Good morning! Here's the latest on Meta, Charlie Hebdo, Apple, Elon Musk, Getty Images, Instagram, Billy Bush, and more... |
Mark Zuckerberg just announced sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President Trump and Trump voters.
Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting opinions that conservatives hold dear.
The recent elections "feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech," Zuckerberg said in a video that was shared first with Fox News.
That's one of the reasons why Zuckerberg said big changes are coming to Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways.
Among the announcements:
>> Meta will "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse." He didn't elaborate.
>> "Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S.," Zuckerberg asserted, so Facebook is cutting ties with third-party fact-checkers and moving toward an X-style community notes system.
>> "We're bringing back civic content," Zuckerberg said. "For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again."
Overall, CNN's Clare Duffy writes, the moderation changes are "a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platforms." Meta's framing – in its PR blog post – is "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." An alternate title could be "More Lies and More Confusion."
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Meta is facing an antitrust trial in April. The company has lots of other business before the U.S. government. And Trump once threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for "the rest of his life."
That's some of the relevant background here. Today's announcements almost seemed addressed directly to the president-elect, especially since Meta gave the exclusive to "Fox & Friends," one of Trump's favorite shows. The company's newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan was on the curvy couch with the co-hosts and fully agreed with the show's "censorship" versus "freedom" framing.
>> Tonally, the Zuckerberg video "is one of the biggest indications of 'elections have consequences' I have ever seen," Saagar Enjeti commented.
>> Yesterday, Zuckerberg added UFC boss and Trump ally Dana White to Meta's board. Zuck and White have "bonded over their passion for professional fighting."
>> Meta has been rolling back its content moderation for a while now.
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Defunding the fact checkers |
Today's changes will likely lead to layoffs at some news outlets. "Facebook (and Google) are chief funders of fact-checking outlets, not just in the US but globally. There are newsrooms around the world for whom that funding means survival. For those using the platforms, it means they are again on their own to discern what's genuine information and what's not," Jane Lytvynenko wrote on Bluesky just now.
As for the shift to the "community notes" model, Kaplan offered some details about Meta's plan in this blog post...
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>> Conservatives will generally welcome these changes, but how will liberals and independents react? Will Zuckerberg's announcements hasten the left's adoption of alternatives like Bluesky?
>> Will Facebook come to feel more like a neighborhood without police officers or streetlights? How will advertisers react?
>> I sympathize with some of the critiques of online fact-checkers, but I'm also grateful when they debunk viral lies. How many users will miss the fact-checkers when they're gone?
>> What will become of the FTC's antitrust action against Meta?
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Friendly, positive... and pro-Trump? |
I am struck by a commonality between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk's recent announcements:
Zuck said "civic content," i.e. political news, will be more prominently featured going forward, and Meta will work "to keep the communities friendly and positive."
Musk said last week that X's algorithm will be tweaked "to promote more informational/entertaining content," citing "too much negativity" that hurts the user experience.
The X change seems like an appeal to advertisers, since sponsors don't want ads next to conspiracy theories and hate speech. But consider the timing: Musk is pushing his "new 'everything is awesome' algo tweak just in time for the new administration. To reduce 'negativity.' Fascinating," TPM publisher Josh Marshall remarked. And Zuckerberg wants more politics back in peoples' feeds – but he wants to keep it "friendly and positive..."
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Zuckerberg, of course, is not the only mogul recalibrating his company in advance of Trump's second term. In this new essay for CJR, Norm Pearlstine, the former Los Angeles Times exec editor, takes aim at billionaire owners — including Patrick Soon-Shiong — who have bent the knee. Billionaires "are proving themselves poor stewards of media companies," he says, and "we need to find owners committed to editorial independence."
>> Anxiety levels at high at TIME, too, according to this story by the SF Standard's Emily Shugerman. She says TIME staffers "have grown increasingly unhappy" about owner Marc Benioff's "public embrace of the incoming president."
>> Every day brings new turmoil at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. In-house media critic Erik Wemple asked why the paper didn't cover the resignation of Ann Telnaes over her bend-the-knee cartoon, and Matt Murray informed him about a new policy "that broadly we should not cover ourselves."
>> Still, the Post deserves a lot of credit for scrutinizing Bezos's other holdings. "Journalists at The Washington Post gave its owner uncomfortable reading as he lounged on a yacht in St. Barths," The Daily Beast's Lily Mae Lazarus notes.
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In a recent interview for Bloomberg Businessweek, Josh Tyrangiel asked OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman about donating $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund, and Altman said "I support any president."
Tyrangiel followed up: "Am I wrong to think the donation is less an act of patriotic conviction and more an act of fealty?" Altman responded: "I don't support everything that Trump does or says or thinks. I don't support everything that Biden says or does or thinks. But I do support the United States of America, and I will work to the degree I’m able to with any president for the good of the country."
Altman noted OpenAI's many interests before the government and said "supporting the inauguration, I think that's a relatively small thing," and added, "I do think we all should wish for the president’s success."
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Musk in the morning papers... |
The headline on the front page of the FT: British prime minister Keir Starmer "strikes back at Musk over 'lies and misinformation' on abuse cases." And on the front page of The Times in the UK: "Europe turns on Musk over attempts to sway voters." CNN's Christian Edwards has details here.
>> Hadas Gold's latest: "X suspends journalist after debunking theory Elon Musk fan account was Musk himself"
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The internet as a 'justification machine' |
Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield's new essay for The Atlantic is a must-read. They propose that misinformation "is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine." It means that "a rationale is always just a scroll or a click away." People can "search for confirming evidence and mainline conspiracist feeds or decontextualized videos," and then the algorithm keeps reassuring them. Reassuring
us.
The piece made me think of the president-elect's recent declaration, "TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING." That's the "justification machine" at work...
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>> Breaking this morning: Getty Images and Shutterstock have agreed to combine in a deal valuing the visual company at $3.7 billion. (Axios)
>> Apple says it "will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones." (BBC)
>> Speaking of... Apple "is stepping up plans to expand its News app," Daniel Thomas reports. (FT)
>> Staffers at The Athletic are pushing to join the New York Times union, Ben Strauss reports. (Wash Post)
>> Ted Turner "is recovering from pneumonia and 'is doing well in rehab,'" Chris Boyette reports. (CNN)
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Ten years after the Charlie Hebdo attack |
Today, France is commemorating "the victims of the deadly assault on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine 10 years ago," Reuters' Elizabeth Pineau reports. And the magazine is out with a special issue "to show its cause is still kicking," the BBC's Hugh Schofield writes in a dispatch from Paris.
>> One of the cartoonists who survived the attack, Laurent Saurisseau, writes in the new issue that "satire has one virtue that has got us through these tragic years – optimism. If people want to laugh, it is because they want to live..."
>> Big picture: Around the world, "satire is under siege," The Economist reports, as "public support is waning for the right to offend."
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Fox Corp shareholder suit may proceed |
Marshall Cohen writes: During the holiday break, a Delaware judge handed down a wonky but consequential ruling that dealt a blow to Fox Corp. The judge said Fox shareholders, specifically NYC's pension funds and the state of Oregon, can move forward with their lawsuit alleging that the board failed to protect investors by letting Fox News spread lies about the 2020 election – lies that led to massive defamation lawsuits.
Fox wants the case dismissed and denies wrongdoing regarding its 2020 coverage. But the new 53-page ruling show just how many "bad facts" are out there regarding Fox, Rupert Murdoch and 2020. Citing evidence from the Dominion case, the judge said the lawsuit "sufficiently pleads that Murdoch faces a substantial likelihood of liability for consciously causing or willfully allowing Fox News to broadcast defamatory content." So the suit may proceed...
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Yesterday's Hulu-Fubo deal – which will make it easier for Disney, Fox and CNN's parent Warner Bros. Discovery to launch Venu Sports – is "the corporate game inside the game for how you watch your games," The Athletic's Andrew Marchand writes. Awful Announcing has more on what's next for Venu here. For Peter Kafka, the biggest Fubo takeaway is that "Disney, which is launching its own stand-alone ESPN streaming service this fall, isn't fully confident about that service's prospects..."
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>> "Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta's AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user's feed," Jason Koebler reports. (404 Media)
>> TikTok competitors Meta and Snap are on a "Wall Street hot streak" as the TikTok ban looms, Sean Burch writes. (TheWrap)
>> At CES, Alphabet announced that the company "will give TV sets running its Google TV operating system an A.I. upgrade by adding Gemini to its Google Assistant voice-control system," Mark Gurman writes. (Bloomberg)
>> Another CES announcement: NBCUniversal is "rolling out a 'Live in Browse' feature on Peacock along with other advertising capabilities aimed at improving engagement and arming brands with more data," Dade Hayes reports. (Deadline)
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↗️ Rising Golden Globes ratings |
"Golden Globes ratings are in: 10.1 million viewers tuned in," Elizabeth Wagmeister writes. "That's up 7% from last year with an average of 9.4 million viewers. I have a feeling we'll be seeing Nikki Glaser back as a repeat host next year..."
>> Speaking of Glaser, the comic capitalized on the moment by sharing 10 harsh jokes she cut from her monologue...
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>> This just in: Comcast just announced a multi-year distribution agreement with Paramount Global. (THR)
>> A new research report finds that "two-thirds of TV consumers now say they'd rather watch a cheaper, ad-supported option over a more expensive, ad-free offering." (TheWrap)
>> Billy Bush is launching a live video podcast called "Hot Mics" next week. He also sat down with Tucker Carlson to revisit the "infamous Trump tape." (Variety)
>> The "pop-up" ESPN show "They Call It Late Night with Jason Kelce" premiered over the weekend. "I've seen the numbers," John Ourand notes, "and they're not particularly good: 290,000 viewers." (X)
>> Max dropped the teaser trailer for "The Last of Us" season two, coming in April, and it looks incredible. (YouTube)
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