Facebook, Instagram dump fact-checkers citing election as ‘cultural tipping point’
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Facebook plans to replace its fact-checkers with “community notes,” a move that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would allow the social network to return “to our roots around free expression.”
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The changes, which will also be in place for Instagram and Threads, will lift restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post.
Meta executives sought in their statements to tie the update to what they described as a sea change in public discourse accompanying the rise of President-elect Donald Trump’s brand of politics.
Fact-checkers who were put in place in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election have proven to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” particularly in the United States, Zuckerberg said.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said.
The decision also follows Zuckerberg recent meeting with Trump at the president-elect’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. And Meta is donating to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, marking a first for the company.
The shift in policy mirrors a series of updates that Elon Musk — a Trump ally — made after purchasing rival social network Twitter, which he’s since rebranded as X.
Kaplan on Tuesday praised the approach Musk has taken, saying X under its new owner has empowered its “community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias,” Kaplan said.
As the company’s fact-checking capabilities have grown, they have expanded “to the point where we are making too many mistakes,” which in turn has frustrated many of the social networks’ users, Kaplan said.
“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said.
ABC News’ Michael Kreisel, Zunaira Zaki and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The federal appeals court that last week rejected TikTok’s attempt to overthrow its pending ban denied the company’s request Friday that sought to pause the ruling and the Jan. 19 deadline for a sale.
The company, which has been forced by a federal law to sell to a new owner or be banned in the U.S., requested the emergency pause earlier in the week arguing it would afford the Supreme Court time to determine whether it should review the law.
However, the D.C. Circuit judges said that Congress made a “deliberate choice” to set a 270-day time frame for the sale-or-ban, “subject to one (and only one) extension.”
“The petitioners have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court,” the judges wrote in the unsigned order.
TikTok has not immediately commented about the order.
The Justice Department asked the court to reject TikTok’s request for a temporary injunction.
“The Court is familiar with the relevant facts and law and has definitively rejected petitioners’ constitutional claims in a thorough decision that recognizes the critical national-security interests underlying the Act,” the DOJ’s attorneys said.
The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the decision either.
The case would have to go to the Supreme Court if TikTok chooses to appeal, which could delay the Jan. 19 deadline.
President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was part of a massive, $95 billion foreign aid package passed by Congress, on April 24.
As part of the act, TikTok, which has over 170 million U.S. users, is forced to sell the company from its current Chinese-based owner ByteDance.
The president and some congressional leaders have argued that the ultimatum against TikTok was necessary because of security concerns about ByteDance and its connections to the Chinese government.
ByteDance rebutted those allegations in its lawsuit, arguing there has been no tangible evidence that the app poses any security risk and filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department in May.
The law has prompted major protests from TikTok’s American users who have defended the app.
President-elect Donald Trump once proposed a TikTok ban when he was in office but has changed his stance and signaled he would reverse the ban once in office. A reversal, however, would require approval from both houses of Congress.
(NEW YORK) — Bitcoin vaulted to a record high on Thursday, surging more than 3% in early trading and hurtling toward investors’ long-sought milestone of $100,000.
The price of bitcoin briefly exceeded $98,000 for the first time on Thursday morning, before retreating to about $97,600.
The value of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency has soared 31% since the reelection of former President Donald Trump, who is widely viewed as friendly toward digital currency.
By comparison, the S&P 500 has climbed 2.4% since Election Day, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq has increased 2.6%.
The run-up of bitcoin extended to other parts of the crypto industry. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, jumped 8% in early trading on Thursday. Lesser-known litecoin rose nearly 6%, and dogecoin ticked up more than 2%.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to bolster the cryptocurrency sector and ease regulations enforced by the Biden administration. Trump also promised to establish the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Trump said he would replace Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whom many crypto proponents dislike for what they perceive as a robust approach to crypto regulation.
In July, Trump told the audience at a cryptocurrency conference in Nashville, Tennessee, that he wanted to turn the U.S. into the “crypto capital of the planet.”
“I’m calling it the ‘election dividend,'” James Butterfill, head of research at digital asset management firm CoinShares, told ABC News. “We went from being worried about a Democrat getting elected to what we’ve got: a Republican clean sweep.”
The recent rise follows a period of stellar returns that stretches back to last year. The price of bitcoin has soared more than 150% since November 2023. Over that period, the S&P 500 has climbed about 30%.
Those gains have been propelled, in part, by U.S. approval in January of bitcoin ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin ETFs allow investors to buy into an asset that tracks the price movement of bitcoin, while avoiding the inconvenience and risk of purchasing the crypto coin itself.
Options trading for bitcoin ETFs
On Tuesday, options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) were made available for trading on the Nasdaq. The options, which provide a new avenue for bitcoin investors, allow individuals to commit to buy or sell the ETF at a given price by a specific date. While such investments typically come with additional risk, they can also make large payouts.
The price of IBIT jumped 3.1% on Thursday.
The newly available options may account for some of the rise in the price of bitcoin over recent days, Bryan Armour, the director of passive strategies research at financial firm Morningstar, told ABC News.
“The options add volatility on top of volatility, which has interested some of the crypto investors,” Armour said.
The crypto industry entered this year bruised after a series of high-profile collapses and company scandals.
FTX, a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in November 2022. The implosion set off a 17-month legal saga that resulted in the conviction of Bankman-Fried for fraud. In April, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The surge of bitcoin since Election Day may continue for the foreseeable future, since past periods of momentum have been shown to propel the cryptocurrency, Armour said. But crypto investments remain highly volatile, he added, recommending that the asset make up no more than 5% of a person’s portfolio.
“It’s notoriously difficult to provide a value for bitcoin’s price,” Armour said. “It can go up; it can go down.”
“I would continue to keep any allocation small,” Armour added.
(NEW YORK) — Throughout the country, once bustling business districts have turned into ghost towns. The pandemic has shown that many jobs can be done remotely. Now some major U.S. cities are breathing new life into empty office buildings by converting them into housing. Notable cities that are part of this trend include New York, Austin, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Boston.
The office vacancy rate is 20.1% in the U.S., according to Moody’s. That’s a 30-year high, with more than 900 million square feet of office space empty — enough to fill New York City’s One World Trade Center 300 times.
Amazon, Citigroup, Walmart, and UPS are among the major companies now requiring employees to spend more time in the office. Some companies are pulling out all the stops to entice workers back. Amenities may include massage rooms, health care services, and on-site personal gyms.
However, most experts agree that hybrid and remote work is here to stay. “Companies don’t need office space in the way that they needed office space 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago,” Evan Horowitz, executive director of The Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, said. “Remote work has just transformed that landscape.”
Major cities across the country, including Boston, Austin, and Chicago, are seeing office vacancies at or near record highs. In San Francisco, more than 22% of offices are currently empty, a significant increase from about 9% in 2019.
Some cities are now at risk of falling into what is known as the “economic doom loop.” High vacancy rates can cause property values to plummet, decreasing tax revenue. This decrease in revenue affects funding for essential services such as schools, police and sanitation, ultimately making these cities less desirable places to live.
Horowitz says Boston is more vulnerable to falling into an “economic doom loop” than other major cities because of its unique s tax structure.
“Boston is closer to crisis mode than other cities because it is so dependent on taxes from commercial real estate, twice as dependent as virtually any other city in the country,” Horowitz said. The loss of commercial tenants is having a ripple effect on area businesses.
When Dave Savoie bought his favorite bar and grill, Silvertone, in 2016 he said it was like a dream come true.
The downtown Boston establishment was popular with the business crowd. Office workers made up 50% of Savoie’s customers, but all that changed with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I used to call them suits,” Savoie said. “You know, the office guys, the finance guys. And this was their place. [Now] they work from home. If people come to the city now, they work a maximum three days a week.”
It proved too much for Silvertone and, after 27 years, eight of them under Savoie’s ownership, the bar announced “last call” in May.
Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu, who is up for reelection next year, is taking steps to address the situation. She is implementing tax breaks and zoning changes to transform unwanted office space into much-needed housing.
“We have about 500 housing units that are now in the pipeline to be converted out of formerly vacant office buildings,” Wu told ABC News. “We’re taking city buildings like libraries that need renovations and adding housing on top of that and making it faster than ever before through zoning and other city regulatory processes to get your building built and to get those shovels in the ground. The more that downtown is a residential, thriving, busy neighborhood, just like every other one of our neighborhoods, the more everyone benefits.”
The idea is that business districts will be reimagined as vibrant 24/7 neighborhoods that seamlessly blend work, living, dining and entertainment. This holistic approach aims to create a dynamic community where daily life and work coexist, fostering a rich, interconnected lifestyle.
“There are lots of ways to build a vibrant downtown that doesn’t involve the central role of office buildings,” Horowitz said. “It could be apartments, it could be lab space. There are lots of other things you can do with land that makes people want to go downtown and enjoy themselves.”
Many cities are already converting office space into housing, with Cleveland leading the way — 11% of its office inventory is currently undergoing this transformation. Similar projects are also taking place in Cincinnati, Houston, and New York, where the iconic Flatiron office building is set to be transformed into luxury condominiums. “This is a challenge that’s affecting every city in America,” Wu said. “And in Boston, we’re showing that it’s also an opportunity.”
That “opportunity” is something David Greaney is seizing on. At a time when many real estate investors are looking to sell their office buildings, Greaney and his firm Synergy are buying them up, at a deep discount. Synergy currently owns 35 properties in the Greater Boston area – four of them were bought in just the past 12 months.
Greaney says the worst is over in terms of office vacancies, and he is positive about the future of cities. “The great thing about cities is that cities evolve, and I certainly think that our cities will evolve,” Greaney said. “You may see more residential uses, more hospitality or institutional uses, but the office component of downtowns, I believe, will continue to be a very big factor.”
Working out of one of the same buildings Greaney recently bought, small business owners and brothers Michael and Emilio Ruggeri are betting on a comeback for Boston’s downtown.
For three decades they have been serving breakfast and lunch to the office crowd at their Archie’s NY Deli. Office workers accounted for nearly 80% of their business pre-pandemic, but that number has since dwindled to about 50%.
“We’ve been doing more deliveries,” said Emilio Ruggeri. “The construction guys have actually kept us going.”
They’ve also reduced their staff, trimmed their menu and shortened their hours to make ends meet, confident that things will turn around.
“I’m an eternal optimist,” said Michael Ruggeri. “The buildings are way too expensive to just stay empty. Someone’s going to take over the space, so we’re hopeful.”
