Social Media

The Daily Beast reports: Facebook’s algorithm angered founder Mark Zuckerberg when he shared a November 2023 post about his knee surgery and it received little engagement, The Wall Street Journal reports. It was this experience that led to the Meta CEO’s Jan. 7 announcement that the platform will divest from a centralized fact-checking process, according to the newspaper. “We’re going …

NBC News reports: Meta will allow its billions of social media users to accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity, among broader changes it made to its moderation policies and practices Tuesday. The company’s new guidelines prohibit insults about someone’s intellect or mental illness on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as have previous iterations. However, …

Bloomberg News reports: Mark Zuckerberg wore a rare Swiss watch worth about $900,000 in a video explaining his company’s decision to end third-party fact checking on its social media platforms in the U.S. The Meta Platforms Inc. chairman sports a Greubel Forsey ‘Hand Made 1’ on his left wrist in the video posted to Facebook on Tuesday unveiling the policy …

Mark Zuckerberg writes on Meta’s corporate blog: Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, Child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we …

User Mag reports: For months, Meta has been restricting content with LGBTQ-related hashtags from search and discovery under its “sensitive content” policy aimed at restricting “sexually suggestive content.” Posts with LGBTQ+ hashtags including #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, #queer, #nonbinary, #pansexual and dozens of others were hidden for any users who had their sensitive content filter turned on. Teenagers have the …

Semafor reports: Meta is revamping its global policy team, with President Nick Clegg stepping down and being replaced by Joel Kaplan, his deputy and the company’s most prominent Republican, people familiar with the matter said. Kaplan, who was White House Deputy Chief of Staff under George W. Bush, has been one of the most forceful voices inside Meta against restrictions …

Reuters reports: A U.S. law against Chinese-owned TikTok evokes the censorship regimes put in place by the United States’ authoritarian enemies, free-speech advocates told the Supreme Court on Friday. In an amicus filing, PEN America, Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, and the Free Press urged the country’s highest court to strike down the federal TikTok law to ban it …

The Hill reports: Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) were named the most active posters on the social platform X this year among all lawmakers in Congress. The Dec. 17 report by Quorum, a Washington-based public affairs firm, found that Roy was the most active member of Congress on X in 2024, authoring 9,799 posts. Cruz was …

CBS News reports: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will take up a challenge to a new law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S, setting up a showdown over access to a widely popular app used by tens of millions of Americans. Arguments will be heard by the high court on Jan. 10, an …

Scripps News reports: President-elect Donald Trump is signaling he might reevaluate a pending ban on TikTok that is set to take effect Jan. 19, one day before his inauguration. The ban would go into effect unless TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sells to a non-Chinese buyer. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. Trump’s potential support …

The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk revealed on Thursday that he had received an offer to settle a federal investigation into potential securities fraud stemming from his 2022 purchase of Twitter, now known as X, which his lawyer appeared to dismiss on grounds that the probe was politically motivated. The private talks burst into public view after Musk — now …

Axios reports: Meta donated $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural fund, the social media giant confirmed to Axios late Wednesday. Big Tech CEOs have been working to gain access and influence with Trump since he won the election last month, “Neither Zuckerberg nor Meta donated to Trump’s inaugural fund in 2017 or to President Biden’s fund in 2021,” per the …

CBS News reports: A federal appeals court upheld a law that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest or face a ban in the U.S., dealing another setback to the widely popular video-sharing app in its battle with the federal government. A panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided …

Courthouse News reports: The Washington state Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Meta intentionally violated the state’s campaign finance law a whopping 822 times, affirming a lower court’s $35 million judgment against the company. “This significant penalty is appropriate for a multinational corporation that intentionally violated our law and, instead of accepting responsibility, sought to gut our best-in-the-nation campaign finance …

The Hill reports: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is the first person to hit a million followers on the social platform Bluesky, according to the platform. Other than Bluesky’s own account, Ocasio-Cortez’s follower landmark is a first for a user, the platform told The Hill on Monday. Democrats and those on the American left have migrated to Bluesky from the similar …

The London Economic reports: The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has announced that it will stop publishing content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from January 20th, 2025, when Donald Trump will officially become the 47th president of the United States. The organisation stated that it can “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has …

Politico Europe reports: Social media giant X “strives to be the town square of the internet by promoting and protecting freedom of expression,” the Elon Musk-owned company told the European Commission in a legally mandated risk assessment made public on Wednesday. Under the Digital Services Act, very large online platforms (VLOPs) must evaluate and report on how they crack down …

The New York Times reports: Australia has passed a law to prevent children under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms. The bill, which the government calls a “world leading” move to protect young people online, was approved in the Senate on Thursday with support from both of the country’s major parties. The lower house of Parliament had passed …

404 Media reports: On Monday, X filed an objection in The Onion’s bid to buy InfoWars out of bankruptcy. In the objection, Elon Musk’s lawyers argued that X has “superior ownership” of all accounts on X, that it objects to the inclusion of InfoWars and related Twitter accounts in the bankruptcy auction, and that the court should therefore prevent the …

The Guardian reports: “We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” author Cory Doctorow said earlier this year. In 2022, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the …