Republican Rep. Devin Nunes filed a lawsuit against Twitter Monday, seeking $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages for "shadow-banning” some conservatives users including himself to influence last year’s midterm elections, Fox News reports.
Our thought bubble, perAxios' Sara Fischer: There’s been no substantial proof that the engineers at any of the big tech platforms have systemic bias against one political ideology over another when building algorithms. But Republicans in Congress have alleged that bias exists for some time, including in nationally-televised hearings.
The legal battle between Qualcomm and Apple is far from over. But some of the first key rulings are coming in. So far, it's a mixed bag.
Driving the news: Last week, a judge issued a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm owes Apple $1 billion in royalty payment rebates. However, that ruling is part of a broader case that has yet to go to trial. Furthermore, Apple's contract manufacturers have already been withholding money that covers the amount in dispute.
After a brutal week for Facebook that saw executive departures, a massive outage and the disclosure of a criminal investigation, the weekend offered the company little respite.
The state of play: There were new revelations in the long-running Cambridge Analytica saga, as well as fresh concerns in the wake of the New Zealand shooting over the company's role in fomenting and amplifying extremism.
Facebook wants to deliver more local news, but there aren't enough local news outlets across the U.S. to do so, according to research the platform released Monday morning in conjunction with four academic researchers.
Why it matters: Facebook and rival Google have shouldered blame for creating local news deserts by upending the business models of small, local newspapers. Now, the tech giant wants to invest heavily to reverse that trend in order to provide users with the local news they crave.
Ride-hail company Lyft on Monday disclosed that it hopes to raise over $2 billion in its IPO, at an initial market cap that could top $19 billion. The company will offer 30.77 million shares at between $62 and $68 per share, with its so-called IPO road-show kicking off today.
The bottom line: The top-range market cap is higher than Lyft's $15 billion valuation when it last raised private funding in the summer of 2018, but the low-range market cap would actually be a bit lower. In both cases, however, the fully-diluted valuation would be significantly higher, at a range of between $23 billion and $25.3 billion.
In President Trump's view, self-driving cars are a menace to society. A skeptic of cutting-edge technology — as his tweets about Boeing's "complex" planes emphasized — Trump has privately said he thinks the autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution is "crazy" and that he'd never let a computer drive him around.
Why it matters: Most Americans share Trump's view: 71% of U.S. drivers would be afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle, per AAA. Yet his own administration is encouraging AV development by removing barriers and issuing voluntary guidance instead of regulations. And we see no evidence Trump has imposed his personal views on the policy process.
Less than a year ago, Recode's Kurt Wagner could write a story saying that "no one in Facebook’s upper ranks ever seems to leave the company." That's not true anymore.
Driving the news: Facebook's #3 executive, Chris Cox, left this week, along with Chris Daniels, who ran WhatsApp. Daniels himself was running the messaging subsidiary only because both of the app's co-founders had already departed — as have Instagram's co-founders.
Ethiopia’s Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said Sunday that information retrieved from the "black boxes" of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed last week shows "clear similarities" to that from October's Lion Air crash in Indonesia, the Washington Post reports.
The big picture: The revelation will almost certainly add more pressure on aircraft maker Boeing, as both crashes involved its brand new 737 Max 8 aircraft. The FAA, along with aviation regulators in at least 40 countries, have grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft indefinitely pending the results of this investigation and a fix to what may be a software problem from Boeing. Moges said that the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board was also involved in the analysis and that a preliminary report will be released within 30 days.
Amazon's bid to build a second headquarters in northern Virginia was overwhelmingly approved Saturday, according to The Washington Post.
The details: Arlington County Board voted unanimously to approve a $23 million incentives package for the tech giant to establish a center in Crystal City. Protesters shouted "shame" as the board voted 5-0 in favor of the move, the Post reported. In February, Amazon canceled plans to build a portion of HQ2 in New York City.
