(Bloomberg) -- A federal appeals court rejected claims that tech giants Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google conspired to suppress conservative views online.The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington on Wednesday affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit by the nonprofit group Freedom Watch and the right-wing YouTube personality Laura Loomer, who accused the companies of violating antitrust laws and the First Amendment in a coordinated political plot.A three-judge panel held in a decision only four pages long that the organization didn’t provide enough evidence of an antitrust violation and that the companies aren’t state entities that can violate free speech rights.“In general, the First Amendment ‘prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech,’” the judges wrote, quoting a previous decision.Larry Klayman, a lawyer for Freedom Watch and Loomer, said in an interview that he’d file a petition to have the case reheard by an enlarged, “en banc” panel of the court’s judges and take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. He said he believes the court chose Wednesday to issue its decision as a response to President Donald Trump’s threat to regulate or shutter social media companies for their alleged anticonservative bias.Klayman said the brief decision gave “short shrift” to an important social issue.Two of the three judges on the appellate panel were appointed by Republican presidents and one by a Democrat. The district court judge who dismissed the case, Trevor McFadden, was appointed by Trump.The companies said in a joint brief in March that courts had repeatedly rejected claims that operating a widely used forum for speech by others “is a public function that amounts to state action.” Subjecting private companies to First Amendment requirements would chill efforts to police pornography and cyberbullying, they said.“Private property owners, no matter their social importance, are not the government and are not subject to the constitutional constraints that limit governmental regulation of speech,” the companies said.Read More: Trump Retweets Far-Right Activists in Attack on Social MediaThe case is one of several filed by conservatives linking social media bans to the market dominance of big tech companies. The suit blamed an illegal conspiracy by the companies for a “complete halt” of Freedom Watch’s organizational growth and Loomer’s 30-day ban from multiple social media platforms after she said Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, favors Sharia law and is “anti-Jewish.”The D.C. Circuit’s decision comes after two unlikely allies weighed in on behalf of Freedom Watch and Loomer, asking the court not to affirm the dismissal of the suit without a full proceeding. The District of Columbia’s government and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed briefs challenging the trial judge’s conclusion that the D.C. Human Rights Act doesn’t ban discrimination online.(Adds Klayman quote and context below it)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Big technology companies are hunting for deals at their fastest pace in years, racking up acquisitions and strategic investments despite increased regulatory scrutiny during the coronavirus-led market turmoil. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have announced 19 deals this year, according to Refinitiv data from May 26, representing the fastest pace of acquisitions to this date since 2015. The Financial Times on Tuesday reported Amazon was also in advanced talks to purchase the self-driving car company Zoox, which was valued at $3.2bn two years ago.

Mark Zuckerberg called out his social-media rival on Wednesday, saying Twitter Inc. should not be fact-checking President Donald Trump — or anybody.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- President Donald Trump says a lot of things on Twitter that aren’t true. Twitter has a set of formal policies designed to combat misleading information. This week, Twitter applied its policies to two of Trump’s tweets, in which the president made misleading claims about voting by mail.Trump responded with a threat:Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.The threat had an immediate effect on the stock of Twitter Inc.; it fell dramatically afterward.To understand the controversy, we need to step back a bit. Social-media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are not subject to the Constitution at all. The First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, applies only to the government. If Twitter denied a platform to Trump, or if it allowed only Republicans or only Democrats to have access to its platform, it would not be violating the Constitution.Nonetheless, Twitter has good reason to allow something like a free-for-all. Its whole purpose is to permit plenty of diverse people to say plenty of diverse things. That’s its business model. And if it’s providing a public service, as I believe that it is, it should not favor any particular side. It should certainly not appoint itself as the truth police.At the same time, the company has to draw some limits, and it does. Suppose that someone tweets that the presidential election will be held on Nov. 5 this year (it will actually be held on Nov. 3), or that people will not be allowed to vote unless they are at least 30 years old. Twitter does not allow that.Or suppose someone says that “social distancing is not effective” to combat Covid-19, or that “walking outside is enough to disinfect you from the coronavirus.” Twitter will not allow that either.It doesn’t try to remove every falsehood, but it also doesn’t want its platform to be used to compromise public health. So in narrowly defined circumstances, it will remove material that it considers harmful.This month, Twitter announced an updated approach to misinformation in general. Its basic approach consists of labels — warning people that what has been tweeted may not be true, and linking to sources that correct the record. If the potential harm is sufficiently severe, a tweet might be removed.That is the background for the current controversy. In two tweets, Trump said that voting by mail is likely to create a significant increase in fraud. One said this:There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out and fraudulently signed.Twitter appended a short label, saying, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” As a spokesperson for Twitter explained, the president’s tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”It should be clear that Twitter’s approach was fully in line with its current policies and also that it was quite mild. Twitter did not remove Trump’s tweet. It did not say that it was false. Indeed, it did not even declare that it was misleading. It said publicly that it was only “potentially misleading.” Its small label informed people how to “get the facts.”It is perfectly acceptable for a newspaper or magazine to correct the record about public officials — to say, for example, that President Bill Clinton misled the public about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.But social-media platforms are not newspapers or magazines, and they have to strike a difficult balance. They cannot be expected, and should not be asked, to take down every falsehood that appears on their platforms. But it is legitimate for them to adopt neutral policies that are designed to educate and inform users about misinformation, or about potentially misleading material.There is an irony here. Trump rightly emphasizes the value of freedom of speech, and even though Twitter is unconstrained by the First Amendment, he is correct to say that the company should respect that value. At the same time, a central purpose free speech is to ensure an informed public. With respect to misleading tweets, Twitter’s policy promotes that value — which means that it should be praised, not threatened.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Cass R. Sunstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the author of “The Cost-Benefit Revolution” and a co-author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Augmented reality filters on Instagram are picking up some new tricks with the latest update to Facebook's Spark AR platform. Spark AR has been making pretty consistent updates to the feature sets developers can play with in creating AR filters since it exited closed beta on Instagram last year. Today, Facebook added some new functionality to the platform on Instagram, allowing creators to build more complex filters to entice users with.

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump has been raging against Twitter Inc. since the social media platform that helped vault him to the presidency slapped fact-check links on a pair of his tweets.Now, he’s poised to take action Thursday that could bring a flurry of lawsuits down on Twitter, Facebook Inc. and other technology giants by having the government narrow liability protections that they enjoy for third parties’ posts, according to a draft of an executive order obtained by Bloomberg.The companies’ protections against lawsuits apply when they act “in good faith” in taking down or limiting the visibility of inappropriate tweets, videos and other social media posts, but the law doesn’t define bad faith. The draft order would push the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules clarifying the issue, potentially allowing users to sue over takedowns if they were inconsistent with companies’ terms of service, did not provide enough notice or meet other suggested criteria.The White House declined to comment early Thursday morning.The draft order would also convene, through the Justice Department, a working group of state attorneys general to look into deceptive practices and review executive ad spending on the platforms.The move could set off a legal battle between Washington and Silicon Valley.“Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election,” the president said Wednesday night -- on Twitter. “If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen! They tried hard in 2016, and lost. Now they are going absolutely CRAZY. Stay Tuned!!!”Word of the executive order came a day after Twitter added links to a fact-checking page on Trump tweets asserting that mail-in-voting leads to rampant fraud.As Trump himself has observed, Twitter gives him the power to dodge the media and speak directly to the American public. It also allows the president and his vast community of followers to instantly spread a steady stream of pro-Trump messages and attacks on his rivals, including exaggerations and outright falsehoods that not even Twitter’s fact-checking links can dent.He has no legal authority to shut down the service, as he threatened to do Wednesday morning, but doing so would mean silencing his loudest megaphone -- as well as what his campaign calls “keyboard warriors” who both amplify his voice and provide him memes and other free content to broadcast to his 80 million followers.Twitter also serves as a valuable punching bag, which he uses to generate outrage and sympathy among his supporters.The social media platform has become even more important for Trump as the coronavirus pandemic prevents him from holding his trademark rallies, and he seeks a free outlet to attack his likely Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.“He’s going to need to continue to use this platform,” said Amy Becker, a professor at Loyola University Maryland, who focuses on political communication. “It’s going to be his random tweets, it’s going to be him attacking whoever criticizes him, there’s going to be a lot of attacks on Biden, the Democrats.”Liability ProtectionsThe order Trump plans to sign Thursday is his latest attempt to exert control over the formidable technology industry. In 2018, he considered issuing an order instructing federal antitrust agencies to open probes into the practices of tech giants like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook. The possible measure was criticized as politicizing antitrust enforcement and it was never signed.Trump’s attacks on Twitter and other social media companies are often hyperbolic and rarely lead to immediate concrete action. The government could never silence a company like Twitter without violating First Amendment rights to free speech. However, his threats are a reminder of other significant levers that the president and the rest of the federal government have at their disposal.Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, wrote Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey on Wednesday to demand an explanation for the fact-checking links added to Trump’s tweets. He accused the company of choosing to “editorialize.”Hawley repeated a threat that’s been raised by other lawmakers over the years: Revoking the protections that shield Twitter and other platforms from legal liability for content its users post.“Politicians can use the powers of government to make life very difficult for private companies and there’s a long track record of politicians from both parties doing this in the last couple years to social media companies,” said Jesse Blumenthal, a conservative who leads tech policy at Stand Together, part of the political network affiliated with libertarian billionaire Charles Koch.In recent days, Trump had tweeted attacks on cable news host and former Republican Representative Joe Scarborough by pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that he was involved in the death 19 years ago of a woman who worked at his district office in Florida. Her widower sent a letter to Twitter asking the publicly traded company to delete Trump’s tweets, but it chose to leave them online.Scarborough is a frequent critic of the president.80 Million Followers, 52,000 TweetsThe feud with Twitter comes as Trump has been under siege for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic that’s infected more than 1.6 million Americans and killed some 100,000. He trails Biden in general election polls by an average of 5.3 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.There has never been a politician as prolific on social media, which he often uses to call opponents names, spread conspiracy theories, dismiss employees and announce policy changes. He has sent more than 52,000 tweets and has more than 80 million followers.Trump has both acknowledged the power he wields when he tweets and the platform’s impact on his 2016 election. At a July 2019 social media event at the White House he boasted about using Twitter to announce that the U.S. would recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, one of the world’s most contentious foreign policy issues.“Boom,” Trump said of the March 19 tweet. “I press it and, within two seconds, we have breaking news.”At that same event he acknowledged that without the platform he might not have been elected.‘Keyboard Warriors’Trump has a symbiotic relationship with his supporters on Twitter. They often create memes that go viral with his retweets. Earlier this month, he retweeted a meme of himself as the president giving a speech in the 1996 movie “Independence Day,” about an alien invasion. That meme has been viewed 18 million times on Twitter.He’s repeatedly promoted a twitter handle that goes by the name of @sexcounseling that reinforces his messages. Earlier this month he egged on his supporters online with the hashtag obamagate, alleging that President Barack Obama’s administration improperly tried to undermine his election campaign in 2016. His supporters tweeted a series of memes with Obama and Biden.“Thank you to all of my great Keyboard Warriors. You are better, and far more brilliant, than anyone on Madison Avenue (Ad Agencies). There is nobody like you!,” Trump said in a May 14 tweet.Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, defended the president’s use of Twitter.“Most Americans have a pretty clear understanding of the way that President Trump uses Twitter,” Murtaugh said Wednesday on Fox News. “Twitter is a way for the president to connect with his voters. We hear all the time from the president’s supporters that they like the way that the president expresses himself on Twitter because they say to this day they say listen here’s a guy who finally says the things out loud that I’m thinking to myself.”Going back to the 2016 campaign, Trump and his campaign have cultivated a relationship with his supporters online. That part of his base remains engaged, echoing and spreading his messages, said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist.“The most effective endorsement for a candidate is from someone that you already trust, that you already have a relationship with,” Wilson said.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Appeals court judges unanimously reaffirmed that online platforms' rules against hate speech don't violate the First Amendment, because tech companies aren't part of the government.

An internal inquiry at the social media giant found its algorithms were polarizing users instead of helping it realize its mission to connect the world.

(Bloomberg) -- Instagram will let creators profit directly from their videos, helping popular users generate more revenue during the Covid-19 crisis, while moving into more direct competition with YouTube.Starting next week, Instagram will show ads before clips that run on its IGTV service for longer-form videos. The company plans to share 55% of the revenue with creators, the same portion that YouTube gives its stars.The company will also start testing a way for users to sell digital badges in their live videos. If viewers buy a badge, their names will stand out among fans’ comments, designating them as supporters. The video host will receive all the money directly for the first few months of the test, until Instagram starts taking a share of the revenue later this year or in 2021, Instagram said.Influencers with large fan bases typically make their money from deals with brands to post about their products or events, negotiated without Instagram’s involvement. But some of that business has dried up during the pandemic lockdown. Travel influencers, for instance, aren’t being paid to stay in resorts while using certain brands.“This has been a trying time, where creators have been there for their fans,” said Justin Osofsky, Instagram chief operating officer. “It’s a time of uncertainty with less paid work generally.”But the move isn’t just to support influencers -- it’s for Instagram and parent Facebook Inc. to make money off a surge in attention. As people shelter in their homes, they’re on Instagram more than ever, with views of live videos surging 70% from February to March, the company said in a blog post. Still, stars had less incentive to create interesting clips, because there were more ways to make money on YouTube. Now Instagram will have a new way to retain this digital talent, while building another source of revenue.The video ads start after users click a 15-second video preview in their main Instagram feed and are taken to IGTV to watch the full clip. This design gives creators an incentive to make more compelling videos to entice users to jump over to IGTV.The effort could make Instagram a bigger contributor to Facebook’s overall sales. In 2019, Instagram’s advertising accounted for about a quarter of Facebook’s revenue, or roughly $20 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.Instagram, founded almost 10 years ago, long debated whether to become a direct source of income for its popular users. But now, with much of the world sheltering in place, it has become even more obvious that some users are building businesses from their Instagram content -- without the company’s help. Creators have turned to the app to recreate experiences they might have otherwise hosted in person, some accepting tips via Venmo, or relying on outside services like Patreon to make money from their fan bases.Instagram sees an opportunity to handle some of this commerce itself. Food influencers are doing home cooking classes; illustrators are teaching followers how to draw; music artists are going live from their living rooms. Now, their audiences can pay to support these efforts with badges at three different price points: 99 cents, $1.99 and $4.99. The badges only last for the duration of the video.“We’re hoping badges will be a tool to support a broad range of uses,” Osofsky said. But, he emphasized, it’s a test and the plan could change. “We’re definitely in the early days.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Hong Kong to be no longer autonomous from China Wednesday, a move that further increases U.S.-China tensions and could pave the way for changes to U.S. policy toward Hong Kong that could have massive ramifications for the Hong Kong, Chinese and American economies.

If Facebook could capture roughly 2% of global e-commerce revenue by 2023, the company could see some $7 billion in incremental net income from Shops, Citi’s Jason Bazinet estimates.

COVID-19 and U.S. elections are amplifying shareholder calls for better oversight of social media, even if the proposals are doomed to fail.

(Bloomberg) -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. pioneered the use of live-streaming hosts to sell everything from lipstick to smartphones in China. Now, the e-commerce giant wants to repeat that success globally with the help of a million influencers on forums from TikTok to Instagram.AliExpress, the company’s online marketplace for shoppers outside China, is on the hunt for social media personalities to hawk wares on its online malls around the world. It’s looking to attract more than 100,000 content creators this year to its recently launched AliExpress Connect, rising to over a million in three years. The platform offers a matchmaking service, helping pair social media influencers with brands and merchants looking to market their products. Its initial focus is Europe, where Russia, France, Spain and Poland comprise the majority of users.Alibaba hopes to replicate the success it’s enjoyed with so-called key opinion leaders driving sales on its China online marketplace Taobao. “For both Taobao and AliExpress, social content is a way to diversify offerings, but not to generate revenue,” Yuan Yuan, head of operations for AliExpress, told Bloomberg News. Influencers will help users stick with the platform instead of just making a one-time purchase. “The goal is to accumulate users, keep them there and encourage them to remain active.”China’s largest e-commerce company currently gets just a fraction of its retail revenue from outside its home country, but it’s harbored bigger international ambitions for years. The move marks Alibaba’s latest global push and comes at a time when Covid-19 is fueling an unprecedented boom in social media. The company’s rivals, including TikTok proprietor ByteDance Ltd. and Tencent-backed Pinduoduo Inc., are playing catch-up in live streaming and other means of social commerce championed by the Taobao Live app.Global social giants like Facebook Inc. have also added new features that support online shopping. In the U.S., more than 75 million social-network users aged 14 or older are expected to make at least one online purchase this year, up over 17% from 2019, according to research firm eMarketer.Influencers and content creators can sign up for Connect using TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and other social accounts. They can then solicit assignments from AliExpress merchants seeking help in promoting their goods or services. This gives the influencer options, from merely reposting the seller’s social media posts to creating original videos. Commission fees can be based on the sales the influencers generate.AliExpress is one of two Alibaba online bazaars for international buyers, the other being the Southeast-Asia-focused Lazada. AliExpress merchants are mainly small, export-oriented businesses in China, but global brands like Samsung and Oral-B have increasingly set up shop on the platform, targeting regional markets. Its top consumer markets include Russia, the U.S., Brazil and Spain.Yuan said AliExpress aims to help at least 100 of its army of a million influencers earn an annual income of more than $1 million within three years. “Only if they can make money will they be motivated to create good content for our platform,” she said.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Last week, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) rolled out Shops in a bid to help small business owners set up a digital storefronts on its social media platforms. The company said setting up a Shop will be free to users, with Facebook taking a small cut of each transaction. This additional foray into e-commerce provides Facebook with the potential for significant upside, according to Citi analyst Jason Bazinet, who raised the firm's price target to $275 from $245, implying 22% upside from the current price.

The viral image compares an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck with Kaepernick protesting police brutality

Trump is addicted to Twitter, and there's no alternative. But he needs enemies, too.

Facebook's internal R&D group, NPE Team, is rolling out yet another new app today called Collab after having just launched a new group audio calling app, CatchUp, on Tuesday. With Collab, the focus has now returned to video, and specifically, the concept of watching, mixing and matching original videos together, beginning with music. In Collab, creators can either record their own musical arrangement or swipe to discover arrangements to build a composition, or a "collab."

Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi, Alexis Christoforous, and Dan Howley discuss Google CEO Sundar Pichai's announcement that a limited number of Google employees will be returning to work in early July.

Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB) Instagram is making it easier for creators to earn money on the platform. On Wednesday, Instagram announced that it will be its introducing ads to IGTV, its long-form video destination, and Badges viewers can purchase on Instagram Live. In a blog post announcing the move, Instagram emphasized that it's committed to helping creators turn their passions into income.

While there is no obvious path for him to shut the services down, the angry rant is weighing on Twitter shares.