Cory Doctorow (Toronto, 1971) is one of the most lucid voices for discussing power and technology. Aware of the importance of words –he is a novelist and journalist–, he invented a concept at the end of 2022 to define, avoiding technicalities, the process that platforms were experiencing: emmerdification. A concept that has become popular and gives its name to his latest book, which has been translated into Spanish by Capitán Swing.

It has surely been the worst week for Mark Zuckerberg since the founding of Facebook. The tycoon has had to announce the dismantling of his virtual reality metaverse, after having burned 80 billion dollars in a bet that the public has received with indifference. While Meta makes a desperate turn towards AI to save face, the judicial front has opened a leak that threatens the entire business model of social networks. Two US juries have issued rulings holding Meta and YouTube directly responsible for designing deliberately addictive products.

A landmark double legal precedent has been set against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), has ordered the tech giant to pay $375 million in damages, finding that the company prioritized profits over safety and concealed what it knew about the potential harmful effects of its apps. According to the state attorney general, who initiated the proceedings, After seven weeks of hearings and just one day of deliberation, the jury found that Meta violated state consumer protection laws by failing to disclose the potential harms of its apps. Specifically, they pointed to risks of child sexual exploitation and consequences for the psychological development of young children. New Mexico law allows a maximum of $5,000 for violations of this type, so the total is based on the 37,500 violations the jury determined, taking into account the number of minors who could have suffered these consequences. Beyond the amount—relatively small for a corporation that generated $200 billion in revenue last year—this is the first time a state has won against a major technology company for harm to minors. And it opens the door to similar lawsuits across the United States.The verdict comes as Meta faces two other major legal proceedings. The first is in California, where the alleged permissiveness of Meta's platforms in blocking minors from accessing the platform has been judged. For now, the jury has concluded that the big tech He is guilty, but the sentence and any potential compensation have not yet been made public. The case stems from a complaint filed by a 20-year-old woman who suffered from an addiction to the group's social media platforms, which began when she was six years old. The young woman received her first mobile phone at age nine, which has also sparked debate about parental responsibility. According to records, she spent up to sixteen hours a day on the apps. The plaintiff also accused Google, owner of YouTube, which attempted to argue that its video-on-demand service could not be considered a social network.

Mark Zuckerberg has put an end to the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was supposed to be the gateway to his metaverse. He announced it last Tuesday on Meta's official forums and in emails to users. It's no surprise: it's the formal liquidation of a project that had been agonizing for years and never surpassed 300,000 monthly active users; a ridiculous figure for a company that hosts 3 billion humans on its platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg has put an end to the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was supposed to be the gateway to his metaverse. He announced it last Tuesday on Meta's official forums and in emails to users. It's no surprise: it's the formal liquidation of a project that had been agonizing for years and never surpassed 300,000 monthly active users; a ridiculous figure for a company that hosts 3 billion humans on its platforms.

The renewal of Isidre Fainé's contract as head of the La Caixa Foundation has been the highlight of this week's business appointments; we've discussed it in the ARA economics section with a special report on the La Caixa scandal, which you can read in the newspaper. However, in the US, Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has appointed Dina Powell, former advisor to Donald Trump, as the company's new president and vice president; and locally, the consulting firm Newlink has opened a new office in Barcelona and a new director. These are the week's most notable appointments:

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.

"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."

Neoliberalism was neither new nor particularly liberal when it was imposed fifty years ago. Its great advantage was its marked departure from classical liberalism: although it deferred to liberal thinkers, it shared neither their method nor their idea of the market. Today we are on the verge of another equally profound ideological innovation.

South African tycoon and Donald Trump advisor Elon Musk has regained the top spot among the world's richest people, according to the list published Tuesday by the magazine Forbes, which attributes his net worth to €316.4 billion. This means his fortune has increased by 75% compared to 2024, and, in fact, at 53 years old, he has already accumulated more wealth than any other person who has ever appeared in the publication. In this sense, Forbes He highlights that the explosion in Musk's wealth coincides with "a year in which he consolidated his political influence," with the US president appointing him to command the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

X CEO Elon Musk will pay Donald Trump $10 million for ending a legal battle over the social network's ban on the US president. Trump's account on X, then Twitter, was suspended in January 2021, following the assault on the Capitol by his supporters. That day, Trump used the network to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, not to certify Democrat Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Twitter suspended the account, citing "the risk of further incitement of violence."