"They have a tremendous lobbying effort, in addition to having the Washington Post," President Trump told reporters today as he was traveling back from West Virginia on Air Force One, according to the pool report.
Asked whether he's looking at taking action on Amazon: "We’ll see what happens. The Post Office is not doing well with Amazon... we’re going to see what happens. The playing field has to be leveled... I’m going to study it and we’re going to take a pretty serious look."
Why it matters: Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the White House isn't considering any action on Amazon.
A handful of advertisers have paused their campaigns on Facebook, COO Sheryl Sandberg told Bloomberg in an interview Thursday.
Why it matters: Sandberg is confirming that chaos around user privacy is having an impact on Facebook's roughly $40 billion business, which is driven mostly by advertising. The impact, however, is probably very small. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Wednesday that the controversies have had no meaningful impact on the company's bottom line.
Facebook explored a data-sharing project with hospitals, now on hold, to profile patients anonymously in order to provide better care, according to CNBC.
Why it matters: Though it promised that no data would identify individual patients by name, Facebook's plan raises a lot of concerns about patient and user privacy. The company has been in hot water in recent weeks after it was discovered that its third-party app tools allowed a researcher to capture user data which was then passed to Cambridge Analytica.
Apple has confirmed to TechCrunch that a new high-end desktop Mac won't be released until next year. In a briefing with Axios and other reporters last year, it had said the redesigned Mac Pro wouldn't arrive in 2017 but stopped short of promising it would come this year either.
Why it matters: Apple doesn't usually signal when new products are coming, but in this case it wants its most loyal customers to be able to plan their purchases.
The Media Ratings Council (MRC,) which has for decades acted as the de facto watchdog for the media and advertising industries, announced accreditation for the first of three rounds of audits that Facebook has committed to. This audit focused on its ability to report impressions served on Facebook and Instagram.
Why it matters: There's been mounting pressure for the "walled gardens" or major tech platforms to be audited by the MRC, the same way other major players in the advertising ecosystem, like Nielsen, comScore and many of the big TV networks are audited. Social networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter are finally beginning to come around to such audits, in an attempt to build better rapport with marketers looking for transparency.
Twitter said Thursday it had permanently suspended roughly 1.2 million accounts for "violations related to the promotion of terrorism" between August 2015 and December 2017. More than 270,000 were suspended in the second half of last year.
Why it matters: Terrorist content is just one of the many ills facing online platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Facebook is conducting a press blitz that's unprecedented for the company as it prepares for CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s debut appearance before Congress next week. The once media-shy Zuckerberg has given numerous interviews and took an hour-long Q&A with reporters Wednesday. Top lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg is all over television, and the company has been flooding reporters’ inboxes with new privacy-centric changes.
Why it matters: By rolling out privacy updates and interviews with apologetic executives, the company is trying to give Zuckerberg material he can use to save himself when he faces fired-up lawmakers. But the new revelations about the scale of Facebook’s privacy scandals are giving critics on Capitol Hill more to work with, too.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday, April 10.
Why it matters: Zuckerberg's Senate appearance will come one day before he testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He'll face tough questions about data privacy and Facebook's role in democracy in both sessions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged a range of mistakes on Wednesday, including allowing most of its two billion users to have their public profile data scraped by outsiders. However, even as he took responsibility, he maintained he was the best person to fix the problems he created.
Why it matters: Zuckerberg is under unprecedented pressure after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which lawmakers will grill him about when he testifies before Congress next week. “We’re probably a year into a massive three-year push,” he said. “These are big issues.”
Trump's attacks on Amazon are likely to put the company under added tax scrutiny by foreign governments, according to a report by Wells Fargo.
Why it matters: Ken Sena, a senior analyst with the bank, said Trump's multi-day Twitter rant regarding retail closures and his "perceptions of Amazon tax evasion stand to play well to some foreign and state governments who conceivably share the president’s concerns."
Facebook has increased the number of people it says may have been impacted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal from 50 million in earlier reports to 87 million and will begin telling people if their information may have been improperly shared.
Thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company's participation in a Pentagon AI project that could sharpen drone targeting, The New York Times reports.
The letter, sent to CEO Sundar Pichai, says Google "should not be in the business of war" and should pull out of the program, Project Maven, which uses artificial intelligence to improve visual recognition.
San Bruno police said Wednesday that Nasim Najafi Aghdam, the suspect in the YouTube shooting, went to a gun range Tuesday morning, shortly before going to the company's headquarters and opening fire. Police also confirmed they believe Aghdam was motivated by her anger toward company for limiting access to her videos.
The bottom line: Police say Aghdam, who died at the scene from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, had no specific connection to any of the three people who were wounded in Tuesday's shooting.
Facebook is updating its terms of service to clarify what it does with user data. The updates are in response to major changes to Facebook's business since the last time it significantly updated the terms in 2015.
Why it matters: Yes, the terms were outdated. But this is also an opportunity for Facebook to play up its commitment to protecting user data after the Cambridge Analytica scandal — although the company says the update isn't connected to the controversy.
The security firm Varonis found that 41% of large companies on which it performed data audits gave all employees access to at least a thousand sensitive files.
Why it matters: Giving employees too much access to sensitive files risks problems with insider threats and increases the likelihood hackers are able to access vital information.
Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Comcast, which collectively own a cross-screen media sales company called NCC Media, are creating a new division within NCC to design, sell and deploy ads across the data networks of the three companies. The companies said Wednesday that they will launch the division later this year.
Why it matters: Data-based ad sales is the future of advertising. They are more cost-efficient and can better target individuals, increasing the likelihood that the ads are more receptive and; therefore, effective, for users. TV networks and digital websites are similarly forming these types of combined networks to sell ads, because the larger your footprint, the stronger your data sets are.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is confirmed to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week, the panel said on Wednesday morning.
Mark your calendars: The hearing will take place on the morning of Wednesday, April 11. It will be the first time that Zuckerberg has testified before Congress.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken very aggressive action against Russian Facebook trolls as the backlash against his platform continues to escalate.
The gritty details: "This morning we removed 70 Facebook and 65 Instagram accounts — as well as 138 Facebook Pages — that were controlled by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)," Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer at Facebook, wrote in a post.
Workers at YouTube are still reeling from Tuesday's shooting. But as the healing effort begins, one question is whether Google and other Silicon Valley companies will be even more vocal in the ongoing national debate over gun control.
The bigger picture: Google has been understandably focused on its own employees in the immediate aftermath, but already some others in tech are viewing the event as more evidence that tougher gun laws are needed.
