Walking into the crowded hotel conference room, Andrew Batey looked like any other tech guy attending ETHDenver, an annual cryptocurrency conference. A venture capital investor based in Florida, Mr. Batey wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logos of more than a dozen crypto companies, with names like LunarCrush and bitSmiley. He had arrived in…
In September 2006, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, described what made his social network special. “Facebook is about real connections to actual friends,” he wrote in a company post. Two decades later, that description is at the center of a landmark antitrust trial against Mr. Zuckerberg’s social networking empire, now called Meta, and…
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…
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…
Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube | iHeartRadio This week we dig into the ways chatbots are starting to manipulate us, including ChatGPT’s sycophantic update, Meta’s digital companionship turn and a secret experiment run on Reddit users. Then Kevin reports back from the unveiling of a new eye-scanning orb….
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…
Plus, teaching student athletes how to go viral. Source link
Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, testified on Tuesday in a landmark federal antitrust trial that he left Meta in 2018 because his company was denied resources. The government has argued that Meta purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a “buy-or-bury strategy” to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals….
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…