Author: News Room

For years, social media companies made it a top priority to combat hate speech. But in recent months, they have waffled over how to tackle hateful online commentary, particularly when it is directed at L.G.B.T.Q. communities.Meta on Tuesday said it would drop some of its rules protecting L.G.B.T.Q. people. The changes included allowing users to share “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”The social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, will “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender…

Jan. 6, 2025, 6:35 p.m. ETDana White, left, the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Mark Zuckerberg have bonded over their passion for professional fighting. Credit…Jeff Bottari/Zuffa, via Getty ImagesMark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Monday that Meta had added Dana White, the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, and two other executives to its board.Meta is adding Mr. White, a longtime friend of President-elect Donald J. Trump, to the social media company’s leadership amid a series of moves to strengthen its ties to the incoming administration. Last week, the company shook up the top of its policy…

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, blamed the company’s fact-checking partners for some of Facebook’s moderation issues, saying in a video that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.”Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could…

Social media companies are increasingly relying on fact-checks written by their users, allowing companies to step back from politically loaded decisions about what content to take down.Elon Musk’s X, which stopped using employees to fact-check posts, relies heavily on its users to police its site for misinformation in a program called Community Notes. YouTube has also begun testing a similar feature, although it uses third-party evaluators to determine whether the corrective notes are helpful.The decisions to move away from strict rules about what is allowed on the sites and employing thousands of content moderators to police them follows yearslong complaints…

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, played a leading role in Tuesday’s content moderation announcement.In an exclusive interview on “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Kaplan said the company’s previous fact-checking system became too biased and the company wanted to return to its roots of more unfettered speech. He pointed to Elon Musk’s X, which has few rules and allows users to moderate each other, as a good model.“This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression,” Mr. Kaplan said in the interview.It was a striking debut by the longtime Republican lobbyist for…

Just a week into 2025, the media industry got its first consequential transaction: The Walt Disney Company is buying 70 percent of Fubo, the video service that had sued to block the media giant’s plan to create Venu, a sports streaming joint venture with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.The agreement, which was announced Monday, puts an end to that litigation. Instead, Fubo will merge with Disney’s Hulu + Live TV offering. But the arrangement has raised some big questions.Who benefits in the Disney-Fubo deal?After years of questions about Disney’s plans for Hulu — the company now owns all of the…

Exxon Mobil sued California’s attorney general, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups on Monday, alleging that they conspired to defame the oil giant and kneecap its business prospects amid a debate over whether plastics can be recycled effectively.The claims are an escalation in the legal conflict between oil companies and environmental groups, which have spent years fighting over environmental concerns related to fossil fuels, plastics and climate change.Exxon’s lawsuit singles out language used by Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, who sued Exxon in September, alleging that the company carried out a “campaign of deception” that led people to…

The Washington Post has started laying off roughly 4 percent of its work force, the company said on Tuesday, as the newspaper struggles to stem millions of dollars in annual losses.The cuts will affect fewer than 100 people across The Post’s business divisions, which include its advertising sales, marketing and information technology teams. They will not affect The Post’s newsroom, which two years ago reduced its work force by roughly 240 jobs through a voluntary buyout program.The cuts are part of a plan to adjust to changing business conditions, the company said in a statement.“The Washington Post is continuing its…

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video…

Taiwan is investigating whether a ship linked to China is responsible for damaging one of the undersea cables that connects Taiwan to the internet, the latest reminder of how vulnerable Taiwan’s critical infrastructure is to damage from China.The incident comes as anxiety in Europe has risen over apparent acts of sabotage, including ones aimed at such undersea communication cables. Two fiber-optic cables under the Baltic Sea were severed in November, prompting officials from Sweden, Finland and Lithuania to halt a Chinese-flagged commercial ship in the area for weeks over its possible involvement.In Taiwan, communications were quickly rerouted after the damage…