Business & Tech Meta's AI Efforts Include Huge Privacy Flub; Sam Altman Says Meta's Been Trying to Poach OpenAI Staff It looks like we're back to "move fast and break things" at Meta, with Meta.ai appearing to be off to a troubled start, exposing users' very private search queries in a bizarre public feed. And the company has reportedly been offering $100 million signing bonuses to OpenAI staff?!
SF News California Fifth Graders Take On Harmful “Sephora Kids” Skincare Trend, Challenge Lawmakers CBS News California’s Julie Watts and her daughter’s fifth grade class investigated the harmful “Sephora Kids” skincare trend aimed at tweens and helped bring attention to AB 728, a bill that passed a committee 4-2 but was quietly killed in Sacramento.
SF News Four Arrested in Sextortion Scheme Linked to San Jose Teen’s 2022 Suicide Two years after 17-year-old Ryan Last of San Jose took his own life, authorities have arrested four men in Côte d’Ivoire for their alleged roles in an international sextortion scheme that targeted thousands, including minors.
Business & Tech Amazon and Founder of OnlyFans Put In Last-Minute Bids to Buy TikTok A deadline is approaching with the expiration of Trump's executive-order reprieve for TikTok, and several last-minute bidders have emerged.
Arts & Entertainment Is Aaron Sorkin Plotting a Sequel to 'The Social Network,' About the Moral Downfall of Mark Zuckerberg? In an interview with Jesse Eisenberg on 'Fresh Air' this week he talks about his changing view of a man he portrayed over a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg. And, apparently, a sequel or follow-up to 'The Social Network' may be in the works.
Business & Tech Big Tech Bigwigs Agree to Strict New EU Hate Speech Moderation Rules, But They’re Free to Just Ignore Them Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have signed on to a European Union agreement to prevent and remove hate speech from their platforms, which seems meaningless, because all of their CEOs and founders were at Trump’s inauguration today.
Business & Tech Meta to Lay Off Around 3,600 More Employees as It Faces 'Intense Year,' Zuckerberg Says Fast on the heels of Meta's announcement that it is curtailing a significant subset of its social media operations — namely content moderation — the company says it is also going to trim its workforce by 5%.
Business & Tech As Bluesky Blows Up, So Do the Bots With rapid growth, and without a robust content moderation system, Bluesky is already entering an era of bots and misinformation.
Business & Tech Instagram Tightens Up Protections on Teen Accounts, Adds Major Restrictions for Users 16 and Under After years of criticism over online bullying, ads that stoke depression, and predators chasing teens on the platform, Menlo Park-based Instagram is tightening up the controls over what teens can see when they log in.
Business & Tech Supreme Court Deals Second Blow This Term to Republicans Seeking to Punish Social Media Platforms Over Censorship The Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision Monday tossing two cases back to lower courts, stymieing a Republican-led effort to litigate their feelings about social media platforms' handling of the 2020 election, and of Donald Trump after January 6th.
SF News Humpday Headlines: Supreme Court Sides With Biden Administration on Social Media Misinformation The Supreme Court ruled in favor of social media companies and the Biden Administration with regard to curbing misinformation online; BART has halted Red Line service; and Santa Rosa is dealing with a large power outage.
Business & Tech US Surgeon General Wants Warning Labels on Social Media Sites, Just Like the Ones We Put On Cigarettes Saying Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok are causing “significant mental health harms for adolescents,” US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is calling for public health warning labels on social media sites and apps, not unlike the warnings placed on packs of cigarettes.
Business & Tech A Clever Original Post on Threads That Goes Viral Could Now Earn Creators a $5,000 Bonus Meta has confirmed that it has launched a limited-time, invite-only bonus program for social media creators on Threads, in an apparent effort to boost engagement on the platform as it crosses the 150 million user mark.
Business & Tech Some Longtime Reddit Moderators Possibly Got Quite Rich Today Following the Company's IPO The long-awaited Reddit IPO happened Thursday afternoon, and shares in the company soared 48%, closing at $50.31 per share by the end of the day — well above the initial price of $34.
Business & Tech Lindsey Graham Tells Social Media Companies 'You Have Blood on Your Hands' and More Drama From Today's Senate Hearing A much anticipated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing took place Wednesday that gave Senator Lindsey Graham and others a chance to grandstand on an issue that has rare bipartisan support, the problem of social media and kids.
Business & Tech X and Other Platforms Restrict Searches for ‘Taylor Swift’ As Deepfake Pornography of Her Goes Viral Graphic AI-generated images of pop star Taylor Swift have snowballed on social media platforms from X to Meta to Reddit, exposing the limits of their content moderation and lack of legislation.
SF News Pro-Palestine Protest Planned for Tuesday Afternoon at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters will be the site of a Tuesday afternoon protest, as supporters of Palestine say Facebook and Instagram are 'shadow-banning' or removing their posts about the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Business & Tech Will Trump Get Back on Twitter/X? Truth Social Close to Kaput, Accountants Say The prospect of Donald Trump tweeting again, with all his incoherently capitalized words and not-very-veiled threats against anyone and everyone, is getting closer to becoming a reality.
Business & Tech Threads Beats ChatGPT to 100 Million User Milestone; Twitter Traffic Allegedly 'Tanking' Meta's Threads app, which just went live last Wednesday evening, already reached 100 million users on Sunday, handily beating ChatGPT's recently set record for achieving that many users in a brief span of time.
Business & Tech A Year Later and After Launching Open-Source Twitter Alternative, Jack Dorsey Says Elon Musk's Takeover Was a Mistake Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has changed his tune quite a bit since this time last year, when he seemed to fully endorse the sale of the company to fellow billionaire Elon Musk.
Business & Tech Supreme Court Will Decide Whether Elected Officials Can Block People On Twitter Our current, staunchly conservative and largely older Supreme Court is going to show the world how much they understand about social media next term, taking up a case about who can block whom on social media.
Business & Tech Well, Well, Well, Twitter Has Reinstated Its Longstanding Policy Against Violent Speech Twitter announced Wednesday that it has "made a few changes to our policies around violent content and similar language," though it is basically just a rephrasing of what Twitter's longstanding police was, pre-Elon.
Business & Tech Facebook Is Letting Trump Back On the Platform After Two-Year Suspension Two years and change after inciting an insurrection and showing no remorse or sympathy for the deaths and injuries of Capitol Police personnel, former president Donald Trump is being allowed back on Facebook and Instagram. But the big question: Will he be invited into the Metaverse!!?!
Business & Tech TikTok Parent Company Admits It Spied On Two U.S. Journalists Who Exposed the App‘s Surveillance TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance admits it spied on two Buzzfeed journalists, though the journalists say at least four people were spied on and tracked after breaking stories about the seemingly innocuous app’s surveillance of U.S. users.
Business & Tech Twitter to Charge $20/mo Subscription For Blue Checkmarks; Musk Polls Users About Bringing Back Vine As we await word on how swift and widespread layoffs may be at Twitter, Chief Twit Elon Musk is making moves and hinting at others — and still acting like a child with a new toy he may break any second.
