Author: News Room

While Republicans largely cheered Meta’s announcement on Tuesday that it would effectively end its fact-checking program, several tech watchdog groups condemned the decision, warning of the potential for a surge in disinformation.Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, said in a statement that the decision was “a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world.” Meta, she cautioned, was inviting “the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories” that fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, said in a statement that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, was…

President-elect Donald J. Trump was at the lectern talking through the approaching inauguration of his second term. But across the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., was a display of the extraordinary way that his family business interests are now fully mixed with his plans for governance of the United States.Mr. Trump opened the unusual news conference on Tuesday by introducing Hussain Sajwani, the founder and chairman of DAMAC Properties, a Dubai-based real estate firm that partnered with the Trump family a decade ago to build the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East.Now, Mr. Trump…

In November 2016, as Facebook was being blamed for a torrent of fake news and conspiracy theories swirling around the first election of Donald J. Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the social network, wrote an apologetic post.In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact checkers.“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan…

Around midday on Feb. 2, a large wave began its slow rumble toward the Aisland 1, an 800-ton deck barge floating in the waters between Dubai and Iran. On board the vessel were its residents of more than a year: a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi, three sailors, a cook and five cats.Landi — the ship’s captain — was a gifted computer programmer who in a previous life had been the chief executive of Eutelia, a telecommunications company. He fancied himself an Italian Steve Jobs, though John McAfee, the cybersecurity entrepreneur turned tax fugitive, might have been a more…

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…