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☆ Meta Platforms Business Chief Marne Levine to Leave
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-13 | by ( Salvador Rodriguez | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. said Monday that the executive in charge of overseeing the company’s advertising business would be leaving the company. Marne Levine , Meta’s chief business officer, is set to depart the company during the summer, just two years after being elevated to the role. Ms. Levine’s exit comes as the company struggles through one of the toughest periods it has faced in its advertising business. Over the past three quarters, Meta has recorded year-over-year declines in revenue.

☆ Google details plans to use AI in search results
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-08 | by ( Catherine Thorbecke | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN —Google on Wednesday detailed plans to use artificial intelligence technology to radically change how people search for information online, one day after rival Microsoft announced a revamped version of Bing powered by AI. These tools are trained on vast troves of information online in order to generate compelling written responses to user prompts and queries. “As we look ahead, you could imagine how generative AI will enable people to interact with visual information in entirely new ways.”Phrabhakar Raghavan, an SVP at Google, details plans to bring the same technology that underpins Microsoft-backed ChatGPT directly into Google's search results. ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity has reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its core product: online search. The rise of AI-powered chatbots, and the incorporation of this technology into products like online search, could also carry risks.

☆ US senators seek answers from Meta on whether user data was accessed by China, Russia and others
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-07 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, Sens. The findings are “especially remarkable given that Facebook has never been permitted to operate in [China],” they added. “These documents are an artifact from a different product at a different time,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone. Hostile governments could seek to use Americans’ personal information to spread disinformation or identify intelligence targets, US officials have said. But the lawmakers’ letter highlights how worries about data access by foreign adversaries extends beyond TikTok and encompasses some of the largest social media platforms.

☆ Meta’s Nicola Mendelsohn on the 'Working with Cancer' initiative
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-06 | by ( Tania Bryer | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailMeta’s Nicola Mendelsohn on the 'Working with Cancer' initiativeMarking World Cancer Day 2023, the Publicis Foundation has launched a cross-industry coalition to erase the stigma of cancer in the workplace. Meta was one of the founding partners and CNBC’s Tania Bryer caught up with Vice President, Global Business Group at Meta, Nicola Mendelsohn, to talk about the ‘Working with Cancer’ pledge, her own diagnosis and founding the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation.

☆ Judge Releases Decision Approving Meta’s Virtual-Reality Deal
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-05 | by ( Jan Wolfe | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

WASHINGTON—A judge has made public his decision that allowed Meta Platforms Inc. to acquire a virtual-reality startup, providing new details on why he ruled against the Federal Trade Commission in its high-profile antitrust case against the Facebook parent company. The ruling, which was initially sealed and was released late Friday, rejected the FTC’s arguments for why Meta’s acquisition of Within Unlimited was anticompetitive. But the judge sided with the FTC on some legal and factual arguments, bolstering the agency’s ability to bring similar cases in the future, some antitrust lawyers said.

☆ Want Big-Skirt Energy? How to Master the Statement Look
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-03 | by ( Fiorella Valdesolo | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

A drenching is always amusing, but it’s her tutu that makes that scene indelible. The show’s costume designer, Patricia Field, was insistent on the garment, saying in an interview, “Whatever she’s wearing has to be completely original to last in time.”That iconic look embodies “big-skirt energy,” a mood dominating the resort and spring 2023 collections. A skirt needn’t literally be big to possess BSE. But whether maxi or midi, spangled or satin, printed or plain, it must project outsize attitude. And women are gravitating to that, reports Marc Rofsky, a buying director at e-commerce site Moda Operandi, who’s seen year-over-year, double-digit growth in skirts between October and January 2023.

☆ Is the Fed ignoring long Covid in its inflation fight?
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-03 | by ( Nicole Goodkind | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

But it’s premature to say that Covid is no longer an economic issue when long Covid has such a significant effect on America’s workforce, economists and health care officials say. Long Covid, which stems from a Covid-19 infection, is considered a chronic illness that is sometimes debilitating. As many as 30% of Americans, about 23 million people, develop long Covid after a Covid infection, said the US Department of Health and Human Services in November. “Long Covid has harmed the workforce,” said the report, compiled by the New York State Insurance Fund. Caregiving for those suffering from Covid or long Covid is also affecting the labor imbalance, said Giacomo Santangelo, an economics professor at Fordham University.

☆ FTC Denies Meta’s Bid to Disqualify Chair Lina Khan From Antitrust Lawsuit
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( Dave Michaels | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

WASHINGTON—Members of the Federal Trade Commission rejected a complaint from Meta Platforms Inc. asking them to disqualify the agency’s chair from judging the company’s proposed acquisition of virtual-reality company Within Unlimited Inc. The FTC voted 2-1, along partisan lines, to allow Lina Khan to participate in the legal case against the Meta-Within deal, according to an order made public Thursday. The agency’s Democratic commissioners said federal ethics rules don’t require Ms. Khan’s disqualification, even if her prior work and statements were critical of Meta, the Facebook owner that rebranded itself as a company focused on developing immersive virtual worlds, or metaverses.

☆ U.S. FTC denies Meta petition to recuse Khan from Within Unlimited review
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: 1 min

WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rejected a petition filed by Facebook-parent Meta seeking the recusal of Chair Lina Khan from participating in any decision concerning the review of Meta’s proposed merger with virtual reality app maker Within Unlimited. The FTC said without Khan's participation it had denied the order. Reporting by David ShepardsonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

New York CNN —Thursday afternoon will round out what has so far been a sobering earnings season for the Big Tech giants. Alphabet’s revenue will likely remain flat from last year and Amazon’s sales are expected to grow just shy of 6% year-over-year. All three companies’ profits are expected to fall from the year-ago quarter, with Amazon set to suffer the steepest drop with a decline of 40.6%. Then came the press conference, which led to a steep divergence between what the Fed thinks and what the Wall Street thinks. A cautionary tale: In mid-November, Ticketmaster’s site overloaded when fans tried to purchase pre-sale tickets for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.

☆ Meta shares surge nearly 20% as Zuckerberg pledges to make 2023 a ‘year of efficiency’
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-01 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

New York CNN —For years, Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg invested heavily in growth, including in areas like virtual reality with unproven potential. All of that helped send shares of Meta up nearly 20% in after hours trading Wednesday. Meta reported nearly $32.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, down 4% from the year prior but ahead of the $31.5 billion analysts had projected. The guidance is somewhat better than Snapchat-parent Snap’s from earlier in the week, which said it expects first quarter revenue to fall between 2% and 10% compared to the previous year. The company also lost a total of more than $13.7 billion in its “Reality Labs” unit which houses its metaverse efforts.

☆ Meta Turnaround Could Trap Bears
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-31 | by ( Laura Forman | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Meta’s Instagram and Facebook platforms are said to be starting to see a path to recovery in terms of engagement. Snap’s results have been a popular bellwether for investors trying to bet on Meta Platforms’ quarterly earnings reports. This week, investors may want to ignore them. Meta will report fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon, following Snap’s report after the bell Tuesday. The social-media-giant-turned-metaverse architect had an abysmal 2022 in the stock market, logging a 64% decline in its share price to shed some $600 billion in market value.

☆ Facebook seeks to block $3.7 billion UK mass action over market dominance
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-30 | by ( Sam Tobin | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Meta Platforms Inc (META.O), the parent company of the Facebook group, is facing a mass action brought on behalf of around 45 million Facebook users in Britain. Her lawyers said users should get compensation for the economic value they would have received if Facebook was not in a dominant position in the market for social networks. Its lawyers said the claimed losses ignore the “economic value” Facebook provides. But lawyers representing Meta said the lawsuit wrongly assumes that any “excess profits” it might make equates to a financial loss suffered by individual Facebook users. This approach “takes no account whatsoever of the significant economic value of the service provided by Facebook”, Marie Demetriou said in court documents.

☆ Facebook’s Trump Gift to Democrats
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( The Editorial Board | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Meta Platforms Inc. is letting Donald Trump back on its social-media sites, and the question is who is happier: Mr. Trump, or Democrats? Our guess is the latter, as they are eager to see the former President back at the center of Republican politics. Nick Clegg , Meta’s president for global affairs, wrote Wednesday that Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will soon be reinstated. “The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying—the good, the bad and the ugly—so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box,” Mr. Clegg wrote in a blog post.

Former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are being reinstated, the social media giant Meta announced Wednesday — a little more than two years after he was suspended from the platforms over incendiary posts about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Meta owns Facebook and Instagram. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., then the minority leader, vowed to “rein in big tech power over our speech” after Facebook announced the length of Trump’s suspension in 2021. Trump’s presidential campaign officially petitioned Facebook to allow Trump back on to the platform this month. “If Facebook wants to have this fight, fine, but the House is leverage, and keeping Trump off Facebook just looks political,” the adviser said.

☆ Meta and Twitter decided to restore Trump’s account. Will other platforms follow suit?
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-26 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

The decisions by Twitter and now Facebook-parent Meta to bring back Trump could push — or at least provide cover for — a number of other platforms to make similar moves. Facebook and Twitter restricted Trump’s accounts in the aftermath of the January 6 attack. Many other platforms followed suit by banning or restricting Trump, including YouTube, Snapchat and game streaming platform Twitch. On Wednesday, Snapchat parent Snap indicated that it is not planning to revisit its decision to ban Trump’s account two years ago. “In January 2021, Donald Trump’s Snapchat account was terminated for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.

☆ Jan. 6 Committee failed to hold social media companies to account for their role in the Capitol attack, staffers and witnesses say
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-26 | by ( Donie O'Sullivan Audrey Ash Zachary Cohen | Donie O'Sullivan | Audrey Ash | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

But now these witnesses, along with some committee staff, are frustrated, saying the committee failed to adequately hold major social media companies to account for the role they played in the worst attack on the Capitol in 200 years. They also said the final report outlines structural issues across social media and society that need to be studied further. Jeremy Moorhead/CNNDisagreement about social media companies’ role in the Jan. 6 attack comes as 2023 looks to be a pivotal year for Silicon Valley firms in Washington, DC. “Indeed, the lack of an official Committee report chapter or appendix dedicated exclusively to these matters does not mean our investigation exonerated social media companies for their failure to confront violent rhetoric,” they wrote. “History has taught us what happens when political speech on social media companies is allowed to fester unchecked.”

☆ Microsoft could bring back Clippy, but make him smart
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

New York CNN —This week, Microsoft confirmed it’s planning to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind the viral new chatbot tool ChatGPT. The prospect of Microsoft, maker of software that people mostly hate, getting involved with ChatGPT, a product people generally like, is raising a lot of eyebrows. Almost immediately, people began joking on social media that ChatGPT could be used to revive the broadly maligned, big-eyed goon known as Clippy. “There is a kernel of truth to the Clippy comparison,” David Lobina, an artificial intelligence analyst at ABI Research, told Sam. All of the above suggestions were generated by asking ChatGPT various forms of the question, “How could Microsoft integrate ChatGPT into its products?”Argh, Samantha, you scamp!

☆ How Microsoft could use ChatGPT to supercharge its products
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

For Microsoft, integrating the chatbot tool could make its core software products more powerful. All of the above suggestions were generated by asking ChatGPT various forms of the question, “How could Microsoft integrate ChatGPT into its products?” Microsoft, for is part, has said little on possible integrations beyond recently announcing plans to add ChatGPT features to its cloud computing service. “Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology,” Microsoft said in a press release this week, announcing the expanded partnership. For Microsoft, that could make integrating the tool into specific products problematic. Integrating ChatGPT too quickly into Microsoft’s products could run the risk of schools rethinking their use of that software.

☆ Meta says it won’t punish Trump for attacking the 2020 election results. But the 2024 vote is a different story
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Oliver Darcy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

New York CNN —Nine minutes after Meta announced that it will allow Donald Trump back on its platforms, the disgraced ex-president was on his own Truth Social app posting about supposed election fraud in the 2020 election. And those content moderation calls are likely to be contentious. For instance, a Meta spokesperson said Trump will be permitted to attack the results of the 2020 election without facing consequences from the company. However, the spokesperson said, if Trump were to cast doubt on an upcoming election — like, the 2024 presidential race — the social giant will take action. But this is only one aspect of the murky content moderation waters that Meta will find itself in.

☆ DOJ files second antitrust suit against Google, seeks to break up its ad business
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-24 | by ( Lauren Feiner | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday filed its second antitrust lawsuit against Google in just over two years. This lawsuit, focused on Google’s online advertising business, seeks to make Google divest parts of the business and is the first against the company filed under the Biden administration. Google also faces three other antitrust lawsuits from large groups of state attorneys general, including one focused on its advertising business led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The company has long denied that it dominates the online advertising market, pointing to the market share of competitors including Meta’s Facebook. Google and other tech companies have also faced increasing scrutiny from abroad, particularly in Europe, where Google has also fought multiple competition cases and new regulations threaten major changes to tech business models.

☆ How Big Tech’s pandemic bubble burst
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-22 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

Microsoft’s customers, Nadella said, are now trying “to do more with less.”Microsoft isn’t the only company experiencing such a dramatic reversal. In recent months, higher interest rates, inflation and recession fears causing a pullback in advertising and consumer spending have all weighed on tech companies’ profits and share prices. “They’ve taken a more seemingly thoughtful approach to hiring and overall managing the company,” Kessler said. Notably, however, none of the Big Tech company CEOs now overseeing layoffs appear to have been hit with any change to their compensation or title. The tech layoff announcements are likely to continue into the upcoming earnings season, Kessler said, amid ongoing economic warning signs.

☆ Google parent Alphabet is cutting 12,000 jobs
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-20 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

New York CNN —Google parent Alphabet is eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, the company said Friday, in the latest cuts to shake the technology sector. “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai said in the email. Google’s job cuts are just the latest in a bruising wave of tech layoffs, as inflation weighs on consumer spending and rising interest rates squeeze funding. “While layoffs from high-profile firms make the headlines, plenty of firms are desperate for more workers, especially tech workers. “The labor market is still so tight that many tech workers, and workers with other skills, are snapped up well before they need to collect an unemployment check.

Trump’s campaign didn’t threaten a lawsuit, as some sources close to Trump thought he would. Trump has slightly more than 4.8 million followers on the platform, compared to nearly 88 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook. But Facebook subsequently changed its rules — including a limitation on high-volume advertising — and Trump's campaign protested. Twitter was credited with abetting Trump’s political rise, but his freewheeling style came across as unhinged even to many Republicans who started to oppose his Twitter use. “Moreover, every day that President Trump’s political voice remains silenced furthers an inappropriate interference in the American political and election process.”

New York/London CNN —Microsoft (MSFT) could announce thousands of job cuts on Wednesday, according to multiple news reports, potentially becoming the latest tech company to cull its workforce as the global economy slows. Sky News, without naming sources, reported the layoffs would affect roughly 5% of the company’s workforce. Facebook (FB) parent Meta also recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. A recent report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found tech layoffs were up 649% in 2022 compared to the previous year, versus just a 13% uptick in job cuts in the overall economy during the same period. The software company’s Azure cloud computing business drove revenue growth over the three months through September, as sales in its personal computing division decreased slightly.

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