Category Archives: Mark Zuckerberg

Fired FTC commissioner raises concern over Trump ties to tech billionaires

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Alvaro Bedoya points to ‘interesting coincidence’ that he was dismissed after criticizing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos

A day after his abrupt firing by Donald Trump from the Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya raised questions about the US president’s relations with some of the country’s richest men.

Appearing at a hearing of the joint judiciary committee of the state legislature in Colorado on Wednesday, the ousted Democratic commissioner said it was an “interesting coincidence” his final public statement in post had blasted Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder.

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Steve Bannon says inauguration marks ‘official surrender’ of tech titans to Trump

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Former Trump White House adviser says supplication akin to Japanese surrender to allied forces in September 1945

Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist, has described the tech titans gathering at Monday’s inauguration as “supplicants” to Donald Trump making “an official surrender”, akin to the Japanese surrender to allied forces on the deck of the USS Missouri in September 1945.

Bannon, who served as architect of Trump’s 2016 presidential win but later fell out with the president-elect after he criticized his intellect and members of his family, told ABC News in an interview airing Sunday that Trump “broke the oligarchs” who had previously been aligned against him.

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Fears for UK boomer radicalisation on Facebook after Meta drops factcheckers

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For middle-aged users, it will be ‘even harder to discern the truth’ among extremist content, expert says

Experts fear the decision by Meta to drop professional factcheckers from Facebook will exacerbate so-called boomer radicalisation in the UK.

Even before what Keir Starmer described as “far-right riots” in England last summer, alarm bells were ringing amid fears older people were even more susceptible to misinformation and radicalisation than younger “digital natives”.

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UK can be ‘AI sweet spot’: Starmer’s tech minister on regulation, Musk, and free speech

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Technology secretary Peter Kyle has the task of making Britain a leading player in the AI revolution, but says economic growth will not come at the cost of online safety

With the NHS still struggling, a prisons crisis still teetering and Britain’s borrowing costs soaring, there are few easy jobs going in Keir Starmer’s cabinet at present.

But even in such difficult times, the task of convincing Silicon Valley’s finest to help make Britain a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution – all while one leading tech boss uses the Labour government as a regular punching bag and others ostentatiously move closer to Donald Trump – is among the most challenging.

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Tech giants told UK online safety laws ‘not up for negotiation’

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Senior cabinet minister promises not to dilute new measures despite Zuckerberg’s attacks on countries ‘censoring’ content

Britain’s new laws to boost safety and tackle hate speech online are “not up for negotiation”, a senior government minister has warned, after Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg vowed to join Donald Trump to pressure countries they regard as “censoring” content.

In an interview with the Observer, Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, said that the recent laws designed to make online platforms safer for children and vulnerable people would never be diluted to help the government woo big tech companies to the UK in its defining pursuit for economic growth.

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Brazil says Meta getting rid of factcheckers is ‘bad for democracy’

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Brazilian officials also ask tech giant to clarify whether it intends to implement changes in country within 30 days

The decision by the social media giant Meta to end factchecking in the United States is “bad for democracy”, Brazil’s newly appointed communication minister, Sidonio Palmeira, said on Wednesday.

Meta’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, stunned many with his announcement on Tuesday that he was pulling the plug on factchecking at Facebook and Instagram in the US, citing concerns about political bias.

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Washington Post cartoonist resigns over paper’s refusal to publish cartoon critical of Jeff Bezos

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Pulitzer prize winner Ann Telnaes drew a cartoon of the paper’s owner kneeling before Donald Trump

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from her position at the newspaper after its refusal to publish a satirical cartoon depicting the outlet’s owner Jeff Bezos – along with other media and technology barons – kneeling before Donald Trump as he gears up for his second US presidency.

“I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations – and some differences – about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Telnaes wrote on Friday in an online post on the Substack platform detailing her decision to quit. “Until now.”

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US business leaders set to break record on donations to Trump inaugural fund

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Donations, not restricted by campaign finance laws, come as industries seek favor with incoming administration

US business leaders are spending big on Donald Trump’s second inaugural fund, which is predicted to exceed even the record-setting $107m raised in 2017.

The donations, which are not restricted by campaign finance laws, come as industries and business leaders seek to curry favor with the incoming administration after the president-elect decisively won a second, non-consecutive term in November.

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Mark Zuckerberg dines with Trump at Mar-a-Lago despite former feud

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Meta CEO reportedly wants to support president-elect after previously banning him from Instagram and Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has become the latest former Donald Trump critic to make his way Mar-a-Lago to break bread with the incoming US president.

The tech mogul had banned Trump from the social media sites Instagram and Facebook, which he owns, following the January 6 riot that the president-elect egged on in an attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.

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Meta rides AI boom to stellar quarterly earnings, but slightly less than expected

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Company beats financial predictions but does not increase daily users as much as Wall Street thought it might

Meta’s blowout year continues after the company reported another stellar financial quarter on Wednesday. Shares fell in after-hours trading.

Wall Street analysts had high expectations for the Instagram and WhatsApp parent company, projecting an 18% jump in sales year over year. The company reported $40.6bn in sales, a 19% increase year over year that outpaced investor expectations of $40.19bn. Meta, which saw a 25% jump in its share price over the past two months, reported $6.03 in earnings per share (EPS), surpassing Wall Street’s expectations of an EPS of $5.29.

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Mark Zuckerberg to receive $700m from Meta dividends

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Facebook’s parent company to pay out to shareholders as it reports $40bn revenues for final quarter

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is expected to receive $700m (£549m) a year in dividends.

On Thursday, Meta announced it would pay its first-ever quarterly dividend to investors since Facebook floated on the stock market in 2012, after beating Wall Street expectations with $40bn in revenues for the final quarter last year.

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‘It was forced’: grieving parents unfazed by sorry tech CEOs at US Senate hearing

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Many parents held up images of the children who died after falling prey to abusers on apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat

Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the parents of children who killed themselves after being subjected to online sexual exploitation during a US Senate hearing Wednesday. Evan Spiegel offered condolences to parents whose children obtained deadly illegal drugs via Snapchat. The words were too little, too late for their intended audience, though. The grieving guardians expressed only frustration with the social media CEOs’ responses to their plight and to questions from members of Congress.

“I’m not happy with the answers the CEOs are giving. They can’t give a straight answer. Not even ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” said Tammy Rodriguez, the mother of Selena Rodriguez, who was 11 when she died by suicide three years ago after being solicited for sexually exploitative content by strangers on Instagram and Snapchat.

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Zuckerberg derided for his ‘high quality beef’ ranch where cows are fed macadamia nuts and beer

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Critics call cattle-raising project on Hawaii ranch ‘a billionaire’s strange sideshow’ and bad for the environment

The social media tycoon Mark Zuckerberg’s latest business venture raising “world-class” beef cattle on his sprawling luxury Hawaiian hideaway has been derided as out of touch and environmentally irresponsible.

The Meta billionaire posted a picture of himself on Wednesday eating a steak – medium rare, no sides – from his Ko’olau ranch, a 1,400-acre compound on Kauai, Hawaii’s oldest island.

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Meta encryption plan will let child abusers ‘hide in the dark’, says UK campaign

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In Home Office initiative, survivors urge Mark Zuckerberg to rethink changes to Messenger and Instagram

Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to roll out encrypted messaging on his platforms will let child abusers “hide in the dark”, according to a government campaign urging the tech billionaire to halt the move.

The Facebook founder has been under pressure from ministers over plans to automatically encrypt communications on his Messenger service later this year, with Instagram expected to follow soon after.

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Tech leaders agree on AI regulation but divided on how in Washington forum

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Bill Gates, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and others gathered for ‘one of the most important conversations of the year’

A delegation of top tech leaders including Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman convened in Washington on Wednesday for a closed-door meeting with US senators to discuss the rise of artificial intelligence and how it should be regulated.

The discussion, billed as an “AI safety forum”, is one of several meetings between Silicon Valley, researchers, labor leaders and government and is taking on fresh urgency with the US elections looming and the rapid pace of AI advancement already affecting peoples’ lives and work.

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Threads app usage plummets despite initial promise as refuge from Twitter

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Social media app, launched in the wake of Twitter chaos, recorded 576,000 active users in August, down 79% from 2.3 million in July

The daily usage of Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, continues to slump after a strong start in its first weeks of existence.

Engagement with the social media app is down 79% from a high of 2.3m active users in early July to 576,000 as of 7 August, according to Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform.

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Musk says proposed Zuckerberg cage fight to be held at ‘epic location’ in Italy

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X owner in talks with government over historic site for event – though Colosseum and Rome ruled out

Elon Musk is in talks with Italy’s government about hosting his proposed cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg at a historic site in the country, but the Colosseum has been ruled out as a venue.

The owner of X Corp and the chief executive of Facebook-owner Meta first raised the idea of a one-on-one scrap in a series of social media posts back in June. The challenge came as Zuckerberg prepared to launch Threads, a rival microblogging site to Musk’s now rebranded Twitter platform.

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Changing Meta’s algorithms did not help US political polarization, study finds

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Study of Facebook and Instagram data from 2020 election shows chronological lists had no measurable impact on polarization

The powerful algorithms used by Facebook and Instagram have increasingly been blamed for amplifying misinformation and political polarization. But a series of groundbreaking studies published on Thursday suggest addressing these challenges will require more than just tweaking the platforms’ software.

The four research papers, published in Science and Nature also reveal the extent of political echo chambers on Facebook, where conservatives and liberals rely on divergent sources of information, interact with opposing groups and consume distinctly different amounts of misinformation.

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Elon Musk goes low against Zuckerberg as Twitter-Threads spat intensifies

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Twitter owner calls Facebook founder a ‘cuck’ as rancour grows over launch of Threads, a competitor to Musk’s network

Twitter owner Elon Musk has suggested he and Mark Zuckerberg should have “a literal dick-measuring contest” in the latest broadside aimed at his rival billionaire.

In a message inspired by the Meta chief executive’s launch last week of Threads, a Twitter competitor, Musk added a ruler emoji.

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Twitter threatens to sue Meta over launch of rival Threads app

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In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a lawyer for the Elon Musk-owned app said Meta had unlawfully misappropriated trade secrets

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly billed as a rival, claiming the company has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”.

In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, first published by the news outlet Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.

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