Re: Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions
Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2024 6:28 pm
A community of futurology enthusiasts
https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/
https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=461
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrx13jj9p3o8 May 2024, 00:18 BST
Ofcom has warned social media sites they could be banned for under-18s if they fail to comply with new online safety rules.
The media regulator has published draft codes of practice which require tech firms to have more robust age-checking measures, and to reformulate their algorithms to steer children away from material they should not see.
But parents of children who died after exposure to harmful online content have described Ofcom's new rules as "insufficient" - one told the BBC change was happening "at a snail's pace."
In statements, Meta and Snapchat said they had extra protections for under-18s, and offered parental tools to control what children can see on their platforms.
Other firms have not responded to a BBC request for comment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv2d2j8y38lo16 May 2024, 12:09 BST
The European Union is investigating Facebook and Instagram over whether they are so addictive that they are having "negative effects" on the "physical and mental health" of children.
It will also scrutinise if have done enough to check whether users are old enough to use them, and how content is recommended to children.
A number of big tech firms are now under investigation for potential breaches of the EU's tough new Digital Services Act (DSA), and could be fined up to 6% of annual global turnover.
Meta, which owns both platforms, says it has "spent a decade developing more than 50 tools and policies" to protect children.
"This is a challenge the whole industry is facing, and we look forward to sharing details of our work with the European Commission," it said.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... g-money/(Mother Jones) Donald Trump’s Truth Social stock might be doing better these days, but the company is still struggling to make money. In the first three months of 2024, it pulled in just $770,000 in advertising revenue. To put that in some context, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, earned more revenue in just three minutes, on its way to making $36.4 billion in revenue over three months.
Truth Social posted those dismal revenue numbers in a public stock filing on Monday, but as anemic as the revenue numbers are, they aren’t even an improvement from last year. Despite all of Trump’s bluster and the publicity from finally going public, the platform actually saw it’s ad revenues drop from the same period last year, when the company reportedly earned a not-much-better $1.1 million in ad revenue.
The new filing also revealed that the company, which went public in March, lost about $13.1 million from first quarter operations, a dramatic uptick from last year’s $3.6 million. And that’s just the cost of doing business—when the company factored in the cost of going public and distributing shares to people who were owed pieces of the venture, it actually lost $327.6 million in the first three months of the year. It still has about $274 million in cash to play with, but none of this is a good sign for the company’s future.
The company’s current stock price would indicate a value of nearly $6 billion, of which Trump personally controls about $4 billion. That valuation seems hard to square with the company’s revenues, which currently amount to less than the sales at an average Chick-Fil-A franchise. On Monday, following the release of its new financial data, the stock price fell by roughly 9 percent by mid-afternoon.
The long-term outlook for the share price is particularly important for Trump, who cannot cash his shares out until September—six months from the stock going public—and so the value of his stake in the company is entirely theoretical, at least for now.