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Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

  • Facebook will not change – Zuckerberg

    Facebook will not change – Zuckerberg

    The founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has said consequent upon the change of Facebook to Meta, it’s family of apps and their brands will not change.

    TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports Zuckerberg made this known on Thursday in his 2021 founder’s letter, stressing that the mission of his company remains the same — bringing people together.

    What this means is that although the parent company, Facebook has changed name to Meta, the name of the Facebook app as we know it will remain the same.

    Zuckerberg himself made this clear in the 2021 founder’s letter in which he stated: “Our apps and their brands aren’t changing… And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do”.

    This goes further to mean that the Facebook app, Messenger app, the Instagram app, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Novi are now all bundled under Meta as the parent.

    Instead of having Facebook as the parent company and also having the Facebook app, the CEO has now made it easier to differentiate between the company and the products the company creates.

    “We just announced that we’re making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments: one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms.

    “Our work on the metaverse is not just one of these segments. The metaverse encompasses both the social experiences and future technology. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.

    “To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.

    “Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology around people.

    “But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

    “From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services.

    “As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for,” the letter reads in part.

    Read Zuckerberg’s founder letter 2021 below:

    FOUNDER’S LETTER, 2021

    We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too.

    In recent decades, technology has given people the power to connect and express ourselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mostly typed text on websites. When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line.

    The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.

    The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this.

    In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today. We made a film that explores how you might use the metaverse one day.

    In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.

    Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more — instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.

    You’ll move across these experiences on different devices — augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms. This isn’t about spending more time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.

    OUR ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY

    The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.

    Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media apps. We believe the metaverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our energy to helping achieve its potential.

    As I wrote in our original founder’s letter: “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

    This approach has served us well. We’ve built our business to support very large and long term investments to build better services, and that’s what we plan to do here.

    The last five years have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that building products people love isn’t enough.

    I’ve gained more appreciation that the internet’s story isn’t straightforward. Every chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks, and disruption of established interests. We’ll need to work together, from the beginning, to bring the best possible version of this future to life.

    Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one. So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance. Most of all, we need to help build ecosystems so that more people have a stake in the future and can benefit not just as consumers but as creators.

    This period has also been humbling because as big of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it’s like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice for consumers and high fees for developers are stifling innovation and holding back the internet economy.

    We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want our services to be accessible to as many people as possible, which means working to make them cost less, not more. Our mobile apps are free. Our ads model is designed to provide businesses the lowest prices. Our commerce tools are available at cost or with modest fees. As a result, billions of people love our services and hundreds of millions of businesses rely on our tools.

    That’s the approach we want to bring to helping to build the metaverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or subsidized to make them available to more people. We’ll continue supporting side-loading and streaming from PCs so people have choice, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible so we can maximize the overall creative economy. We’ll need to make sure we don’t lose too much money along the way though.

    Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

    WHO WE ARE

    As we embark on this next chapter, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.

    We’re a company that focuses on connecting people. While most tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we’ve always focused on building technology so people can interact with each other.

    Today we’re seen as a social media company. Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It’s an iconic social media brand.

    Building social apps will always be important for us, and there’s a lot more to build. But increasingly, it’s not all we do. In our DNA, we build technology to bring people together. The metaverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networking was when we got started.

    Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards.

    We just announced that we’re making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments: one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms. Our work on the metaverse is not just one of these segments. The metaverse encompasses both the social experiences and future technology. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.

    To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.

    Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology around people.

    But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

    From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.

    I used to study Classics, and the word “meta” comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story. Ours is a story that started in a dorm room and grew beyond anything we imagined; into a family of apps that people use to connect with one another, to find their voice, and to start businesses, communities, and movements that have changed the world.

    I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things. It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made by all of us.

    We have built things that have brought people together in new ways. We’ve learned from struggling with difficult social issues and living under closed platforms. Now it is time to take everything we’ve learned and help build the next chapter.

    I’m dedicating our energy to this — more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you’ll join us. The future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.

  • What Mark Zuckerberg’s Trial Says About Us – Azu Ishiekwene

    Azu Ishiekwene

    The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is having a torrid time. One by one, his worst fears are coming true.

    According to Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, authors of An Ugly Truth, a scathing tell-all on Zuckerberg and his second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook founder has been troubled for years by three deadly fears: the prospect of hackers breaching the site, his employees being harmed, and the breakup of his empire.

    He’s had them coming for the past five years, at least. But in just one week, his deadly fears have not only come to him with chairs, they have arrived at Menlo Park with their own shades as well.

    Just before the disruption of services on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for six hours on October 4, an engineer and former product-manager-turned-whistleblower, Frances Haugen, dragged out Zuckerberg in a devastating interview and public testimony, accusing Facebook, the world’s largest social technology platform, of putting profits above safety.

    If Facebook was a country, Haugen’s testimony might have been treated not just as a rebellion, but a coup attempt. And Zuckerberg is not just another tyrant in a banana republic. He is a potentate with a fan base of over three billion, revenue of $85.9 billion and a market value of $800 billion. Facebook is bigger than many countries, and Zuckerberg, more influential than presidents.

    Zuckerberg has rejected the whistleblower’s charges, saying they are untrue. But the crux of the matter is whether Facebook is exercising a duty of care remotely matching the brand’s monumental influence and impact.

    After the Cambridge Analytica scandal and concerns that right wing groups, especially, were using social media to stoke hate crimes and spread dangerous and misleading information about public health issues in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, the heat has been turned on Facebook to raise its game.

    The jacket of An Ugly Truth is lined with statements of remorse by Zuckerberg and Sandberg since 2006, promising distressed subscribers a new day and pledging a new leaf.

    But it would seem that the fulfillment of those promises is hardly matched by the brutishness with which the brand seeks to impede or destroy its competitors using the massive trove of data at its disposal.

    I’m not on Facebook or Instagram. Yet, I recognise that I’m caught in the predatory web of one of the behemoth’s most egregious platforms – WhatsApp. My addiction is not Zuckerberg’s fault; it’s entirely mine.

    Long before Haugen laid out her charges, I had been having a deep personal conversation with myself over the potential impact that WhatsApp, which I signed up to only about four years ago, was having on me.

    I sensed that I was getting addicted to WhatsApp, but like most addicts going through a rite of passage, it took a long time to convince myself that it was happening. I was in denial.

    I would pick up my phone in the morning, determined to reply just one or two messages or check the time. And then, I would find myself drifting from tray to tray, clearing message after message and leaping from one tray to the other as notifications stream in with the seducing charm of a red-light district.

    Some say it’s an ecosystem, a network of family and friends connected by shared interests, experiences and banter. In a way it is.

    It’s a far more connected world today than it was in the 1980s when my aunt migrated to the UK and the whole brood that saw her off to the airport in two buses wept at the lounge as she departed. Speaking with her again from Nigeria which, at the time, had less than 800,000 telephone lines in a population of over 100 million was always going to be a misery. Her departure was like a funeral.

    In a lot of ways, things have changed for good, empowering millions of young people and forcing greater transparency in government. But in some ways, too, it feels like an eco-prison. Once you’re online, everyone in your community knows you’re there. Even when you disable your “Read Receipts”, stalkers still find a way to figure you’re in the yard and pounce.

    To keep my space and sanity, I find myself leaping from one message tray to another, dodging unwanted incoming calls, and at the same time, taking care not to miss important information in the swamp of things.

    At first, it was an adventure. But as time went on, the cons overwhelmed the pros of my daily WhatsApp experience. I began to wonder if flitting from one message to another with hardly enough time to process and digest one before the next, was not dangerous, if not to my mental health, perhaps to my mindfulness.

    It was also difficult to remember where I got a particular information from – which chatroom, which message tray, or in fact, which platform. The whole thing would slowly blur into a fuzz, lacking in depth, context or meaning, yet bandied about by “contacts” as gospel.

     

    Algorithms feed on our vulnerable, curious sides as humans. Most adults can, however, begin to turn the tide once they realise that the bulk of what exists in the “chat-o-sphere” is for the benefit of the propagators and those mining the data.

    As the social media eco-prison took hold in my world with memes displacing touch and tech-speak and abbreviations replacing context and right spellings, flightiness became a real danger. I had to improvise to catch my sanity. And that meant letting necessity drive my social engagements, instead of the other way round.

    Friends with whom I shared my experience told me it was a real struggle for them, too. They were also fighting their own social media demons, but of greater concern was the mental health of children of school age who appear to be spending more and more time on Facebook and other forms of social media, with all the attendant risks and dangers.

    Yet, it would be unfair to scapegoat Facebook or single out any other social media platform for all the social problems of contemporary society. Throughout history new forms of technology have elicited both excitement and fear among the populace.

    Socrates never wrote, because he said the invention of writing would worsen forgetfulness and his student, Plato, agreed with him.

    The invention of the telephone was greeted with criticism that it was soon bound to make humanity a transparent jelly heap. And when television came along, it was scorned as a useless wooden box incapable of holding the attention of any serious-minded person.

    The dramatic change in technology, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s has spooked fears of job loss and weakened control. There are also fears related to privacy, cyber security and mental wellbeing and children’s safety. Yet, inventors and innovators have always prevailed and created opportunities for a better world.

    Facebook may be in the eye of the storm now but all social media platforms have the same predatory instinct for which Zuckerberg is being called out. Haugen’s expose, coupled with political pressure on Big Tech from a number of countries around the world may lead to some soul-searching in Silicon Valley. But I doubt very much that we’re on the eve of a meltdown.

    Zuckerberg and other tech entrepreneurs who have changed our world never pretended they’re out to finish what Mother Teresa started. They are in it for profit. The only thing that keeps their genius going is to build, buy or bury.

    Shouldn’t they care about safety and people? Of course, they should. If they don’t and the market does not punish them soon enough, governments ultimately will. But until such a time, we must increasingly take responsibility for our safety and not be seduced by the prospects of a Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey nanny.

    The world has been here before. Between the late 19th and early 20th century three of the most famous monopolies in the world – Andrew Carnegie’s Steel Company, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and the American Tobacco Company were broken up. When AT&T got too big for its own good, it joined the list of fallen monopolies in 1984.

    Recent events may have shaken Mark Zuckerberg, unsettling his quest for immortality. But they don’t necessarily mean that his third most deadly fear – a breakup – is imminent. Yet, it’s a good time for Facebook and its users to stop and reflect.

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

     

  • Zuckerberg blocks Nnamdi Kanu from Facebook

    Zuckerberg blocks Nnamdi Kanu from Facebook

    The leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu has been blocked from the social media platform by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.

    The media and publicity secretary of IPOB, Emma Powerful made this known in a statement made available to newsmen on Wednesday.

    TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports Kanu’s Facebook account was blocked after his revealing live broadcast of Tuesday night, according to Powerful.

    The statement reads: “The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) is appalled at the despicable attitude of Facebook for blocking the Facebook page of our leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, after his expository and explosive live broadcast on Tuesday night. It is not only baffling but too petty for a global social media giant like Facebook to allow itself to be used by agents of oppression in Nigeria to suppress the truth.

    “We strongly condemn this attitude of Facebook managers in Lagos and Abuja who collude with corrupt Nigerian government officials to suppress the free flow of Information via their platform. This unconscionable and reprehensible attitude amounts to partnering with perpetrators of human rights abuses and other criminal activities masterminded by the Nigeria state against innocent citizens.

    “The Fulani-controlled federal government and its foot soldiers – terrorist herdsmen and bandits – have continued to subjugate indigenous nations in the country, including Biafrans with the intent for conquest. These foot soldiers on a daily basis unleash all sorts of mayhem on the innocent and hapless indigenous peoples while the federal government mischievously remains docile.

    “These vampires masquerading as herdsmen have forcibly seized our forests and converted our farms to grazing fields for their cattle. They have equally turned our ancestral lands to slaughterhouses where they kill with impunity in most dehumanising manners, innocent locals going about their legitimate business. They commit these crimes unchallenged by security operatives. They kidnap for ransoms, maim and rape our women. They feed their cattle with our crops, and Facebook is saying we don’t have a right to cry out?

    The IPOB spokesperson described the attitude of the Zuckerberg-managed Facebook as oppressive and prevention of information flow, which he said was similar to how the British government prevented information from Biafra from going out during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 — 1970.

    “Now that our leader has started exposing the atrocities of these wolves in human clothing, Facebook has decided to be an accomplice to mass murder and oppressive tendencies of Fulani Janjaweed rulers of Nigeria. Why should Facebook block the account of the leader of the largest peaceful mass movement in the world for speaking the bitter truth people are too terrified to talk about?

    “Why hasn’t Facebook prevailed on the perpetrators of these heinous crimes in Nigeria to stop their atrocities instead of denying innocent victims media access? Facebook is quick to fall for the lie of agents of oppression and accuse us of hate speech but fails to realise that hate action begets hate speech if in the Facebook lexicon, bitter truth translates to hate speech.

    “This unholy act is only akin to what Britain and her allies did to Biafra during the Genocidal War of 1967-70 when they imposed land, air and media blockade on Biafra in order to deny the truth about the ongoing genocide from going out.

    “Facebook, it seems does not want the atrocities of Fulani killer herdsmen to come to the knowledge of the world but they have failed woefully. Facebook is today assisting an oppressive government that pampers, frees and settles ‘captured’ terrorists while doing nothing to protect or rehabilitate victims of terror.

    “But our message to Facebook is simple: no matter how hard you try to suppress the gospel of truth being preached by our leader, the struggle for Biafra liberation cannot be slowed down. On the contrary, our efforts will be intensified because Biafra restoration is a divine mandate that must be accomplished in this era.

    “We are very resolute in our resolve to restore Biafra and will not be deterred. If you like, block all Biafran activists on your platform, we shall keep pushing on until Biafra is fully restored,” the statement added.

    In the release, however, IPOB spokesman enumerated other options to be explored in getting information from Kanu henceforth.

    “We, therefore, wish to encourage our leader’s teeming global audience to follow him and hook up to his live broadcasts via IPOB’s numerous other platforms. Our leader can be followed through many other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, IPOB Community Radio App, Radio Biafra app, satellite and FM.

    “May we therefore remind all those compromised local staff of Facebook in Lagos and Abuja that but for Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB, their families in their communities would have today been overrun by herdsmen and terrorists. An accomplice to a cruel man will surely get the reward of cruelty!” it further stated.

  • Zuckerberg bans Trump from Facebook, Instagram indefinitely

    Zuckerberg bans Trump from Facebook, Instagram indefinitely

    Facebook has extended the ban placed on Facebook and Instagram accounts of President Donald Trump.

    Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook made this known in a statement on Thursday.

    He stated that the ban is indefinite and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.

    The statement reads: “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.

    “His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world.

    “We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect — and likely their intent — would be to provoke further violence.

    “Following the certification of the election results by Congress, the priority for the whole country must now be to ensure that the remaining 13 days and the days after inauguration pass peacefully and in accordance with established democratic norms.

    “Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies.

    “We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech.

    “But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.

    “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.

    “Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete”.

  • Facebook bans Holocaust denial

    Facebook bans Holocaust denial

    Facebook is banning Holocaust denial on its platform, with the social media giant saying it is concerned by rising anti-Semitism, in the latest move restricting controversial content.

    “If people search for the Holocaust on Facebook, we’ll start directing you to authoritative sources to get accurate information,’’ Facebook Chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said on Monday.

    Zuckerburg said he has “struggled with the tension’’ between protecting free speech and limiting hateful content.

    “Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance,’’ Zuckerburg said.

    Last week, Facebook said it was removing any group or page that openly identified with QAnon, a conspiracy theory group that holds some far-right views but largely believes that a cabal of paedophiliac Satanists run the world.

    The move also applies to Instagram.

    The social media giant also announced restrictions on intentional disinformation on the coronavirus and posts designed to suppress voting.

    The platform has been under pressure to moderate more content amid signs that groups like QAnon were able to gain traction through social media.

  • Facebook, Twitter, Google CEOs avoid subpoena, agree to testify before U.S. Senate committee

    Facebook, Twitter, Google CEOs avoid subpoena, agree to testify before U.S. Senate committee

    The chief executives of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet-owned Google have agreed to voluntarily testify at a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 28 about a key law protecting internet companies.

    Facebook and Twitter confirmed on Friday that their CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, respectively, will appear, while a source said that Google’s Sundar Pichai will appear.

    That came a day after the committee unanimously voted to approve a plan to subpoena the three CEOs to appear before the panel.

    Twitter’s Dorsey tweeted on Friday that the hearing “must be constructive & focused on what matters most to the American people: how we work together to protect elections.”

    The CEOs are to appear virtually.

    In addition to discussions on reforming the law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability over content posted by users, the hearing will bring up issues about consumer privacy and media consolidation.

    Republican President Donald Trump has made holding tech companies accountable for allegedly stifling conservative voices a theme of his administration.

    As a result, calls for a reform of Section 230 have been intensifying ahead of the Nov. 3 elections, but there is little chance of approval by Congress this year.

    Last week Trump met with nine Republican state attorneys general to discuss the fate of Section 230 after the Justice Department unveiled a legislative proposal aimed at reforming the law.

    The chief executives of Google, Facebook, Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc recently testified before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.

    The panel, which is investigating how the companies’ practices hurt rivals, is expected to release its report as early as next Monday.

  • Facebook to ban new political ads in week before U.S. elections

    Facebook to ban new political ads in week before U.S. elections

    Facebook Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg said his company would not allow new political advertisements to run on the platform in the week before the U.S. presidential election.

    The company will, however, allow ads that began running before the final week to remain.

    And Zuckerberg did not say that Facebook would stop allowing politicians to run misleading ads in the meantime, allowing political candidates to show ads with lies until Election Day on Nov. 3.

    In justifying the decision, the tech executive noted that the ads published before the final week of election season will be published transparently in Facebook’s Ads Library so that anyone can scrutinize them, including journalists and fact-checkers.

    “It’s important that campaigns can run get-out-the-vote campaigns, and I generally believe the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims,” Zuckerberg said in a statement on Thursday.

    Facebook has come under scrutiny for allowing misinformation to proliferate on its platform in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

    Around 7 out of 10 adults in the U.S. use Facebook, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre in 2019, giving the company enormous ability to distribute political information.

  • Coca-Cola cleans $7 billion off Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune

    Coca-Cola cleans $7 billion off Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune

    Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive officer, has had $7 billion wiped off his fortune after Coca-Cola announced halting all social media advertising for 30 days.

    This follows #StopHateforProfit campaign launched on June 19 in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers and the subsequent worldwide protests.

    It was triggered by Facebook’s refusal to remove a post by President Donald Trump, which threatened the protesters with violence. Trump wrote in his post, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and also called the demonstrators “thugs”.

    “There is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media. The Coca-Cola Company will pause paid advertising on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days.

    “We will take this time to reassess our advertising policies to determine whether revisions are needed. We also expect greater accountability and transparency from our social media partners,” James Quincey, Chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company

    Zuckerberg’s net wealth is down by $7.21 billion as of Saturday, while Facebook’s share price dropped more than 8% at the close of Friday trading, as the ad boycott snowballs.

    Coca-Cola is the latest brand to back the #StopHateforProfit campaign by American civil rights groups.

    Big corporations, including Unilever, Verizon and many others have over the last week, either paused or halted their advertising with Facebook and other social media platforms as a result.

    Meanwhile, the pressure appears to be working as late on Friday, Zuckerberg announced the company will now label “newsworthy” posts from politicians that break its rules on hate speech or violent speech.

  • Facebook fires employee over Trump’s posts

    Facebook has fired an employee, Brandon Dail for criticizing its Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Founder Mark Zuckerberg over posts made by US President Donald Trump.

    Dail, a user interface engineer in Seattle, wrote on Twitter that he was dismissed for publicly scolding a colleague who had refused to include a statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement on developer documents he was publishing.

    Dail sent the tweet a day after joining dozens of employees, including six other engineers on his team in abandoning their desks and tweeting objections to Zuckerberg’s handling of Trump’s posts in a rare protest at the social media company.

    “Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dail wrote in the tweet, sent on June 2. He said on Friday that he stood by what he wrote.

    Facebook confirmed Dail’s characterisation of his dismissal, but declined to provide additional information. The company said during the walkout that participating employees would not face retaliation.

    Dail did not respond to a request for comment.

    Trump’s posts which prompted the staff outcry included the racially charged phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in reference to demonstrations against racism and police brutality held after the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.