One of the most thrilling videos I’ve seen in 2026 is the footage shot on a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses by a shirtless man who ran onto the field during the Super Bowl. You watch as he yelps with glee, zigging and zagging away from officials as they try to catch him, until eventually one of the New England Patriots tackles him.
(Business Insider does not condone any form of potentially illegal disruption of sports games, even when it’s very amusing!)
This notable act of social deviancy is the perfect thing to capture on Meta Ray-Bans. You couldn’t do this with a phone. It made me wonder why I don’t see more viral videos shot this way. What, exactly, are all those people doing with their Meta glasses?
Meta’s glasses have been around in different iterations for about five years. Since then, the lineup has grown, with Meta adding more styles and features, including AI tools. Although Meta doesn’t break out sales numbers in its earnings reports, EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s owner and Meta’s partner in the project, has said that sales of the glasses tripled in 2025 and sold over a million units in 2024.
I set out to see what kinds of things people were posting on social media using their Meta glasses. And what I found — at least on my Instagram Reels and TikTok — is that one of the main uses is a lot of trolling.
Video after video was some version of a teenage boy or early 20-something man going into a big box store and saying weird things to the employees or customers, pranking fellow students in high school hallways, or initiating some awkward and admittedly often funny interaction with strangers on the street. A recurring theme was attempting to hit on women in public while wearing the glasses (usually unsuccessfully).
A mini trend in Meta glasses pranks involves putting fart spray (???) onto a scented candle and then walking around a Walmart or other store, asking customers for help deciding between two candle scents (one being fart-tainted). One example of the video genre I watched was captioned “getting kicked out of stores *Part 3*.” The creator’s other videos were mostly prank videos featuring Meta glasses on big-box store workers.
The fart candle prank is apparently now widely known enough online that there’s meta-commentary on it: videos about the dangers of being asked to smell a candle by someone in blinking glasses.
One TikTok I saw was called “planting the world’s biggest turd prank,” where the glasses-wearing person puts a novelty-sized fake poop into the bathroom of a fast-food restaurant and then tells the cashier to come look at it. The cashier is reluctant but laughs when he sees the obviously fake prop. Is this comedy? Sure. This, at least, was pretty clearly a prank with some prop comedy and a clear punchline, not merely harassing low-wage workers.
Certainly, people are using Meta glasses for more than just stupidity. I’m sure there are people who take videos of their kids or dogs or skate tricks and never post them to Instagram — very nice and wholesome stuff. Someone told me they bought pairs for the groomsmen to wear at their wedding, which sounds like a lovely idea.
The big thing most critics of these glasses worry about is privacy when someone is wearing a minimally detectable camera device. The glasses have an LED that switches on to signal that they’re filming, but it is fairly unobtrusive and requires others to know what the light means. In most of the videos I watched, when someone wearing glasses talks to strangers or cashiers, there doesn’t seem to be any awareness on the other people’s part that they’re being filmed. There’s a noticeable way people in videos tend to react when they know they’re being filmed with a phone; that stiffening recognition is absent in the Meta Ray-Ban videos.
The glasses have always been slightly controversial, in part thanks to Meta’s less-than-sterling reputation for privacy. Fight for the Future, an internet privacy advocacy group, has created flyers for restaurants and other establishments to post in their windows, stating they don’t allow Meta Ray-Bans inside.
In February, The New York Times reported that the company was considering adding facial recognition to its glasses. In an internal memo on the topic, a Meta employee wrote that the timing to launch might be perfect: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.“
These glasses have raised some reasonable concerns about what our society deems acceptable behavior and about privacy expectations in public spaces. Being legally allowed to film in public spaces is an important part of our freedom of speech and expression. Like other types of unpleasant speech, the right to do it doesn’t mean people can’t think you’re a jerk for doing it. Being annoying in a Walmart isn’t a crime (if it were, I’d be making a lot more citizen’s arrests), but we as a society can agree that it sucks and that you shouldn’t do it, and also perhaps that Meta offering a product that helps erode social decorum is not great.
“People are responsible for following the law, whether or not they’re wearing Ray-Ban Metas. Unlike smartphones, our glasses have an LED light that activates whenever someone captures content, so it’s clear the device is recording,” Tracy Clayton, a spokesperson for Meta, told Business Insider. “And as with any recording device, people shouldn’t use them for engaging in harmful activities like harassment, infringing on privacy rights, or capturing sensitive information.”
Prank videos have been a popular genre on YouTube for a long time, and hidden camera prank shows have been a television staple since the 1980s. Meta glasses are lowering the barrier to entry. A well-executed hidden camera prank is hilarious, but a lot of these are crummy ones that are more harassment than humor.
In terms of potential global harms, tricking someone into sniffing a fart candle is pretty mild. But the fact that there’s just so much of this kind of crummy prank content made with Meta glasses gives me pause. If this is what ultimately turns out to be the biggest use of these glasses, well, it’s bad, but not in the way most skeptics of the glasses initially imagined.
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