Business & Tech Facebook, Desperate to Control Distribution, Looks to Retail Stores — But Will Anyone Shop at The Meta Store? Facebook — because I refuse to call them Meta — is going hard on retail, and eventually we're likely to see stores around the globe selling Portals and Oculus headsets and, like, Meta-branded mugs and T-shirts?
Business & Tech Yep, Facebook Now Wants to Be Called 'Meta' Facebook's big rebranding reveal came on schedule today, during CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address at the company's annual Connect conference, and the new name for Facebook is Meta.
Business & Tech Facebook's PR Crisis Continues As More News Outlets Report on the 'Facebook Papers' Revelations about Facebook's knowledge of its enormous and fundamental problems, and the company's ineptitude in handling them or lack of true interest in trying because it would hurt the bottom line, are continuing to roll in.
Business & Tech Oversight Board Unhappy That Facebook Hid How It Handles VIP Accounts, Says It Will Review 'XCheck' System The ostensibly independent Facebook Oversight Board is pointing back to a Wall Street Journal story last month and basically saying Facebook employees concealed a vital detail from them in the Trump suspension case, and this whole policy around VIP accounts needs to be audited.
Business & Tech Facebook Is Pulling an Alphabet and Changing Its Name Next Week It's all about the metaverse! According to an internal source at Facebook, the company is preparing a big announcement next week to change its corporate identity and name, which of course has nothing to do with all the negative associations that "Facebook" now has.
Business & Tech Facebook Wants to Build a Hi-Res Version of 'Second Life' It's Calling the 'Metaverse' Facebook's latest futuristic idea, which the company says it wants to build with a team of 10,000 new hires in Europe, sounds like a fancy new version of the mid-aughts virtual reality desktop game Second Life, only with Zuckerberg watching your online travels.
Business & Tech Instagram and Facebook Experience Second Outage In a Week; Twitter Is Gleeful It may not be the worldwide meltdown of Monday, but Instagram and Facebook were not loading properly for some users on both coasts of the U.S. today, and the company has confirmed there's a problem.
Business & Tech Mark Zuckerberg Would Again Like to Assure You That Profit Is Not Facebook's Sole Motive In response to a string of very bad headlines and a catastrophic outage of all of the company's services this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly posted a message on Tuesday that he says he sent to all of his employees, reassuring them that Facebook is not evil.
Business & Tech Facebook Vaguely Explains Cause of Longest Outage In 13 Years; Whistleblower Says 'Declare Moral Bankruptcy' The six-hour outage on Monday that brought down Facebook's entire network of products — including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus — was caused by a router issue, or something, and both the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg say they're very sorry you had to stop scrolling for an afternoon.
Business & Tech Facebook Employee ID Badges Weren’t Working Today, So They Couldn’t Get In to Fix the Outage Facebook is coming back online, but new details from today's massive worldwide outage are emerging, including the fact that employees couldn’t fix server hardware because their ID badges wouldn’t even let them enter company buildings.
Business & Tech Facebook Whistleblower Who Shared Docs With Wall Street Journal Goes on '60 Minutes' to Spill More Dirt On Sunday, the whistleblower behind the bombshell pieces published by the Wall Street Journal last month went on '60 Minutes' to discuss why she jumped ship with a trove of damning internal research, specifically to show the public how the company prioritizes profit over the public good.
SF News Monday Morning Headlines: Facebook Pauses Development of 'Instagram Kids' Facebook is pausing development of its controversial 'Instagram Kids' app as it faces scrutiny in Washington, one Afghan family describes their harrowing journey to get back to the Bay Area, and the Grand Princess cruise ship is back at sea.
Business & Tech Zuckerberg Denies Secret Deal With Jared Kushner to Never Censor Trump’s Posts Maybe this explains Facebook’s kid-gloves approach to right-wing propaganda — a new book claims Zuckerberg agreed to a “hands-off approach to conservative sites” in exchange for lax regulations.
Business & Tech Facebook Seemingly Still Monkeying With Algorithm to Limit Right-Wing Agitprop K-Pop stans and dog advice posts are the early benefactors of some possible Facebook algorithm and reporting changes, but the Dinesh D'Souzas and Ben Shapiros of the world are sharp at adapting to game the system.
Business & Tech Eight Months Into National Vaccine Effort, Facebook Says It's Removed Anti-Vaxx Misinformation Superspreaders After being on the receiving end of stern words from President Biden last month, Facebook says it has removed three-dozen pages and accounts associated with a dozen previously identified superspreaders of vaccine misinformation.
Business & Tech Facebook Now Pushing Off Return to Office Until January Facebook announced Thursday that its workers in U.S. offices, and some international workers, don't have to return to their desks in person until January 2022.
Business & Tech Biden Backs Down Slightly From Saying Facebook Is 'Killing People' With Vaccine Misinformation President Joe Biden attempted to de-escalate a war of words he started last week with Facebook, walking back a statement he made about the platform "killing people" due to its failure to curb misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.
Business & Tech Facebook Is Dismantling CrowdTangle Team Because It Showed the Platform to Be a Right-Wing Echo Chamber CrowdTangle, the analytics tool for social media posts that Facebook acquired five years ago, may not be long for this world, and its mostly independent team within Facebook is now being broken up.
SF Politics Trump Is Now Suing All the Tech Companies Who Banned Him Donald Trump is busying himself with a new crusade that is likely to fail, and it's a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
Business & Tech Mark Zuckerberg, American Hero on a Dork's Surfboard? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a strange but totally on-brand Instagram video on July 4th of himself holding a big American flag riding an electric foil surfboard on a lake, set to the tune of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads."
Business & Tech Facebook's Market Cap Tops $1 Trillion for the First Time After Antitrust Case Is Dismissed Facebook has now joined the ranks of trillion-dollar companies, alongside the only other companies to reach such a market capitalization, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft.
Business & Tech Facebook Is Suspending Trump for Two Years, Or Until He's No Longer a Danger to the Republic Facebook says that Trump's punishment for inciting a riot at the Capitol on January 6th will be a two-year suspension, and that suspension will only be lifted if he no longer represents a "risk to public safety."
Business & Tech Facebook's Cryptocurrency Dreams Are Not Dead; Diem Expected to Launch This Year Remember when Facebook started talking about launching its own crypto coin two years ago called Libra and everyone balked and then it kind of went away? Well, it didn't totally go away, it's now called Diem, and the project is still moving forward toward a launch.
Business & Tech 44 Attorneys General Are Kindly Asking Facebook Not to Launch Instagram For Kids 44 U.S. attorneys general are asking the company to please, kindly, not launch an Instagram for kids, because of all the significant legal, safety, welfare, and privacy concerns this will raise.
Business & Tech Mark Zuckerberg Has Bought Another 600 Acres on Kauai, and Hawaiians Are Pissed Adding to their already significant land holdings on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan recently closed on another deal adding 600 more acres on the island.
