinar about what’s working with SEO in 2025 and the focus was on how to make your content easier to be scraped in the hope that it will boost your ranking. No, really. Write content with cute summaries at the top, list of answers that AI bots can scrape and turn into top summary and maybe, maybe, your site will rank higher on Google.
Google and and other AIholes are desperate to reduce their chat hallucinations and want you to write it for them.
Case in point. Recently, after using ChatGPT, a U.S. man swapped salt for sodium bromide, had his own hallucinations which led to a three week hospital stay. Even if he had health insurance (we hope, we pray), it would have been much cheaper if he had called a real live nutritionist for help with his diet concerns. Should nutritionists write their blogs so ChatGPT doesn’t make those mistakes? Why should anyone help AI bots take away their clients?
We know AI search summaries cut into traffic to real web sites. Canadian experts raised the alarm about AI summaries affect on accuracy and traffic to real news web sites.
Further, because of AI, more people have stopped using Google as a search engine. I get clients who complain about how bad Google search is now and what are the alternatives? I usually recommend Kagi, in depth review from Ars Technica here.
UK Government asks people to delete old emails
No, really. Because of the severe drought in the United Kingdom, the government published a list of things to do to save water and deleting your old emails and photos to reduce strain on data centres was on the list.
Data centres chug water. The average Chat-GPT session to write a 100 word email consumes about 500 millilitres of water.
Instead of asking folks to delete their old emails and pictures, perhaps UK politicians could start looking into the environmental cost of AI software companies.
The AI use that really gets me is the transcription services. Dragon Naturally Speaking, now owned by Nuance, has been around since 1980s and provides computer voice transcription. We didn’t need AI to provide voice transcription at a higher cost to the environment.
When looking at implementing AI software or otherwise twisting your business around AI, take the hype with lots of salt. Sodium chloride not sodium bromide.
