The Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group was ordered on Tuesday to pay $167 million in damages to Meta, capping a six-year legal battle after NSO hacked 1,400 WhatsApp accounts belonging to journalists, human-rights activists and government officials. In December, Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that…
With its horse-trodden roads, endless fields of almond blossoms and cowboy heritage, the 20,000 person town of Oakdale, Calif., fits the American West of imagination. And for decades, its media diet was classically all-American, too. Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even…
The expansion of the loophole for tariff-free shipments of goods nearly a decade ago gave rise to Temu, Shein and other low-cost online retailers offering items straight from Chinese factories at unfathomable discounts. It also unleashed something else — a cascade of billions of dollars of digital advertising that provided a windfall for Meta, Alphabet…
Meta said on Wednesday that it expected to see strong revenue growth in its advertising business in the coming months, even as President Trump’s tariffs threaten to batter the global economy. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, also reported rising revenue and profit for the first quarter, buoyed by Instagram and…
The House on Monday overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to criminalize the nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit photos and videos of others — including A.I.-generated images known as “deepfakes” — and to mandate that platforms quickly remove them. The vote of 409 to 2 cleared the measure for President Trump, who was expected to quickly sign…
Since Howard Lutnick was tapped to serve as President Trump’s commerce secretary, executives from some of the world’s largest companies have been trying to win him over. Leaders of Nvidia, Facebook, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Alphabet have visited his newly purchased $25 million property in Washington — a 16,250-square-foot mansion that Mr. Lutnick, a…
Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page. Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the…
In his second day on the stand of a landmark antitrust trial, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said he bought Instagram and WhatsApp because it was hard to build new apps and dodged questions about whether he was trying to snuff out competitive threats to his company. “Building a new app is hard,”…
In 2012, when Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, cut a $1 billion check to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, most people thought he had lost his marbles. “A billion dollars of money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the host of “The Daily Show.” “For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures?” Mr. Stewart called the…
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday accused Meta of creating a monopoly that squelched competition by buying start-ups that stood in its way, kicking off a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle a social media empire that has transformed how the world connects online. In a packed courtroom in the U.S. District Court of the…