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Tonight, this newsletter is offering minimal eclipse content. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

📱 THE META-VERSE

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Getty Images

A single trillion-dollar company controls Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp. That concentration of digital ownership can create real-world harm, as a recent censorship dispute with Meta lays bare.

Last week, Meta apologized after blocking links by a nonprofit newspaper and an independent journalist who published a report that criticized Facebook and accused it of suppressing posts related to climate change.

Meta denied that it was censoring content and blamed an unspecified “security issue.”

Every single link — about 6,000 stories — that the Kansas Reflector had ever posted to Facebook disappeared from the platform on Thursday. For seven hours, anyone trying to post a Reflector link was met with a warning that the the site posed a security risk.

That’s seven hours during which the Reflector staff had no idea why Meta — a tech behemoth no major publisher can ignore, given its grip on the most world’s most popular social sites — had blown up not only years worth of digital labor but also dinged the credibility of the local paper, whose audience was told, erroneously, that its links contained potential malware.

By the end of the day, almost all of the Reflector’s links had come back online, save for one: an opinion piece that criticized Facebook’s policies around paid promotions.

To test theory that that the Reflector’s domain had some kind of security issue, a Brooklyn-based journalist, Marisa Kabas, asked for permission to republish the text of that column on her own website.

But sure enough, when Kabas posted her own link to the column on Threads, Meta flagged it as malicious content and took it down. Then Meta nuked everything her website had ever published on its platforms, a block that lasted at least two hours, Kabas told CNN.

Meta didn’t respond CNN’s request for more information about the security issue. The editor-in-chief of the Kansas Reflector, Sherman Smith, wrote on Friday that Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone “wouldn’t elaborate on how the mistake happened and said there would be no further explanation.”

“What was the security error? We don’t know,” Kabas wrote in her recounting of the situation. “What caused the links to be blocked? We don’t know.” And while all of the links have been restored “our trust has been undermined at a time when people need little reason to distrust the news.”

The Meta-verse

The debacle helps illustrate one of the more pernicious issues of our Extremely Online Era that’s often glossed over in a morass of boring regulatory jargon: the concentration of power in social media.

One of the ironies of the situation is that the first public statement from Meta came Thursday evening on X, site formerly known as Twitter. Naturally, Kabas and the Reflector staff had to move their complaints to one of the few public platforms not operated by Meta, which left mostly X and its smaller rival Bluesky.

“Anyone involved this past week now understands that putting our civic conversation into the hands of a single for-profit business generates profound risks for society as a whole,” wrote Clay Wirestone, the Reflector’s opinion editor.

Of course, Meta is regularly accused of censoring content by people across the political spectrum — people who often misunderstand that Meta is a business and not the Free Speech Police. The difference here is that Meta acknowledged it made a mistake and ultimately fixed it, albeit in a frustratingly opaque way that left content creators with a lot of questions.

Meta controls a whole bunch of the global social media ecosystem, and that means there aren’t a lot of competitors to keep it honest. Meanwhile, all of media relies on it because content creators have to get in front of readers if they want to survive.

With nearly 4 billion monthly active users on its platforms — Facebook alone accounts for 3 billion — it’s not hard to see why some folks want to break Meta up, or at the very least create stronger regulations keep it from elbowing everyone else out the market.

Of course, others argue that breaking up Meta wouldn’t necessarily solve the biggest problems with social media — namely that it perpetuates misinformation at an unprecedented speed and scope, wrecks teens’ mental health and creates toxic echo chambers that undermine the promise of democracy. And if you bust up Meta, there may be no stopping another tech giant from filling the void.

We don’t know what happened within Meta to trigger an erroneous block of legitimate news sources last week. But what we do know is that the company’s control over what we see online can have profound effects on the real world. When Meta decides to dramatically reduce referral traffic to media outlets, as it did last year, there’s little anyone outside of Meta can do to push back.

NUMBER OF THE DAY

$2 billion

Shares of Donald Trump's media company continued their descent back to Earth on Monday, dropping another 8% after shedding about a third of their value last week. The selloff has erased more than $2 billion from the former president's personal net worth.  

Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Trump's Truth Social platform, began trading late last month at wildly overvalued levels that inflated the former president's stake to a peak of $5.2 billion. Since then, it's fallen to $2.9 billion.

🌙 WE USED TO BE COOL

The last four years have been, well, a lot. And one of the many downstream effects of a global pandemic that changed everything about our lives is that our days are just different now. Nights, too.

See here: There are a lot fewer 24-hour diners now than there were in 2019, my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn writes. 

And it’s not just restaurants. Walmart, four years after Covid-19 prompted curtailed hours, still hasn’t gone back to “open all night.” Some supermarkets, electronics retailers, coffee shops and pharmacies that shuttered early during Covid-19 have never come back to late-night hours. Not even all of 24 Hour Fitness’ gyms — the promise is right in its name — are 24 hours.

Diners have taken the biggest hit. 

The number of restaurants offering 24-hour service fell 18% from 2020 to 2024, according to Yelp data. And it seems even New York has to sleep sometimes, because we've lost 13% of our 24-hour restaurants here. Los Angeles has lost 35% and Chicago 10%.

The shift reflects a sleepier, less boozy lifestyle. We're eating dinner earlier, drinking less late into the night. Healthier? Maybe. Cooler? God, no.

A similar trend is playing out in London, as my colleague Anna Cooban reported. Aross the Pond, the pandemic collided with a cost-of-living crisis, pushing hospitality businesses to the brink. 

Since March 2020, more than 3,000 venues have shut down across Britain’s capital and its outskirts, according to the Night Time Industries Association. That’s down 15% from before the pandemic. Michael Kill, the trade body’s chief executive, says the average operating costs for such businesses have shot up 30% to 40% in that time, while fewer customers are walking through their doors.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🔌 Tesla reached a settlement in a high-profile case that was set to put the company and its automated-driving system on trial starting Monday.

✈️ A Houston-bound Boeing 737 operated by Southwest Airlines returned safely to Denver International Airport on Sunday after an engine cover fell off and struck the wing flap, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

💸 US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is wrapping up her trip to China, where she raised American concerns about Chinese overproduction, warned against support for Russia and, unexpectedly, caused a stir on Chinese social media over her travel style and chopstick-wielding skills.

✏️ POST OF THE DAY