The seventh-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, turns 90 today. Famously the tycoon/philanthropist pledged to give away 90% of his wealth, founding with Bill and Melinda Gates “The Giving Pledge,” a campaign urging the world’s wealthiest individuals to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. Over $1.2 trillion has now been pledged, with participants including Elon Musk, Ted…
Tag: Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook Ignored 455 Complaints About Militia Page Urging Weapons at Kenosha Protest
BuzzFeed News reports:
In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters…
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok
Facebook spent more money on lobbying than any single company in the first half of 2020, That’s according to figures cited by the Wall Street Journal from the Center for Responsive Politics. But that’s not all they did. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also began personally delivering a message last fall that TikTok “doesn’t share Facebook’s commitment to freedom of expression, and…
Bill Gates Weighs In on US Pandemic Response, Encryption, and Grilling Tech Executives
Bill Gates gave a wide-ranging new interview to Wired’s Steven Levy (also republished at Ars Technica.) The interview’s first question: as a man who’d been warning about a pandemic for years, are you disappointed with the response of the United States? Bill Gates: Yeah. There’s three time periods, all of which have disappointments. There is 2015 until this particular pandemic hit….
Why We Have a ‘TikTok Problem’
An anonymous reader shares an analysis: As national security expert Lucas Kunce notes, Facebook is in fact the reason we have a TikTok problem to begin with. When Twitter launched a TikTok-like product Vine years before, Facebook actively killed the product by refusing to let Vine access its APIs on the same terms other corporations got. Mark Zuckerberg personally made the…
Facebook Must Better Police Online Hate, State Attorneys General Say
Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. From a report: In a letter [PDF] to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They…
Facebook’s Instagram Launches TikTok Copycat in Political Storm
Facebook’s Instagram photo-sharing app is launching its clone of TikTok in more than 50 countries, a week after Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg defended the company’s copycat strategies to U.S. lawmakers at an antitrust hearing. From a report: The product, called Reels, lets people edit 15-second clips of videos together alongside music, just like on TikTok. It will be embedded into…
TikTok Accuses Facebook of ‘Plagiarism and Smears’
hackingbear writes: TikTok owner ByteDance has accused Facebook of plagiarism and smears although it did not elaborate on the accusation. “ByteDance has always been committed to becoming a global company. During this process, we have faced all kinds of complex and unimaginable difficulties, including the tense international political environment, collision and conflict of different cultures and plagiarism and smears from competitor…
Zuckerberg Goes Off-Script, Blasts Apple and Google in Testimony
During today’s testimony before a Congressional antitrust panel, Mark Zuckerberg went off-script a little bit pointing out how Facebook lags behind a number of competitors, including Alphabet, Amazon.com and Apple. From a report: Zuckerberg isn’t hesitating to use some sharp elbows, pointing out that Amazon is the fastest-growing advertising platform and Google is the biggest. “In many areas, we are behind…
Mark Zuckerberg Emails Outline Plan To Neutralize Competitors
An anonymous reader shares a report: In late February 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed his chief financial officer, David Ebersman, to float the idea of buying smaller competitors, including Instagram and Path. “These businesses are nascent but the networks established, the brands are already meaningful, and if they grow to a large scale the could be very disruptive to us,”…