Platforms

To Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, people are tired of how today’s Internet operates. He says the social media era of the Internet, a charge led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, has separated commerce from the general audience, herding users together and directing them to targets of the company’s choosing rather than allowing free exploration. “Now we’re in a closed platform wave, and Apple and Google are surfing that wave too,” Sweeney said.

Facebook has come under increasing fire for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. The company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users.

The way that Facebook controls its News Feed is often controversial and largely opaque to the outside world. Now the company is attempting to shine more light on the content it surpresses but doesn't remove entirely. Facebook published its “Content Distribution Guidelines” detailing the roughly three-dozen types of posts it demotes for various reasons in the News Feed, like clickbait and posts by repeat policy offenders.

Facebook conditioned its $5 billion payment to the Federal Trade Commission to resolve the Cambridge Analytica data leak probe on the agency dropping plans to sue Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg individually, shareholders allege in a lawsuit. Two groups of shareholders claimed that members of Facebook’s board allowed the company to overpay on its fine in order to protect Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and largest shareholder.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, signed off in August 2021 on a new initiative code-named Project Amplify. The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting months before in January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook’s News Feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to show people positive stories about the social network. The idea was that pushing pro-Facebook news items — some of them written by the company — would improve its image in the eyes of its users.

Leaders of the Stop Hate For Profit social media boycott group are discussing whether to organize another campaign against Facebook in light of an explosive investigative series from the Wall Street Journal. The 

Twitter will pay more than $800 million to settle a consolidated class-action securities lawsuit alleging the social-media company deliberately misled investors about user engagement in 2015.

Thanks to a multipart Wall Street Journal series this week, we have learned about a number of the company's challenges based on internal reports and documents written by Facebook employees sounding alarms. Facebook has argued that the Journal's information is ou

Government officials, tech lobbyists, civil rights advocates and researchers participated in POLITICO’s inaugural tech summit: “At a Digital Crossroads: Washington and Silicon Valley.” Key takeaways include:

Twelve former top US national security officials are urging Congress to hit pause on a package of antitrust bills in order to consider how breaking up tech companies could harm the US