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Documents show TikTok parent ByteDance surveilled Forbes journalists and former BuzzFeed employees Emily Baker-White, Katharine Schwab, and Richard Nieva — ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists' physical location using their IP addresses, as first reported by Forbes in October.
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ByteDance fired four employees after finding in a probe they accessed data on US TikTok users, including reporters, while trying to learn the sources of a story — The company's internal investigation showed that workers also obtained data on a small number of other U.S. users.
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Sources: aiming to appease the US government, TikTok offers to operate more of its business at arm's length and allow more outside scrutiny by Oracle and others — Popular short-video app TikTok is offering to operate more of its business at arm's length and subject it to outside scrutiny …
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How ByteDance and TikTok, which owe their existence to intermingled Western and Chinese ideas, capital, and people, became caught in changing US-China relations
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Source: Michael Bloomberg wants to expand his media empire and is interested in acquiring Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones or The Washington Post — Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and media mogul, is interested in acquiring either Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones …
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YouTube buys NFL Sunday Ticket's residential rights for seven years, sources say for ~$2B/year; DirecTV paid $1.5B/year for residential and commercial rights — Video streamer to pay annual fee of roughly $2 billion under seven-year deal — Created with sketchtool.
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The NFL will make $120B in the next decade from NBC, CBS, Disney, Fox, Google, Apple, and Amazon deals, cementing its position as a premier content provider — The league chose YouTube as its Sunday Ticket partner in part because the service aims to be “much more broadly available.”
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Q&A with Insider's Linette Lopez on covering Elon Musk since 2018, Twitter suspending her for a tweet showing a court document with his email address, and more — “Once Elon took over, I was not optimistic. As usual, he is exceeding expectations for me."
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Whistleblower protection org Government Accountability Project files a complaint to Congress over Twitter's suspension of Steve Herman and other journalists — Nearly a week after Twitter's new owner Elon Musk said that the accounts of suspended journalists would be reinstated, at least six remain blocked.


Pathmatics: ~70% of Twitter's top 100 ad spenders before Elon Musk's takeover weren't spending as of the week ending December 18; 89% of 2021 revenue was ads — Executives are promising big incentives and new technology while also trying to explain the actions of their new owner
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January 6 committee recommends Congress “continue to evaluate policies of media companies that have had the effect of radicalizing their consumers” — The House committee examining last year's attack on the U.S. Capitol issued its long-awaited final report on Thursday night …
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Film executives are reaffirming their vows to theatrical releases, especially after Top Gun: Maverick, but it's unclear whether audiences will show up regularly — This year brought some big box office wins — never underestimate Tom Cruise — but mostly it was a time for film execs to stanch bleeding …
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Fox News host Sean Hannity and others say they doubted Trump's 2020 voting fraud claims, as Dominion Voting lawyers try to show Fox knowingly aired false claims — On Wednesday, lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems shared some of the strongest evidence yet that some Fox employees knew what they broadcast about the claims was false.
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