Business & Tech Trump Now Wants Facebook to Make Good On Its Promise to Reinstate His Account After a Two-Year Ban The Trump campaign has formally petitioned Meta to reinstate the Donald's former Facebook account, now that his two-year timeout has expired, and given that his dormant account still has seven times more followers than he has on Truth Social.
Business & Tech Meta Threatens to Pull Journalism Content From Facebook Over Congressional Bill That May Cost Them Meta is putting up a stink in the face of a bill that's working its way through Congress, and is currently folded in to a defense-spending authorization package, which would give journalistic content creators the ability to seek payments from Meta for using their content.
Business & Tech The Facebook-OnlyFans Bribery Lawsuit Is On, Claims Meta Took Cash to Label Adult Sites as ‘Terrorist Content’ A long-simmering allegation that Facebook execs took bribes from OnlyFans is now a lawsuit that will move forward, as several OnlyFans creators say rival adult sites were literally blacklisted onto a terrorist list.
Business & Tech Meta/Facebook Lets Go Of 11,000 Workers; Zuckerberg: 'I Got This Wrong' Mark it: Today, November 9, 2022, is the day that the seemingly unstoppable rise of Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire was stopped.
Business & Tech Reports: Facebook Parent Company Meta Planning Mega-Layoffs, ‘Many Thousands’ May Get the Ax This Week The long-feared Big Kahuna of tech-boom layoffs, massive cuts at Meta companies Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, could arrive as soon as Wednesday, and it’s beginning to feel a lot like 2001.
Business & Tech Major Investor Says Meta 'Needs to Get Its Mojo Back,' Says Pivot to the Metaverse Was Too Hasty Another shoe may be dropping for Facebook/Meta, and for CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as a key investor in the company speaks out publicly, on behalf of investors, saying that the company needs to dial back its investment in the metaverse and lay off about 20% of its employees.
Business & Tech Meta Announces That Metaverse Avatars Will Soon Gain Legs — Also, They'd Like to Sell You a $1,500 VR Headset "It's painful how hellbent Mark Zuckerberg is on convincing us that VR is a thing." That's a TechCrunch headline on an article about Meta's VR developer conference this week, at which the company unveiled a new $1,500 headset for use in the still very beta metaverse.
Business & Tech Meta Is Downsizing Its Offices, Prefers to Call This ‘Vibe Planning’ Amidst a hiring freeze and a plummeting stock price, Meta says it is downsizing and rearranging its offices, a process they bizarrely refer to as "vibe planning."
Business & Tech Facebook Takes Down Influence Campaigns Originating In Russia and China Regarding Ukraine War Meta/Facebook says that it has discovered and removed "the largest and most complex Russian-origin operation" to influence social media users since the war in Ukraine began, as well as a separate, smaller, more inept campaign out of China.
Business & Tech Zuckerberg Reportedly Getting Increasingly Snippy and ‘Intense’ In Pivot to Metaverse, Amidst Declining Profits Some new leaks of palace intrigue from Facebook (now Meta) show that Mark Zuckerberg is becoming increasingly demanding to work for as the company pivots its focus to the Metaverse, which by the way, still does not actually exist.
Business & Tech Congress Gets Report On Antitrust Investigation Into Big Tech, Including Infamous Facebook Memo; Crackdown Looms A report has come out by the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, stemming from an investigation that was launched three years ago, and in particular it calls out a 2018 internal memo to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Business & Tech Facebook and Instagram are Deleting Posts About Abortion Pills, Sometimes ‘Within Seconds’ Big Brother is declaring it’s a thoughtcrime to mention the availability of abortion pills on Meta’s Facebook or Instagram platforms. But the exact same posts are staying up if they substitute the words “guns” or “weed” for “abortion pills.”
Business & Tech Russian Dissident Alexei Navalny Says Google and Meta Are Enabling Putin's War Machine By Banning Ads Imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny gave an address to an international democracy summit suggesting that tech platforms like Google and Facebook have given a "gift" to Putin by shutting down all advertising.
Business & Tech Sheryl Sandberg Steps Down As Facebook/Meta COO, Ending an Era Longtime Facebook/Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg announced Wednesday afternoon that she is leaving her role as COO of the company after 14 years, which is probably an indicator that she's no longer interested in defending the company against storms of its own creation.
Business & Tech Facebook Releases Report On Which Posts They Remove and Censor, Turns Out Most Aren’t Political Facebook held a conference call Tuesday to discuss which posts they most often remove and why, which was inconveniently timed after the weekend’s Buffalo mass shooting video was still on the platform.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Facebook Is Opening a VR Headset Store In Burlingame Twitter employees are a wee bit concerned what their stock options are worth, COVID cases have jumped 50% in California since March, and Facebook/Meta is opening its first VR headset store in Burlingame.
SF Politics Watch: Former President Obama Speaks at Stanford About Dangers of Disinformation Former President Barack Obama gave the keynote address at a conference on disinformation in the digital age today, and he delivered some pointed words about the miasma of lies we were pummeled with in the Trump era, and are still being served in our newsfeeds.
Business & Tech Apple and Facebook Both Duped By Hackers Posing as Law Enforcement, Handed Over Personal Data Phone numbers, home addresses, and (yikes!) internet browsing histories have been handed right over to hackers who approached tech companies while posing as police, and what’s more, most of the hackers were teenagers.
Business & Tech Facebook Relaxes (and Then Reverses) Its Rules Over Calling for Leaders to Be Killed, Because of Putin Meta made a Putin-specific change to its policy on calling for the assassination of world leaders late last week, then backtracked today for ill-explained reasons.
Business & Tech Facebook and Twitter Attempt to Stifle Russian Propaganda Campaign; Russia Turns to Chinese-Owned TikTok Social media is again being used as a battleground by Russia as it continues to try to "sell" its invasion of Ukraine to the Russian people, and to sympathizers abroad.
SF Politics Peter Thiel Stepping Down From Meta’s Board, Will Focus on Getting Trumpers Elected in the Midterms The billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir will no longer serve on the board of directors of Facebook parent company Meta, where he had Zuckerberg’s ear for years (or held Zuckerberg’s leash, depending on who you ask).
Business & Tech Meta Already Has a Sexual Harassment Problem In the Metaverse In a development that's surprising to absolutely no one, Facebook/Meta is already having to address groping and sexual inappropriateness in the Metaverse, even though there is no real Metaverse yet — there's just a beta version of a very early stab at it.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Meta Stock Price Tumbles Because of Metaverse Spending Facebook/Meta's share price took a dive in after-hours trading after a rare decline in profits due to metaverse spending, the SFPD is withdrawing from a key agreement with Chesa Boudin's office, and the fire near Big Sur is all contained.
Business & Tech Sister of Federal Officer Killed by Boogaloo Extremists Sues Facebook for Letting Them Organize Online The feds say that far-right “Boogaloo” militia types killed federal officer David Patrick Underwood, while trying to pose as Antifa. Underwood’s sister says Facebook gave them the tools to do it, and is suing the company.
Business & Tech Apple Reportedly Doles Out Special Six-Figure Bonuses to Engineers to Keep Them From Getting Poached By Meta Apple is reportedly giving out unusually big bonuses in the form of stock to select groups of engineers in the company, in an effort to stop some attrition that is happening to Facebook/Meta.
