Mark Zuckerberg is playing Catan on his private jet with some Facebook executives and he's losing. Donald Trump won the election for the first time just a few days ago, and as he moves the pieces on the board, he looks annoyed. The reason is that his vice president of public policy, Elliot Schrage, pushed him to publish a statement claiming that fake news on the social network he created is a tiny fraction and didn't influence the election results. The mere act of making that connection seems to him a major capitulation to the press, and he attributes it to resentment because his platform is draining the lifeblood of the industry—advertising. Several thousand meters in the air, they discuss the move, and Schrage suggests that perhaps the time has come to give the media a larger share of the profits: after all, Facebook relies heavily on the content produced by news outlets. Zuckerberg isn't convinced. His solution is very expeditious: to reinvent the American media.

The Commercial Court No. 15 of Madrid has ordered Meta to pay €479 million to 87 Spanish digital newspaper publishers and news agencies belonging to the AMI (Association of Information Media), including ARA. The ruling states that Mark Zuckerberg's multinational company gained a competitive advantage by including advertising on its Facebook and Instagram social networks using users' personal data protected by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The decision responds to a lawsuit filed by the national digital press association, which argued that the improper use of users' protected personal data gave Meta an unfair advantage. The court ruled in favor of the association and ordered Meta to pay a multimillion-euro fine for unfair competition.

The major digital platforms (the big techThey dominate the economy. Digital technology has become indispensable, whether for information retrieval, social networking, e-commerce, operating systems, or smartphones. Each of these fields is dominated by a few companies. The leaders are Google with its search engine; Meta in social networking with WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram; Amazon in e-commerce; Microsoft with Windows and applications; and Apple in mobile phones. High fixed costs, network effects, and dynamic economies of scale (e.g., in the learning curve) make these companies increasingly competitive. big tech are dominant. The accumulation of data leads to feedback effects, in which more production and more sales induce more data and more network effects that make the company more efficient, improve products and services, and stay ahead of competitors. They are, therefore, markets that migrate towards a winner that takes the whole market or most of it (winner-takes-alleitherwinner-takes-most).

What should we do with the social media profiles of someone who has died? And with all the other accounts where they stored photos, emails, and contacts? How can we ensure that our online usernames will disappear with us or that they will continue to be managed as we would have liked? Among the legal experts consulted, there are different opinions on whether or not it is necessary for social media to be part of a will, but they agree that it is an option that will most likely gain significant popularity in the coming decades. The reason? That more and more people are living completely digital lives, many of whom own social media profiles with thousands of followers, or whose social media accounts are a source of income, such as those from the United States. influencers.

More than €550 million is the amount sought by some eighty media outlets associated with the AMI in a lawsuit filed against Meta—the company that owns Facebook and Instagram—which is set to be heard this Wednesday. The Madrid commercial court is holding a hearing to determine the damages caused by the tech giant between May 25, 2018, and July 31, 2023, for using the personal data of millions of European users to build its hyper-targeted advertising business. This lawsuit joins the lawsuit filed by major television and radio networks—including Mediaset and Atresmedia—for the same events; in this case, they have a joint claim of €160 million.

"I worked there [at Facebook] for seven years, and if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say it started out as a hopeful charade and ended in tragedy, filled with darkness and regret. I was one of the people advising the company's top brass, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as planets thought like planet, as they thought. hopeless as they kowtowed to authoritarian regimes like China and deceived the public as if nothing. had given them that power and behaved."

For six years, Mia Moglie (My Wife, in Italian) was a public Facebook group where men posted photographs of their partners, without having given the consent, in which they appeared sleeping or on the beach. Although Meta, the social media company's owner, had long received complaints for allowing posts that violated the right to privacy, it wasn't until feminist Carolina Capria and the organization No Justice, No Pace reported it on Instagram that the page was shut down. Up to 32,000 men had shared images, some accompanied by sexualizing or degrading comments and retouched with artificial intelligence.

A group of 29 former Facebook and Instagram content moderators from Barcelona have filed a complaint against Meta and the company CCC Barcelona Digital Services for the psychological disorders they suffered after having to review hundreds of violent images daily, including murder, rape, and child pornography. In the complaint, which ARA has been able to consult, they accuse CCC Barcelona Digital Services, a company subcontracted by Meta, of a continuing offense against workers' rights, another of serious injuries due to gross negligence, and a third offense against moral integrity.

The European Commission (EC) has announced a €500 million fine for Apple and another €200 million for Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) for violating the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in March 2024. The sanctions come amid a trade war between the United States and the rest of the world.

"Content moderation" is a euphemistic term for the filtering work carried out by certain individuals on social media, with the aim of preventing people from posting real atrocities. Indeed, networks (especially those with the greatest global reach, such as Facebook, Instagram, X or TikTok) continually receive thousands of videos, for many of which the adjective "garbage" falls sadly short. A large part of them are due to people who, for whatever reason, decide to film themselves committing crimes, the more violent, gruesome and convoluted the better. Rape, murder, mutilation, desecration, in which the victims can be animals, but also babies, the elderly, pregnant women, corpses, etc. And a large number of suicides, too.

Much of the political mobilization and bickering in today's world takes place on social media. In fact, a few years ago many spin doctors and other political communication experts considered more traditional methods and direct contact with people, such as door-to-door canvassing or organizing rallies and events, to be a thing of the past, a relic of yesterday's world that still needed to be realized until the new, purely digital world arrived. In recent years, new winds have blown and traditional political events have revived, but mobilization through social media remains a sort of mandate that obsesses political parties.

Meta, Facebook's parent company, breaks the contract with its subcontracts in Barcelona. Telus International, a content moderation company located in Torre Glòries building, has lost its only client in the Catalan capital, forcing it to close. ARA has acknowledged that Meta has terminated its contract with Telus, and this Thursday the company informed all its employees—more than 2,000—of this decision.

Facebook will not participate in this year's Mobile World Congress either. Mark Zuckerberg's company has confirmed that it will not attend the Barcelona congress, scheduled from June 28 to July 1, because its risk prevention and health protection policy advises against attending face-to-face fairs until after June due to the pandemic. Even so, Facebook plans to explore the option of participating virtually in the fair, ACN has reported. The confirmation that Facebook will not be in Barcelona physically comes after Ericsson, Sony and Nokia also confirmed they would not.