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  • ‘It’s an especially bad time’: Tech layoffs are hitting ethics and safety teams | CNN Business

    ‘It’s an especially bad time’: Tech layoffs are hitting ethics and safety teams | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, as online platforms began facing greater scrutiny for their impacts on users, elections and society, many tech firms started investing in safeguards.

    Big Tech companies brought on employees focused on election safety, misinformation and online extremism. Some also formed ethical AI teams and invested in oversight groups. These teams helped guide new safety features and policies. But over the past few months, large tech companies have slashed tens of thousands of jobs, and some of those same teams are seeing staff reductions.

    Twitter eliminated teams focused on security, public policy and human rights issues when Elon Musk took over last year. More recently, Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, laid off some employees focused on responsible AI and other trust and safety work, according to former employees and public social media posts. Microsoft cut a key team focused on ethical AI product development. And Facebook-parent Meta suggested that it might cut staff working in non-technical roles as part of its latest round of layoffs.

    Meta, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, hired “many leading experts in areas outside engineering.” Now, he said, the company will aim to return “to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles,” as part of cuts set to take place in the coming months.

    The wave of cuts has raised questions among some inside and outside the industry about Silicon Valley’s commitment to providing extensive guardrails and user protections at a time when content moderation and misinformation remain challenging problems to solve. Some point to Musk’s draconian cuts at Twitter as a pivot point for the industry.

    “Twitter making the first move provided cover for them,” said Katie Paul, director of the online safety research group the Tech Transparency Project. (Twitter, which also cut much of its public relations team, did not respond to a request for comment.)

    To complicate matters, these cuts come as tech giants are rapidly rolling out transformative new technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality — both of which have sparked concerns about their potential impacts on users.

    “They’re in a super, super tight race to the top for AI and I think they probably don’t want teams slowing them down,” said Jevin West, associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. But “it’s an especially bad time to be getting rid of these teams when we’re on the cusp of some pretty transformative, kind of scary technologies.”

    “If you had the ability to go back and place these teams at the advent of social media, we’d probably be a little bit better off,” West said. “We’re at a similar moment right now with generative AI and these chatbots.”

    When Musk laid off thousands of Twitter employees following his takeover last fall, it included staffers focused on everything from security and site reliability to public policy and human rights issues. Since then, former employees, including ex-head of site integrity Yoel Roth — not to mention users and outside experts — have expressed concerns that Twitter’s cuts could undermine its ability to handle content moderation.

    Months after Musk’s initial moves, some former employees at Twitch, another popular social platform, are now worried about the impacts recent layoffs there could have on its ability to combat hate speech and harassment and to address emerging concerns from AI.

    One former Twitch employee affected by the layoffs and who previously worked on safety issues said the company had recently boosted its outsourcing capacity for addressing reports of violative content.

    “With that outsourcing, I feel like they had this comfort level that they could cut some of the trust and safety team, but Twitch is very unique,” the former employee said. “It is truly live streaming, there is no post-production on uploads, so there is a ton of community engagement that needs to happen in real time.”

    Such outsourced teams, as well as automated technology that helps platforms enforce their rules, also aren’t as useful for proactive thinking about what a company’s safety policies should be.

    “You’re never going to stop having to be reactive to things, but we had started to really plan, move away from the reactive and really be much more proactive, and changing our policies out, making sure that they read better to our community,” the employee told CNN, citing efforts like the launch of Twitch’s online safety center and its Safety Advisory Council.

    Another former Twitch employee, who like the first spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of putting their severance at risk, told CNN that cutting back on responsible AI work, despite the fact that it wasn’t a direct revenue driver, could be bad for business in the long run.

    “Problems are going to come up, especially now that AI is becoming part of the mainstream conversation,” they said. “Safety, security and ethical issues are going to become more prevalent, so this is actually high time that companies should invest.”

    Twitch declined to comment for this story beyond its blog post announcing layoffs. In that post, Twitch noted that users rely on the company to “give you the tools you need to build your communities, stream your passions safely, and make money doing what you love” and that “we take this responsibility incredibly seriously.”

    Microsoft also raised some alarms earlier this month when it reportedly cut a key team focused on ethical AI product development as part of its mass layoffs. Former employees of the Microsoft team told The Verge that the Ethics and Society AI team was responsible for helping to translate the company’s responsible AI principles for employees developing products.

    In a statement to CNN, Microsoft said the team “played a key role” in developing its responsible AI policies and practices, adding that its efforts have been ongoing since 2017. The company stressed that even with the cuts, “we have hundreds of people working on these issues across the company, including net new, dedicated responsible AI teams that have since been established and grown significantly during this time.”

    Meta, maybe more than any other company, embodied the post-2016 shift toward greater safety measures and more thoughtful policies. It invested heavily in content moderation, public policy and an oversight board to weigh in on tricky content issues to address rising concerns about its platform.

    But Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that Meta will undergo a second round of layoffs is raising questions about the fate of some of that work. Zuckerberg hinted that non-technical roles would take a hit and said non-engineering experts help “build better products, but with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our company remains primarily technologists.”

    Many of the cuts have yet to take place, meaning their impact, if any, may not be felt for months. And Zuckerberg said in his blog post announcing the layoffs that Meta “will make sure we continue to meet all our critical and legal obligations as we find ways to operate more efficiently.”

    Still, “if it’s claiming that they’re going to focus on technology, it would be great if they would be more transparent about what teams they are letting go of,” Paul said. “I suspect that there’s a lack of transparency, because it’s teams that deal with safety and security.”

    Meta declined to comment for this story or answer questions about the details of its cuts beyond pointing CNN to Zuckerberg’s blog post.

    Paul said Meta’s emphasis on technology won’t necessarily solve its ongoing issues. Research from the Tech Transparency Project last year found that Facebook’s technology created dozens of pages for terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. According to the organization’s report, when a user listed a terrorist group on their profile or “checked in” to a terrorist group, a page for the group was automatically generated, although Facebook says it bans content from designated terrorist groups.

    “The technology that’s supposed to be removing this content is actually creating it,” Paul said.

    At the time the Tech Transparency Project report was published in September, Meta said in a comment that, “When these kinds of shell pages are auto-generated there is no owner or admin, and limited activity. As we said at the end of last year, we addressed an issue that auto-generated shell pages and we’re continuing to review.”

    In some cases, tech firms may feel emboldened to rethink investments in these teams by a lack of new laws. In the United States, lawmakers have imposed few new regulations, despite what West described as “a lot of political theater” in repeatedly calling out companies’ safety failures.

    Tech leaders may also be grappling with the fact that even as they built up their trust and safety teams in recent years, their reputation problems haven’t really abated.

    “All they keep getting is criticized,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook who now runs tech consulting firm Anchor Change. “I’m not saying they should get a pat on the back … but there comes a point in time where I think Mark [Zuckerberg] and other CEOs are like, is this worth the investment?”

    While tech companies must balance their growth with the current economic conditions, Harbath said, “sometimes technologists think that they know the right things to do, they want to disrupt things, and aren’t always as open to hearing from outside voices who aren’t technologists.”

    “You need that right balance to make sure you’re not stifling innovation, but making sure that you’re aware of the implications of what it is that you’re building,” she said. “We won’t know until we see how things continue to operate moving forward, but my hope is that they at least continue to think about that.”

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  • Meta’s Threads app rolls out first big batch of updates | CNN Business

    Meta’s Threads app rolls out first big batch of updates | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Meta’s Twitter rival app Threads on Tuesday rolled out its first major batch of updates since its launch two weeks ago as it works to maintain momentum.

    The new features include a translation button and a tab on users’ activity feed dedicated to showing who’s followed them, according to a post from Cameron Roth, a software engineer working on Threads.

    All new features should be available to iOS Threads users by the end of Tuesday, Roth said.

    Threads users have been clamoring for updates since its launch. The new app attracted over 100 million user sign-ups in less than a week, but it still lacks many of the features popular on Twitter and other platforms, including direct messaging and a robust search function.

    User engagement on Threads has dipped since its first week, according to web traffic analysis firm Similarweb. And Meta executives have teased plans to improve the app in hopes of getting users to keep coming back.

    “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily … The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Threads post Monday.

    Tuesday’s updates also include the ability to subscribe and receive notifications from accounts a user doesn’t follow and a “+” button that lets users follow new accounts from the replies on a post, as well as bug fixes and other improvements.

    Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who is overseeing Threads, has also hinted at plans to introduce a desktop version of the app as well as a feed of only accounts a user follows and an edit button.

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  • Arkansas governor signs sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage | CNN Business

    Arkansas governor signs sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed a sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage, in the latest example of states taking more aggressive steps intended to protect teens online.

    But even as Sanders signed the bill into law on Wednesday afternoon, the legislation appeared to contain vast loopholes and exemptions benefiting companies that lobbied on the bill and raising questions about how much of the industry it truly covers.

    The legislation, known as the Social Media Safety Act and taking effect in September, is aimed at giving parents more control over their kids’ social media usage, according to lawmakers. It defines social media companies as any online forum that lets users create public profiles and interact with each other through digital content.

    It requires companies that operate those services to verify the ages of all new users and, if the users are under 18 years old, to obtain a parent’s consent before allowing them to create an account. To perform the age checks, the law relies on third-party companies to verify users’ personal information, such as a driver’s license or photo ID.

    “While social media can be a great tool and a wonderful resource, it can have a massive negative impact on our kids,” Sanders said at a press conference before signing the bill.

    Utah finalized a similar law last month, raising concerns among some users and advocacy groups that the legislation could make user data less secure, internet access less private and infringe upon younger users’ basic rights.

    The push by states to legislate on social media comes after years of mounting scrutiny of the industry and claims that it has harmed users’ well-being and mental health, particularly among teens.

    Despite its seemingly universal scope, however, the new law, also known as SB396, includes numerous carveouts for certain types of digital services and, in some cases, individual companies. And although its sponsors have said the law is specifically meant to apply to certain platforms, including TikTok, parts of the legislative language appear to result in the exact opposite effect.

    In the final days of negotiation over the bill, Arkansas lawmakers approved an amendment that created several categorical exemptions from the age verification requirements. Media companies that “exclusively” offer subscription content; social media platforms that permit users to “generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment”; and companies that “exclusively offer” video gaming-focused social networking features were exempted.

    Another amendment carved out companies that sell cloud storage services, business cybersecurity services or educational technology and that simultaneously derive less than 25% of their total revenue from running a social media platform.

    Sen. Tyler Dees, a lead co-sponsor of the legislation, explained in remarks on the Arkansas senate floor on April 6 that the exemptions and tweaks to the bill, some of which he said were made in consultation with Apple, Meta and Google, were intended to shield non-social media services from the bill’s age requirements and to focus attention on new accounts created by children, not existing adult accounts.

    “There’s other services that Google offers … like cloud storage, et cetera,” Dees said. “So that’s really the intent of carving out — like LinkedIn, that is a social – I’m sorry, that is a business networking site, and so that’s the intent of those bills.”

    Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is apparently exempt from SB396 under a provision that carves out companies that provide “career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services.”

    Other lawmakers have questioned whether the legislation — which has now become law — exempts a giant of the social media industry: YouTube, whose auto-play features and algorithmic recommendation engine have been accused of promoting extremism and radicalizing viewers.

    The confusion over YouTube appears to stem from the carveout for businesses that offer cloud storage and that make less than 25% of their revenue from social media.

    What is unclear is whether YouTube is subject to SB396 because it is a distinct company within Google whose revenue comes almost entirely from operating a social media platform, or whether it is not covered because YouTube is a part of Google and Google is exempt because it derives only a small share of its revenues from YouTube.

    In response to questions by CNN, Dees said SB396 targets platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but omitted any mention of Google and declined to answer whether YouTube specifically would be covered by the law.

    “The purpose of this bill was to empower parents and protect kids from social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat,” Dees said in a statement. “We worked with stakeholders to ensure that email, text messaging, video streaming, and networking websites were not covered by the bill.”

    In remarks at Wednesday’s bill signing, Sanders told reporters that Google and Amazon are exempted from the law, implying that YouTube will not be subject to the age verification requirements imposed on other major social media sites.

    Meanwhile, Dees’ statement appeared to contradict the language in SB396 that purports to exempt any company that “allows a user to generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative” — content that can be commonly found on TikTok, Snapchat and the other social media platforms Deese named.

    According to Meta spokesperson, “We want teens to be safe online. We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including tools that let parents and teens work together to limit the amount of time teens spend on Instagram, and age-verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences.”

    Meta “automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram, we’ve further restricted the options advertisers have to reach teens, as well as the information we use to show ads to teens… and we don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders,” according to the spokesperson, who added: “We’ll continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues.”

    Spokespeople for Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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  • How Elon Musk upended Twitter and his own reputation in 6 months as CEO | CNN Business

    How Elon Musk upended Twitter and his own reputation in 6 months as CEO | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    When Elon Musk first agreed to buy Twitter, he promised to make the company “better than ever,” with greater transparency, fewer bots, a stronger business and more of what he called “free speech.”

    But six months after Musk took control of Twitter, the future of the company and the platform have never been less certain.

    After acquiring the social media platform for $44 billion in late October, Musk reportedly now values Twitter at around $20 billion — and some who track the company believe even that estimate is likely high. Musk repeatedly warned that Twitter could be at risk of filing for bankruptcy only to claim he had brought it back from the brink thanks to his slashing costs, both by laying off 80% of Twitter’s staff and allegedly by failing to pay some of its bills, according to multiple lawsuits. But it’s not clear just how and when Musk might return Twitter to growth.

    He has antagonized journalists and news outlets that have long been central to the platform’s success, overseen policy changes that threaten to make Twitter less safe or reliable, made the platform less transparent to researchers and scared away many top advertisers. Musk’s primary plan to grow Twitter’s business through an overhauled subscription strategy has resulted in much chaos but only a limited number of actual subscriptions.

    In the process, Musk has also upended his own reputation. Once known by much of the public primarily for his innovative efforts to launch rockets and build electric cars, Musk has instead spent much of the past six months in the headlines for controversial policy and feature changes at Twitter, draconian cuts to staff resulting in frequent service disruptions, and briefly banning several prominent journalists. He’s also tweeted a long list of eccentric remarks from his personal Twitter account, including sharing conspiracy theories and publicly mocking a Twitter worker with a disability who was unsure whether he’d been laid off.

    “If he had done nothing except cut costs, then Twitter would have been okay,” said Leslie Miley, a former Twitter engineering manager who started its product safety and security team and left the company in 2015. He has since held roles at Google, Microsoft and the Obama Foundation. “If you had just let everyone go, treated them with respect, and just let the service run for two years, you probably would be okay.”

    Now, though, Miley said he expects Twitter will “eventually go down the road of MySpace.”

    “It’s going to take a little bit longer … [but] I think Twitter is on its way to irrelevance,” he said, “there is no strategy to acquire or retain users because you are offering them no value.”

    Twitter, which has slashed much of its public relations team under Musk, responded to CNN’s request for comment on this story with the auto-reply from its press email that it has used for weeks: a poop emoji.

    For years, what differentiated Twitter from other social platforms was that it served as a central hub for real-time news. It was a place for ordinary people to read and even engage in conversation with celebrities, business leaders and other newsmakers.

    Many of Musk’s recent moves at the platform threaten to undermine that purpose, not to mention the larger information ecosystem — and it’s not clear the efforts will improve the company’s business.

    “Twitter has never been perfect, it had a lot of problems but it was critical global infrastructure for information that Elon Musk is now systematically, frankly, vandalizing,” former Twitter chair of global news Vivian Schiller told CNN in a recent interview.

    Most recently, Musk removed the legacy blue check marks that verified the identities of prominent users, saying he would instead make the checks available only to those who pay $8 per month for Twitter Blue in the interest of “treating everyone equally.”

    “There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities,” Musk said in a tweet earlier this month.

    But the move may make it easier for bad actors to impersonate high-profile people and harder for users to trust the veracity and authenticity of information on the platform. What’s more, Musk then decided to sponsor the blue checks for certain celebrities, including Stephen King and LeBron James, in effect creating exactly the “different standard” for famous users he’d professed to want to avoid.

    Now, Musk says content from verified users will be promoted on the platform, potentially making it harder for users who can’t afford a subscription, or simply don’t want to pay Musk for one, to find an audience on the platform. And the new paid verification system won’t necessarily rid the platform of bots, an issue Musk spent months railing on while trying to get out of the acquisition deal last year, according to Filippo Menczer, a computer science professor at Indiana University and director of the Observatory on Social Media.

    “You can create fake accounts and pay $8 [for a blue check] … so if you are a well-funded bad actor, you can do more damage now than you could before,” Menczer said. “And if you are a reliable source and you’re not well-funded, your information will not be as visible as before.”

    Menczer added that the result could be “less free speech, because you’re drowning out the speech of regular people [with speech] by people who either have the technical skills or the money to manipulate the system.”

    Twitter’s move to charge users of its API will also make it harder for researchers to identify and warn the platform about inauthentic activity, Menczer said, and could disrupt other positive uses of the platform that contributed to its reputation as a news hub. Weather agencies, for example, have warned that the change could make it harder for them to release automated emergency weather alerts.

    Any social network lives or dies based on its ability to retain and attract users — and there’s real reason for Twitter to be worried.

    A number of users, celebrities and media organizations have said they plan to leave Twitter over Musk’s recent policy changes — which often appear to be made on a whim without any real principles.

    NPR, BBC and CBC left Twitter after opposing a controversial new “government-funded media” label that they say was misleading. CenterLink, a global nonprofit that represents hundreds of centers providing services to LGBTQ communities, said it would no longer use Twitter after the platform removed protections for transgender users from its hateful conduct policy. And some high-profile users, such as bullying activist Monica Lewinsky, have threatened to exit the platform over the blue check change, now that they may be at greater risk of impersonation on Twitter.

    There remain few alternatives that offer similar features and scale to Twitter, but a growing list of upstart competitors has emerged since Musk’s takeover. At least one large rival, Facebook-parent Meta, has also confirmed it’s working on a service that sounds a lot like Twitter.

    “Almost everything he said he was going to do, he has screwed up in any number of ways,” Miley said. “If it weren’t so damaging to people and organizations who have depended upon the platform, it would be funny. But it’s not actually funny because it has degraded people’s ability to communicate effectively.”

    All of the chaos has made it difficult to convince advertisers, which previously made up 90% of Twitter’s revenue, to rejoin the platform, after many halted spending in the wake of Musk’s takeover over concerns about increased hate speech, as well as confusion about layoffs and the platform’s future direction.

    Just 43% of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers as of September — the month before Musk’s takeover — were still advertising on the platform in April, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

    Musk, for his part, has said that Twitter’s usage has increased since his takeover and that advertisers are steadily returning to the platform. But because he took the company private, he is not obligated to make financial disclosures and followers of the company are left to take him at his word.

    Musk built his reputation by overhauling Tesla, helping to launch a widespread shift away from gas cars to electric vehicles and growing SpaceX into a space transport juggernaut. Now, he appears to be attempting a similar overhaul at Twitter — upending the tried-and-true digital advertising business in favor of a subscription model that no other social media platform has yet been able to find large scale success with.

    “I give him some credit for trying a different business model, I think the business model based on user data is quite abusive,” said Luigi Zingales, professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, although Musk has also attempted to improve Twitter’s targeted advertising business.

    Some other tech companies have followed his lead in some places. Facebook-parent Meta copied Twitter by launching a paid verification option. And Meta, along with a number of other tech companies, have undergone multiple rounds of cost-cutting since last fall. Twitter appears to have given cover for some of these ideas, and other firms’ somewhat more principled approaches made them look better by comparison.

    For Twitter and Musk, the stakes for success are high: Musk’s relationships with banks and investors for future endeavors could hinge in part on his performance at the social media firm, which he took on billions of dollars in debt to purchase. Banks “will sit down and say, what kind of cred does this guy have? Will we find him making these shoot-from-the-lip sort of dictates that, in fact, throw our money down a hole?” said Columbia Business School management professor William Klepper.

    Any change to Musk’s reputation from his time leading Twitter could also ultimately have ripple effects for his broader business empire, causing potential investors, recruits and customers to think twice about betting on one of his companies. Tesla

    (TSLA)     shareholders recently complained to the company’s board that Musk appears “overcommitted.”

    “His reputation has been diminished significantly with Twitter … and once you lose it, it’s very difficult to recover,” Klepper said. “It would be a good opportunity for [Musk] to rethink whether or not … he’s really leadership material.”

    Musk in December pledged to step down as Twitter CEO after millions of users voted in favor of his exit in a poll he posted to the platform. But for now, he remains “Chief Twit.”

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  • Meta sells Giphy at a significant loss after UK breakup order | CNN Business

    Meta sells Giphy at a significant loss after UK breakup order | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Stock-photo website Shutterstock on Tuesday said it will acquire Giphy and its online repository of animated images for $53 million, after UK antitrust regulators forced Meta to spin off the company last year.

    The value of the deal is sharply lower than the $315 million Meta was widely reported to have paid to acquire Giphy in 2020.

    UK officials had alleged that Meta’s acquisition would reduce competition in advertising and social media, and an appeals court upheld that decision last year, prompting Meta to say it would sell Giphy to comply with the UK’s breakup order.

    The deal will add GIFs and reaction stickers to Shutterstock’s digital content library while expanding Shutterstock’s access to Giphy’s 1.7 billion users, the company said in Tuesday’s announcement.

    The transaction is expected to close in June.

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  • Malaysia to take legal action against Meta over ‘undesirable’ content | CNN Business

    Malaysia to take legal action against Meta over ‘undesirable’ content | CNN Business

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    Malaysia said Friday it would take legal action against Facebook parent company Meta for failing to remove “undesirable” posts, the strongest measure the country has taken to date over such content.

    Last year’s closely fought national election has led to a rise in ethnic tensions, and since coming to power in November, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration has vowed to curb what it calls provocative posts that touch on race and religion.

    Facebook

    (FB)     has recently been “plagued by” a significant volume of undesirable content relating to race, royalty, religion, defamation, impersonation, online gambling and scam advertisements, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said in a statement.

    It also said Meta had failed to take sufficient action despite the body’s repeated requests and that legal action was necessary to promote accountability for cybersecurity and protect consumers.

    Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The commission also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what legal action might be taken.

    Race and religion are thorny issues in Malaysia, which has a majority of Muslim ethnic Malays alongside significant ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indian minorities.

    Commentary on the country’s revered royals is also a sensitive issue, and negative remarks toward them can be tried under sedition laws.

    The action against Facebook comes just weeks ahead of regional elections in six states that are expected to pit Anwar’s multi-ethnic coalition against a conservative Malay Muslim alliance.

    Facebook is Malaysia’s biggest social media platform, with an estimated 60% of its population of 33 million having a registered account.

    Globally, big social media firms that include Meta, Google’s

    (GOOGL)     YouTube, and TikTok are often under regulatory scrutiny over content posted on their platforms.

    Some Southeast Asian governments have frequently requested that content be taken down.

    In 2020, Vietnam threatened to shut down Facebook in the country if it did not bow to government pressure to censor more local political content on its platform. The authorities said last year that social media platforms operating in Vietnam removed more than 3,200 posts and videos in the first quarter that contained false information and violated the country’s law.

    In Indonesia in 2019, Facebook took down hundreds of local accounts, pages and groups linked to a fake news syndicate.

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  • Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as X | CNN Business

    Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as X | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In a radical rebranding, Twitter owner Elon Musk has replaced Twitter’s iconic bird logo with X.

    Musk made the shock announcement of his plans early Sunday. By Monday morning US time, he tweeted that X.com now points to Twitter.com.

    “Interim X logo goes live later today,” he wrote, shortly before sharing a photo of Twitter’s headquarters lit up by a giant new X.

    The Twitter website now features the same logo, while the familiar blue bird is gone.

    Previously, Musk said he was bidding “adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

    Twitter

    (TWTR)    , founded in 2006, has used its vivid, globally recognized blue bird emblem for more than a decade.

    The renaming could be seen as something of a brand overhaul “Hail Mary” for the company: Musk in recent months has repeatedly warned that Twitter, facing steep losses in ad revenue, was on the edge of bankruptcy.

    Increasing the pressure, earlier this month rival social media platform Threads launched from Facebook

    (FB)     parent Meta. It surpassed 100 million user sign-ups in its first week.

    Twitter had 238 million active users prior to being taken private by Musk in October 2022.

    One of the world’s richest men, Musk was once best known for his innovative efforts through companies SpaceX and Tesla

    (TSLA)     to launch rockets and build electric cars.

    Now, many of the headlines he makes are for his eccentric remarks on his personal Twitter account – often sharing conspiracy theories and getting into public spats on the social media platform.

    Musk overhauled the site after acquiring it for $44 billion in late October, then followed with mass layoffs, disputes over millions of dollars allegedly owed in severance and Musk’s note to employees that remaining at the company would mean “working long hours at high intensity.” He wrote: “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

    The upheaval prompted organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press and GLAAD, to pressure brands to rethink advertising on Twitter.

    The groups pointed to the mass layoffs as a key factor in their thinking, citing fears that Musk’s cuts would make Twitter’s election-integrity policies effectively unenforceable, even if they technically remain active.

    Musk also began overseeing controversial policy changes which led to frequent service disruptions at Twitter and upended his own reputation in the process.

    In June, Musk named Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal marketing executive, CEO of the company.

    She commented on the name change on Twitter Sunday afternoon: “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”

    As the new venture begins, it faces challenges. Musk recently disclosed that the platform still has a negative cash flow due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt loads.

    Criticizing the exit, or pause, of such Twitter advertisers as General Mills

    (GIS)    , Macy’s

    (M)     and some car companies that compete with Tesla, Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and said he wanted to buy Twitter to bolster users’ ability to speak freely on the platform.

    Musk explained his approach to free speech by saying: “Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

    He added that Twitter would “be very reluctant to delete things” and that the platform would aim to allow all legal speech. Many users have worried that could mean a rise in hate speech.

    Meanwhile, the initial frenzy around rival Threads appears to have come back to earth, especially as it has been plagued with spam and lacks several user-friendly features Twitter, or, now X, offers.

    Adam Mosseri, who is overseeing the Threads launch for Meta, has hinted at plans to add features such as a desktop version of the app, a feed of only accounts a user follows and an edit button.

    Its ability to draw advertising support is, as yet, unproven.

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  • Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

    Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    In less than 48 hours, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads has surpassed 70 million sign-ups, upended the social media landscape and appears to have rattled Twitter enough that it is now threatening legal action against Meta.

    But even as users signed up for Threads in droves, with some clearly eager to flee the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the sudden success of Meta’s app could raise a new set of concerns.

    Meta has long been criticized for its market dominance, and for allegedly trying to choke off competition by copying and killing rival applications. Now, some competition experts and even some Threads users worry that if the new app’s traction continues, it may simply lead to the accumulation of even more power and dominance for Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    “The prospect of total monopoly by Meta, yikes,” wrote one user. “It’s a real problem for society when a few dozen people and companies own every single thing so that no alternative paradigms can exist that they don’t co-opt from the cradle,” replied another.

    Twitter had always been much smaller than Meta’s platforms, but it had an outsized influence in tech, media and politics. As Twitter faltered under Musk, though, a cottage industry emerged of smaller apps trying to capture some of its magic. Now more than any of them, Meta seems best positioned to claim the crown.

    Threads’ blockbuster launch this week highlights the uncomfortable reality of the modern digital economy: To potentially beat some of the biggest players in the industry, you might have to be a giant yourself.

    The overnight success of Threads is a testament both to the dissatisfaction with Musk’s ownership of Twitter and to the unique power and reach of one of Meta’s most important properties: Instagram.

    Instagram has more than two billion users, far more than the 238 million users Twitter reported having in the months before Musk took over. When new users sign up for Threads, which they do using an Instagram account, the app prompts them to follow all of their existing Instagram contacts with a single tap. It’s optional, but is easy to accept, and it takes a conscious decision to decline.

    By promoting Threads through Instagram, and by sharing Instagram user data with Threads to let people instantly recreate their social networks, Meta has significantly greased the onboarding process. That frictionless experience has allowed Threads to leapfrog what’s known in the industry as the “cold start” problem, in which a new platform struggles to gain new users because there are no other users there to attract them.

    Thanks to the Instagram integration, “that biggest problem, the chicken-egg problem, has been solved from the jump,” Reddit co-founder and venture investor Alexis Ohanian said in a video Thursday (posted, naturally, on Threads).

    That Threads appeared to clear that hurdle easily, Ohanian said, makes him “bullish” on the new app.

    But that same innovation that made signing up so many users so quickly may raise competition concerns, particularly in Europe where new antitrust rules for digital platforms are set to go into effect in a matter of months.

    “From a competition perspective this can be problematic because Meta can use it to leverage its market power and raise barriers to entry, as other rivals would not have the customer base Meta has via Instagram,” said Agustin Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the Brussels-based consumer advocacy organization BEUC.

    Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), “digital gatekeepers” — a term that’s expected to cover Meta and/or its subsidiaries — will be prohibited from combining a user’s data from multiple platforms without consent, Reyna said. Another restriction forbids requiring users to sign up for one platform as a condition of using another.

    Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri appeared to acknowledge those issues this week in an interview with The Verge. Threads won’t be launching in the EU for now, he said, because of “complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year” — a statement The Verge suggested was a reference to the DMA.

    The DMA was passed specifically to deal with the antitrust concerns raised by large tech platforms. That Threads apparently cannot (yet) comply with rules designed to protect competition underscores uncertainty about the app’s potential competitive impact.

    Meta’s approach to Threads could also revive longstanding criticisms about the company’s alleged practice of copying and killing rivals, particularly as Twitter has warned Meta it may sue over claims of trade secret theft (an allegation Meta denies).

    The issue isn’t limited to the realm of social media. As the world races to develop artificial intelligence, Threads represents a huge new opportunity for Meta to gather training data for its own AI technology, in a way that could help it catch up to industry leaders such as OpenAI and Google. That could complicate any attempt at a comprehensive analysis of what Threads means for competition in tech.

    Part of what makes the debate so complicated is Threads’ seemingly very real threat to Twitter.

    If Threads puts pressure on Twitter to improve its service, that is a form of competition between apps, said Geoffrey Manne, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based International Center for Law and Economics.

    But, he added, if it leads to a concentration of power in the social media industry more broadly, it could mean a reduction in competition overall. It all depends on how you define the market.

    “I’m inclined to say it does both simultaneously, and the ultimate consequences aren’t so clear,” Manne said.

    Rather than viewing it through the lens of a social media market, one helpful way to look at the issue is from the perspective of the advertising market, he said. It’s possible that once Threads introduces advertising — which Zuckerberg has said won’t happen until the app has increased to significant scale — Threads simply reinforces Meta’s advertising market power, Manne said. That could lead to further antitrust scrutiny for Meta even if the question about competition in social media is ambiguous.

    Jeff Blattner, a former DOJ antitrust official, said it can only benefit consumers to have Threads as a rival to Twitter.

    “Two platforms run by maniac billionaires are better than one,” he wrote on Threads — though if Threads is so successful as to effectively knock out Twitter altogether, then in some ways the original question about Meta’s dominance will still stand.

    Threads has one thing going for it that may nip any competition concerns in the bud: A commitment to integrate with the same open protocols used by other distributed social media alternatives, such as Mastodon.

    That would give users the option to migrate their accounts, along with all their follower data intact, to a rival like Mastodon that isn’t controlled by Meta.

    While that interoperability isn’t available yet, Mosseri has repeatedly highlighted it as a priority on his to-do list.

    When and if it happens, that could be a significant step. What may appear now as an audience grab by Meta could someday wind up being how millions of people were onboarded to a massive, decentralized social networking infrastructure that is not controlled by any single company, individual or organization.

    “This is why we think interoperability requirements are so important,” said Charlotte Slaiman, a competition expert at the Washington-based consumer group Public Knowledge. If users could port their entire social graph from one rival to another whenever they wanted, she said, “we could have more fair competition based on the quality of the product, not just incumbency advantage.”

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  • Twitter’s rebrand is the next stage in Elon Musk’s vision for the company. But does anyone want it? | CNN Business

    Twitter’s rebrand is the next stage in Elon Musk’s vision for the company. But does anyone want it? | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk’s move over the weekend to rebrand Twitter and replace its iconic bird logo with an X is just the latest step in his effort to make over the billionaire’s longtime favorite platform in his image.

    When Musk bought Twitter late last year, he laid out a vision for an “everything” app called X, where users could communicate, shop, consume entertainment and more. Last June — prior to his takeover — Musk told Twitter employees that the platform should be more like China’s WeChat, where he said users “basically live on” the app because “it’s so usable and helpful to daily life.”

    The vision for the rebrand may go all the way back to Musk’s creation of the original X.com in 1999, which Musk hoped would be an all-in-one financial platform and which eventually became PayPal.

    Despite Musk’s longstanding ambitions — and the heightened stakes since he shelled out $44 billion to purchase the social network — ditching Twitter’s branding in service of a future super app is a significant risk.

    Twitter still has a long way to go if Musk wants to build out the kind of services WeChat is known for — everything from ordering groceries and booking yoga classes to paying bills and chatting with friends. And that’s not to mention the financial and competitive challenges the company faces merely existing in its current form, let alone launching a massive expansion. It’s also not clear how much demand there is for such a super app outside of China, given that efforts by other platforms to simply sell users on added shopping features have been slow to take off.

    “While Musk’s vision is to turn ‘X’ into an ‘everything app,’ this takes time, money, and people -— three things that the company no longer has,” Mike Proulx, research director and vice president at Forrester, said in an investor note. By ditching Twitter’s name, Proulx added, Musk “will have singlehandedly wiped out over fifteen years of a brand name that has secured its place in our cultural lexicon,” leaving him to start fresh at a precarious time for the company.

    The X branding has already started taking over Twitter.

    Musk — who bought Twitter with a company called X Corp. — tweeted on Sunday that X.com now redirects to Twitter. (Musk reportedly bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017.)

    On Sunday night, the new stylized X logo was projected onto the company’s headquarters. And by Monday, the bird logo had been replaced by an X on Twitter’s website. Musk even told followers that tweets should instead be called “x’s.”

    On Sunday, CEO Linda Yaccarino seemed to confirm Musk’s vision for the company. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino said in a tweet.

    Walter Isaacson, the legendary tech journalist who has been shadowing Musk to write his biography, tweeted on Sunday that Musk told him even before the Twitter acquisition that he wanted to use the social platform to fulfill his original, decades-old vision for X.com. “I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” Musk texted Isaacson at 3:30 a.m. one morning last October, just ahead of his takeover, according to the writer.

    On Monday, Musk explained the move in a tweet saying, “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.”

    “In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” Musk said. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context.”

    (The rebrand also seems to be a continuation of a sort of obsession with the letter “X,” which also features in the name of one of Tesla’s cars, the Model X; the name of his rocket company, SpaceX; the name of his new artificial intelligence firm, xAI; and the name of two of his children, X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl.)

    In recent weeks, Twitter has quietly begun its effort to build out a payments business called Twitter Payments — the company was granted money transmitter licenses in four US states since last month, including Arizona and Michigan. Musk has discussed his desire to promote longer videos on Twitter. And he’s tried to shift Twitter’s business model away from advertising by allowing users to pay for verification, a strategy that has resulted in some chaos but only a limited number of actual subscriptions.

    Still, Musk faces obvious hurdles to turning Twitter into a fully-developed super app. Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has fired around 80% of its staff, scared away many of the advertisers that made up its core user base and frustrated many of its users with controversial policy decisions. And now, Twitter faces steep competition from Meta’s rival app Threads, which launched to stunning success, although its usage has petered off slightly in recent days.

    Musk last week also said that Twitter still has negative cash flow because of a 50% decline in ad revenue.

    Even if Musk does add new features to Twitter, many US tech platforms have struggled to succeed in imitating WeChat. Deloitte said in a report published last year that Western markets are unlikely to see “a single, dominant super-app like WeChat in the near term” because the services such apps would aim to bundle together, such as digital payments and ride hailing, already “have too many well-established players.”

    A 2019 effort by the social media giant then known as Facebook to create its own digital currency and payments system that the company said would make it easier to buy things online officially flopped last year following intense regulatory scrutiny. And both TikTok and Instagram have reportedly scaled back their ambitions to incorporate e-commerce onto their platforms after their shopping features failed to gain significant traction with users.

    And until Musk rolls out significant changes to the platform, observers of the company say ditching Twitter’s well-known brand is a risky move.

    “To rebrand without significant new features seems like a desperate attempt for attention,” especially in the wake of Meta’s launch of Threads, said Joshua White, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University. “This is akin to buying Coke and changing the bottle and name without changing the formula — likely a mistake.”

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  • Should parents decide what their kids do online? These states think so | CNN Business

    Should parents decide what their kids do online? These states think so | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In the future, when teenagers want to sign up for an account on Facebook or Instagram, they may first need to ask their parent or guardian to give their consent to the social media companies.

    That, at least, is the vision emerging from a growing number of states introducing — and in some cases passing — legislation intended to protect kids online.

    For years, US lawmakers have called for new safeguards to address concerns about social platforms leading younger users down harmful rabbit holes, enabling new forms of bullying and harassment and adding to what’s been described as a teen mental health crisis.

    Now, in the absence of federal legislation, states are taking action, and raising some alarms in the process. The governors of Arkansas and Utah recently signed controversial bills into law that require social media companies to conduct age verification for all state residents and to obtain consent from guardians for minors before they join a platform. Lawmakers in Connecticut and Ohio are also working to pass similar legislation.

    On the surface, providing more guardrails for teens is a step forward that some parents may welcome after years of worrying about the potential harms kids face on social media. But some users, digital rights advocates and child safety experts say the wave of new state legislation risks undermining privacy for teens and adults, puts too much burden on parents and raises serious questions about enforcement.

    Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy for nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNN he worries about government interference where “the state is telling families how to raise their children” and said it could “trample on the rights of every resident.”

    “Requiring people to get government approval by sharing their private identification before accessing social media will harm everyone’s ability to speak out and share information, regardless of their age,” he added. “Young people should not be used as pawns to fight big tech, and we are disappointed that first Utah, and now Arkansas, are implementing such overbroad laws.”

    Parents have long worried about privacy risks from their kids using social media, but the state legislation raises a new set of privacy concerns, experts say.

    In Arkansas, for example, the law will rely on third-party companies to verify all users’ personal information, such as a driver’s license or photo ID. (The legislation in Arkansas also appeared to contain vast loopholes and exemptions benefiting companies, such as Google and presumably its subsidiary, YouTube, that lobbied on the bill.)

    The impact on privacy is even more stark for teens in some of these states. In addition to requiring parental consent, Utah’s law, for example, will give parents access to “content and interactions” on their teens’ accounts.

    Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a fellow at the NYU School of Law, said the bills are problematic because users in these states will no longer remain anonymous, which could lead to fewer people of all ages expressing themselves and seeking information online.

    He believes teens in the LGBTQ+ community will be most impacted by potentially “outing them to homophobic or transphobic parents and cutting them off from their digital community.”

    Lucy Ivey, an 18-year-old TikTok influencer who attends Utah Valley University, echoed those concerns.

    “With a new law like this, they may now be intimidated and discouraged by the legal hoops required to use social media out of fear of authority or their parents, or fear of losing their privacy at a time when teens are figuring out who they are,” Ivey told CNN when the Utah law passed.

    Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise, Speaker: Raising Kids in the Digital Age, argued teens need to learn how to function in online communities because that is the expectation both going into college and in their professional life.

    “Keeping them off online communities until, in some cases, when they’re finishing their first year of college — but can still have jobs or drive — is backward, if they can’t even have an Instagram or a Discord account where their mom isn’t reading every message.”

    Instead, she believes teens need better digital literacy in schools with a heightened social-emotional component.

    “Literacy should not just be ‘don’t look at pornography’ or ‘stay off bad sites’ or ‘don’t cyberbully;’ that’s so limited,” she said. “It should also be understanding how algorithms work, how teens can respond or what to do when feeling excluded, or if they’re feeling insecure. We need to help kids with all these things.”

    Heitner also said the bills should focus on holding companies more accountable rather than putting the onus on parents to either keep teens off platforms or constantly feel the pressure to police or oversee their activity.

    “Not all parents are passionate, kind and supportive of their kids, and even the ones who are don’t have the capacity or time to deal with the 24/7 nature of social media,” said Heitner. “It’s an unfair burden.”

    Given that the bills are unprecedented, it’s unclear how exactly social media companies will adapt and enforce it.

    Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research, said minors could “steal” identities — such as from family members who don’t use social media — to create accounts that they can access and use without oversight. VPNs could also complicate matching IP addresses to the states of the users, he said.

    Facebook-parent Meta previously told CNN it has the same goals as parents and policymakers, but the company said it also wants young people to have safe, positive experiences online and keep its platforms accessible. It did not address how it would comply with the legislation.

    In a statement provided to CNN, a TikTok spokesperson said it is “committed to providing a safe and secure platform that supports the well-being of teens, and empowers parents with the tools and controls to safely navigate the digital experience.” Representatives from Snap did not respond to a request for comment.

    But even if legislative steps from Utah, Arkansas and other states prove to be flawed, Inouye says “these early efforts are at minimum bringing attention to these issues.”

    Heitner said she is most encouraged by a small but growing number of school districts and families, and one Pennsylvania county, which have filed lawsuits against social media companies for their alleged impact on teen mental health. “These efforts are more productive than putting this on parents,” she said.

    The Arkansas legislation is expected to take effect in September and Utah’s bill aims to be implemented next year. But bills like these could “face years of litigation and injunctions before they ever take effect,” Cahn said.

    “Hopefully Congress will act before then to implement real protections for all Americans,” he said.

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  • FTC says Meta should be barred from monetizing data from younger users | CNN Business

    FTC says Meta should be barred from monetizing data from younger users | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday accused Facebook-parent Meta of violating its landmark $5 billion privacy settlement and called for toughening up restrictions on the company, after alleging Meta has improperly shared user data with third parties and failed to protect children as it has promised.

    The proposal to update the binding 2020 settlement with Meta marks a new front in the FTC’s long-running battle with the social media company, which has included multiple lawsuits aimed at breaking up the tech giant or preventing it from growing larger.

    The FTC said Meta should be banned from monetizing data it collects from younger users. It added that the company should be barred from releasing any new features or products until a third-party auditor determines the company’s privacy policies do enough to protect users. It also called for new limitations on how Meta can use facial recognition technology.

    If approved, the sweeping proposal could threaten the future of Meta’s business, including its expansion into virtual reality.

    In a statement on Wednesday, Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the FTC proposal “a political stunt” and vowed to contest the effort.

    “Despite three years of continual engagement with the FTC around our agreement, they provided no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory,” Stone said. “FTC Chair Lina Khan’s insistence on using any measure – however baseless – to antagonize American business has reached a new low.”

    The FTC proposal comes as policymakers at all levels of government have increasingly blamed social media for furthering a mental health crisis among young people, prompting calls for strict regulations on how tech platforms can use the personal information of users under 18, target them with automated recommendations or seek to boost their engagement in other ways. Many of those proposals have taken the form of broad-based legislation, but the FTC proposal would represent a novel approach by amending a past consent order in connection with a single company that influences more than a billion users.

    As part of the FTC’s call for changes, the agency said Meta had misled the public about its compliance with the historic settlement that resolved allegations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica data fiasco, as well as prior agreements with the agency.

    Meta had allowed personal information to leak to apps that users of the platform were no longer using, the FTC alleged. That data sharing, the FTC claimed, contrasted with Meta’s public statements about how it cuts off a third-party app’s access to Facebook users’ information if the users stop using the third-party app for 90 days.

    The FTC also alleged that multiple coding errors in a messaging app marketed to children, Messenger Kids, allowed users to connect to “unapproved contacts” in group video calls, and that the flaws went unresolved for weeks.

    Those flaws meant parents could not control who their kids were speaking to on the app, in contrast to claims by Meta that they could, according to the FTC.

    In addition to being a breach of Meta’s prior settlements, the alleged violations surrounding Messenger Kids also ran afoul of a federal children’s privacy law known as COPPA, the FTC said, because parents were not provided an opportunity to give Meta their consent before the company collected information on their kids.

    Meta will have 30 days to respond to the proposed findings and changes, the FTC said, before the commission votes to finalize them. The FTC can unilaterally approve updates to the settlement, but Meta would have the opportunity to appeal that move in federal court, according to an agency fact sheet.

    The FTC voted 3-0 to issue the proposed findings and changes, but one commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, questioned whether the agency has the authority to impose such sweeping restrictions on Meta in light of the alleged violations.

    In a statement, Bedoya said he was skeptical whether there was enough of a connection between Meta’s alleged harms and the proposed remedies to legally sustain a complete ban on monetizing the data of young users.

    “I look forward to hearing additional information and arguments and will consider these issues with an open mind,” Bedoya said.

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  • Meta’s business groups cut in latest round of layoffs | CNN Business

    Meta’s business groups cut in latest round of layoffs | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Facebook-parent Meta on Wednesday began cutting employees in its business groups as part of a previously announced round of layoffs, according to social media posts from impacted workers.

    Meta employees in operations, project management, marketing, policy, communications and risk analytics announced on LinkedIn Wednesday morning that they had been laid off.

    The company declined to confirm the reductions were underway, but a Meta spokesperson pointed CNN to the March blog post from CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing that the company would cut 10,000 employees this year, and that affected members of the business groups would be notified this month.

    Zuckerberg previously said the business groups would be the third and final major round of those layoffs. Laid off members of Meta’s technology and recruiting teams were notified in the past two months. Some smaller reductions may continue through the end of 2023, Zuckerberg said in March.

    The 10,000 job reductions mark the second significant wave of layoffs at Meta in recent months. The company said in November that it was eliminating approximately 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 jobs, in the single largest round of cuts in its history.

    In September, Meta reported a headcount of 87,314, per a securities filing. With the 11,000 job cuts announced in November and the 10,000 announced in March, Meta’s headcount will fall to around 66,000 — a total reduction of about 25% — assuming no additional hiring.

    Meta has said the layoffs are part of its “year of efficiency,” as the company attempts to recover from repeated revenue declines, heightened competition, concerns about user growth and big losses in its Reality Labs division amid its pivot to building the so-called metaverse. Zuckerberg has also taken responsibility for over-hiring earlier in the pandemic, when there was strong demand for the company’s products and online advertising, which dropped off somewhat once the world reopened.

    The turnaround strategy is showing early signs of success. Meta’s stock jumped last month after the company posted a 3% year-over-year revenue increase for the first three months of 2023, reversing a trend of three consecutive quarters of revenue declines. Still, profits declined by nearly a quarter compared to the same period in the prior year, and price per advertisement — an indicator of the health of the company’s core digital ad business — also decreased by 17% from the year prior.

    Zuckerberg said on an earnings call with analysts last month that when Meta started its “efficiency work” late last year, “our business wasn’t performing as well as I wanted, but now we’re increasingly doing this work from a position of strength.”

    But left in its wake are the thousands of employees affected by layoffs.

    “Finding work you care about and believe in and the right people to be in the trenches with is an incredible dream; it also makes moments like this incredibly difficult,” one employee affected by Wednesday’s layoffs said in a LinkedIn post. The employee called the cuts a “shock to the system.”

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  • First on CNN: Senators press Google, Meta and Twitter on whether their layoffs could imperil 2024 election | CNN Business

    First on CNN: Senators press Google, Meta and Twitter on whether their layoffs could imperil 2024 election | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Three US senators are pressing Facebook-parent Meta, Google-parent Alphabet and Twitter about whether their layoffs may have hindered the companies’ ability to fight the spread of misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections.

    In a letter to the companies dated Tuesday, the lawmakers warned that reported staff cuts to content moderation and other teams could make it harder for the companies to fulfill their commitments to election integrity.

    “This is particularly troubling given the emerging use of artificial intelligence to mislead voters,” wrote Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Vermont Democratic Sen. Peter Welch and Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by CNN.

    Since purchasing Twitter in October, Elon Musk has slashed headcount by more than 80%, in some cases eliminating entire teams.

    Alphabet announced plans to cut roughly 12,000 workers across product areas and regions earlier this year. And Meta has previously said it would eliminate about 21,000 jobs over two rounds of layoffs, hitting across teams devoted to policy, user experience and well-being, among others.

    “We remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community – including our efforts to prepare for elections around the world,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said in a statement to CNN about the letter.

    Alphabet and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The pullback at those companies has coincided with a broader industry retrenchment in the face of economic headwinds. Peers such as Microsoft and Amazon have also trimmed their workforces, while others have announced hiring freezes.

    But the social media companies are coming under greater scrutiny now in part due to their role facilitating the US electoral process.

    Tuesday’s letter asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino how each company is preparing for the 2024 elections and for mis- and disinformation surrounding the campaigns.

    To illustrate their concerns, the lawmakers pointed to recent changes at Alphabet-owned YouTube to allow the sharing of false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, along with what they described as content moderation “challenges” at Twitter since the layoffs.

    The letter, which seeks responses by July 10, also asked whether the companies may hire more content moderation employees or contractors ahead of the election, and how the platforms may be specifically preparing for the rise of AI-generated deepfakes in politics.

    Already, candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appear to have used fake, AI-generated images to attack their opponents, raising questions about the risks that artificial intelligence could pose for democracy.

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  • Elon Musk is the gift that keeps on giving to Mark Zuckerberg | CNN Business

    Elon Musk is the gift that keeps on giving to Mark Zuckerberg | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    At the start of last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.

    Revelations from hundreds of internal company documents, known as the Facebook Papers, had drawn sharp criticism from lawmakers, users and civil society groups in late 2021 and forced company executives to appear before Congress. Zuckerberg’s plan to rebrand Facebook as Meta and pivot to the so-called metaverse was met with broad skepticism. And the company’s core ad business was under significant pressure from privacy changes made by Apple.

    But then, the attention of lawmakers, media and the tech world writ large abruptly shifted to another tech billionaire: Elon Musk.

    Musk early last year criticized Twitter, then nearly joined its board, then agreed to buy the company before launching a monthslong and ultimately unsuccessful fight to get out of the deal. The saga, which only continued after Musk completed the deal and pushed through numerous controversial changes, often dominated news cycles. In the process, it seemed to make Twitter’s rivals look better managed and draw away critical attention that might otherwise have been focused on other tech giants, including Meta, as they went through painful layoffs and suffered declines on Wall Street.

    This week, however, Zuckerberg notched his biggest win from Musk yet. After years of trying and failing to capture Twitter’s audience with copycat features, Zuckerberg is now capitalizing on Twitter’s struggles with a new app called Threads. Meta’s Twitter clone launched this week to unprecedented success, despite Meta’s history of privacy violations and enabling election meddling, not to mention longstanding concerns that the company and Zuckerberg wield too much power over the social media market.

    The app’s overnight success was a direct result of the chaos under Musk’s leadership of Twitter since last October. During that time, he has managed to anger many of the platform’s users and advertisers with his erratic statements, mass layoffs and significant changes to Twitter’s policies. While Twitter users have lamented what Musk’s ownership has meant for the platform, it may be the best thing that could have happened for Zuckerberg.

    “Musk has done one thing after another to piss off his own user base,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School.

    Some early Threads users even commented on the strange nature of the situation — that they would be eager to join a social network run by one billionaire whose company has faced intense public criticism simply because they were so eager to get away from another.

    “It boggles the mind,” one user posted to Threads. “I boycotted Facebook years ago and when I heard about this I joined immediately.”

    “Never used [Facebook] nor [Instagram],” another user said, adding that they had to join Instagram for the first time to gain access to Threads. “Last thing I would have EVER expected was to use any platform of Zuckerberg’s.”

    And yet, by Friday, Zuckerberg said Threads had reached 70 million user signups — amassing a user base nearly a third of the size of Twitter’s in fewer than two days for a platform that could eventually help knock out one of Facebook’s chief rivals and give a boost to Meta’s struggling ad business.

    If Musk is a boon to Zuckerberg’s fortunes, he’s an unlikely one. Zuckerberg and Musk have often been at odds over the years.

    In 2018, in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk said he had deleted the Facebook pages for his companies Tesla and SpaceX because the platform “gives me the willies.” And later that year, he also deleted his Instagram account.

    More recently, Musk has claimed that Instagram “makes people depressed” and appeared to imply that Meta was complicit in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

    Zuckerberg has also thrown jabs at Musk, including after a SpaceX explosion accidentally blew up a satellite that was being used by Facebook, and in a critique of his stance on artificial intelligence during a 2017 Facebook Live broadcast.

    But earlier this year, Zuckerberg also complimented Musk’s leadership of Twitter. In a podcast interview last month, Zuckerberg said that “Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner … I think that those were generally good changes.”

    In some ways, Musk’s moves at Twitter may have given Zuckerberg and Meta — as well as other tech companies — cover to take similar actions without as much criticism. Meta announced it would eliminate more than 20,000 employees over two rounds of layoffs, marking the largest cuts in its history. But Meta came off looking responsible compared to Twitter’s mass layoffs by handling the cuts professionally and providing more robust severance.

    After Musk restored the account of former President Donald Trump following a two-year suspension that began after the January 6 attack, Twitter faced criticism from civil society civic? groups who called on advertisers to boycott the platform. But Meta, along with YouTube, followed suit several months later (although those platforms cited their own risk analyses, rather than Musk’s leadership, in explaining their decisions).

    The distraction and chaos of Musk’s Twitter takeover could hardly have come at a better time for Zuckerberg and Meta.

    The social media giant’s business had a brutal year — posting its first-ever quarterly revenue decline as a public company during the June quarter, and then again in each of the two remaining quarters of the year, as it struggled with a weak online advertising market while pouring billions into its plan for the metaverse. The company lost more than $600 billion in market value during 2022.

    Now, the launch of Threads marks a huge new opportunity for Meta and Zuckerberg. Threads could be a way of getting social media users to spend even more time on Meta’s apps, especially as Facebook increasingly struggles with the perception of being a has-been platform that’s less attractive to younger users.

    Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that he hopes to eventually have more than one billion users on Threads, far more than the 238 million active users on Twitter prior to Musk’s takeover.

    Although there are no ads on the platform yet, Threads could also ultimately supplement Meta’s core advertising business. Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who oversaw the Threads launch, told The Verge in an interview about the new platform this week that, “if we make something that lots of people love and keep using, we will, I’m sure, monetize it” through advertising.

    For Musk, losing Twitter users, or having its future growth hamstrung, thanks to Threads, could mean further harm to the $44 billion investment he made to buy the social media platform — and, perhaps more importantly, to his reputation as a genius with a knack for turning around troubled companies.

    Musk appears to be trying to push back against Zuckerberg’s turn of fortune. On Wednesday, a lawyer for Musk sent a letter to Meta threatening to sue the company over the rival app, accusing it of trade secret theft through the hiring of former Twitter employees. (Meta denied the charge.)

    The Twitter-Threads battle has raised the stakes for another fight: a cage fight that Musk and Zuckerberg have spent the past several weeks planning. Zuckerberg, a regular practitioner of Brazilian jiu jitsu, appears to have the upper hand.

    But whether or not the fight ends up going forward, Zuckerberg seems to have already won.

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  • Meta shuts down network of fake accounts that ‘signal a shift’ in China-based influence efforts | CNN Business

    Meta shuts down network of fake accounts that ‘signal a shift’ in China-based influence efforts | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Facebook’s parent company Meta announced Wednesday that it has taken down a network of more than 100 China-based accounts that posed as organizations in the US and Europe and pushed pro-Beijing talking points.

    The Facebook and Instagram accounts, which included a fictitious news organization and posed as a think tank, likely used deepfake images developed through artificial intelligence to make the fake accounts appear legitimate, Meta said.

    The network, which had more than 15,000 followers on Meta’s platforms, appears to have had some financial resources behind it. In one instance, the people behind the accounts called for protests in Budapest against George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and frequent target of right-wing groups, and posted on Twitter an offer to pay people to attend. The accounts also offered to pay freelance writers to contribute to at least one of its websites.

    The accounts were awash with pro-China commentary, including “warnings against boycotting the 2022 Beijing Olympics; allegations of US foreign policy in Africa,” and “claims of comfortable living conditions for Uyghurs in China,” Meta said in its report. The fake accounts also posted “negative commentary about Uyghur activists and critics of the Chinese state,” it said.

    Meta did not link the network to the Chinese government, instead saying it found links to individuals in China associated with a technology company. CNN has reached out to the company for comment. Meta regularly takes down covert influence campaigns and discloses information about them in quarterly reports.

    The takedowns “signal a shift in the nature” of China-based influence networks, as Chinese operatives embrace new tactics like setting up a front company, hiring freelance writers around the world and offering to recruit protesters, Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead, told reporters on Tuesday.

    While the networks are generally small and have struggled to build an audience, “they are experimenting with diverse tactics and that’s always something we want to keep an eye on,” Nimmo said. 

    The tactics are similar to those used by Russian operatives during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. Using fake personas and posing as representatives of US political and activist organizations, Russians successfully recruited unwitting Americans to take part in political stunts.

    Chinese operatives have in recent years “evolved their posture” from being concerned about being caught influencing US elections to seeing influence operations as another tool to project power, a US official told CNN.

    “We’re keeping a close eye” on the Chinese influence operations heading into the 2024 election, the official said.

    Indictments from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in 2018 detailed how disinformation from Russia were designed to exacerbate existing divisions in the United States.

    Ahead of the 2022 US midterm election, FBI officials expressed concern that Chinese operatives appeared to be engaging in “Russian-style influence activities” that stoke American divisions. Russian and Chinese government-affiliated operatives and organizations both promoted misinformation about the integrity of American elections that originated in the US during the midterm election season, FBI officials have said. 

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  • Meta is giving parents more visibility into who their teens are messaging on social media | CNN Business

    Meta is giving parents more visibility into who their teens are messaging on social media | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Meta is adding new safeguards and monitoring tools for teens across its social platforms: parental controls on Messenger, suggestions for teens to step away from Facebook after 20 minutes, and nudges urging young night-owl Instagrammers to stop scrolling.

    The features announced Tuesday come as Meta

    (META)     and other social media platforms face heightened pressure from lawmakers over the impact that their platforms have on younger users, who can be just 13 when they sign up for Meta

    (META)    ’s apps.

    Messenger, Meta’s instant-messaging app, is adding parental supervision tools for the first time that are similar to those that exist on Instagram already: Parents and guardians can see how much time their teens spend on the chat tool, view and receive updates on their contacts list, and get notified if their teen reports someone.

    Another new feature is the ability for parents and teens to have discussions directly through notifications if their accounts are synced up.

    “We heard from parents and teens about the value they’re seeing from how a two-way dialogue can foster and encourage discussions,” Diana Williams, who oversees product changes for youth and families at Meta, told CNN in an interview.

    On Facebook, Meta will start to nudge teen users to take time away from the app after 20 minutes.

    Instagram will add introduce a new nudge that suggests teens close Instagram if they’re scrolling Reels videos for too long during nighttime hours. The effort builds on existing Instagram features like Quiet Mode, which temporarily holds notifications and lets people know if you’re trying to focus.

    In addition, Instagram is testing a feature that limits how people interact with non-followers. Users must now send an invite to connect with someone if they’re not a follower, and they cannot call the recipient or send photos, videos or voice messages or make calls until the user accepts their request. The feature aims to cut down on unwanted content from strangers, particularly for women, the company said.

    It’s the latest in a series of new tools and guardrails for teens from Meta, following the release of leaked internal documents that found Instagram can negatively impact the mental health of its young users. Instagram, for example, has since introduced an educational hub for parents with resources, tips and articles from experts on user safety.

    The company said it’s also taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens and will actively nudge them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been dwelling on any type of content for too long.

    Few changes have been made to Facebook and Messenger until now. Facebook does, however, have a Safety Center that provides supervision tools and resources, such as articles and advice from leading experts.

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  • Meta takes aim at Twitter with new Threads app | CNN Business

    Meta takes aim at Twitter with new Threads app | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    The rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk has just kicked up a notch.

    Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has teased a new app that is set to take on Twitter by offering a rival space for real-time conversations online.

    The app is called Threads and it is expected to go live Thursday, according to a listing in the App Store. The app appears to have many similarities to Twitter — the App Store description emphasizes conversations, as well as the potential to build a following and connect with like-minded people.

    “Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” it reads.

    “Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”

    The move by Meta comes amid a fresh bout of turmoil at Twitter, which experienced an outage over the weekend, followed by an announcement that the site had imposed temporary limits on how many tweets its users are able to read while using the app.

    Musk, the platform’s billionaire owner, said these restrictions had been applied “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

    Commenting on the launch of Threads Monday, Musk tweeted: “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run,” parroting reported comments by Meta executives that appeared to take a jab at Musk’s erratic behavior.

    Since taking Twitter private in October, Musk has turned the social media platform on its head, alienating advertisers and some of its highest-profile users.

    He is now looking for ways to return the platform to growth. Twitter announced Monday that users would soon need to pay for TweetDeck, a tool that allows people to organize and easily monitor the accounts they follow.

    Twitter is also attempting to encroach on Meta’s domain.

    In May, Twitter added encrypted messaging and said calls would follow, developments that could allow the platform to compete with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, also owned by Meta.

    Musk and Zuckerberg’s rivalry could soon extend beyond business and into the ring. Last month, the two men discussed the possibility of a cage fight, with the Las Vegas arena that hosts the Ultimate Fighting Championship seemingly the favorite location for the match.

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  • Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name | CNN Business

    Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name | CNN Business

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    Reuters
     — 

    Billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated legally: companies including Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.

    X is so widely used and cited in trademarks that it is a candidate for legal challenges – and the company formerly known as Twitter could face its own issues defending its X brand in the future.

    “There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.

    Musk renamed social media network Twitter as X on Monday and unveiled a new logo for the social media platform, a stylized black-and-white version of the letter.

    Owners of trademarks – which protect things like brand names, logos and slogans that identify sources of goods – can claim infringement if other branding would cause consumer confusion. Remedies range from monetary damages to blocking use.

    Microsoft since 2003 has owned an X trademark related to communications about its Xbox video-game system. Meta Platforms – whose Threads platform is a new Twitter rival – owns a federal trademark registered in 2019 covering a blue-and-white letter “X” for fields including software and social media.

    Meta and Microsoft likely would not sue unless they feel threatened that Twitter’s X encroaches on brand equity they built in the letter, Gerben said.

    The three companies did not respond to requests for comment.

    Meta itself drew intellectual property challenges when it changed its name from Facebook. It faces trademark lawsuits filed last year by investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality company MetaX, and settled another over its new infinity-symbol logo.

    And if Musk succeeds in changing the name, others still could claim ‘X’ for themselves.

    “Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as ‘X’, Twitter’s protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo,” said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb.

    “The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow.”

    Insider reported earlier that Meta had an X trademark, and lawyer Ed Timberlake tweeted that Microsoft had one as well.

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  • Despite TikTok ban threat, influencers are flocking to a new app from its parent company | CNN Business

    Despite TikTok ban threat, influencers are flocking to a new app from its parent company | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.

    Multiple creators described the app as being like “if Pinterest and Instagram had a baby, with TikTok’s algorithm.” Some compared it to TikTok circa 2020 and encouraged other influencers to join the app before it grows. They also asked followers to share their Lemon8 usernames in the comments.

    As it turned out, the app wasn’t just a random alternative to TikTok. Lemon8 is a social media platform launched in the United States earlier this year by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance amid federal and state efforts to ban or restrict TikTok in the country over national security concerns.

    The similarities in the videos comparing the new service to Instagram and Pinterest, which were posted by both English and Spanish-speaking creators, raised questions about whether people were being paid to promote the new app on TikTok. But despite that speculation — and the mounting scrutiny on TikTok and ByteDance — a growing number of US users and influencers are now eagerly touting Lemon8, with its focus on photos and highly curated, informational or “aspirational” content.

    “We have to talk about TikTok’s new sister app,” a creator said in one such video.

    “I’ve seen a lot of bigger content creators that I love on it and promoting it on their Instagram stories, so I thought, ‘okay, it’s my time to hop on this bandwagon,’” said Melanie Cruz, who got her start creating content as a YouTube vlogger in high school around 2018. “I like that it’s something simple, it’s nothing too in your face … it’s not overwhelming.”

    Lemon8 has been downloaded just over one million times in the United States since it became available on US app stores in February, and had around half a million daily active US users last month, according to intelligence platform Apptopia.

    The early traction for Lemon8 hints at the whack-a-mole challenge lawmakers could face in reining in TikTok and other social media platforms. It also carries some hints of TikTok’s own rise, which was reportedly fueled in part by ByteDance spending heavily to advertise the service on rival platforms Facebook and Snapchat. This time, however, the best place to promote the next TikTok may be on TikTok itself.

    The New York Times reported last month that ByteDance had begun early marketing efforts for Lemon8 that included working with influencers. Now, some creators featured on Lemon8’s “for you” feed appear to be disclosing their work with the company using the hashtag #Lemon8Partner in their captions.

    A ByteDance company source said that Lemon8 is still in its early days and testing how to work with creators. They said ByteDance has not launched any formal marketing efforts for Lemon8, but in some cases has made deals to pay creators to post on the platform. However, they denied rumors that ByteDance had paid creators to promote the new app on TikTok.

    ByteDance has also recently listed open jobs for Lemon8 creator partnerships roles, according to postings viewed by CNN. “Lemon8 is a social media platform committed to building a diverse and inclusive community where people can discover new content and creators every day,” the job postings read.

    Lemon8’s photo-heavy focus marks a stark shift away from most of the major social apps that, following TikTok’s lead, have gone all-in on endlessly scrollable short-form videos in recent years.

    Lemon8’s homepage is a “for you” feed where users can scroll through content, similar to TikTok, but instead of videos, the feed is two columns of still images. When you click through to a post, it might be a single photo or a carousel of images. It’s also possible to post videos on the app, but they’re less popular.

    The app is heavily centered on beauty and lifestyle content — the “for you” page can be sorted into six categories including fashion, home and travel. Many of the posts feature lengthy captions, and users can also edit images to include text overlays. On top of similarities to Instagram and Pinterest, Lemon8 looks nearly identical to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu.

    Still, the app lacks some standard social platform features such as messaging and the option to tag other users in posts.

    A recent scroll through Lemon8’s “for you” page showed before-and-after photos of a botox treatment, a “no restrictions” day-long eating plan, book recommendations, black tie wedding attire tips and “10 recent girly Amazon buys I do NOT regret.”

    “It seems like people love it or hate it,” Madison Bravenec, a health coach and content creator, said of the app’s focus on aesthetics. But she added that the app’s targeted focus on certain types of content has made it easier to find a community that’s interested in the wellness content she likes to create, whereas the most popular posts on TikTok often have to appeal to a wider audience.

    Some creators say Lemon8 is filling a hole in the social media ecosystem that was left when Instagram moved to prioritize short-form video content in order to better compete with TikTok, frustrating many creators who joined the app for its original focus on photos.

    “We’re not videographers, we’re not the types of people who would like to change the ways we create content and communicate with others just because a platform is prioritizing one deliverable over the other,” said Can Ahtam, a professional photographer who joined Instagram more than a decade ago. “So all of us did feel the impact of reach being lower with the photos we were sharing [on Instagram].”

    Ahtam added: “If we were to compare them side-by-side right now, Lemon8 would have the upper hand in photos being shared.”

    Lemon8’s userbase remains a far cry from the 150 million users TikTok says it has in the United States.

    Still, in videos reviewing Lemon8, some creators have pondered whether the app could ultimately function as a replacement if TikTok were to get banned in the United States, preserving the content recommendation algorithm that helped make TikTok one of the country’s most popular apps and launched the careers of countless influencers.

    But if TikTok were to go down, Lemon8 would likely go with it, according to James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    “The concern is still the same, which is that ByteDance is a Chinese company subject to Chinese law,” Lewis said. “If it collects [users’ personal] information, then you’ve got the same problem.”

    TikTok, for its part, has said that its app does not pose a risk to US users, and that the Chinese government has never asked for US user data.

    The practical ramifications for creators of a TikTok (and, perhaps by extension, Lemon8) ban — if one were enacted — would still likely be months away, if not more. Lewis said he doesn’t expect any nationwide legislation to be passed before the end of this year, and it would almost certainly face legal challenges that could drag out its implementation if it did.

    By launching a new app even with TikTok in the spotlight, “ByteDance clearly doesn’t feel like they’re at risk,” Lewis said. And many creators say they’re not necessarily worried either.

    Even if TikTok and Lemon8 were banned, Cruz said, “I already have a following on all the other platforms.”

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  • Meta threatens to pull news content in California if bill to pay publishers passes | CNN Business

    Meta threatens to pull news content in California if bill to pay publishers passes | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, threatened to remove news from its social media sites in California if the state passes a bill requiring big tech companies to pay news outlets for their content.

    In a statement posted on Twitter, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, called California’s Journalism Preservation Act “a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.”

    “The bill fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves and that substantial consolidation in California’s local news industry came over 15 years ago, well before Facebook was widely used,” Stone said.

    The bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, requires digital companies such as Google and Facebook to pay local news publishers a “journalism usage fee” whenever their news content is used or posted on those platforms. The bill also requires news publishers to invest 70% of usage fee profits into journalism jobs.

    “This threat from Meta is a scare tactic that they’ve tried to deploy, unsuccessfully, in every country that’s attempted this,” Wicks said in a statement. “It’s egregious that one of the wealthiest companies in the world would rather silence journalists than face regulation.”

    According to a spokesperson for Wicks, the bill is due for a vote in the California State Assembly on Thursday.

    The bill has garnered praise from some of the largest journalism unions in California, including Media Guild of the West and Pacific Media Workers Guild. In a joint letter, the two unions called Meta and Google “powerful landlords overseeing an ever-expanding slum of low-quality information, happy to collect advertising rents from struggling tenants while avoiding paying for upkeep.”

    However, the bill also has its detractors. Free Press Action, a non-profit media advocacy organization, has criticized the bill as doing “nothing to support trustworthy local reporting and would instead pad the profits of massive conglomerates.”

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