Twitter plans to shut down Periscope, the live video streaming app it acquired in 2015, due to declining usage and high costs. In a blog post wistfully headlined “Farewell, Periscope,” the team running the app disclosed that it has been in an “unsustainable maintenance-mode state” for some time.
UPDATED THURSDAY, 2:28 AM
Capitol Violence Sparks Social Media Reckoning With Trump
On Wednesday, in an unprecedented step, the two companies temporarily suspended Trump from posting to their platforms after a mob of his supporters stormed the house of Congress. It was the most aggressive action either company has yet taken against Trump, who more than a decade ago embraced the immediacy and scale of Twitter to rally loyalists, castigate enemies and spread false rumors.
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday voted to issue orders to nine major internet platforms requiring information about how they handle data for a new study. The orders, which do not implicate any legal wrongdoing, were sent to Amazon, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp and Youtube. The agency is requesting information about how the platforms collect, use, track or estimate personal and demographic information.
Twitter wants to be more than just 280-character blocks of text. On Tuesday, the social network announced disappearing tweets and previewed a few more upcoming features, including audio.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter testified Tuesday about their platforms, misinformation and the 2020 election.
Exclusives
QUARTERLY REPORT
Tech Giants Report Mixed 3Q Results
While all five — Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook, Apple and Twitter — exceeded analyst expectations, gloomy forecasts and other uncertainties led to share-price declines for all but Alphabet in after-market trading.
The CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google were scolded by Republicans at a Senate hearing Wednesday for alleged anti-conservative bias in the companies’ social media platforms and received a warning of coming restrictions from Congress. Lawmakers of both parties are assessing the companies’ tremendous power to disseminate speech and ideas, and are looking to challenge their long-enjoyed bedrock legal protections for online speech.
The Senate Commerce Committee has summoned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai to testify for a hearing Wednesday. The executives agreed to appear remotely after being threatened with subpoenas. With the presidential election looming, Republicans led by President Donald Trump have thrown a barrage of grievances at Big Tech’s social media platforms, which they accuse without evidence of deliberately suppressing conservative, religious and anti-abortion views. Above (l-r): Dorsey, Pichai and Zuckerberg.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Friday his company had been wrong to block links to an article making claims about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son. “Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that,” he tweeted here.
Facebook and Twitter cast doubt on a New York Post story that made claims about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, taking proactive steps to restrict dissemination of the story in the hours after it was published on Wednesday.
Facebook has deleted a post in which President Trump had claimed Covid-19 was “less lethal” than the flu. Twitter hid the same message behind a warning about “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information”.
The Senate Commerce Committee voted last week to authorize subpoenas for (l-r) Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai of Google and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to force them to testify if they didn’t agree to do so voluntarily. Spokespeople for the companies said Monday that the CEOs will cooperate and appear at an Oct. 28 hearing.
the social media companies still aren’t enforcing even the limited restrictions they’ve recently put in place to stem the tide of dangerous QAnon material, a review by The Associated Press found. Both platforms have vowed to stop “suggesting” QAnon material to users, a powerful way of introducing QAnon to new people.
Telecom giant AT&T plans to push for changes to a federal law that protects companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter from liability for users’ posts. “There is no longer any reason that the nation’s most powerful online platforms should enjoy legal immunities unavailable to similarly-situated traditional companies,” AT&T EVP Joan Marsh said Monday in a blog post.
The administration said in a high-court filing Thursday that Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account with more than 85 million followers is his personal property and blocking people from it is akin to elected officials who refuse to allow their opponents’ yard signs on their front lawns.
The social media company says the agency was examining whether it had misused people’s personal information to serve ads.
QUARTERLY REPORT
A Surge Of New Users For Twitter
Average daily user growth spiked 34% in the second quarter, the company said Thursday, the largest jump in users ever recorded by the company.
The ruse discovered Wednesday included bogus tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities were also hacked. Hackers used social engineering to target some of Twitter’s employees and then gained access to the high-profile accounts. The attackers sent out tweets from the accounts of the public figures, offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
Escalating a battle between Madison Avenue and the social media industry, Unilever is suspending all U.S. advertising on Twitter, as well as Facebook Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram, for the rest of the year. “Given our responsibility framework and the polarized atmosphere in the U.S., we have decided that starting now through at least the end of the year, we will not run brand advertising in social-media newsfeed platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the U.S.,” the consumer goods giant stated.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based tech group supported by Facebook, Google and Twitter, filed a lawsuit against President Trump on Tuesday, alleging that his executive order targeting social media giants threatens to “curtail and chill constitutionally protected speech” during the presidential election.
COMMENTARY
Trump Echoes Nixon In Targeting Twitter
Preston Padden: “In Nixon’s railing against the liberal bias of the networks, one can almost hear Mr. Trump railing against social-media companies.”
Michael Depp and Harry Jessell discuss Cox’s appointment of Dan York as Cox’s new chief and Jessell’s forthcoming interview with Cox Executive Chairman Steve Pruett. They also tackle the president’s executive order threatening to take away immunity from social platforms if they tag content or go too far in regulating it.
President Trump’s taking aim at Twitter for fact-checking his tweets is part of a long tradition upheld by aggrieved internet trolls. The stakes are high.
Trump, a prolific Twitter user, has been at war with the company since earlier this week, when it applied fact checks to two of his tweets about mail-in ballots. The third tweet to be flagged started as a message of support for the governor of Minnesota, where there have been three days of violent protest
Without certain liability protections, companies like Twitter would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries — like the president’s.
UPDATED, FRIDAY MORNING
Trump Wants FCC To Join Twitter Crackdown
The president today signed an executive order targeting Twitter and other social media. It comprises several directives, including one calling on the FCC to establish rules that would limit how far social media can go in tagging and censoring user content before risking the immunity they now have from libel and other civil actions arising from user content. Above, the president holds up a copy of the New York Post before signing the order.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg distanced his company from Twitter and its fight with President Donald Trump, as the White House readied an executive order about social media companies. Trump, who accuses social media firms of bias against conservatives, without evidence, stepped up his attacks on Twitter after the company put a fact-checking label on two of his tweets about mail-in ballots on Tuesday for the first time.
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order intended to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for what gets posted on their platforms, two senior administration officials said early Thursday. Such an order, which officials said was still being drafted and was subject to change, would make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they move to suspend users or delete posts, among other examples. It’s almost certain to face a court challenge.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Twitter of “interfering” in the 2020 election after it fact-checked two of his tweets pushing conspiracies about voting by mail.
Twitter added a link to two of President Trump’s tweets in which he had made false claims about mail-in ballots, urging people to “get the facts.”
The social media company came under fire — again — for not removing the president’s posts that contain falsehoods.
