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8:20 PM ET, January 8, 2025

Mediagazer

 Top News: 
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Meta revamping its content moderation systems with Community Notes is good, but Zuckerberg pretending it's about free speech is bad, and the timing is stupid  —  When the NY Times declared in September that “Mark Zuckerberg is Done With Politics,” it was obvious this framing was utter nonsense.
RELATED:
Pranav Dixit / Business Insider:
Audio: Meta told the International Fact-Checking Network that its US partnerships will end in March but Community Notes rollout is expected to take time  —  - Meta plans to end US fact-checking partnerships in March, with payments to continue through August.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says Meta's moderation changes are “deeply troubling”, and Mastodon will take action on Threads accounts violating Mastodon's policies
Variety:
Los Angeles fires prompt cancellation of movie premieres and tapings of Jimmy Kimmel Live and After Midnight, and the Critics Choice Awards have been postponed  —  “Jimmy Kimmel Live” has been canceled Wednesday night, because of the fires that have been raging throughout Los Angeles since Tuesday, Variety has confirmed.
Cristiano Lima-Strong / Washington Post:
Meta's fact-checking overhaul is set to deepen a growing schism between how platforms do content moderation in the US and in stricter regions like Europe  —  As platform scales back moderation in line with conservative demands in the U.S., it still has to maneuver through stiffer regulations in Europe and elsewhere.
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Philip Blenkinsop / Reuters:
EU rejects Zuckerberg's claim that “Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship”, saying it only requires illegal content removal
Business Insider:
Instagram ends a program that paid creators for ads placed between content on their profiles; Meta began testing the program in the US in 2022  —  Instagram has ended a program that allowed creators to earn money from ads placed between content on their profiles, the company confirmed to Business Insider.
Hadas Gold / CNN:
A book by a Politico reporter claims Trump's team was given the questions asked by Fox News anchors at an Iowa town hall last January in advance; Fox is probing  —  New York CNN —  —  President-elect Donald Trump's team was given the questions asked by Fox News anchors at an Iowa town hall …
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Mosseri says Meta is adding recommendations of political content on Instagram and Threads; Threads' control setting for political content will get three options  —  It's been nearly a year since Instagram and Threads defaulted to blocking recommendations of “political” content from accounts …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google rolls out Daily Listen, which uses AI to generate a 5-minute personalized audio overview of stories and topics that a user follows, on its mobile app  —  Google is kicking off a new experiment in Search Labs today called “Daily Listen.”  It's a bit like NotebookLM's Audio Overviews, while there are also podcast parallels.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
YouTube Music is testing Monthly Audience, a public metric that will show an artist's total number of unique listeners and viewers across all formats  —  Artist pages in YouTube Music have long included a subscriber count that's very much carried over from the main app, and Google is now testing a new “Monthly Audience Metric.”
Discussion: Android Central and PhoneArena
Bloomberg:
Ex-Facebook director Katie Harbath says Mark Zuckerberg's team uses elections to take stock of “where society is, to readjust how they're approaching content”  —  - Meta CEO accused fact checkers of bias and destroying trust  — Facebook and Instagram continue fact-checking outside US
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Brooke Singman / Fox News:
Meta's Joel Kaplan says the Trump administration is “a huge supporter of free expression”, which “gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on”
Stuart A. Thompson / New York Times:
Meta's fact-checking partners PolitiFact and FactCheck.org say they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked
 
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 More News: 
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Meta tests showing eBay listings on Facebook Marketplace in Germany, France, and the US, after the EU fined it €798M for abusing dominance; EBAY closes up 9.86%
 Earlier Picks: 
Elena Giordano / Politico:
Italy says Cecilia Sala, the journalist detained in Iran since 19 December, has been freed and is heading back to Italy
Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Whatnot, which lets users sell comics and other items through live videos, raised a $265M Series E at a $4.97B valuation, and says its annual GMV passed $3B
Mark Kleinman / Sky News:
Piers Morgan and News UK strike a deal that gives him ownership of the Uncensored YouTube channel; News UK will get a share of ad revenue until 2029
Arno Rosenfeld / The Forward:
Docs: The Heritage Foundation plans to “identify and target” volunteer Wikipedia editors who it says are “abusing their position” to publish antisemitic content
 

 
From Techmeme:

Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Ivanti warns that threat actors exploited a critical-rated zero-day in its widely used Connect Secure VPN tool to compromise its corporate customers' networks

Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Apple says it “has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles” and never sold it for advertising or other purposes, after paying $95M to settle a lawsuit

Financial Times:
Analysis: Elon Musk's UK obsession is driven by a few X accounts; an ex-Twitter exec says Musk may be the first tech leader to be radicalized by his own product
 
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