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7:00 PM ET, February 18, 2021

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 Top News: 
Jason Scott / Bloomberg:
Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg says he will hold talks with Zuckerberg to “see if there's a pathway forward”, but says news legislation will go ahead  —  - ‘The world is watching us very closely,’ says Treasurer  — News content law expected to pass through parliament next week
RELATED:
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Facebook's refusal to pay a misguided media tax, pushed by Rupert Murdoch, is a defense of the open web and criticizing it for rejecting a link tax is bizarre  —  None of this should have been a surprise.  Back in September we wrote about Facebook publicly saying that if Australia went forward …
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Banning Australian news makes sense for Facebook and may prompt people to visit news sites directly; Google's payoffs, though, will invite global shakedowns  —  Yesterday, I wrote that Australia's News Media Bargaining Code threatened to splinter the internet.
Benedict Evans:
Australia's proposal for media compensation, which covers raw link sharing, is presented as a competition case when it's actually a tech tax and media subsidy  —  Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.
Reuters and Associated Press:
Facebook says it generated ~5.1B free referrals to Australian publishers worth ~AU$407M last year, as Australia's Media Bargaining law passes the House
Nicholas McElroy / ABC:
Australian authorities in public health, weather, and other areas say Facebook has removed posts from their feeds following Facebook's news ban
News Corp:
News Corp announces a multi-year, global partnership with Google to provide content from its news sites “in return for significant payments by Google”
Campbell Brown / Facebook:
Facebook News Partnerships VP: Australia's planned law “fails to recognize ... the fundamental nature of the relationship between our platform and publishers”
William Easton / About Facebook:
Ahead of proposed media law, Facebook says it's banning Australians from sharing/viewing news and all users from sharing from and viewing Australian news Pages
Nicholas Quah / Vulture:
Hanaa' Tameez / Nieman Lab:
NYT debuts a Slack app that provides a daily recommended read, a “save for later” button, and alerts users if a link they shared was discussed in other channels  —  On Thursday, The New York Times launched a Slack app that's designed to help foster conversations about Times stories …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Google adds the Apple TV app to its newest Chromecast device with Google TV and has made it available on Sony and TCL smart TVs that Google TV  —  Plugging a notable gap in its streaming lineup, Google has added the Apple TV app — the only way to get the Apple TV Plus service — to its newest Chromecast device.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Roku beats with Q4 revenue of $650M vs $615M expected, up 58% YoY, net profit of $65.2M vs an expected loss; 14.3M active accounts were added for FY2020  —  Roku grew revenue in the fourth quarter 58%, to a record $649.9 million — and posted a $65.2 million net profit for the quarter, whereas Wall Street had expected a loss.
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
Court filing says a Facebook manager warned that the company reported revenues it “should have never made” by overstating how many users advertisers could reach  —  Lawsuit cites product executive's qualms over figures provided to advertisers  —  A Facebook employee warned …
Lili Bayer / Politico:
Alex Mahadevan / Poynter:
An early analysis of Birdwatch, Twitter's crowdsourced fact-checking pilot with about 1,000 users, shows partisan rhetoric and a lack of source citations  —  A Poynter analysis found that less than half of Birdwatch users include sources and many fact-checking notes contain partisan rhetoric.
 
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 More News: 
Manori Ravindran / Variety:
BBC Studios' streaming channel BBC Select launches today in the US on Amazon Prime and Apple TV for $4.99/month, with non-fiction culture and politics shows
Todd Spangler / Variety:
UFC signs partnership with TikTok, under which it will produce live content including interviews and training segments for the platform
Discussion: Engadget
Sean Burch / The Wrap:
Triller CEO says the company never inflated user numbers after a report said the app had half the 50M users it claimed
Reuters:
Belarusian court sentences two journalists who filmed protests to two years in prison; they were accused of orchestrating the protests by filming them
 Earlier Picks: 
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Recent deals like the iHeart Media's purchase of Triton Digital suggest that ad tech, not exclusive content, will be the key to long-term success in podcasting
Marc Tracy / New York Times:
Profile of Stewart Bainum, who set up a nonprofit to buy The Baltimore Sun; filing shows price of $65M for The Sun and other papers under nonbinding term sheet
Brian Flood / Fox News:
Rush Limbaugh has died at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer
 

 
From Techmeme:

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority:
Source: Google has canceled the development of a second-generation Pixel Tablet, planned for release in 2025, due to concerns that it wouldn't sell very well

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is testing a more conversational version of Siri, dubbed “LLM Siri”, with plans to release it in spring 2026 as part of iOS 19 and macOS 16

Hannah Lang / Reuters:
Sources: a16z, Ripple, Kraken, and Circle are jostling for a seat on Trump's promised crypto advisory council, which is expected to set up a bitcoin reserve

 
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