Social Media Watch
News Source
EXCERPT:
Trump Media, which is to say the Twitter clone Truth Social, is ditching CEO Devin Nunes (formerly a congressman, also cows and relentless complaints) after what the Associated Press reports as a “stock collapse that wiped out billions in investor wealth. — Read the rest
The post Trump Media shakeup after stock collapse appeared first on Boing Boing.
The parent company of Facebook, Meta, has announced plans to lay off nearly 10% of its total workforce, 8,000 positions, starting in early May 2026. These layoffs may not be the only layoffs, as more might be announced after May of this year.
Meta Reportedly to Cut 8,000 Jobs in Upcoming Layoffs Amid AI Cost Pressures – MLQ.ai– news.google.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
Key Points
- Meta to eliminate about 8,000 positions, roughly 10% of its global workforce of nearly 79,000, starting May 20.1
- Cuts aim to offset costs of AI infrastructure investments and streamline operations with AI-assisted workers.1
- Additional layoffs expected in second half of 2026, though details on scale and timing unclear.1
- Follows earlier reports of potential cuts up to 20% of staff.1
- Meta declined to comment on the reports.1
Just over three months ago, Australia’s world-leading regulations attempting to ban social media use by under-16s came into force. The relevant regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, has released its first compliance report on the effectiveness of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024. The report makes interesting reading, given the number of countries apparently considering whether to emulate the Australian endeavors.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the eSafety Commissioner finds “progress” to be remarkably modest. Based on a survey of 898 parents and caregivers of children age eight to 15 taken between January 19 and February 2, 2026, the commissioner reports that while just under half reported their children having their own account on at least one of the banned platforms prior to the law coming into force on December 10, 2025, that proportion decreased to only 31.3 percent in the survey period.
Judge Dismisses Elon Musk Antitrust Lawsuit Let’s Data Science
from news.google.com
Meta and YouTube have each faced legal setbacks that could portend badly for the social media industry as a whole. The first saw Meta lose $381 million lawsuit over child exploitation and safety, the second saw YouTube and Google lose $3 million each for not preventing child addiction. Both cases are expected to set off copycat cases, including against other social media platforms.
Meta, YouTube face thousands of cases on whether they harmed children after bellwether cases go against them Fortune
from news.google.com
Two landmark jury verdicts against social media companies have arrived at the front of a wave of lawsuits alleging that the popular platforms endanger the mental health of children.
Financial penalties total $381 million in the two cases involving tech giant Meta in New Mexico and both Meta and YouTube in California. The verdicts highlight a growing shift in the public perception of social media companies and their responsibilities toward child safety.
But it may be too soon to tell whether litigation will change the way popular social media and messaging platforms function — or influence the complex algorithms that deliver content to billions of users worldwide.
A California jury found Alphabet’s Google and Meta liable for $3m in damages in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit that accused the companies of being legally responsible for the addictive design of their platforms.
The decision was handed down by a Los Angeles-based jury on Wednesday after more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, and more than a month after jurors heard opening statements in the trial.
A landmark jury verdict holding Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google liable for harming a young user with products designed to be addictive threatens to put the social networking companies in the same category as Big Tobacco and opioid makers — a potential crack in their shield from legal responsibility for what happens on their platforms.
While the $6 million in damages a jury in Los Angeles awarded to the 20-year-old plaintiff — which the companies vowed to appeal — will barely register on their balance sheets, the impact of the verdict will likely be more damaging and harder to quantify. The loss, in the first of thousands of product-liability lawsuits against Meta, Google and other social networks, is the kind of black eye that often leads to an increase in government regulations.
Musk says Labour looking for ‘any excuse for censorship’ amid X row Daily Mail
from news.google.com
The DOJ and multiple states have filed notices to appeal a federal court ruling in the Google Search antitrust case that imposed limited restrictions on the internet giant’s conquest of the search and AI market. The verdict was so friendly to Google that one analyst called it “a home run for the status quo.”
Bloomberg reports that the DOJ and a coalition of states announced Tuesday they will appeal a September 2025 federal court decision that is widely considered to be the best case scenario for Big Tech following a landmark antitrust case. The appeal targets a ruling by US District Judge Amit Mehta that allowed the tech giant to avoid major structural changes despite being found guilty of operating an illegal monopoly in the search market.
PARIS — French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.
The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It is looking into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.
In addition, prosecutors filed a request for “voluntary interviews” of Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X from 2023 to 2025, scheduled for April 20. Employees of the platform X have also been summoned that same week in April to be heard as witnesses, the statement said.
The TikTok deal has officially closed, with a “mostly American” investor group mutually led by Oracle and Silber Lake. ByteDance will still have a 20% stake, meaning TikTok will help fund the CCP. The venture will be led by a board that will have a majority of U.S. directors on it.
Deal for TikTok to Operate in U.S. Officially Closes, Desperate Dems of Course Call for an Investigation – RedState
For years, the fate of social media titan TikTok has hung in the balance, with potential deals falling through which would have overcome concerns about just how safe it was for people in the U.S. to use.
One of the concerns over the platform was that with the parent company ByteDance being based in China, it has entaglements with the authoritarian government and Chinese Communist Party. So, in the waning hours of the Biden administration, Congress passed a law that would ban access to the site unless it sold to a new owner outside China.
The new Trump 47 administration also took it up with the Supreme Court in an amicus brief, but SCOTUS chose not to stand in the way of the ban, something that President Trump delayed several times in hopes of making a deal.
Big Tech social media companies could face Big Tobacco moment as landmark trial begins baltimoresun.com
from news.google.com
TikTok Faces Backlash, Outages, Competition Following Change In U.S. Ownership 01/27/2026 MediaPost
from news.google.com
PARIS: French lawmakers on Monday (Jan 26) were set to vote on draft legislation to ban social media for under-15s, an effort championed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to protect children from excessive screen time.
The legislation, which also provides for a ban on mobile phones in high schools, follows Australia banning social media for under-16s in December, a world first.
As social media has grown around the world, so has concern that too much screen time is arresting child development and contributing to declining mental health in minors.
“The emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, either by American platforms or Chinese algorithms,” Macron said in a video broadcast on Saturday.
The socialist UK government is mulling plans to ban the social media giant X, owned by Elon Musk, over supposed online safety concerns.
UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has voiced support for regulator Ofcom to potentially restrict access to X if the platform fails to comply with national online safety laws.
The nation’s censors are specifically citing the use of X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, which has been used to manipulate digital images.
The government argues that it is a crime to create AI-generated images of people without their consent.
Bill Gates has backed off the climate change hoax in preparation for abandoning global warming safety standards for AI resource acquisition. Meanwhile, his NGO, the Gates Foundation is working with the UN to prepare the world for a global digital ID system. The initiate is called the “50-in-5” campaign.
It aims to complete the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in 50 countries by 2028. So far, 30 countries have signed up. Some of the major countries include India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Nigeria.
UN & Gates Foundation Push Global Digital ID System Rollout – slaynews.com
A quiet but explosive global push is underway as the United Nations (UN) advances a new plan to roll out a Gates Foundation-backed digital ID and payment system in 50 major countries around the world.
Critics warn that the dystopian effort could redefine citizenship, erase privacy, and convert basic human rights into state-managed digital privileges.
The UN, backed aggressively by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is fast-tracking a worldwide digital ID system designed to envelop 50 nations by 2028.
The initiative, branded as the UN’s “50-in-5” campaign, aims to lock participating nations into Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
After the social media platform X rolled out a new feature called “About this Account” numerous active X accounts were exposed as being filled with foreign propagandists and engagement farmers adding fuel to ALL SIDES of ALL major issues.
Many MAGA accounts turned out to be foreign accounts as have anti-Trump accounts. From Gaza to Ukraine, from Gender Wars to Race Wars, propagandists and people seeking engagement for monthly X payments have been throwing gas on everyone’s fires.
A bombshell revelation is rocking X today — one that exposes a vast, coordinated foreign influence operation masquerading as “grassroots American activism.” For years, millions of Americans unknowingly engaged with political content that was not American at all, but manufactured abroad by troll farms, foreign propagandists, and anonymous operators posing as U.S. citizens.
A new X feature reveals that accounts posing as Gazan ‘victims’, American activists, MAGA — amplified by major newsrooms like The New York Times — were actually foreign ops flooding X with anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Hamas propaganda. What millions believed was grassroots sentiment was, in fact, a coordinated foreign influence campaign, a foreign psyop.
Thousands of accounts have been exposed by X’s new “About this Account” feature, which displays the country of origin based on signup IP, app store data, and activity patterns. This rollout, starting around November 22, 2025, has revealed the true country of origin for many profiles claiming to be U.S. or Gaza-based but operating from countries like India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—especially among MAGA-aligned influencers and anti-Israel pages.
If you have spent any time on X (fka Twitter), you know that it is a cesspool of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, frequently neo-Nazi accounts that purport to be “America First” and “MAGA” and posting from the United States, frequently red states.
The X algorithms for the “For You” feed were unbearable.
It’s amazing how “For You” feeds nonstop Jew-baiting and Jew hatred on my feed also. There’s something very broken about it @elonmusk https://t.co/HY46Dr97Fa
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) September 29, 2025
But I and many others suspected that many, if not most, of these accounts, particularly the ones that purported to be “MAGA” were fakes.
My “For You” on @X is a dumpster fire of the worst and most fraudulent anti-Israel accounts, the algorithm creating that feed sucks, it’s become unusable @elonmusk
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) September 10, 2025
Spanish court orders Meta to pay $550 million to digital media companies Reuters
from news.google.com
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just given a huge boost to California’s plan to continue building one of the most expansive digital verification regimes in the country.
The appeals court refused to rehear NetChoice v. Bonta, leaving in place a ruling that allows California to advance a system critics warn could become a statewide online digital ID requirement.
The court’s decision keeps intact most of Senate Bill 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act.
The bill was signed by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2024.
The law forces social media companies to implement “age assurance” systems to determine whether users are adults or minors.
The state of Texas has secured an “historic” $1.375 billion settlement agreement with Google
The October 31 announcement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office marked the conclusion of two of the largest data privacy enforcement actions ever brought by a single state against the tech giant. Paxton sued Google for unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data in 2022.
“This historic $1.375 billion price tag for Google’s misconduct sends a clear warning to all of Big Tech that I will take aggressive action against any company that misuses Texans’ data and violates their privacy,” said Paxton in a press release. “If Big Tech thinks they can get away with abusing user data and illegally spying on Texans without consequences, I will make sure they are proven wrong. This monumental settlement is a testament to my office’s commitment to taking on the biggest companies in the world and securing victory on behalf of Texans.”
“The settlement obtained by Attorney General Paxton for these combined abuses far eclipses that of any other one state’s settlement against Google for similar claims, with the largest single-state settlement to date outside of Texas being $93 million,” declared the AG office. “Additionally, a forty-state coalition secured $391 million in its privacy case against Google, which is almost one billion dollars less than what Attorney General Paxton secured for Texas alone.”